UNIVERSITY oFiioRrH t^dttni^ 
 
 BOOK CARD 
 
 Please keep this mi h 
 book pocket 
 
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 THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 ENDOWED BY THE 
 DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
 SOCIETIES 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/lifeworksofgeorg1314elio 
 
THE COMPLETE W O R K S O F 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 WITH LIFE BY J. W. CROSS 
 
 With Photoghaa lkk Tllus tha tions i iiOM 
 Xew Drawings 
 
 BY 
 
 Gertkude De.main ITammond, R.I. 
 
 AND 
 
 Frederick I^. Stoddard 
 
THE BOOK SHOP 
 
 J man in threadbare clothing ivas seated on a stool 
 ' against some bookshelves 
 
 (Page 157) 
 
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 VOLUME XIII 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 VOLUME TWO 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 CHABLES E. LAUBIAT COMPANY 
 1908 
 
Contents 
 
 BOOK THREE {Continued) 
 
 Page 
 
 Maidens Choosing 1 
 
 BOOK FOUR 
 
 Gwendolen gets her Choice 42 
 
 BOOK FIVE 
 
 Mordecai 182 
 
 BOOK SIX 
 
 Revelations 336 
 
Daniel Deronda 
 
 {Continued) 
 MAIDENS CHOOSING 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 "How trace the why and wherefore in a mind reduced to the barren- 
 ness of a fastidious egoism, in which all direct desires are dulled, and 
 have dwindled from motives into a vacillating expectation of motives; 
 a mind made up of moods, where a fitful impulse springs here and there 
 conspicuously rank amid the general weediness ? 'T is a condition apt 
 to befall a Ufe too much at large, uiunoulded by the pressure of obli- 
 gation. Nam deteriores omnes sumus licentice, saith Terence; or, as 
 a more familiar tongue might deUver it, 'As you like ' w a bad finger-post" 
 
 POTENTATES make known their inten- 
 tions and affect the funds at a small 
 expense of words. So, when Grand- 
 court, after learning that Gwendolen had left 
 Leubronn, incidentally pronounced that resort 
 of fashion a beastly hole worse than Baden, the 
 remark was conclusive to Mr. Lush that his 
 patron intended straightway to return to Dip- 
 low. The execution was sure to be slower than 
 the intention, and in fact Grandcourt did loiter 
 through the next day without giving any dis- 
 tinct orders about departure, — perhaps because 
 he discerned that Lush was expecting them: 
 he lingered over his toilet, and certainly came 
 voft. xni— 1 
 
 > 610325 
 
2 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 down with a faded aspect of perfect distinction 
 which made fresh complexions, and hands with 
 the blood in them, seem signs of raw vulgarity; 
 he lingered on the terrace, in the gambling- 
 rooms, in the reading-room, occupying himself 
 in being indifferent to everybody and everything 
 around him. When he met Lady Mallinger, 
 however, he took some trouble, — raised his hat, 
 paused, and proved that he listened to her rec- 
 ommendation of the waters by replying, " Yes; 
 I heard somebody say how providential it was 
 that there always happened to be springs at 
 gambling-places . ' ' 
 
 " Oh, that was a joke," said innocent Lady 
 Mallinger, misled by Grandcourt's languid seri- 
 ousness, " in imitation of the old one about the 
 towns and the rivers, you know." 
 
 " Ah, perhaps," said Grandcourt, without 
 change of expression. Lady Mallinger thought 
 this worth telling to Sir Hugo, who said, " Oh, 
 my dear, he is not a fool. You must not sup- 
 pose that he can't see a joke. He can play his 
 cards as well as most of us." 
 
 " He has never seemed to me a very sensible 
 man," said Lady Mallinger, in excuse of her- 
 self. She had a secret objection to meeting 
 Grandcourt, who was little else to her than a 
 large living sign of what she felt to be her 
 failure as a wife, — the not having presented 
 Sir Hugo with a son. Her constant reflection 
 was that her husband might fairly regret his 
 choice, and if he had not been very good might 
 have treated her with some roughness in con- 
 sequence, gentlemen naturally disliking to be 
 disappointed. 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 3 
 
 Deronda, too, had a recognition from Grand- 
 court, for which he was not grateful, though he 
 took care to return it with perfect civility. No 
 reasoning as to the foundations of custom could 
 do away with the early-rooted feeling that his 
 birth had been attended with injury for which 
 his father was to blame ; and seeing that but for 
 this injury Grandcourt's prospect might have 
 been his, he was proudly resolute not to behave 
 in any way that might be interpreted into irri- 
 tation on that score. He saw a very easy 
 descent into mean unreasoning rancour and tri- 
 umph in others' frustration; and being deter- 
 mined not to go down that ugly pit, he turned 
 his back on it, clinging to the kindlier affections 
 within him as a possession. Pride certainly 
 helped him well, — the pride of not recognizing 
 a disadvantage for one's self which vulgar 
 minds are disposed to exaggerate, such as the 
 shabby equipage of poverty : he would not have 
 a man like Grandcourt suppose himself envied 
 by him. But there is no guarding against in- 
 terpretation. Grandcourt did believe that De- 
 ronda, poor devil, who he had no doubt was his 
 cousin by the father's side, inwardly winced 
 under their mutual position; wherefore the 
 presence of that less lucky person was more 
 agreeable to him than it would otherwise have 
 been. An imaginary envy, the idea that others 
 feel their comparative deficiency, is the ordi- 
 nary cortege of egoism; and his pet dogs were 
 not the only beings that Grandcourt liked to 
 feel his power over in making them jealous. 
 Hence he was civil enough to exchange several 
 words with Deronda on the terrace about the 
 
4 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hunting round Diplow, and ^ven said, " You 
 had better come over for a run or two when the 
 season begins." 
 
 Lush, not displeased with delay, amused him- 
 self very well, partly in gossiping with Sir 
 Hugo and in answering his questions about 
 Grandcourt's affairs so far as they might affect 
 his willingness to part with his interest in 
 Diplow. Also about Grandcourt's personal en- 
 tanglements, the baronet knew enough already 
 for Lush to feel released from silence on a 
 sunny autumn day, when there was nothing 
 more agreeable to do in lounging promenades 
 than to speak freely of a tyrannous patron 
 behind his back. Sir Hugo willingly inclined 
 his ear to a little good-humoured scandal, which 
 he was fond of calling traits de moeurs; but 
 he was strict in keeping such communications 
 from hearers who might take them too seri- 
 ously. Whatever knowledge he had of his 
 nephew's secrets, he had never spoken of it to 
 Deronda, who considered Grandcourt a pale- 
 blooded mortal, but was far from wishing to 
 hear how the red corpuscles had been washed 
 out of him. It was Lush's policy and inclina- 
 tion to gratify everybody when he had no reason 
 to the contrary ; and the baronet always treated 
 him well, as one of those easy-handled person- 
 ages who, frequenting the society of gentlemen, 
 without being exactly gentlemen themselves, can 
 - be the more serviceable, like the second-best arti- 
 cles of our wardrobe, which we use with a com- 
 fortable freedom from anxiety. 
 
 " Well, you will let me know the turn of 
 events," said Sir Hugo, " if this marriage seems 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 5 
 
 likely to come off after all, or if anything else 
 happens to make the want of money more 
 pressing. My plan would be much better for 
 him than burthening Ryelands." 
 
 " That 's true," said Lush, " only it must not 
 be urged on him, — just placed in his way that 
 the scent may tickle him. Grandcourt is not a 
 man to be always led by what makes for his 
 own interest; especially if you let him see that 
 it makes for your interest too. I 'm attached 
 to him, of course. I 've given up everything 
 else for the sake of keeping by him, and it has 
 lasted a good fifteen years now. He would not 
 easily get any one else to fill my place. He 's 
 a peculiar character, is Henleigh Grandcourt, 
 and it has been growing on him of late years. 
 However, I 'm of a constant disposition, and 
 I Ve been a sort of guardian to him since he 
 was twenty: an uncommonly fascinating fellow 
 he was then, to be sure — and could be now, if 
 he liked. I 'm attached to him; and it would 
 be a good deal worse for him if he missed me 
 at his elbow." 
 
 Sir Hugo did not think it needful to express 
 his sympathy or even assent, and perhaps Lush 
 himself did not expect this sketch of his mo- 
 tives to be taken as exact. But how can a man 
 avoid himself as a subject in conversation? And 
 he must make some sort of decent toilet in 
 words, as in cloth and linen. Lush's listener 
 was not severe: a member of Parliament could 
 allow for the necessities of verbal toilet; and 
 the dialogue went on without any change of 
 mutual estimate. 
 
 However, Lush's easy prospect of indefinite 
 
6 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 procrastination was cut off the next morniiig by 
 Grandcourt's saluting him with the question, — 
 
 " Are you making all the arrangements for 
 our starting by the Paris train? " 
 
 " I did n't know you meant to start," said 
 Lush, not exactly taken by surprise. 
 
 " You might have known," said Grandcourt, 
 looking at the burnt length of his cigar, and 
 speaking in that lowered tone which was usual 
 with him when he meant to express disgust and 
 be peremptory. " Just see to everything, will 
 you? and mind no brute gets into the same 
 carriage with us. And leave my P. P. C. at 
 the Mallingers'." 
 
 In consequence they were at Paris the next 
 day; but here Lush was gratified by the pro- 
 posal or command that he should go straight 
 on to Diplow and see that everything was right, 
 while Grandcourt and the valet remained be- 
 hind; and it was not until several days later 
 that Lush received the telegram ordering the 
 carriage to the Wanchester station. 
 
 He had used the interim actively, not only in 
 carrying out Grandcourt's orders about the stud 
 and household, but in learning all he could of 
 Gwendolen, and how things were going on at 
 Offendene. What was the probable effect that 
 the news of the family misfortunes would have 
 on Grandcourt's fitful obstinacy he felt to be 
 quite incalculable. So far as the girl's poverty 
 might be an argument that she would accept 
 an offer from him now in spite of any previous 
 coyness, it might remove that bitter objection 
 to risk a repulse which Lush divined to be one 
 of Grandcourt's deterring motives ; on the other 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 7 
 
 hand, the certainty of acceptance was just " the 
 sort of thing " to make him lapse hither and 
 thither with no more apparent will than a moth. 
 Lush had had his patron under close observa- 
 tion for many years, and knew him perhaps 
 better than he knew any other subject; but to 
 know Grandcourt was to doubt what he would 
 do in any particular case. It might happen 
 that he would behave with an apparent mag- 
 nanimity, like the hero of a modern French 
 drama, whose sudden start into moral splendour 
 after much lying and meanness leaves you little 
 confidence as to any part of his career that may 
 follow the fall of the curtain. Indeed, what 
 attitude would have been more honourable for 
 a final scene than that of declining to seek an 
 heiress for her money, and determining to marry 
 the attractive girl who had none? But I^ush 
 had some general certainties about Grandcourt, 
 and one was, that of all inward movements those 
 of generosity were the least likely to occur in 
 him. Of what use, however, is a general cer- 
 tainty that an insect will not walk with his head 
 hindmost, when what you need to know is the 
 play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and 
 thither in a network of possible paths? Thus 
 Lush was much at fault as to the probable issue 
 between Grandcourt and Gwendolen, when what 
 he desired was a perfect confidence that they 
 would never be married. He would have con- 
 sented willingly that Grandcourt should marry 
 an heiress, or that he should marry Mrs. Glasher: 
 in the one match there would have been the imme- 
 diate abundance that prospective heirship could 
 not supply, in the other there would have been 
 
8 
 
 DAXIEL DERONDA 
 
 the security of the wife's gratitude, for Lush 
 had always been ]Mrs. dasher's friend ; and that 
 the future ]\lrs. Grandcourt should not be so- 
 cially received could not affect his private com- 
 fort. He would not have minded, either, that 
 there should be no marriage in question at all; 
 but he felt himself justified in doing his utmost 
 to hinder a marriage with a girl who was hkely to 
 bring nothing but trouble to her husband, — not 
 to speak of annoyance if not ultimate injury to 
 her husband's old companion, whose future Mr. 
 Lush earnestly wished to make as easy as possi- 
 ble, considering that he had well deserved such 
 compensation for leading a dog's hfe, though 
 that of a dog who enjoyed many tastes undis- 
 turbed, and who profited by a large establish- 
 ment. He wished for himself what he felt to be 
 good, and was not conscious of wishing harm to 
 any one else; unless perhaps it were just now a 
 little harm to the inconvenient and impertinent 
 Gwendolen. But the easiest-humoured amateur 
 of luxury and music, the toad-eater the least 
 liable to nausea, must be expected to have his 
 susceptibilities. And ^Ir. Lush was accustomed 
 to be treated by the world in general as an apt, 
 agreeable fellow: he had not made up his mind 
 to be insulted by more than one person. 
 
 With this imperfect preparation of a war 
 policy, Lush was awaiting Grandcourt's arrival, 
 doing little more than wondering how the cam- 
 paign would begin. The first day Grandcourt 
 was much occupied with the stables, and amongst 
 other things he ordered a groom to put a side- 
 saddle on Criterion and let him review the horse's 
 paces. This marked indication of purpose set 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 9 
 
 Lush on considering over again whether he 
 should incur the tickhsh consequences of speak- 
 ing first, while he was still sure that no compro- 
 mising step had been taken ; and he rose the next 
 morning almost resolved that if Grandcourt 
 seemed in as good a humour as yesterday and 
 entered at all into talk, he would let drop the in- 
 teresting facts about Gwendolen and her family, 
 just to see how they would work, and to get 
 some guidance. But Grandcourt did not enter 
 into talk, and in answer to a question even about 
 his own convenience, no fish could have main- 
 tained a more unwinking silence. After he had 
 read his letters he gave various orders to be exe- 
 cuted or transmitted by Lush, and then thrust 
 his shoulders towards that useful person, who 
 accordingly rose to leave the room. But before 
 he was out of the door Grandcourt turned his 
 head slightly, and gave a broken, languid " Oh! " 
 
 " What is it? " said Lush, who, it must have 
 been observed, did not take his dusty puddings 
 with a respectful air. 
 
 " Shut the door, will you? I can't speak into 
 the corridor." 
 
 Lush closed the door, came forward, and chose 
 to sit down. 
 
 After a little pause Grandcourt said, " Is Miss 
 Harleth at Offendene? " He was quite certain 
 that Lush had made it his business to inquire 
 about her, and he had some pleasure in thinking 
 that Lush did not want him to inquire. 
 
 " Well, I hardly know," said Lush, carelessly. 
 " The family 's utterly done up. They and the 
 Gascoignes too have lost all their money. It 's 
 owing to some rascally banking business. The 
 
10 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 poor mother has n't a sou, it seems. She and the 
 girls have to huddle themselves into a little cot- 
 tage like a labourer's." 
 
 " Don't lie to me, if you please," said Grand- 
 court, in his lowest audible tone. " It 's not 
 amusing, and it answers no other purpose." 
 
 " What do you mean? " said Lush, more 
 nettled than was common with him, — the pros- 
 pect before him being more than commonly 
 disturbing. 
 
 " Just tell me the truth, will you? " 
 
 " It 's no invention of mine. I have heard the 
 story from several, — Bazley, Brackenshaw's 
 man, for one. He is getting a new tenant for 
 Offendene." 
 
 " I don't mean that. Is Miss Harleth there, 
 or is she not? " said Grandcourt, in his former 
 tone. 
 
 " Upon my soul, I can't tell," said Lush, 
 rather sulkily. " She may have left yesterday. 
 I heard she had taken a situation as governess; 
 she may be gone to it, for what I know. But if 
 you wanted to see her, no doubt the mother 
 would send for her back." This sneer slipped 
 off his tongue without strict attention. 
 
 " Send Hutchins to inquire whether she will 
 be there to-morrow." 
 
 Lush did not move. Like many persons who 
 have thought over beforehand what they shall 
 say in given cases, he was impelled by an unex- 
 pected irritation to say some of those prear- 
 ranged things before the cases were given. 
 Grandcourt, in fact, was likely to get into a 
 scrape so tremendous that it was impossible to 
 let him take the first step towards it without re- 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 11 
 
 monstrance. Lush retained enough caution to 
 use a tone of rational friendliness; still he felt 
 his own value to his patron, and was prepared 
 to be daring. 
 
 " It would be as well for you to remember, 
 Grandcourt, that you are coming under closer 
 fire now. There can be none of the ordinar}^ 
 flirting done, which may mean everything or 
 nothing. You must make up your mind whether 
 you wish to-be accepted; and more than that, 
 how you would like being refused. Either one 
 or the other. You can't be philandering after 
 her again for six weeks." 
 
 Grandcourt said nothing, but pressed the 
 newspaper down on his knees and began to light 
 another cigar. Lush took this as a sign that he 
 was willing to listen, and was the more bent on 
 using the opportunity; he wanted if possible to 
 find out which would be the more potent cause 
 of hesitation, — probable acceptance or prob- 
 able refusal. 
 
 " Everything has a more serious look now 
 than it had before. There is her family to be 
 provided for. You could not let your wife's 
 mother live in beggary. It will be a confound- 
 edly hampering affair. Marriage will pin you 
 down in a way you have n't been used to ; and in 
 point of money you have not too much elbow- 
 room. And after all, what will you get by it? 
 You are master over your estates, present or 
 future, as far as choosing your heir goes ; it 's a 
 pity to go on encumbering them for a mere 
 whim, which you may repent of in a twelve- 
 month. I should be sorry to see you making a 
 mess of your life in that way. If there were any- 
 
12 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 thing solid to be gained by the marriage that 
 would be a different affair." 
 
 Lush's tone had gradually become more and 
 more unctuous in its friendliness of remon- 
 strance, and he was almost in danger of for- 
 getting that he was merely gambling in argu- 
 ment. When he left off, Grandcourt took his 
 cigar out of his mouth, and looking steadily at 
 the moist end while he adjusted the leaf with his 
 delicate finger-tips, said, — 
 
 " I knew before that you had an objection to 
 my marrying Miss Harleth." Here he made a 
 little pause, before he continued, " But I never 
 considered that a reason against it." 
 
 " I never supposed you did," answered Lush, 
 not unctuously, but dryly. " It was not that I 
 urged as a reason. I should have thought it 
 might have been a reason against it, after all 
 your experience, that you would be acting like 
 the hero of a ballad, and making yourself ab- 
 surd, — and all for what? You know you 
 could n't make up your mind before. It 's im- 
 possible you can care much about her. And as 
 for the tricks she is likely to play, you may 
 judge of that from what you heard at Leu- 
 bronn. However, what I wisfied to point out to 
 you was, that there can be no shilly-shally now." 
 
 " Perfectly," said Grandcourt, looking round 
 at Lush and fixing him with narrow eyes ; " I 
 don't intend that there should be. I dare say 
 it 's disagreeable to you. But if you suppose I 
 care a damn for that, you are most stupendously 
 mistaken." 
 
 " Oh, well," said Lush, rising with his hands in 
 his pockets, and feeling some latent venom still 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 13 
 
 within him, " if you have made up your mind! 
 — only there 's another aspect of the affair. I 
 have been speaking on the supposition that it was 
 absolutely certain she would accept you, and that 
 destitution would have no choice. But I am not 
 so sure that the young lady is to be counted on. 
 She is kittle cattle to shoe, I think. And she had 
 her reasons for running away before." Lush 
 had moved a step or two till he stood nearly in 
 front of Grandcourt, though at some distance 
 from him. He did not feel himself much re- 
 strained by consequences, being aware that the 
 only strong hold he had on his present position 
 was his serviceableness ; and even after a quarrel, 
 the want of him was likely sooner or later to 
 recur. He foresaw that Gwendolen would cause 
 him to be ousted for a time, and his temper at 
 this moment urged him to risk a quarrel. 
 
 " She had her reasons," he repeated, more 
 significantly. 
 
 " I had come to that conclusion before," said 
 Grandcourt, with contemptuous irony. 
 
 " Yes, but I hardly think you know what her 
 reasons were." 
 
 " You do, apparently," said Grandcourt, not 
 betraying by so much as an eyelash that he cared 
 for the reasons. 
 
 " Yes, and you had better know too, that you 
 may judge of the influence you have over her if 
 she swallows her reasons and accepts you. For 
 my own part, I would take odds against it. She 
 saw Lydia in Cardell Chase, and heard the whole 
 story." 
 
 Grandcourt made no immediate answer, and 
 only went on smoking. He was so long before 
 
14 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 he spoke that Lusl^ moved about and looked out 
 of the windows, unwilling to go away without 
 seeing some effect of his daring move. He had 
 expected that Grandcourt would tax him with 
 having contrived the affair, since Mrs. Glasher 
 was then living at Gadsmere, a hundred miles 
 off, and he was prepared to admit the fact : what 
 he cared about was that Grandcourt should be 
 staggered by the sense that his intended advan- 
 ces must be made to a girl who had that knowl- 
 edge in her mind and had been scared by it. At 
 length Grandcourt, seeing Lush turn towards 
 him, looked at him again and said contemptu- 
 ously, " What follows?" 
 
 Here certainly was a " mate " in answer to 
 Lush's "check;" and though his exasperation 
 with Grandcourt was perhaps stronger than it 
 had ever been before, it would have been mere 
 idiocy to act as if any further move could be 
 useful. He gave a slight shrug with one 
 shoulder, and was going to walk away, when 
 Grandcourt, turning on his seat towards the 
 table, said, as quietly as if nothing had occurred, 
 " Oblige me by pushing that pen and paper here, 
 will you? " 
 
 No thunderous, bullying superior could have 
 exercised the imperious spell that Grandcourt 
 did. Why, instead of being obeyed, he had never 
 been told to go to a warmer place, was perhaps 
 a mystery to several who found themselves 
 obeying him. The pen and paper were pushed 
 to him, and as he took them he said, " Just wait 
 for this letter." 
 
 He scrawled with ease, and the brief note was 
 quickly addressed. " Let Hutchins go with it 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 15 
 
 at once, wiU you?" said Grandcourt, pushing 
 the letter away from him. 
 
 As Lush had expected, it was addressed to 
 Miss Harleth, Offendene. When his irritation 
 had cooled down, he was glad there had been no 
 explosive quarrel; but he felt sure that there was 
 a notch made against him, and that somehow or 
 other he was intended to pay. It was also clear 
 to him that the immediate effect of his revelation 
 had been to harden Grandcourt's previous de- 
 termination. But as to the particular move- 
 ments which made this process in his baffling 
 mind, Lush could only toss up his chin in despair 
 of a theory. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "He brings white asses laden with the freight 
 Of Tyrian vessels, purple, gold, and bahn. 
 To bribe my will: I'll bid them chase him forth. 
 Nor let him breathe the taint of his surmise 
 On my secure resolve 
 
 Ay, 't is secure, 
 And therefore let him come to spread his freight. 
 For firmness hath its appetite and craves 
 The stronger lure, more strongly to resist; 
 "Would know the touch of gold to fling it off ; 
 Scent wine to feel its hp the soberer ; 
 Behold soft byssus, ivory, and plumes 
 To say, 'They're fair, but I will none of them,' 
 And flout Enticement in the very face." 
 
 MR. GASCOIGNE one day came to Of- 
 fendene with what he felt to be the satis- 
 factory news that Mrs. Mompert had 
 fixed Tuesday in the following week for her in- 
 terview with Gwendolen at Wanchester. He 
 said nothing of his having incidentally heard 
 that Mr. Grandcourt had returned to Diplow; 
 knowing no more than she did that Leubronn 
 had been the goal of her admirer's journejnng, 
 and feeling that it would be unkind uselessly to 
 revive the memory of a brilliant prospect under 
 the present reverses. In his secret soul he 
 thought of his niece's unintelligible caprice with 
 regret, but he vindicated her to himself by con- 
 sidering that Grandcourt had been the first to 
 behave oddly, in suddenly walking away when 
 there had been the best opportunity for crown- 
 ing his marked attentions. The Rector's prac- 
 tical judgment told him that his chief duty to 
 his niece now was to encourage her resolutely to 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 17 
 
 face the change in her lot, since there was no 
 manifest promise of any event that would avert 
 it. 
 
 " You will find an interest in varied experi- 
 ence, my dear, and I have no doubt you will be 
 a more valuable woman for having sustained 
 such a part as you are called to." 
 
 " I cannot pretend to believe that I shall like 
 it," said Gwendolen, for the first time showing 
 her uncle some petulance. " But I am quite 
 aware that I am obliged to bear it." 
 
 She remembered having submitted to his ad- 
 monition on a different occasion, when she was 
 expected to like a very different prospect. 
 
 " And your good sense will teach you to be- 
 have suitably under it," said Mr. Gascoigne, 
 with a shade more gravity. "I feel sure that 
 Mrs. Mompert will be pleased with you. You 
 will know how to conduct yourself to a woman 
 who holds in all senses the relation of superior to 
 you. This trouble has come on you young, but 
 that makes it in some respects easier, and there 
 is benefit in all chastisement if we adjust our 
 minds to it." 
 
 This was precisely what Gwendolen was un- 
 able to do; and after her uncle was gone, the 
 bitter tears, which had rarely come during the 
 late trouble, rose and fell slowly as she sat alone. 
 Her heart denied that the trouble was easier be- 
 cause she was young. When was she to have 
 any happiness, if it did not come while she was 
 young? Not that her visions of possible happi- 
 ness for herself were as unmixed with necessary 
 evil as they used to be, — not that she could still 
 imagine herself plucking the fruits of life with- 
 
 VOL. XIII — 2 
 
18 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 out suspicion of their core. But this general dis- 
 enchantment with the world, — nay, with her- 
 self, since it appeared that she was not made for 
 easy pre-eminence, — only intensified her sense 
 of forlornness: it was a visibly sterile distance 
 enclosing the dreary path at her feet, in which 
 she had no courage to tread. She was in that 
 first crisis of passionate youthful rebellion 
 against what is not fitly called pain, but rather 
 the absence of joy, — that first rage of disap- 
 pointment in life's morning, which we whom 
 the years have subdued are apt to remember but 
 dimly as part of our own experience, and so to 
 be intolerant of its self -enclosed unreasonable- 
 ness and impiety. What passion seems more 
 absurd, when we have got outside it and looked 
 at calamity as a collective risk, than this amazed 
 anguish that I and not Thou, He, or She should 
 be just the smitten one? Yet perhaps some who 
 have afterwards made themselves a willing fence 
 before the breast of another, and have carried 
 their own heart-wound in heroic silence, — some 
 who have made their latter deeds great, never- 
 theless began with this angry amazement at their 
 own smart, and on the mere denial of their fan- 
 tastic desires raged as if under the sting of wasps 
 which reduced the universe for them to an un- 
 just infliction of pain. This was nearly poor 
 Gwendolen's condition. What though such a 
 reverse as hers had often happened to other 
 girls? The one point she had been all her life 
 learning to care for was, that it had happened 
 to her: it was what she felt under Klesmer's 
 demonstration that she was not remarkable 
 enough to command fortune by force of will and 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 19 
 
 merit; it was what she would feel under the 
 rigours of Mrs. Mompert's constant expectation, 
 under the dull demand that she should be cheer- 
 ful with three Miss Momperts, under the neces- 
 sity of showing herself entirely submissive, and 
 keeping her thoughts to herself. To be a queen 
 disthroned is not so hard as some other down- 
 stepping: imagine one who had been made to 
 believe in his own divinity finding all homage 
 withdrawn, and himself unable to perform a 
 miracle that would recall the homage and restore 
 his own confidence. Something akin to this il- 
 lusion and this helplessness had befallen the poor 
 spoiled child, with the lovely lips and eyes and 
 the majestic figure, — which seemed now to 
 have no magic in them. 
 
 She rose from the low ottoman where she had 
 been sitting purposeless, and walked up and 
 down the drawing-room, resting her elbow on 
 one palm while she leaned down her cheek on the 
 other, and a slow tear fell. She thought, " I 
 have always, ever since I was little, felt that 
 mamma was not a happy woman; and now I 
 dare say I shall be more unhappy than she has 
 been." Her mind dwelt for a few moments on 
 the picture of herself losing her youth and ceas- 
 ing to enjoy, — not minding whether she did 
 this or that: but such picturing inevitably 
 brought back the image of her mother. " Poor 
 mamma! it will be still worse for her now. I can 
 get a little money for her, — that is all I shall 
 care about now." And then with an entirely 
 new movement of her imagination, she saw her 
 mother getting quite old and white, and herself 
 no longer young but faded, and their two faces 
 
20 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 meeting still with memory and love, and she 
 knowing what was in her mother's mind — 
 " Poor Gwen too is sad and faded now " — and 
 then for the first time she sobbed, not in anger 
 but with a sort of tender misery. 
 
 Her face was towards the door, and she saw 
 her mother enter. She barely saw that ; for her 
 eyes were large with tears, and she pressed her 
 handkerchief against them hurriedly. Before 
 she took it away she felt her mother's arms round 
 her, and this sensation, which seemed a prolonga- 
 tion of her inward vision, overcame her will to be 
 reticent: she sobbed anew in spite of herself, as 
 they pressed their cheeks together. - 
 
 Mrs. Davilow had brought something in her 
 hand which had already caused her an agitating 
 anxiety, and she dared not speak until her dar- 
 ling had become calmer. But Gwendolen, with 
 whom weeping had always been a painful mani- 
 festation to be resisted if possible, again pressed 
 her handkerchief against her eyes, and with a 
 deep breath drew her head backward and looked 
 at her mother, who wajs pale and tremulous. 
 
 " It was nothing, mamma," said Gwendolen, 
 thinking that her mother had been moved in this 
 way simply by finding her in distress. " It is all 
 over now." 
 
 But Mrs. Davilow had withdrawn her arms, 
 and Gwendolen perceived a letter in her hand. 
 
 "What is that letter? — worse news still?" 
 she asked with a touch of bitterness. 
 
 " I don't know what you will think it, dear," 
 said Mrs. Davilow, keeping the letter in her 
 hand. " You will hardly guess where it comes 
 from." 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 21 
 
 " Don't ask me to guess anything," said 
 Gwendolen, rather impatiently, as if a bruise 
 were being pressed. 
 
 "It is addressed to you, dear." 
 
 Gwendolen gave the slightest perceptible toss 
 of the head. 
 
 " It comes from Diplow," said Mrs. Davilow, 
 giving her the letter. 
 
 She knew Grandcourt's indistinct handwrit- 
 ing, and her mother was not surprised to see her 
 blush deeply ; but watching her as she read, and 
 wondering much what was the purport of the 
 letter, she saw the colour die out. Gwendolen's 
 lips even were pale as she turned the open note 
 towards her mother. The words were few and 
 formal. 
 
 " Mr. Grandcourt presents his compliments to Miss 
 Harleth, and begs to know whether he may be per- 
 mitted to call at Offendene to-morrow after two, and to 
 see her alone. Mr, Grandcourt has just returned from 
 Leubronn, where he had hoped to find Miss Harleth." 
 
 Mrs. Davilow read, and then looked at her 
 daughter inquiringly, leaving the note in her 
 hand. Gwendolen let it fall on the floor, and 
 turned away. 
 
 " It must be answered, darling," said Mrs. 
 Davilow, timidly. " The man waits." 
 
 Gwendolen sank on the settee, clasped her 
 hands, and looked straight before her, not at her 
 mother. She had the^ expression of one who had 
 been startled by a sound and was listening to 
 know what would come of it. The sudden 
 change of the situation was bewildering. A few 
 minutes before she was looking along an ines- 
 
22 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 capable path of repulsive monotony, with hope- 
 less inward rebellion against the imperious lot 
 which left her no choice ; and lo, now, a moment of 
 choice was come. Yet — was it triumph she felt 
 most or terror? Impossible for Gwendolen not 
 to feel some triumph in a tribute to her power at 
 a time when she was first tasting the bitterness of 
 insignificance: again she seemed to be getting 
 a sort of empire over her own life. But how to 
 use it? Here came the terror. Quick, quick, 
 like pictures in a book beaten open with a sense 
 of hurry, came back vividly, yet in fragments, 
 all that she had gone through in relation to 
 Grandcourt, — the allurements, the vacillations, 
 the resolve to accede, the final repulsion ; the in- 
 cisive face of that dark-eyed lady with the lovely 
 boy; her own pledge (was it a pledge not to 
 marry him?) — the new disbelief in the worth 
 of men and things for which that scene of dis- 
 closure had become a symbol. That unalter- 
 able experience made a vision at which in the 
 first agitated moment, before tempering reflec- 
 tions could suggest themselves, her native terror 
 shrank. 
 
 Where was the good of choice coming again? 
 What did she wish? Anything different? No! 
 and yet in the dark seed-growths of consciousness 
 a new wish was forming itself, — "I wish I had 
 never known it!" Something, anything she 
 wished for that would have saved her from the 
 dread to let Grandcourt come. 
 
 It was no long while, — yet it seemed long to 
 Mrs. Davilow, before she thought it well to say, 
 gently, — 
 
 " It will be necessary for you to write, dear. 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 23 
 
 Or shall I write an answer for you, — which you 
 will dictate?" 
 
 " No, mamma," said Gwendolen, drawing a 
 deep breath. " But please lay me out the pen 
 and paper." 
 
 That was gaining time. Was she to decline 
 Grandcourt's visit, — close the shutters, — not 
 even look out on what would happen ? — though 
 with the assurance that she should remain just 
 where she was? The young activity within her 
 made a warm current through her terror, and 
 stirred towards something that would be an 
 event, — towards an opportunity in which she 
 could look and speak with the former effective- 
 ness. The interest of the morrow was no longer 
 at a dead-lock. 
 
 " There is really no reason on earth why you 
 should be so alarmed at the man's waiting a 
 few minutes, mamma," said Gwendolen, remon- 
 strantly, as Mrs. Davilow, having prepared 
 the writing materials, looked towards her ex- 
 pectantly. " Servants expect nothing else than 
 to wait. It is not to be supposed that I must 
 write on the instant." 
 
 " No, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, in the tone of 
 one corrected, turning to sit down and take up a 
 bit of work that lay at hand; " he can wait an- 
 other quarter of an hour, if you like." 
 
 It was very simple speech and action on her 
 part, but it was what might have been subtly cal- 
 culated. Gwendolen felt a contradictory desire 
 to be hastened: hurry would save her from de- 
 liberate choice. 
 
 " I did not mean him to wait long enough for 
 that needlework to be finished," she said, lifting 
 
24 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her hands to stroke the backward curves of her 
 hau*, while she rose from her seat and stood still. 
 
 " But if you don't feel able to decide? " said 
 Mrs. Davilow, sympathizingly. 
 
 " I must decide," said Gwendolen, walking to 
 the writing-table and seating herself. All the 
 while there was a busy undercurrent in her, like 
 the thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue 
 while he is considering how he can slip away. 
 Why should she not let him come ? It bound her 
 to nothing. He had been to Leubronn after her : 
 of course he meant a direct unmistakable renewal 
 of the suit which before had been only implied. 
 What then? She could reject him. Why was 
 she to deny herself the freedom of doing this, — ■ 
 which she would like to do ? 
 
 "If Mr. Grandcourt has only just returned 
 from Leubronn," said JNIrs. Davilow, observing 
 that Gwendolen leaned back in her chair after 
 taking the pen in her hand, — "I wonder 
 whether he has heard of our misfortunes." 
 
 " That could make no difference to a man in 
 his position," said Gwendolen, rather contemptu- 
 ously. 
 
 " It would, to some men," said Mrs. Davilow. 
 " They would not like to take a wife from a fam- 
 ily in a state of beggary almost, as we are. Here 
 we are at Offendene, with a great shell over us 
 as usual. But just imagine his finding us at 
 Sa\\yer's Cottage. JNIost men are afraid of be- 
 ing bored or taxed by a ^dfe's family. If ]Mr. 
 Grandcourt did know, I think it a strong proof 
 of his attachment to you." 
 
 Mrs. Davilow spoke with unusual emphasis: 
 it was the first time she had ventured to say any- 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 25 
 
 thing about Grandcourt which would necessarily 
 seem intended as an argument in favour of him, 
 her habitual impression being that such argu- 
 ments would certainly be useless and might be 
 worse. The effect of her words now was 
 stronger than sjie could imagine: they raised a 
 new set of possibilities in Gwendolen's mind, — a 
 vision of what Grandcourt might do for her 
 mother if she, Gwendolen, did — what she was not 
 going to do. She was so moved by a new rush of 
 ideas, that, like one conscious of being urgently 
 called away, she felt that the immediate task 
 must be hastened: the letter must be written, 
 else it might be endlessly deferred. After all, 
 she acted in a hurry, as she had wished to do. 
 To act in a hurry was to have a reason for keep- 
 ing away from an absolute decision, and to 
 leave open as many issues as possible. 
 She wrote : — 
 
 " Miss Harleth presents her compliments to Mr. 
 Grandcourt. She will be at home after two o'clock 
 to-morrow." 
 
 Before addressing the note she said, " Pray 
 ring the bell, mamma, if there is any one to an- 
 swer it." She really did not know who did the 
 work of the house. 
 
 It was not till after the letter had been taken 
 away and Gwendolen had risen again, stretching 
 out one arm and then resting it on her head, with 
 a long moan which had a sound of relief in it, 
 that Mrs. Davilow ventured to ask, — 
 
 " What did you say, Gwen? " 
 
 " I said that I should be at home," answered 
 Gwendolen, rather loftily. Then, after a pause, 
 
26 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " You must not expect, because Mr. Grand- 
 court is coming, that anything is going to 
 happen, mamma." 
 
 " I don't allow myself to expect anything, 
 dear. I desire you to follow your own feeling. 
 You have never told me what th^t was." 
 
 " What is the use of telling? " said Gwendo- 
 len, hearing a reproach in that true statement. 
 " When I have anything pleasant to tell, you 
 may be sure I will tell you." 
 
 " But Mr. Grandcourt will consider that you 
 have already accepted him, in allowing him to 
 come. His note tells you plainly enough that he 
 is coming to make you an offer." 
 
 " Very well; and I wish to have the pleasure 
 of refusing him." 
 
 Mrs. Davilow looked up in wonderment, but 
 Gwendolen implied her wish not to be questioned 
 further by saying, — 
 
 " Put down that detestable needlework, and 
 let us walk in the avenue. I am stifled." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 "Desire has trimmed the sails, and Circumstance 
 Brings but the breeze to fill them." 
 
 WHILE Grandcourt on his beautiful 
 black Yarico, the groom behind him on 
 Criterion, was taking the pleasant ride 
 from Diplow to Offendene, Gwendolen was 
 seated before the mirror while her mother gath- 
 ered up the lengthy mass of light-brown hair 
 which she had been carefully brushing. 
 
 " Only gather it up easily and make a coil, 
 mamma," said Gwendolen. 
 
 " Let me bring you some earrings, Gwen," 
 said Mrs. Davilow, when the hair was adjusted, 
 and they were both looking at the reflection in the 
 glass. It was impossible for them not to notice 
 that the eyes looked brighter than they had done 
 of late, that there seemed to be a shadow lifted 
 from the face, leaving all the lines once more in 
 their placid youthfulness. The mother drew 
 some inferences that made her voice rather cheer- 
 ful. " You do want your earrings? " 
 
 " No, mamma; I shall not wear any orna- 
 ments, and I shall put on my black silk. Black 
 is the only wear when one is going to refuse an 
 offer," said Gwendolen, with one of her old 
 smiles at her mother, while she rose to throw off 
 her dressing-gown. 
 
 " Suppose the offer is not made after all," said 
 Mrs. Davilow, not without a sly intention. 
 " Then that will be because I refuse it before- 
 
28 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hand," said Gwendolen. " It comes to the same 
 thing." 
 
 There was a proud little toss of her head as 
 she said this; and when she walked dowfistairs 
 in her long black robes, there was just that firm 
 poise of head and elasticity of form which had 
 lately been missing, as in a parched plant. Her 
 mother thought, " She is quite herself again. It 
 must be pleasure in his coming. Can her mind 
 be really made up against him? " 
 
 Gwendolen would have been rather angry if 
 that thought had been uttered; perhaps all the 
 more because through the last twenty hours, with 
 a brief interruption of sleep, she had. been so 
 occupied with perpetually alternating images 
 and arguments for and against the possibility of 
 her marrying Grandcourt, that the conclusion 
 which she had determined on beforehand ceased 
 to have any hold on her consciousness : the alter- 
 nate dip of counterbalancing thoughts begot- 
 ten of counterbalancing desires had brought her 
 into a state in which no conclusion could look 
 fixed to her. She would have expressed her 
 resolve as before; but it was a form out of which 
 the blood had been sucked, — no more a part 
 of quivering life than the " God's will be done " 
 of one who is eagerly watching chances. She 
 did not mean to accept Grandcourt; from the 
 first moment of receiving his letter she had 
 meant to refuse him; still, that could not but 
 prompt her to look the unwelcome reasons full 
 in the face until she had a little less awe of them, 
 could not hinder her imagination from filling 
 out her knowledge in various ways, some of 
 which seemed to change the aspect of what she 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 20 
 
 knew. By dint of looking at a dubious object 
 with a constructive imagination, one can give 
 it twenty different shapes. Her indistinct 
 grounds of hesitation before the interview at 
 the Whispering Stones, at present counted for 
 nothing; they were all merged in the final re- 
 pulsion. If it had not been for that day in 
 Cardell Chase, she said to herself now, there 
 would have been no obstacle to her marrying 
 Grandcourt. On that day and after it, she had 
 not reasoned and balanced: she had acted with 
 a force of impulse against which all questioning 
 was no more than a voice against a torrent. The 
 impulse had come, — not only from her maidenly 
 pride and jealousy, not only from the shock 
 of another woman's calamity thrust close on her 
 vision, but — from her dread of wrong-doing, 
 which was vague, it is true, and aloof from the 
 daily details of her life, but not the less strong. 
 Whatever was accepted as consistent with being 
 a lady she had no scruple about; but from the 
 dim region of what was called disgraceful, 
 wrong, guilty, she shrank with mingled pride 
 and terror; and even apart from shame, her 
 feeling would have made her place any delib- 
 erate injury of another in the region of guilt. 
 
 But now — did she know exactty what was 
 the state of the case with regard to Mrs. Glasher 
 and her children? She had given a sort of prom- 
 ise, — had said, " I will not interfere with your 
 wishes." But would another woman who mar- 
 ried Grandcourt be in fact the decisive obstacle 
 to her wishes, or be doing her and her boy any 
 real injury? Might it not be just as well, nay 
 better, that Grandcourt should marry? For 
 
30 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 what could not a woman do when she was mar- 
 ried, if she knew how to assert herself? Here 
 all was constructive imagination. Gwendolen 
 had about as accurate a conception of marriage 
 — that is to say, of the mutual influences, de- 
 mands, duties of man and woman in the state 
 of matrimony — as she had of magnetic currents 
 and the law of storms. 
 
 " Mamma managed badly," was her way of 
 summing up what she had seen of her mother's 
 experience; she herself would manage quite 
 differently. And the trials of matrimony were 
 the last theme into which Mrs. Davilow could 
 choose to enter fully with this daughter. 
 
 " I wonder what mamma and my uncle would, 
 say if they knew about Mrs. Glasher! " thought 
 Gwendolen, in her inward debating; not that 
 she could imagine herself telling them, even if 
 she had not felt bound to silence. " I wonder 
 what anybody would say; or what they would 
 say to Mr. Grandcourt's marrying some one 
 else and having other children!" To consider 
 what " anybody " would say, was to be released 
 from the difficulty of judging where everything 
 was obscure to her when feeling had ceased to 
 be decisive. She had only to collect her memo- 
 ries, which proved to her that " anybody " re- 
 garded illegitimate children as more rightfully 
 to be looked shy on and deprived of social advan- 
 tages than illegitimate fathers. The verdict of 
 " anybody " seemed to be that she had no reason 
 to concern herself greatly on behalf of Mrs. 
 Glasher and her children. 
 
 But there was another way in which they had 
 caused her concern. What others might think, 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 31 
 
 could not do away with a feeling v/hich in the 
 first instance would hardly be too strongly de- 
 scribed as indignation and loathing that she 
 should have been expected to unite herself with 
 an outworn life, full of baclovard secrets which 
 must have been more keenly felt than any asso- 
 ciations with her. True, the question of love on 
 her own part had occupied her scarcely at all 
 in relation to Grandcourt. The desirability of 
 marriage for her had always seemed due to other 
 feelings than love; and to be enamoured was 
 the part of the man, on whom the advances de- 
 pended. Gwendolen had found no objection 
 to Grandcourt' s way of being enamoured before 
 she had had that glimpse of his past, which she 
 resented as if it had been a deliberate offence 
 against her. His advances to her were delib- 
 erate, and she felt a retrospective disgust for 
 them. Perhaps other men's lives were of the 
 same kind, — full of secrets which made the 
 ignorant suppositions of the woman they wanted 
 to marry a farce at which they were laughing 
 in their sleeves. 
 
 These feelings of disgust and indignation 
 had sunk deep; and though other troublous 
 experience in the last weeks had dulled them 
 from passion into remembrance, it was chiefly 
 their reverberating activity which kept her firm 
 to the understanding with herself, that she was 
 not going to accept Grandcourt. She had never 
 meant to form a new determination; she had 
 only been considering what might be thought 
 or said. If anything could have induced her to 
 change, it would have been the prospect of 
 making all things easy for "poor mamma:" 
 
32 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 that, she admitted, was a temptation. But no! 
 she was going to refuse him. Meanwhile the 
 thought that he was coming to be refused was 
 inspiriting : she had the white reins in her hands 
 again; there was a new current in her frame, 
 reviving her from the beaten-down conscious- 
 ness in which she had been left by the interview 
 with Klesmer. She was not now going to crave 
 an opinion of her capabilities ; she was going to 
 exercise her power. 
 
 Was this what made her heart palpitate an- 
 noyingly when she heard the horse's footsteps 
 on the gravel ? — w hen Miss Merry, who opened 
 the door to Grandcourt, came to tell her that he 
 was in the drawing-room? The hours of prepa- 
 ration and the triumph of the situation were 
 apparently of no use: she might as well have 
 seen Grandcourt coming suddenly on her in the 
 midst of her despondency. While walking into 
 the drawing-room she had to concentrate all her 
 energy in that self-control which made her ap- 
 pear gravely gracious as she gave her hand to 
 him, and answered his hope that she was quite 
 well in a voice as low and languid as his own. 
 A moment afterwards, when they were both of 
 them seated on two of the wreath-painted chairs, 
 — Gwendolen upright with downcast eyelids, 
 Grandcourt about fwo yards distant, leaning 
 one arm over the back of his chair and looking 
 at her, while he held his hat in his left hand, — 
 any one seeing them as a picture would have 
 concluded that they were in some stage of love- 
 making suspense. And certainly the love- 
 making had begun: she already felt herself 
 being wooed by this silent man seated at ai\ 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 33 
 
 agreeable distance, with the subtlest atmosphere 
 of attar of roses and an attention bent wholly 
 on her. And he also considered himself to be 
 wooing: he was not a man to suppose that his 
 presence carried no consequences; and he was 
 exactly the man to feel the utmost piquancy in 
 a girl whom he had not found quite calculable. 
 
 " I was disappointed not to find you at Leu- 
 bronn," he began, his usual broken drav/1 having 
 just a shade of amorous languor in it. " The 
 place was intolerable without you. A mere ken- 
 nel of a place. Don't you think so? " 
 
 " I can't judge what it would be Vvithout my- 
 self," said Gwendolen, turning her eyes on him, 
 with some recovered sense of mischief. " With 
 myself I liked it well enough to have stayed 
 longer, if I could. But I was obliged to come 
 home on account of family troubles." 
 
 " It was very cruel of you to go to Leubronn," 
 said Grandcourt, taking no notice of the trou- 
 bles, on which Gwendolen — she hardly knew 
 why — wished that there should be a clear under- 
 standing at once. " You must have known that 
 it would spoil everything: you knew you were 
 the heart and soul of everything that went on. 
 Are you quite reckless about m^e? " 
 
 It was impossible to sa}^ " yes " in a tone that 
 would be taken seriously, equally impossible to 
 say " no; " but what else could she say? In her 
 difficulty, she turned down her eyelids again, 
 and blushed over face and neck. Grandcourt 
 saw her in a new phase, and believed that she was 
 showing her inclination ; but he was determined 
 that she should show it more decidedly. 
 
 " Perhaps there is some deeper interest? 
 
 VOL. XIII — 3 
 
34 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Some attraction — some engagement — which 
 it would have been only fair to make me aware 
 of? Is there any man who stands between us? " 
 
 Inwardly the answer framed itself, " No; but 
 there is a woman." Yet how could she utter 
 this ? Even if she had not promised that woman 
 to be silent, it would have been impossible for 
 her to enter on the subject with Grandcourt. 
 But how could she arrest this wooing by begin- 
 ning to make a formal speech, — "I perceive 
 your intention — it is most flattering, &c."? A 
 fish honestly invited to come and be eaten has 
 a clear course in declining, but how if it finds 
 itself swimming against a net? And apart from 
 the network, would she have dared at once to 
 say anything decisive? Gwendolen had not 
 time to be clear on that point. As it was, she 
 felt compelled to silence; and after a pause, 
 Grandcourt said, — 
 
 " Am I to understand that some one else is 
 preferred? " 
 
 Gwendolen, now impatient of her own em- 
 barrassment, determined to rush at the difficulty 
 and free herself. She raised her eyes again and 
 said with something of her former clearness and 
 defiance, " No," wishing him to understand. 
 
 What then? I may not be ready to take you J' 
 There was nothing that Grandcourt could not 
 understand which he perceived likely to affect 
 his amour propre. 
 
 " The last thing I would do, is to importune 
 you. I should not hope to win you by making 
 myself a bore. If there were no hope for me, 
 I would ask you to tell me so at once, that I 
 might just ride away to — no matter where." 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 35 
 
 Almost to her own astonishment, Gwendolen 
 felt a sudden alarm at the image of Grandcourt 
 finally riding away. What would be left her 
 then? Nothing but the former dreariness. She 
 liked him to be there. She snatched at the sub- 
 ject that would defer any decisive answer. 
 
 " I fear you are not aware of what has hap- 
 pened to us. I have lately had to think so much 
 of my mamma's troubles, that other subjects 
 have been quite thrown into the background. 
 She has lost all her fortune, and we are going 
 to leave this place. I must ask you to excuse 
 my seeming preoccupied." 
 
 In eluding a direct appeal Gwendolen recov- 
 ered some of her self-possession. She spoke 
 with dignity and looked straight at Grandcourt, 
 whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers, 
 and mysteriously arrested them, — mysteriously ; 
 for the subtly varied drama between man and 
 woman is often such as can hardly be rendered 
 in words put together like dominos, according 
 to obvious fixed marks. The word of all work 
 Love will no more express the myriad modes of 
 mutual attraction, than the word Thought can 
 inform you what is passing through your neigh- 
 bour's mind. It would be hard to tell on which 
 side — Gwendolen's or Grandcourt's — the in- 
 fluence was more mixed. At that moment his 
 strongest w^ish was to be completely master of 
 this creature — this piquant combination of 
 maidenliness and mischief : that she knew things 
 which had made her start away from him, 
 spurred him to triumph over that repugnance; 
 and he was believing that he should triumph. 
 And she — ah, piteous equality in the need to 
 
36 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 dominate! — she was overcome like the thirsty 
 one who is drawn towards the seeming water 
 in the desert, overcome by the suffused sense that 
 here in this man's homage to her lay the rescue 
 from helpless subjection to an oppressive lot. 
 
 All the while they were looking at each other ; 
 and Grandcourt said, slowly and languidly as 
 if it were of no importance, other things having 
 been settled, — 
 
 " You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. 
 Davilow's loss of fortune will not trouble you 
 further. You will trust me to prevent it from 
 weighing upon her. You will give me the claim 
 to provide against that." 
 
 The little pauses and refined drawlings with 
 which this speech was uttered, gave time for 
 Gwendolen to go through the dream of a life. 
 As the words penetrated her, they had the effect 
 of a draught of wine, which suddenly makes all 
 things easier, desirable things not so wrong, and 
 people in general less disagreeable. She had 
 a momentary phantasmal love for this man who 
 chose his words so well, and who was a mere in- 
 carnation of delicate homage. Repugnance, 
 dread, scruples, — these were dim as remem- 
 bered pains, while she was already tasting relief 
 under the immediate pain of hopelessness. She 
 imagined herself already springing to her 
 mother, and being playful again. Yet when 
 Grandcourt had ceased to speak, there was an 
 instant in which she was conscious of being at 
 the turning of the ways. 
 
 " You are very generous," she said, not moving 
 her eyes, and speaking with a gentle intonation. 
 
 " You accept what will make such things a 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 37 
 
 matter of course? " said Grandcourt, without any- 
 new eagerness. " You consent to become my 
 wife?" 
 
 This time Gwendolen remained quite pale. 
 Something made her rise from her seat in spite 
 of herself and walk to a httle distance. Then 
 she turned and with her hands folded before her 
 stood in silence. 
 
 Grandcourt immediately rose too, resting his 
 hat on the chair, but still keeping hold of it. 
 The evident hesitation of this destitute girl to 
 take his splendid offer stung him into a keenness 
 of interest such as he had not known for years. 
 None the less because he attributed her hesitation 
 entirely to her knowledge about Mrs. Glasher. 
 In that attitude of preparation, he said, — 
 
 " Do you command me to go? " No familiar 
 spirit could have suggested to him more effec- 
 tive words. 
 
 " No," said Gwendolen. She could not let 
 him go : that negative was a clutch. She seemed 
 to herself to be, after all, only drifted towards 
 the tremendous decision; but drifting depends 
 on something besides the currents, when the sails 
 have been set beforehand. 
 
 "You accept my devotion?" said Grand- 
 court, holding his hat by his side and looking 
 straight into her eyes, without other movement. 
 Their eyes meeting in that way seemed to allow 
 any length of pause; but wait as long as she 
 would, how could she contradict herself? What 
 had she detained him for? He had shut out any 
 explanation. 
 
 " Yes," came as gravely from Gwendolen's 
 lips as if she had been answering to her name in 
 
38 DANIEL DEROXDA 
 
 a court of justice. He received it gravely, and 
 they still looked at each other in the same atti- 
 tude. Was there ever before such a way of 
 accepting the bhss-giving /' Yes " ? Grandcoui^t 
 hked better to be at that distance from her, and 
 to feel under a ceremony imposed by an inde- 
 finable prohibition that breathed from Gwen- 
 dolen's bearing. 
 
 But he did at length lay do^ra his hat and 
 advance to take her hand, just pressing his lips 
 upon it and letting it go again. She thought 
 his behaviour perfect, and gained a sense of 
 freedom which made her ahnost read}^ to be mis- 
 chievous. Her " Yes " entailed so little at this 
 moment, that there was nothing to screen the 
 reversal of her gloomy prospects: her vision 
 was filled by her own release from the ]Momperts, 
 and her mother's release from Saw}^er's Cottage. 
 With a happy curl of the lips, she said, — 
 
 " Will you not see mamma? I will fetch her." 
 
 " Let us wait a little," said Grandcom^t, in his 
 favourite attitude, having his left forefinger and 
 thumb in his waistcoat pocket, and with his right 
 caressing his whisker, while he stood near Gwen- 
 dolen and looked at her, — not unlike a gentle- 
 man who has a felicitous introduction at an 
 evening party. 
 
 " Have you ami:hing else to say to me? " said 
 Gwendolen, playfully. 
 
 " Yes, — I know having things said to you 
 is a great bore," said Grandcourt, rather s^tq- 
 pathetically. 
 
 " Not when they are things I like to hear." 
 
 " Will it bother you to be asked how soon we 
 can be married? " 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 39 
 
 " I think it will, to-day," said Gwendolen, 
 putting up her chin saucily. 
 
 " Not to-day, then, but to-morrow. Think 
 of it before I come to-morrow. In a fortnight 
 — or three weeks — as soon as possible." 
 
 Ah, you think you will be tired of my com- 
 pany," said Gwendolen. " I notice when people 
 are married the husband is not so much with his 
 wife as when they were engaged. But perhaps 
 I shall like that better too." 
 
 She laughed charmingly. 
 
 " You shall have whatever you like," said 
 Grandcourt. 
 
 " And nothing that I don't like? — please say 
 that; because I think I dislike Vv^hat I don't 
 like more than I like what I like," said Gwen- 
 dolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise 
 where all her nonsense is adorable. 
 
 Grandcourt paused: these were subtilties in 
 which he had much experience of his own. " I 
 don't know — this is such a brute of a world, 
 things are always turning up that one does n't 
 like. I can't always hinder your being bored. 
 If you like to hunt Criterion, I can't hinder his 
 coming down by some chance or other." 
 
 " Ah, my friend Criterion, how is he? " 
 
 " He is outside : I made the groom ride him, 
 that you might see him. He had the side-saddle 
 on for an hour or two yesterday. Come to the 
 window and look at him." 
 
 They could see the two horses being taken 
 slowly round the sweep; and the beautiful crea- 
 tures, in their fine grooming, sent a thrill of 
 exultation through Gwendolen. They were the 
 symbols of command and luxury, in delightful 
 
40 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 contrast with the ughness of poverty and humili- 
 ation at which she had lately been looking close. 
 
 "Will you ride Criterion to-morrow?" said 
 Grandcourt. " If you will, everything shall be 
 arranged." 
 
 " I should like it of all things," said Gwen- 
 dolen. " I want to lose myself in a gallop again. 
 But now I must go and fetch mamma." 
 
 " Take my arm to the door, then," said Grand- 
 court; and she accepted. Their faces were very 
 near each other, being almost on a level, and 
 he was looking at her. She thought his manners 
 as a lover more agreeable than any she had seen 
 described. She had no alarm lest he meant to 
 kiss her, and was so much at her ease that she 
 suddenly paused in the middle of the room and 
 said, half archly, half earnestly, — 
 
 " Oh, while I think of it, — there is something 
 I dislike that you can save me from. I do not 
 like Mr. Lush's company." 
 
 " You shall not have it. I '11 get rid of 
 him." 
 
 " You are not fond of him yourself? " 
 
 " Not in the least. I let him hang on me 
 because he has always been a poor devil," said 
 Grandcourt, in an adagio of utter indifference. 
 " They got him to travel with me when I was 
 a lad. He was always that coarse-haired kind 
 of brute, — a sort of cross between a hog and 
 a dilettante.'' 
 
 Gwendolen laughed. All that seemed kind 
 and natural enough: Grandcourt 's fastidious- 
 ness enhanced the kindness. And when they 
 reached the door, his way of opening it for her 
 was the perfection of easy homage. Really, 
 
MAIDENS CHOOSING 41 
 
 she thought, he was Ukely to be the least dis- 
 agreeable of husbands. 
 
 Mrs. Davilow was waiting anxiously in her 
 bedroom when Gwendolen entered, stepped 
 towards her quickly, and kissing her on both 
 cheeks said in a low tone, " Come down, mamma, 
 and see Mr. Grandcourt. I am engaged to 
 him." 
 
 " My darling child! " said Mrs. Davilow, with 
 a surprise that was rather solemn than glad. 
 
 " Yes," said Gwendolen, in the same tone, 
 and with a quickness v/hich implied that it was 
 needless to ask questions. " Everything is set- 
 tled. You are not going to Sa^^yer's Cottage, 
 I am not going to be inspected by Mrs. Mom- 
 pert, and everything is to be as I like. So come 
 down with me immediately." 
 
Book jTour 
 
 GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 II est plus aise de connoitre rhomme en general que de connoitre un 
 homme en particulier. — La Rochefoucauld. 
 
 N hour after Grandcourt had left, the im- 
 
 portant news of Gwendolen's engage- 
 
 ment was known at the Rectory, and Mr. 
 and Mrs. Gascoigne, with Anna, spent the even- 
 ing at Offendene. 
 
 " My dear, let me congratulate you on having 
 created a strong attachment," said the Rector. 
 "You look serious, and I don't wonder at it: 
 a lifelong union is a solemn thing. But from 
 the way Mr. Grandcourt has acted and spoken 
 I think we may already see some good arising 
 out of our adversity. It has given you an oppor- 
 tunity of observing your future husband's deli- 
 cate liberality." 
 
 Mr. Gascoigne referred to Grandcourt's mode 
 of implying that he would provide for Mrs. 
 Davilow, — a part of the love-making which 
 Gwendolen had remembered to cite to her 
 mother with perfect accuracy. 
 
 " But I have no doubt that Mr. Grandcourt 
 would have behaved quite as handsomely if you 
 had not gone away to Germany, Gwendolen, 
 and had been engaged to him, as you no doubt 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 48 
 
 might have been, more than a month ago," said 
 Mrs. Gascoigne, feeling that she had to dis- 
 charge a duty on this occasion. " But now there 
 is no more room for caprice; indeed, I trust 
 you have no incHnation to any. A woman has 
 a great debt of gratitude to a man who perse- 
 veres in making her such an offer. But no doubt 
 you feel properly." 
 
 " I am not at all sure that I do, aunt," said 
 Gwendolen, with saucy gravity. " I don't know 
 everything it is proper to feel on being 
 engaged." 
 
 The Rector patted her shoulder and smiled as 
 at a bit of innocent naughtiness, and his wife 
 took his behaviour as an indication that she was 
 not to be displeased. As for Anna, she kissed 
 Gwendolen and said, " I do hope you will be 
 happy," but then sank into the background and 
 tried to keep the tears back too. In the late 
 days she had been imagining a little romance 
 about Rex, — how if he still longed for Gwen- 
 dolen, her heart might be softened by trouble into 
 love, so that they could by and by be married. 
 And the romance had turned to a prayer that 
 she, Anna, might be able to rejoice like a good 
 sister, and only think of being useful in working 
 for Gwendolen, as long as Rex was not rich. 
 But now she wanted grace to rejoice in some- 
 thing else. Miss Merry and the four girls, — 
 Alice with the high shoulders. Bertha and Fanny 
 the whisperers, and Isabel the listener, — were 
 all present on this family occasion, when every- 
 thing seemed appropriately turning to the 
 honour and glory of Gwendolen, and real life 
 was as interesting as " Sir Charles Grandison." 
 
44 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 The evening passed chiefly in decisive remarks 
 from the Rector, in answer to conjectures from 
 the two elder ladies. According to him, the case 
 was not one in which he could think it his duty to 
 mention settlements : everything must, and doubt- 
 less would safely be left to Mr. Grandcourt. 
 
 " I should like to know exactly what sort of 
 places Ryelands and Gadsmere are," said Mrs. 
 Davilow. 
 
 " Gadsmere, I believe, is a secondary place," 
 said Mr. Gascoigne; " but Ryelands I know to 
 be one of our finest seats. The park is exten- 
 sive, and the woods of a very valuable order. 
 The house was built by Inigo Jones, and the 
 ceilings are painted in the Italian style. The 
 estate is said to be worth twelve thousand a-year, 
 and there are two livings, one a rectory, in the 
 gift of the Grandcourts. There may be some 
 burthens on the land. Still, Mr. Grandcourt 
 was an only child." 
 
 It would be most remarkable," said Mrs. 
 Gascoigne, "if he were to become Lord S tan- 
 nery in addition to everything else. Only think : 
 there is the Grandcourt estate, the Mallinger 
 estate, and the baronetcy, and the peerage," — 
 she was marking off the items on her fingers, 
 and paused on the fourth while she added, " but 
 they say there will be no land coming to him 
 with the peerage." It seemed a pity there was 
 nothing for the fifth finger. 
 
 " The peerage," said the Rector, judiciously, 
 " must be regarded as a remote chance. There 
 are two cousins between the present peer and 
 Mr. Grandcourt. It is certainly a serious re- 
 flection how death and other causes do sometimes 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 45 
 
 concentrate inheritances on one man. But an 
 excess of that kind is to be deprecated. To be 
 Sir Malhnger Grandcourt Malhnger — I sup- 
 pose that will be his style — with the correspond- 
 ing properties, is a valuable talent enough for 
 any man to have committed to him. Let us hope 
 it will be well used." . 
 
 " And what a position for the wife, Gwen- 
 dolen! " said Mrs. Gascoigne; " a great respon- 
 sibility indeed. But you must lose no time in 
 writing to Mrs. Mompert, Henry. It is a good 
 thing that you have an engagement of marriage 
 to offer as an excuse, else she might feel offended. 
 She is rather a high woman." 
 
 " I am rid of that horror," thought Gwen- 
 dolen, to whom the name of Mompert had be- 
 come a sort of Mumbo- jumbo. She was very 
 silent through the evening, and that night could 
 hardly sleep at all in her little white bed. It was 
 a rarity in her strong youth to be wakeful ; and 
 perhaps a still greater rarity for her to be care- 
 ful that her mother should not know of her rest- 
 lessness. But her state of mind was altogether 
 new: she who had been used to feel sure of 
 herself, and ready to manage others, had just 
 taken a decisive step which she had beforehand 
 thought that she would not take, — nay, per- 
 haps, was bound not to take. She could not go 
 backward now; she liked a great deal of what 
 lay before her; and there was nothing for her 
 to like if she went back. But her resolution was 
 dogged by the shadow of that previous resolve 
 which had at first come as the undoubting move- 
 ment of her whole being. While she lay on her 
 pillow with wide-open eyes, "looking on dark- 
 
46 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ness which the bhnd do see," she was appalled 
 by the i4ea that she was going to do what she 
 had once started away from with repugnance. 
 It was new to her that a question of right or 
 wrong in her conduct should rouse her terror; 
 she had known no compunction that atoning 
 caresses and presents could not lay to rest. But 
 here had come a moment when something like 
 a new consciousness was awaked. She seemed 
 on the edge of adopting deliberately, as a notion 
 for all the rest of her life, what she had rashly 
 said in her bitterness, when her discovery had 
 driven her away to Leubronn, — that it did not 
 signify what she did; she had only to amuse 
 herself as best she could. That lawlessness, that 
 casting away of all care for justification, sud- 
 denly frightened her: it came to her with the 
 shadowy array of possible calamity behind it, 
 — calamity which had ceased to be a mere name 
 for her; and all the infiltrated influences of dis- 
 regarded religious teaching, as well as the deeper 
 impressions of something awful and inexorable 
 enveloping her, seemed to concentrate them- 
 selves in the vague conception of avenging 
 power. The brilliant position she had longed 
 for, the imagined freedom she would create for 
 herself in marriage, the deliverance from the dull 
 insignificance of her girlhood, — all were im- 
 mediately before her; and yet they had come to 
 her hunger like food with the taint of sacrilege 
 upon it, which she must snatch with terror. In 
 the darkness and loneliness of her little bed, her 
 more resistant self could not act against the first 
 onslaught of dread after her irrevocable deci- 
 sion. That unhappy-faced woman and her 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 47 
 
 children — Grandcourt and his relations with 
 her — kept repeating themselves in her imagi- 
 nation like the clinging memory of a disgrace, 
 and gradually obliterated all other thought, 
 leaving only the consciousness that she had taken 
 those scenes into her life. Her long wakeful- 
 ness seemed a delirium; a faint, faint light pene- 
 trated beside the window-curtain; the chillness 
 increased. She could bear it no longer, and 
 cried, " Mamma! " 
 
 " Yes, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, immediately, 
 in a wakeful voice. 
 
 " Let me come to you." 
 
 She soon went to sleep on her mother's shoul- 
 der, and slept on till late, when, dreaming of 
 a lit-up ball-room, she opened her eyes on her 
 mother standing by the bedside with a small 
 packet in her hand. 
 
 " I am sorry to wake you, darling, but I 
 thought it better to give you this at once. The 
 groom has brought Criterion; he has come on 
 another horse, and says he is to stay here." 
 
 Gwendolen sat up in bed and opened the 
 packet. It was a delicate little enamelled casket, 
 and inside was a splendid diamond ring with a 
 letter which contained a folded bit of coloured 
 paper and these words : — 
 
 Pray wear this ring when I come at twelve in sign of 
 our betrothal. I enclose a check drawn in the name of 
 Mr. Gascoigne, for immediate expenses. Of course 
 Mrs. Davilqw will remain at OflPendene, at least for 
 some time. 1 hope, when I come, you will have granted 
 me an early day, when you may begin to command me 
 at a shorter distance. — Yours devotedly, 
 
 H. M. Grandcourt. 
 
\ 
 
 48 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 The check was for five hundred pounds; and 
 Gwendolen turned it towards her mother, with 
 the letter. 
 
 "How very kind and delicate!" said Mrs. 
 Davilow, with much feeling. " But I really 
 should like better not to be dependent on a son- 
 in-law. I and the girls could get along very 
 well." 
 
 " Mamma, if you say that again, I wdll not 
 marry him," said Gwendolen, angrily. 
 
 " My dear child, I trust you are not going 
 to marry only for my sake," said Mrs. Davilow, 
 deprecatingly. 
 
 Gwendolen tossed her head on the pillow away 
 from her mother, and let the ring lie. She was 
 irritated at this attempt to take away a motive. 
 Perhaps the deeper cause of her irritation was 
 the consciousness that she was not going to 
 marry solely for her mamma's sake, — that she 
 was drawn towards the marriage in ways against 
 which stronger reasons than her mother's renun- 
 ciation were yet not strong enough to hinder her. 
 She had waked up to the signs that she was 
 irrevocably engaged; and all the ugly visions, 
 the alarms, the arguments of the night, must be 
 met by daylight, in which probably they would 
 show^ themselves weak. 
 
 " What I long for is your happiness, dear," 
 continued Mrs. Davilow, pleadingly. " I will 
 not say anything to vex you. Will you not put 
 on the ring? " 
 
 For a few moments Gwendolen did not an- 
 swer, but her thoughts were active. At last she 
 raised herself with a determination to do as she 
 would do if she had started on horseback, and 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 49 
 
 go on with spirit, whatever ideas might be run- 
 ning in her head. 
 
 " I thought the lover always put on the be- 
 trothal ring himself," she said laughingly, slip- 
 ping the ring on her finger, and looking at it 
 with a charming movement of her head. " I 
 know why he has sent it," she added, nodding at 
 her mamma. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "He would rather make me put it on than 
 ask me to let him do it. Aha ! he is very proud. 
 But so am I. We shall match each other. I 
 should hate a man who went down on his knees, 
 and came fawning on me. He really is not 
 disgusting." 
 
 " That is very moderate praise, Gwen." 
 
 " No, it is not, for a man," said Gwendolen, 
 gayly. " But now I must get up and dress. 
 Will you come and do my hair, mamma dear," 
 she went on, drawing down her mamma's face 
 to caress it with her own cheeks, " and not be 
 so naughty any more as to talk of living in 
 poverty? You must bear to be made com- 
 fortable, even if you don't like it. And Mr. 
 Grandcourt behaves perfectly, now, does he 
 not?" 
 
 " Certainly he does," said Mrs. Davilow, en- 
 couraged, and persuaded that after all Gwen- 
 dolen was fond of her betrothed. She herself 
 thought him a man whose attentions were likely 
 to tell on a girl's feeling. Suitors must often 
 be judged as words are, by the standing and 
 the figure they make in polite society: it is 
 difficult to know much else of them. And all 
 the mother's anxiety turned, not on Grand- 
 voL. xin — 4 
 
50 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 court's character, but on Gwendolen's mood in 
 accepting him. 
 
 The mood was necessarily passing through a 
 new phase this morning. Even in the hour of 
 making her toilet, she had drawn on all the 
 know^ledge she had for grounds to justify her 
 marriage. And what she most dwelt on was the 
 determination that when she was Grandcourt's 
 wife she would urge him to the most liberal 
 conduct towards Mrs. Glasher's children. 
 
 " Of what use would it be to her that I should 
 not marry him? He could have married her if 
 he had liked; but he did not like. Perhaps she 
 is to blame for that. There must be a great 
 deal about her that I know nothing of. And 
 he must have been good to her in many ways, 
 else she would not have wanted to marry him." 
 
 But that last argument at once began to ap- 
 pear doubtful. Mrs. Glasher naturally wished 
 to exclude other children who would stand 
 between Grandcourt and her own; and Gwen- 
 dolen's comprehension of this feeling prompted 
 another way of reconciling claims. 
 
 " Perhaps we shall have no children. I hope 
 we shall not. And he might leave the estate to 
 the pretty little boy. My uncle said that Mr. 
 Grandcourt could do as he liked with the estates. 
 Only when Sir Hugo Mallinger dies there will 
 be enough for two." 
 
 This made Mrs. Glasher appear quite unrea- 
 sonable in demanding that her boy should be sole 
 heir; and the double property was a security 
 that Grandcourt's marriage would do her no 
 wrong, when the wife was Gwendolen Harleth 
 with all her proud resolution not to be fairly 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 51 
 
 accused. This maiden had been accustomed to 
 think herself blameless ; other persons only were 
 faulty. 
 
 It was striking that in the hold which this 
 argument of her doing no wrong to Mrs. 
 Glasher had taken on her mind, her repugnance 
 to the idea of Grandcourt's past had sunk into 
 a subordinate feeling. The terror she had felt 
 in the night-watches at over-stepping the border 
 of wickedness by doing what she had at first 
 felt to be wrong, had dulled any emotions about 
 his conduct. She was thinking of him, whatever 
 he might be, as a man over whom she was going 
 to have indefinite power; and her loving him 
 having never been a question with her, any 
 agreeableness he had was so much gain. Poor 
 Gwendolen had no awe of unmanageable forces 
 in the state of matrimony, but regarded it as 
 altogether a matter of management, in which 
 she would know how to act. In relation to 
 Grandcourt's past she encouraged new doubts 
 whether he were likely to have differed much 
 from other men; and she devised little schemes 
 for learning what was expected of men in 
 general. 
 
 But whatever else might be true in the world, 
 her hair was dressed sfUitably for riding, and she 
 went down in her riding-habit, to avoid delay 
 before getting on horseback. She wanted to 
 have her blood stirred once more with the intoxi- 
 cation of youth, and to recover the daring with 
 which she had been used to think of her course in 
 life. Already a load was lifted off her; for in 
 daylight and activity it was less oppressive to 
 have doubts about her choice, than to feel that 
 
52 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 she had no choice but to endure insignificance 
 and servitude. 
 
 " Go back and make yourself look like a 
 duchess, mamma," she said, turning suddenly as 
 she was going downstairs. " Put your point- 
 lace over your head. I must have you look like a 
 duchess. You must not take things humbly." 
 
 When Grandcourt raised her left hand gently 
 and looked at the ring, she said gravely, " It was 
 very good of you to think of everything and 
 send me that packet." 
 
 " You will tell me ifthere is anything I for- 
 get? " he said, keeping the hand softly within his 
 own. " I will do anything you wish." 
 
 " But I am very unreasonable in my wishes," 
 said Gwendolen, smiling. 
 
 " Yes, I expect that. Women always are." 
 
 " Then I will not be unreasonable," said 
 Gwendolen, taking away her hand and tossing 
 her head saucily. " I will not be told that I am 
 what women always are." 
 
 " I did not say that," said Grandcourt, looking 
 at her with his usual gravity. " You are what 
 no other woman is." 
 
 " And what is that, pray? " said Gwendolen, 
 moving to a distance with a little air of menace. 
 
 Grandcourt made his pause before he an- 
 swered: " You are the woman I love." 
 
 " Oh, what nice speeches ! " said Gwendolen, 
 laughing. The sense of that love which he must 
 once have given to another woman under strange 
 circumstances was getting familiar. 
 
 " Give me a nice speech in return. Say when 
 we are to be married." 
 
 " Not yet. Not till we have had a gallop over 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 53 
 
 the downs. I am so thirsty for that, I can think 
 of nothing else. I wish the hunting had begun. 
 Sunday the twentieth, twenty-seventh, Monday, 
 Tuesday." Gwendolen was counting on her fin- 
 gers with the prettiest nod while she looked at 
 Grandcourt, and at last swept one palm over the 
 other while she said triumphantly, " It will begin 
 in ten days! " 
 
 " Let us be married in ten days, then," said 
 Grandcourt, " and we shall not be bored about 
 the stables." 
 
 " What do women always say in answer to 
 that? " said Gwendolen, mischievously. 
 
 " They agree to it," said the lover, rather off 
 his guard. 
 
 " Then I will not! " said Gwendolen, taking 
 up her gauntlets and putting them on, while she 
 kept her eyes on him with gathering fun in 
 them. 
 
 The scene was pleasant on both sides. A 
 cruder lover would have lost the view of her 
 pretty ways and attitudes, and spoiled all by 
 stupid attempts at caresses, utterly destructive 
 of drama. Grandcourt preferred the drama; 
 and Gwendolen, left at ease, found her spirits 
 rising continually as she played at reigning. 
 Perhaps if Klesmer had seen more of her in this 
 unconscious kind of acting, instead of when she 
 was trying to be theatrical, he might have rated 
 her chance higher. 
 
 When they had had a glorious gallop, how- 
 ever, she was in a state of exhilaration that dis- 
 posed her to think well of hastening the mar- 
 riage which would make her life all of a piece 
 with this splendid kind of enjoyment. She 
 
54 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 would not debate any more about an act to which 
 she had committed herself; and she consented 
 to fix the wedding on that day three weeks, 
 notwithstanding the difficulty of fulfilling the 
 customary laws of the trousseau. 
 
 Lush, of course, was made aware of the en- 
 gagement by abundant signs, without being 
 formally told. But he expected some communi- 
 cation as a consequence of it, and after a few 
 days he became rather impatient under Grand- 
 court's silence, feeling sure that the change 
 would affect his personal prospects, and wishing 
 to know exactly how. His tactics no longer in- 
 cluded any opposition, — which he did not love 
 for its own sake. He might easily cause Grand- 
 court a great deal of annoyance, but it would 
 be to his own injury, and to create annoyance 
 was not a motive with him. Miss Gwendolen he 
 would certainly not have been sorry to frustrate 
 a little,, but — after all, there was no knowing 
 what would come. It was nothing new that 
 Grandcourt should show a perverse wilfulness; 
 yet in his freak about this girl he struck Lush 
 rather newly as something like a man who 
 was fey — led on by an ominous fatality; and 
 that one born to his fortune should make a 
 worse business of his life than was necessary, 
 seemed really pitiable. Having protested 
 against the marriage. Lush had a second-sight 
 for its evil consequences. Grandcourt had been 
 taking the pains to write letters and give orders 
 himself instead of employing Lush; and ap- 
 peared to be ignoring his usefulness, even 
 choosing, against the habit of years, to break- 
 fast alone in his dressing-room. But a tete-a- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 55 
 
 tete was not to be avoided in a house empty of 
 guests ; and Lush hastened to use an opportun- 
 ity of saying, — it was one day after dinner, for 
 there were difficulties in Grandcourt's dining at 
 Offendene, — 
 
 " And when is the marriage to take place? " 
 
 Grandcourt, who drank little wine, had left 
 the table and was lounging, while he smoked, in 
 an easy-chair near the hearth, where a fire of oak 
 boughs was gaping to its glowing depths, and 
 edging them with a delicate tint of ashes delight- 
 ful to behold. The chair of red-brown velvet 
 brocade was a becoming background for his pale- 
 tinted well-cut features and exquisite long 
 hands: omitting the cigar, you might have 
 imagined him a portrait by Moroni, who would 
 have rendered wonderfully the impenetrable 
 gaze and air of distinction; and a portrait by 
 that great master would haA^e been quite as lively 
 a companion as Grandcourt was disposed to be. 
 But he answered without unusual delay, — 
 
 " On the tenth." 
 
 " I suppose you intend to remain here." 
 
 " We shall go to Ryelands for a little while; 
 but we shall return here for the sake of the 
 hunting." 
 
 After this word there was the languid inarticu- 
 late sound frequent with Grandcourt when he 
 meant to continue speaking, and Lush waited for 
 something more. Nothing came, and he was go- 
 ing to put another question, when the inarticu- 
 late sound began again and introduced the 
 mildly uttered suggestion, — 
 
 " You had better make some new arrange- 
 ment for yourself." 
 
5(5 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " What! I am to cut and run? " said Lush, 
 prepared to be good-tempered on the occasion. 
 
 " Something of that kind." 
 
 " The bride objects to me. I hope she will 
 make up to you for the want of my services." 
 
 " I can't help your being so damnably disa- 
 greeable to women," said Grandcourt, in sooth- 
 ing apology. 
 
 " To one woman, if you please." 
 
 " It makes no difference, since she is the one 
 in question." 
 
 " I suppose I am not to be turned adrift after 
 fifteen years without some provision." 
 
 " You must have saved something out of me." 
 
 " Deuced little. I have often saved something 
 for you." 
 
 " You can have three hundred a-year. But 
 you must live in town and be ready to look after 
 things for me when I want you. I shall be 
 rather hard up." 
 
 "If you are not going to be at Ry elands this 
 winter, I might run down there and let you know 
 how Swinton goes on." 
 
 " If you like. I don't care a toss where you 
 are, so that you keep out of sight." 
 
 " Much obliged," said Lush, able to take the 
 affair more easily than he had expected. He was 
 supported by the secret belief that he should by 
 and by be wanted as much as ever. 
 
 " Perhaps you will not object to packing up 
 as soon as possible," said Grandcourt. " The 
 Torringtons are coming, and Miss Harleth will 
 be riding over here." 
 
 " With all my heart. Can't I be of use in 
 going to Gadsmere? " 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 57 
 
 " No. I am going myself." 
 
 " About yom- being rather hard up. Have 
 you thought of that plan — " 
 
 " Just leave me alone, will you? " said Grand- 
 court, in his lowest audible tone, tossing his cigar 
 into the fire, and rising to walk away. 
 
 He spent the evening in the solitude of the 
 smaller drawing-room, where, with various new 
 publications on the table, of the kind a gentle- 
 man may like to have at hand without touching, 
 he employed himself (as a philosopher might 
 have done) in sitting meditatively on a sofa and 
 abstaining from literature, — political, comic, 
 cynical, or romantic. In this way hours may pass 
 surprisingly soon, without the arduous invisible 
 chase of philosophy; not from love of thought, 
 but from hatred of effort, — from a state of the 
 inward world, something like premature age, 
 where the need for action lapses into a mere 
 image of what has been, is, and may or might be ; 
 where impulse is born and dies in a phantasmal 
 world, pausing in rejection even of a shadowy 
 fulfilment. That is a condition which often 
 comes with whitening hair; and sometimes, too, 
 an intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, like 
 the main trunk of an exorbitant egoism, con- 
 spicuous in proportion as the varied susceptibili- 
 ties of younger years are stripped away. 
 
 But Grand.court's hair, though he had not 
 much of it, was of a fine sunny blond, and his 
 moods were not entirely to be explained as ebb- 
 ing energy. We mortals have a strange spirit- 
 ual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy 
 stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be 
 preparing one knows not what biting or explo- 
 
58 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 sive material. The navvy waking from sleep and 
 without malice heaving a stone to crush the life 
 out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood 
 to lack the trained motive which makes a char- 
 acter fairly calculable in its actions; but by a 
 roundabout course even a gentleman may make 
 of himself a chancy personage, raising an un- 
 certainty as to what he may do next, which sadly 
 spoils companionship. 
 
 Grandcourt's thoughts this evening were like 
 the circlets one sees in a dark pool continually 
 dying out and continually started again by some 
 impulse from below the surface. The deeper 
 central impulse came from the image of Gwen- 
 dolen; but the thoughts it stirred would be 
 imperfectly illustrated by a reference to the 
 amatory poets of all ages. It was characteris- 
 tic that he got none of his satisfaction from the 
 belief that Gwendolen was in love with him; 
 and that love had overcome the jealous resent- 
 ment which had made her run away from him. 
 On the contrary, he believed that this girl was 
 rather exceptional in the fact that, in spite of 
 his assiduous attention to her, she was not in love 
 with him; and it seemed to him very likely that 
 if it had not been for the sudden poverty which 
 had come over her family, she would not have 
 accepted him. From the very first there had 
 been an exasperating fascination in the tricksi- 
 ness with which she had — not met his advances, 
 but — wheeled away from them. She had been 
 brought to accept him in spite of everything, — 
 brought to kneel down like a horse under train- 
 ing for the arena, though she might have an 
 objection to it all the while. On the whole, 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 59 
 
 Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this no- 
 tion than he could have done out of winning 
 a girl of whom he was sure that she had a 
 strong inclination for him personally. And yet 
 this pleasure in mastering reluctance flourished 
 along with the habitual persuasion that no 
 woman whom he favoured could be quite indif- 
 ferent to his personal influence; and it seemed 
 to him not unlikely that by and by Gwendolen 
 might be more enamoured of him than he of 
 her. In any case she would have to submit; 
 and he enjoyed thinking of her as his future 
 wife, whose pride and spirit were suited to com- 
 mand every one but himself. He had no taste 
 for a woman who was all tenderness to him, full 
 of petitioning solicitude and willing obedience. 
 He meant to be master of a woman who would 
 have liked to master him, and who perhaps would 
 have been capable of mastering another man. 
 
 Lush, having failed in his attempted reminder 
 to Grandcourt, thought it well to communicate 
 with Sir Hugo, in whom, as a man having per- 
 haps interest enough to command the bestowal 
 of some place where the work was light, gentle- 
 manly, and not ill-paid, he was anxious to cul- 
 tivate a sense of friendly obligation, not feeling 
 at all secure against the future need of such a 
 place. He wrote the following letter, and ad- 
 dressed it to Park Lane, whither he knew the 
 family had returned from Leubronn: — 
 
 My dear Sir Hugo, — Since we came home the 
 marriage has been absolutely decided on, and is to 
 take place in less than three weeks. It is so far the 
 worse for him that her mother has lately lost all her 
 fortune, and he will have to find supplies. Grandcourt, 
 
60 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 I know, is feeling the want of cash; and unless some 
 other plan is resorted to, he will be raising money 
 in a foolish way. I am going to leave Diplow imme- 
 diately, and I shall not be able to start the topic. 
 What I should advise is, that Mr. Deronda, who I 
 know has your confidence, should propose to come and 
 pay a short visit here, according to invitation (there 
 are going to be other people in the house), and that 
 you should put him fully in possession of your wishes 
 and the possible extent of your offer. Then, that 
 he should introduce the subject to Grandcourt so as 
 not to imply that you suspect any particular want of 
 money on his part, but only that there is a strong 
 wish on yours. What I have formerly said to him 
 has been in the way of a conjecture that you might be 
 willing to give a good sum for his chance of Diplow ; 
 but if Mr. Deronda came armed with a definite offer, 
 that would take another sort of hold. Ten to one he 
 will not close for some time to come ; but the proposal 
 will have got a stronger lodgment in his mind; and 
 though at present he has a great notion of the hunt- 
 ing here, I see a likelihood, under the circumstances, 
 that he will get a distaste for the neighbourhood, and 
 there will be the notion of the money sticking by him 
 without being urged. I would bet on your ultimate 
 success. As I am not to be exiled to Siberia, but am 
 to be within call, it is possible that, by and by, I may 
 be of more service to you. But at present I can think 
 of no medium so good as Mr. Deronda. Nothing puts 
 Grandcourt in worse humour than having the lawyers 
 thrust their papers under his nose uninvited. 
 
 Trusting that your visit to Leubronn has put you 
 in excellent condition for the winter, I remain, my dear 
 Sir Hugo, yours very faithfully, 
 
 Thomas Cranmer Lush. 
 
 Sir Hugo, having received this letter at break- 
 fast, handed it to Deronda, who, though he had 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 61 
 
 chambers in town, was somehow hardly ever in 
 them, Sir Hugo not being contented without 
 him. The chatty baronet would have liked a 
 young companion even if there had been no 
 peculiar reasons for attachment between them: 
 one with a fine harmonious unspoiled face fitted 
 to keep up a cheerful view of posterity and in- 
 heritance generally, notwithstanding particular 
 disappointments ; and his affection for Deronda 
 was not diminished by the deep-lying though 
 not obtrusive difference in their notions and 
 tastes. Perhaps it was all the stronger; acting 
 as the same sort of difference does between a 
 man and a woman in giving a piquancy to the 
 attachment which subsists in spite of it. Sir 
 Hugo did not think unapprovingly of himself; 
 but he looked at men and society from a liberal- 
 menagerie point of view, and he had a certain 
 pride in Deronda's differing from him, which, 
 if it had found voice, might have said, — " You 
 see this fine young fellow — not such as you see 
 every day, is he? — he belongs to me in a sort 
 of way, I brought him up from a child; but you 
 would not ticket him off easily, he has notions 
 of his own, and he 's as far as the poles asunder 
 from what I was at his age." This state of 
 feeling was kept up by the mental balance in 
 Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness 
 such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing 
 him to yield in ordinary details, while he had 
 a certain inflexibility of judgment and inde- 
 pendence of opinion, held to be rightfully 
 masculine. 
 
 When he had read the letter, he returned it 
 without speaking, inwardly wincing under 
 
62 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Lush's mode of attributing a neutral usefulness 
 to him in the family affairs. 
 
 " What do you say, Dan? It would be pleas- 
 ant enough for you. You have not seen the 
 place for a good many years now, and you might 
 have a famous run with the harriers if you went 
 down next week," said Sir Hugo. 
 
 " I should not go on that account," said 
 Deronda, buttering his bread attentively. He 
 had an objection to this transparent kind of 
 persuasiveness, which all intelligent animals are 
 seen to treat with indifference. If he went to 
 Diplow, he should be doing something disagree- 
 able to oblige Sir Hugo. 
 
 " I think Lush's notion is a good one, and it 
 would be a pity to lose the occasion." 
 
 " That is a different matter, — if you think 
 my going of importance to your object," said 
 Deronda, still with that aloofness of manner 
 which iniplied some suppression. He knew that 
 the baronet had set his heart on the affair. 
 
 " Why, you will see the fair gambler, the Leu- 
 bronn Diana, I shouldn't wonder," said Sir 
 Hugo, gayly. " We shall have to invite her 
 to the Abbey when they are married, Louisa," 
 he added, turning to Lady Mallinger, as if she 
 too had read the letter. 
 
 " I cannot conceive whom you mean," said 
 Lady Mallinger, w^ho in fact had not been listen- 
 ing, her mind having been taken up with her 
 first sips of coffee, the objectionable cuff of her 
 sleeve, and the necessity of carrying Theresa to 
 the dentist, — innocent and partly laudable pre- 
 occupations, as the gentle lady's usually were. 
 Should her appearance be inquired after, let it 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 63 
 
 be said that she had reddish blond hair (the hair 
 of the period), a small Roman nose, rather 
 prominent blue eyes and delicate eyelids, with 
 a figure which her thinner friends called fat, her 
 hands showing curves and dimples like a mag- 
 ftified baby's. 
 
 " I mean that Grandcourt is going to marry 
 the girl you saw at Leubronn — don't you re- 
 member her? — the Miss Harleth who used to 
 play at roulette." 
 
 " Dear me! Is that a good match for him? " 
 
 " That depends on the sort of goodness he 
 wants," said Sir Hugo, smiling. " However, 
 she and her friends have nothing, and she will 
 bring him expenses. It 's a good match for my 
 purposes, because if I am willing to fork out 
 a sum of money, he may be willing to give up 
 his chance of Diplow, so that we shall have it 
 out and out, and when I die you will have the 
 consolation of going to the place you would like 
 to go to — wherever I may go." 
 
 " I wish you would not talk of dying in that 
 light way, dear." 
 
 " It 's rather a heavy way, Lou, for I shall 
 have to pay a heavy sum, — forty thousand, at 
 least." 
 
 ''But why are we to invite them to the 
 Abbey? " said Lady Mallinger. " I do not like 
 women who gamble, like Lady Cragstone." 
 
 " Oh, you will not mind her for a week. Be- 
 sides, she is not like Lady Cragstone because 
 she gambled a little, any more than I am like 
 a broker because I 'm a Whig. I want to keep 
 Grandcourt in good humour, and to let him see 
 plenty of this place, that he may think the less 
 
64 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 of Diplow. I don't know yet whether I shall 
 get him to meet me in this matter. And if Dan 
 were to go over on a visit there, he might hold 
 out the bait to him. It would be doing me a 
 great service." This was meant for Deronda. 
 
 " Daniel is not fond of Mr. Grandcourt, 1 
 think, is he? " said Lady Mallinger, looking at 
 Deronda inquiringly. 
 
 There is no avoiding everybody one does n't 
 happen to be fond of," said Deronda. " I will 
 go to Diplow — I don't know that I have any- 
 thing better to do — since Sir Hugo wishes it." 
 
 "That's a trump!" said Sir Hugo, well 
 pleased. " And if you don't find it very pleas- 
 ant, it 's so much experience. Nothing used to 
 come amiss to me when I was young. You must 
 see men and manners." 
 
 " Yes; but I have seen that man, and some- 
 thing of his manners too," said Deronda. 
 
 " Not nice manners, I think," said Lady 
 Mallinger. 
 
 " Well, you see they succeed with your sex," 
 said Sir Hugo, provokingly. " And he was an 
 uncommon good-looking fellow when he was two 
 or three and twenty — like his father. He 
 does n't take after his father in marrying the 
 heiress, though. If he had got Miss Arrow- 
 point and my land too, confound him, he would 
 have had a fine principality." 
 
 Deronda, in anticipating the projected visit, 
 felt less disinclination than when consenting to 
 it. The story of that girl's marriage did interest 
 him: what he had heard through Lush of her 
 having run away from the suit of the man she 
 was now going to take as a husband, had thrown 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 65 
 
 a new sort of light on her gambhng ; and it was 
 probably the transition from that favoured 
 worldliness into poverty which had urged her 
 acceptance where she must in some way have 
 felt repulsion. All this implied a nature liable 
 to difficulty and struggle, — elements of life 
 which had a predominant attraction for his sym- 
 pathy, due perhaps to his early pain in dwelling 
 on the conjectured story of his own existence. 
 Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had 
 done, in proportion to the possibility of his de- 
 fending them, rescuing them, telling upon their 
 lives with some sort of redeeming influence; 
 and he had to resist an inclination, easily ac- 
 counted for, to withdraw coldly from the for- 
 tunate. But in the movement which had led 
 him to repurchase Gwendolen's necklace for her, 
 and which was at work in him still, there was 
 something beyond his habitual compassionate 
 fervour, — something due to the fascination of 
 her womanhood. He was very open to that sort 
 of charm, and mingled it with the consciously 
 Utopian pictures of his own future; yet any 
 one able to trace the folds of his character might 
 have conceived that he would be more likely than 
 many less passionate men to love a woman with- 
 out telling her of it. Sprinkle food before a 
 delicate-eared bird: there is nothing he would 
 more willingly take, yet he keeps aloof, because 
 of his sensibility to checks which to you are im- 
 perceptible. And one man differs from another, 
 as we all differ from the Bosjesman, in a sensi- 
 bility to checks, that come from variety of needs, 
 spiritual or other. It seemed to foreshadow that 
 capability of reticence in Deronda that his 
 
 VOL. XIII — 5 
 
66 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 imagination was much occupied with two 
 women, to neither of whom would he have held 
 it possible that he should ever make love. Hans 
 Meyrick had laughed at him for having some- 
 thing of the knight-errant in his disposition; 
 and he would have found his proof if he had 
 known what was just novf going on in De- 
 ronda's mind about Mirah and Gwendolen. 
 
 Deronda wrote without delay to announce the 
 visit to Diplow, and received in reply a polite 
 assurance that his coming would give great 
 pleasure. That was not altogether untrue. 
 Grandcourt thought it probable that the visit 
 was prompted by Sir Hugo's desire to court 
 him for a purpose which he did not make up 
 his mind to resist ; and it was not a disagreeable 
 idea to him that this fine fellow, whom he be- 
 lieved to be his cousin under the rose, would 
 witness, perhaps with some jealousy, Henleigh 
 Mallinger Grandcourt play the commanding 
 part of betrothed lover to a splendid girl whom 
 the cousin had already looked at with admira- 
 tion. 
 
 Grandcourt himself was not jealous of any- 
 thing unless it threatened his mastery, — which 
 he did not think himself likely to lose. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, 
 
 him or her I shall follow, 
 As the water follows the moon, silently, 
 
 with fluid steps an3rwhere around the globe. 
 
 Walt Whitman. 
 
 "IV TOW my cousins are at Diplow," said 
 I Grandcourt, " will you go there? — to- 
 morrow? The carriage shall come for 
 Mrs. Davilow. You can tell me what you 
 would like done in the rooms. Things must 
 be put in decent order while we are away at 
 Ry elands. And to-morrow is the only day." 
 
 He was sitting sideways on a sofa in the 
 drawing-room at Offendene, one hand and 
 elbow resting on the back, and the other hand 
 thrust between his crossed knees — in the atti- 
 tude of a man who is much interested in watch- 
 ing the person next to him. Gwendolen, who had 
 always disliked needle-work, had taken to it with 
 apparent zeal since her engagement, and now 
 held a piece of white embroidery which on exam- 
 ination would have shown many false stitches. 
 During the last eight or nine days their hours 
 had been chiefly spent on horseback, but some 
 margin had always been left for this more dif- 
 ficult sort of companionship, which, however, 
 Gwendolen had not found disagreeable. She 
 was very well satisfied with Grandcourt. His 
 answers to her lively questions about what he 
 had seen and done in his life, bore drawling 
 very well. From the first she had noticed that 
 
68 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 he knew what to say; and she was constantly 
 feehng not only that he had nothing of the 
 fool in his composition, but that by some subtle 
 means he communicated to her the impression 
 that all the folly lay with other people, who did 
 what he did not care to do. A man who seems 
 to have been able to command the best, has a 
 sovereign power of depreciation. Then Grand- 
 court's behaviour as a lover had hardly at all 
 passed the limit of an amorous homage which 
 was inobtrusive as a wafted odour of roses, and 
 spent all its effect in a gratified vanity. One 
 day, indeed, he had kissed, not her cheek, but 
 her neck a little below her ear ; and Gwendolen, 
 taken by surprise, had started up with a marked 
 agitation which made him rise too, and say, " I 
 beg your pardon — did I annoy you? " " Oh, 
 it was nothing," said Gwendolen, rather afraid 
 of herself, " only I cannot bear — to be kissed 
 under my ear." She sat down again with a 
 little playful laugh, but all the while she felt 
 her heart beating with a vague fear: she was 
 no longer at liberty to flout him as she had 
 flouted poor Rex. Her agitation seemed not 
 uncomplimentary, and he had been contented 
 not to transgress again. 
 
 To-day a slight rain hindered riding; but to 
 compensate, a package had come from London, 
 and Mrs. Davilow had just left the room after 
 bringing in for admiration the beautiful things 
 (of Grandcourt's ordering) which lay scattered 
 about on the tables. Gwendolen was just then 
 enjoying the scenery of her life. She let her 
 hands fall on her lap, and said with a pretty 
 air of perversity, — 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 69 
 
 " Why is to-morrow the only day? " 
 " Because the next day is the first with the 
 hounds," said Grandcourt. 
 " And after that? " 
 
 " After that I must go away for a couple of 
 days — it 's a bore — but I shall go one day 
 and come back the next." Grandcourt noticed 
 a change in her face, and releasing his hand 
 from under his knees, he laid it on hers, and 
 said, " You object to my going away? " 
 
 "It is no use objecting," said Gwendolen, 
 coldly. She was resisting to the utmost her 
 temptation to tell him that she suspected to 
 whom he w^as going — and the temptation to 
 make a clean breast, speaking without restraint. 
 
 " Yes, it is," said Grandcourt, enfolding her 
 hand. " I will put off going. And I will travel 
 at night, so as only to be away one day." He 
 thought that he knew the reason of what he 
 inwardly called this bit of temper, and she was 
 particularly fascinating to him at this moment. 
 
 " Then don't put off going, but travel at 
 night," said Gwendolen, feeling that she could 
 command him, and finding in this peremptori- 
 ness a small outlet for her irritation. 
 
 " Then you will go to Diplow, to-morrow? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, if you wish it," said Gwendolen, in 
 a high tone of careless assent. Her concentra- 
 tion in other feelings had really hindered her 
 from taking notice that her hand was being 
 held. 
 
 " How you treat us poor devils of men! " said 
 Grandcourt, lowering his tone. " We are al- 
 ways getting the worst of it." 
 
 ''Are you? " said Gwendolen, in a tone of 
 
70 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 inquiry, looking at him more naively than usual. 
 She longed to believe this coromonplace badi- 
 nage as the serious truth about her lover: in 
 that case she, too, was justified. If she knew 
 everything, Mrs. Glasher would appear more 
 blamable than Grandcourt. ''Are you always 
 getting the worst? " 
 
 " Yes. Are you as kind to me as I am to 
 you? " said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes 
 with his narrow gaze. 
 
 Gwendolen felt herself stricken. She was 
 conscious of having received so much that her 
 sense of command was checked, and sank away 
 in the perception that, look around her as she 
 might, she could not turn back: it was as if 
 she had consented to mount a chariot where 
 another held the reins; and it was not in her 
 nature to leap out in the eyes of the world. 
 She had not consented in ignorance, and all she 
 could say now would be a confession that she 
 had not been ignorant. Her right to explana- 
 tion was gone. All she had to do now was to 
 adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwill- 
 ing penance which conscience imposed should not 
 gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she 
 resolutely changed her mental attitude. There 
 had been a little pause, during which she had 
 not turned away her eyes; and with a sudden 
 break into a smile, she said, — 
 
 " If I were as kind to you as you are to me, 
 that would spoil your generosity; it would no 
 longer be as great as it could be — and it is 
 that now." 
 
 " Then I am not to ask for one kiss," said 
 Grandcourt, contented to pay a large price for 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 71 
 
 this new kind of love-making, which introduced 
 marriage by the finest contrast. 
 
 "Not one!" said Gwendolen, getting saucy, 
 and nodding at him defiantly. 
 
 He lifted her little left hand to his lips, and 
 then released it respectfully. Clearly it was 
 faint praise to say of him that he was not dis- 
 gusting : he was almost charming ; and she felt 
 at this moment that it was not likely she could 
 ever have loved another man better than this 
 one. His reticence gave her some inexplicable, 
 delightful consciousness. 
 
 " Apropos," she said, taking up her work 
 again, " is there any one besides Captain and 
 Mrs. Torrington at Diplow? — or do you leave 
 them tete-a-tete? I suppose he converses in 
 cigars, and she answers with her chignon." 
 
 " She has a sister with her," said Grandcourt, 
 with his shadow of a smile, " and there are 
 two men besides, — one of them you know, I 
 believe." 
 
 " Ah, then, I have a poor opinion of him," 
 said Gwendolen, shaking her head. 
 
 " You saw him at Leubronn, — young De- 
 ronda, — a young fellow with the Mallingers." 
 
 Gwendolen felt as if her heart were making 
 a sudden gambol; and her fingers, which tried 
 to keep a firm hold on her work, got cold. 
 
 " I never spoke to him," she said, dreading 
 any discernible change in herself. "Is he not 
 disagreeable? " 
 
 " No, not particularly," said Grandcourt, in 
 his most languid way. " He thinks a little too 
 much of himself. I thought he had been in- 
 troduced to you." 
 
72 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " No. Some one told me his name the even- 
 ing before I came away; that was all. What 
 is he? " 
 
 " A sort of ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger's. 
 Nothing of any consequence." 
 
 "Oh, poor creature! How very unpleasant 
 for him!" said Gwendolen, speaking from the 
 lip, and not meaning any sarcasm. " I wonder 
 if it has left off raining! " she added, rising and 
 going to look out of the window. 
 
 Happily it did not rain the next day, and 
 Gwendolen rode to Diplow on Criterion as she 
 had done on that former day when she returned 
 with her mother in the carriage. She always 
 felt the more daring for being in her riding- 
 dress; besides having the agreeable belief that 
 she looked as well as possible in it, — a sustain- 
 ing consciousness in any meeting which seems 
 formidable. Her anger towards Deronda had 
 changed into a superstitious dread, — due, per- 
 haps, to the coercion he had exercised over her 
 thought, — lest that first interference of his in 
 her Hfe might foreshadow^ some future influ- 
 ence. It is of such stuff that superstitions are 
 commonly made: an intense feeling about our- 
 selves which makes the evening star shine at us 
 with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar 
 encourage us. And superstitions carry conse- 
 quences which often verify their hope or their 
 foreboding. 
 
 The time before luncheon was taken up for 
 Gwendolen by going over the rooms with Mrs. 
 Torrington and Mrs. Davilow; and she thought 
 it likely that if she saw Deronda, there would 
 hardly be need for more than a bow between 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 73 
 
 them. She meant to notice him as little as 
 possible. 
 
 And after all she found herself under an 
 inward compulsion too strong for her pride. 
 From the first moment of their being in the 
 room together, she seemed to herself to be doing 
 nothing but notice him; everything else was 
 automatic performance of an habitual part. 
 
 When he took his place at lunch, Grandcourt 
 had said, " Deronda, Miss Harleth tells me you 
 were not introduced to her at Leubronn? " 
 
 " Miss Harleth hardly remembers me, I im- 
 agine," said Deronda, looking at her quite 
 simply, as they bowed. " She was intensely 
 occupied when I saw her." 
 
 Now, did he suppose that she had not sus- 
 pected him of being the person who redeemed 
 her necklace? 
 
 " On the contrary. I remember you very 
 well," said Gwendolen, feeling rather nervous, 
 but governing herself and looking at him in 
 return with new examination. " You did not 
 approve of my playing at roulette." 
 
 "How did you come to that conclusion?" 
 said Deronda, gravely. 
 
 " Oh, you cast an evil eye on my play," said 
 Gwendolen, with a turn of her head and a 
 smile. "I began to lose as soon as you came 
 to look on. I had always been winning till 
 then." 
 
 " Roulette in such a kennel as Leubronn is 
 a horrid bore," said Grandcourt. 
 
 " I found it a bore when I began to lose," 
 said Gwendolen. Her face was turned towards 
 Grandcourt as she smiled and spoke, but she 
 
74 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 gave a side-long glance at Deronda, and saw 
 his eyes fixed on her with a look so gravely 
 penetrating that it had a keener edge for her 
 than his ironical smile at her losses, — a keener 
 edge than Klesmer's judgment. She wheeled 
 her neck round as if she wanted to listen to 
 what was being said by the rest, while she was 
 only thinking of Deronda. His face had that 
 disturbing kind of form and expression which 
 threatens to affect opinion, — as if one's stand- 
 ard were somehow wrong. (Who has not seen 
 men with faces of this corrective power till they 
 frustrated it by speech or action?) His voice, 
 heard now for the first time, was to Grand- 
 court's toneless drawl, which had been in her 
 ears every day, as the deep notes of a violon- 
 cello to the broken discourse of poultry and 
 other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. 
 Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was per- 
 haps right in saying that Deronda thought too 
 much of himself, — a favourite way of explain- 
 ing a superiority that humiliates. However, the 
 talk turned on the rinderpest and Jamaica, and 
 no more was said about roulette. Grandcourt 
 held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort 
 of baptist Caliban ; Deronda said he had always 
 felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his 
 own point of view and could sing a good song; 
 Mrs. Davilow observed that her father had an 
 estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had 
 never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torring- 
 ton was sure she should never sleep in her bed 
 if she lived among blacks; her husband cor- 
 rected her by saying that the blacks would be 
 manageable enough if it were not for the half- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 75 
 
 breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites 
 had to thank themselves for the half-breeds. 
 
 While this polite pea-shooting was going on, 
 Gwendolen trifled with her jelly, and looked at 
 every speaker in turn that she might feel at 
 ease in looking at Deronda. 
 
 " I wonder what he thinks of me really? He 
 must have felt interested in me, else he would 
 not have sent me my necklace. I wonder what 
 he thinks of my marriage? What notions has 
 he to make him so grave about things? Why 
 is he come to Diplow? " 
 
 These questions ran in her mind as the voice 
 of an uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda 
 with unmixed admiration, — a longing which 
 had had its seed in her first resentment at his 
 critical glance. Why did she care so much about 
 the opinion of this man who was nothing of 
 any consequence "? She had no time to find the 
 reason, — she was too much engaged in caring. 
 In the drawing-room, when something had 
 called Grandcourt away, she went quite unpre- 
 meditatedly up to Deronda, who was standing 
 at a table apart, turning over some prints, and 
 said to him, — 
 
 " Shall you hunt to-morrow, Mr. Deronda? " 
 
 " Yes, I believe so." 
 
 " You don't object to hunting, then? " 
 
 " I find excuses for it. It is a sin I am in- 
 clined to, — when I can't get boating or 
 cricketing." 
 
 " Do you object to my hunting? " said Gwen- 
 dolen, with a saucy movement of the chin. 
 
 " I have no right to object to anything you 
 phoose to do." 
 
76 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " You thought you had a right to object to 
 my gambling," persisted Gwendolen. 
 
 " I was sorry for it. I am not aware that 
 I told you of my objection," said Deronda, with 
 his usual directness of gaze, — a large-eyed 
 gravity, innocent of any intention. His eyes 
 had a peculiarity which has drawn many men 
 into trouble; they were of a dark yet mild in- 
 tensity, which seemed to express a special 
 interest in every one on whom he fixed them, and 
 might easily help to bring on him those claims 
 which ardently sympathetic people are often 
 creating in the minds of those who need help. 
 In mendicant fashion, we make the goodness 
 of others a reason for exorbitant demands on 
 them. That sort of effect was penetrating 
 Gwendolen. 
 
 " You hindered me from gambling again," 
 she answered. But she had no sooner spoken 
 than she blushed over face and neck; and De- 
 ronda blushed too, conscious that in the little 
 affair of the necklace he had taken a question- 
 able freedom. 
 
 It was impossible to speak further; and she 
 turned away to a window, feeling that she had 
 stupidly said what she had not meant to say, 
 and yet being rather happy that she had plunged 
 into this mutual understanding. Deronda also 
 did not dislike it. Gwendolen seemed more de- 
 cidedly attractive than before; and certainly 
 there had been changes going on within her 
 since that time at Leubronn: the struggle of 
 mind attending a conscious error had wakened 
 something like a new soul, which had better, but 
 also worse, possibilities than her former poise 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 77 
 
 of crude self-confidence: among the forces she 
 had come to dread was something within her 
 that troubled satisfaction. 
 
 That evening Mrs. Davilow said, " Was it 
 really so, or only a joke of yours, about Mr. 
 Deronda's spoiling your play, Gwen? " 
 
 Her curiosity had been excited, and she could 
 venture to ask a question that did not concern 
 Mr. Grandcourt. 
 
 " Oh, it merely happened that he was looking 
 on when I began to lose," said Gwendolen, care- 
 lessly. " I noticed him." 
 
 "I don't wonder at that: he is a striking 
 young man. He puts me in mind of Italian 
 paintings. One would guess, without being 
 told, that there was foreign blood in his veins." 
 
 " Is there? " said Gwendolen. 
 
 " Mrs. Torrington says so. I asked particu- 
 larly who he was, and she told me that his mother 
 was some foreigner of high rank." 
 
 " His mother? " said Gwendolen, rather 
 sharply. " Then who was his father? " 
 
 " Well — every one says he is the son of Sir 
 Hugo Mallinger, who brought him up; though 
 he passes for a ward. She says, if Sir Hugo 
 Mallinger could have done as he liked with his 
 estates he would have left them to this Mr. 
 Deronda, since he has no legitimate son." 
 
 Gwendolen was silent; but her mother ob- 
 served so marked an effect in her face that she 
 was angry with herself for having repeated Mrs. 
 Torrington's gossip. It seemed, on reflection, 
 unsuited to the ear of her daughter, for whom 
 Mrs. Davilow disliked what is called knowledge 
 
78 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 of the world; and indeed she wished that she 
 herself had not had any of it thrust upon 
 her. 
 
 An image which had immediately arisen in 
 Gwendolen's mind was that of the unknown 
 mother, — no doubt a dark-eyed woman, — 
 probably sad. Hardly any face could be less 
 like Deronda's than that represented as Sir 
 Hugo's in a crayon portrait at Diplow. A dark- 
 eyed beautiful woman, no longer young, had 
 become " stuff o' the conscience " to Gwendolen. 
 
 That night when she had got into her little 
 bed, and only a dim light was burning, she 
 said, — 
 
 " Mamma, have men generally children be- 
 fore they are married? " 
 
 " No, dear, no," said Mrs. Davilow. " Why 
 do you ask such a question? " (But she began 
 to think that she saw the why.) 
 
 " If it were so, I ought to know;" said Gwen- 
 dolen, with some indignation. 
 
 " You are thinking of what I said about Mr. 
 Deronda and Sir Hugo Mallinger. That is 
 a very unusual case, dear." 
 
 "Does Lady Mallinger know?" 
 
 " She knows enough to satisfy her. That is 
 quite clear, because Mr. Deronda has lived with 
 them." 
 
 " And people think no worse of him? " 
 
 " Well, of course he is under some disadvan- 
 tage: it is not as if he were Lady Mallinger's 
 son. He does not inherit the property, and he 
 is not of any consequence in the world. But 
 people are not obliged to know anything about 
 his birth; you see, he is very well received." 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 79 
 
 " I wonder whether he knows about it; and 
 whether he is angry with his father? " 
 
 " My dear child, why should you think of 
 that?" 
 
 "Why?" said Gwendolen, impetuously, sit- 
 ting up in her bed. " Have n't children reason 
 to be angry with their parents? How can they 
 help their parents marrying or not marrying? " 
 
 But a consciousness rushed upon her, which 
 made her fall back again on her pillow. It was 
 not only what she would have felt months be- 
 fore, — that she might seem to be reproaching 
 her mother for that second marriage of hers; 
 what she chiefly felt now was, that she had been 
 led on to a condemnation which seemed to make 
 her own marriage a forbidden thing. 
 
 There was no further talk, and till sleep came 
 over her, Gwendolen lay struggling with the 
 reasons against that marriage, — reasons which 
 pressed upon her newly now that they were un- 
 expectedly mirrored in the story of a man whose 
 slight relations with her had, by some hidden 
 aflinity, bitten themselves into the most per- 
 manent layers of feeling. It was characteristic 
 that, with all her debating, she was never trou- 
 bled by the question whether the indefensible- 
 ness of her marriage did not include the fact that 
 she had accepted Grandcourt solely as the man 
 whom it was convenient for her to marry, not 
 in the least as one to whom she Avould be binding 
 herself in duty. Gwendolen's ideas were piti- 
 ably crude; but many grand difficulties of life 
 are apt to force themselves on us in our crudity. 
 And to judge wisely I suppose we must know 
 how things appear to the unwise; that kind of 
 
80 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 appearance making the larger part of the 
 world's history. 
 
 In the morning there was a double excitement 
 for her. She was going to hunt, from which 
 scruples about propriety had threatened to 
 hinder her, until it was found that Mrs. Torring- 
 ton was horse-woman enough to accompany her, 
 — going to hunt for the first time since her 
 escapade with Rex; and she was going again 
 to see Deronda, in whom, since last night, her 
 interest had so gathered that she expected, as 
 people do about revealed celebrities, to see some- 
 thing in his appearance which she had missed 
 before. What was he going to be? What sort 
 of life had he before him, — he being nothing 
 of any consequence ? And with only a little dif- 
 ference in events he might have been as impor- 
 tant as Grandcourt, nay, — her imagination 
 inevitably went in that direction, — might have 
 held the very estates which Grandcourt was to 
 have. But now Deronda would probably some 
 day see her mistress of the Abbey at Topping, 
 see her bearing the title which would have been 
 his own wife's. These obvious, futile thoughts 
 of what might have been, made a new epoch for 
 Gwendolen. She, whose unquestioning habit 
 it had been to take the best that came to her for 
 less than her own claim, had now to see the posi- 
 tion which tempted her in a new light, as a hard, 
 unfair exclusion of others. What she had now 
 heard about Deronda seemed to her imagination 
 to throw him into one group with Mrs. Glasher 
 and her children; before whom she felt herself 
 in an attitude of apology, — she who had 
 hitherto been surrounded by a group that in her 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 81 
 
 opinion had need be apologetic to her. Perhaps 
 Deronda himself was thinking of these things. 
 Could he know of Mrs. Glasher? If he knew 
 that she knew, he would despise her; but he 
 could have no such knowledge. Would he, 
 without that, despise her for marrying Grand- 
 court? His possible judgment of her actions 
 was telling on her as importunately as Klesmer's 
 judgment of her powers; but she found larger 
 room for resistance to a disapproval of her 
 marriage, because it is easier to make our con- 
 duct seem justifiable to ourselves than to make 
 our ability strike others. " How can I help — ^ 
 it? " is not our favourite apology for incom- 
 petence. But Gwendolen felt some strength in 
 saying, — 
 
 " How can I help what other people have 
 done? Things would not come right if I were 
 to turn round uow and declare that I would not 
 marry JNIr. Grandcourt." And such turning 
 round was out of the question. The horses in 
 the chariot she had mounted were going at full 
 speed. 
 
 This mood of youthful, elated desperation 
 had a tidal recurrence. She could dare anything 
 that lay before her sooner than she could choose 
 to go backward into humiliation; and it was 
 even soothing to think that there would now be 
 as much ill-doing in the one as in the other. But 
 the immediate delightful fact was the hunt, 
 where she would see Deronda, and where he 
 would see her; for always lurking ready to 
 obtrude before other thoughts about him was the 
 impression that he was very much interested in 
 her. But to-day she was resolved not to repeat 
 
 VOL. XIII — 6 
 
82 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her foily of yesterday, as if she were anxious to 
 say anything to him. Indeed, the hunt would be 
 too absorbing. 
 
 And so it was for a long while. Deronda was 
 there, and within her sight very often; but this 
 only added to the stimulus of a pleasure which 
 Gwendolen had only once before tasted, and 
 which seemed likely always to give a delight 
 independent of any crosses, except such as took 
 away the chance of riding. No accident hap- 
 pened to throw them together; the run took 
 them within convenient reach of home, and in 
 the agreeable sombreness of the gray November 
 afternoon, with a long stratum of yellow light 
 in the west, Gwendolen was returning with the 
 company from Diplow, who were attending her 
 on the way to Offendene. Now that the sense of 
 glorious excitement was over and gone, she was 
 getting irritably disappointed that she had had 
 no opportunity of speaking to Deronda, whom 
 she would not see again, since he was to go away 
 in a couple of days. What was she going to 
 say? That was not quite certain. She wanted 
 to speak to him. Grandcourt was by her side; 
 Mrs. Torrington, her husband, and another 
 gentleman in advance ; and Deronda's horse she 
 could hear behind. The wish to speak to him 
 and have him speaking to her was becoming im- 
 perious; and there was no chance of it unless 
 she simply asserted her will and defied every- 
 thing. Where the order of things could give 
 way to Miss Gwendolen, it must be made to do 
 so. They had lately emerged from a wood of 
 pines and beeches, where the twilight stillness 
 had a repressing effect, which increased her im- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 83 
 
 patience. The horse-hoofs again heard behind 
 at some little distance were a growing irritation. 
 She reined in her horse and looked behind her; 
 Grandcourt, after a few paces, also paused; but 
 she, waving her whip and nodding sideways 
 with playful imperiousness, said " Go on! I 
 want to speak to Mr. Deronda." 
 
 Grandcourt hesitated ; but that he would have 
 done after any proposition. It was an awkward 
 situation for him. No gentleman, before mar- 
 riage, could give the emphasis of refusal to a 
 command delivered in this playful way. He 
 rode on slowly, and she waited till Deronda 
 came up. He looked at her with tacit inquiry, 
 and she said at once, letting her horse go along- 
 side of his, — 
 
 " Mr. Deronda, you must enlighten my igno- 
 rance. I want to know why you thought it 
 wrong for me to gamble. Is it because I am a 
 woman? " 
 
 " Not altogether; but I regretted it the more 
 because you were a woman," said Deronda, with 
 an irrepressible smile. Apparently it must be 
 understood between them now that it was he who 
 sent the necklace. " I think it would be better 
 for men not to gamble. It is a besotting kind of 
 taste, likely to turn into a disease. And, be- 
 sides, there is something revolting to me in rak- 
 ing a heap of money together, and internally 
 chuckling over it, when others are feeling the 
 loss of it. I should even call it base, if it were 
 more than an exceptional lapse. There are 
 enough inevitable turns of fortune which force 
 us to see that our gain is another's loss; that is 
 one of the ugly aspects of life. One would like 
 
84 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to reduce it as much as one could, not get amuse- 
 ment out of exaggerating it." Deronda's voice 
 had gathered some indignation while he was 
 speaking. 
 
 " But you do admit that we can't help things," 
 said Gwendolen, with a drop in her tone. The 
 answer had not been anything like what she 
 had expected. " I mean that things are so in 
 spite of us; we can't always help it that our 
 gain is another's loss." 
 
 " Clearly. Because of that, we should help it 
 where we can." 
 
 Gwendolen, biting her lip inside, paused a 
 moment, and then forcing herself to speak with 
 an air of playfulness again, said, — 
 
 " But why should you regret it more because 
 I am a woman?" 
 
 " Perhaps because we need that you should be 
 better than we are." 
 
 " But suppose we need that men should be 
 better than we are," said Gwendolen, with a lit- 
 tle air of "check!" 
 
 " That is rather a difficulty," said Deronda, 
 smiling. " I suppose I should have said, we 
 each of us think it would be better for the other 
 to be good." 
 
 " You see, I needed you to be better than I 
 was — and you thought so," said Gwendolen, 
 nodding and laughing, while she put her horse 
 forward and joined Grandcourt, who made no 
 observation. 
 
 "Don't you want to know what I had to say 
 to Mr. Deronda? " said Gwendolen, whose own 
 pride required her to account for her conduct. 
 
 "A — no," said Grandcourt, coldly. 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 85 
 
 " Now, that is the first impolite word you have 
 spoken, — that you don't wish to hear what I 
 had to say," said Gwendolen, playing at a pout. 
 
 " I wish to hear what you say to me — not 
 to other men," said Grandcourt. 
 
 " Then you wish to hear this. I wanted to 
 make him tell me why he objected to my gam- 
 bling, and he gave me a little sermon." 
 
 " Yes, — but excuse me the sermon." If 
 Gwendolen imagined that Grandcourt cared 
 about her speaking to Deronda, he wished her 
 to understand that she was mistaken. But he 
 was not fond of being told to ride on. She 
 saw he was piqued, but did not mind. She had 
 accomplished her object of speaking again to 
 Deronda before he raised his hat and turned with 
 the rest towards Diplow, while her lover at- 
 tended her to Offendene, where he was to bid 
 farewell before a whole day's absence on the un- 
 specified journey. Grandcourt had spoken truth 
 in calling the journey a bore: he was going by 
 train to Gadsmere. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 "No penitence and no confessional: 
 No priest ordains it, yet they 're forced to sit 
 Amid deep ashes of their vanished years." 
 
 IMAGINE a rambling, patchy house, the 
 best part built of gray stone, and red-tiled, 
 a round tower jutting at one of the corners, 
 the mellow darkness of its conical roof sur- 
 mounted by a weather-cock making an agree- 
 able object either amidst the gleams and greenth 
 of summer or the low-hanging clouds and 
 snowy branches of winter: the ground shady 
 with spreading trees: a great cedar flourishing 
 on one side, backward some Scotch firs on a 
 broken bank where the roots hung naked, and 
 beyond, a rookery : on the other si^ e a pool over- 
 hung with bushes, where the water-fowl flut- 
 tered and screamed: all around, a vast meadow 
 which might be called a park, bordered by an 
 old plantation and guarded by stone lodges 
 which looked like little prisons. Outside the 
 gate the country, once entirely rural and lovely, 
 now black with coal-mines, was chiefly peopled 
 by men and brethren with candles stuck in their 
 hats, and with a diabolic complexion which laid 
 them peculiarly open to suspicion in the eyes 
 of the children of Gadsmere, — Mrs. Glasher's 
 four beautiful children, who had dwelt there 
 for about three years. Now, in November, when 
 the flower-beds were empty, the trees leafless, 
 and the pool blackly shivering, one might have 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 87 
 
 said that the place was sombrely in keeping with 
 the black roads and black mounds which seemed 
 to put the district in mourning ; — except when 
 the children were playing on the gravel with 
 the dogs for their companions. But Mrs. 
 Glasher under her present circumstances liked 
 Gadsmere as well as she would have liked any 
 other abode. The complete seclusion of the 
 place, which the unattractiveness of the country 
 secured, was exactly to her taste. When she 
 drove her two ponies with a wagonet full of 
 children, there were no gentry in carriages to be 
 met, only men of business in gigs; at church 
 there were no eyes she cared to avoid, for the 
 curate's wife and the curate himself were either 
 ignorant of anything to her disadvantage, or 
 ignored it: to them she was simply a widow 
 lady, the tenant of Gadsmere ; and the name of 
 Grandcourt was of little interest in that district 
 compared with the names of Fletcher and Gaw- 
 come, the lessees of the collieries. 
 
 It was full ten years since the elopement of 
 an Irish officer's beautiful wife with young 
 Grandcourt, and a consequent duel where the 
 bullets wounded the air only, had made some 
 little noise. Most of those who remembered the 
 affair now wondered what had become of that 
 Mrs. Glasher whose beauty and brilliancy had 
 made her rather conspicuous to them in foreign 
 places, where she was known to be living with 
 young Grandcourt. 
 
 That he should have disentangled himself 
 from that connection seemed only natural and 
 desirable. As to her, it was thought that a 
 woman who was understood to have forsaken 
 
88 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her child along with her husband had probably 
 sunk lower. Gran^court had of course got 
 weary of her. He was much given to the pur- 
 suit of women : but a man in his position would 
 by this time desire to make a suitable marriage 
 with the fair young daughter of a noble house. 
 No one talked of Mrs. Glasher now, any more 
 than they talked of the victim in a trial for man- 
 slaughter ten years before : she was a lost vessel 
 after whom nobody would send out an expedi- 
 tion of search ; but Grandcourt was seen in har- 
 bour with his colours flying registered as sea- 
 worthy as ever. 
 
 Yet, in fact, Grandcourt had never disen- 
 tangled himself from Mrs. Glasher. His pas- 
 sion for her had been the strongest and most 
 lasting he had ever known; and though it was 
 now as dead as the music of a cracked flute, it 
 had left a certain dull disposedness, which on 
 the death of her husband three years before had 
 prompted in him a vacillating notion of marry- 
 ing her, in accordance with the understanding 
 often expressed between them during the days 
 of his first ardour. At that early time Grand- 
 court would willingly have paid for the freedom 
 to be won by a divorce ; but the husband would 
 not oblige him, not wanting to be married again 
 himself, and not wishing to have his domestic 
 habits printed in evidence. 
 
 The altered poise which the years had brought 
 in Mrs. Glasher was just the reverse. At first 
 she was comparatively careless about the possi- 
 bility of marriage. It was enough that she had 
 escaped from a disagreeable husband and found 
 a sort of bliss with a lover who had completely 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 89 
 
 fascinated her, — young, handsome, amorous, 
 and hving in the best style, with equipage and 
 conversation of the kind to be expected in young 
 men of fortune who have seen everything. She 
 was an impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of 
 adoration, exasperated by five years of marital 
 rudeness ; and the sense of release was so strong 
 upon her that it stilled anxiety for more than 
 she actually enjoyed. An equivocal position 
 was of no importance to her then; she had no 
 envy for the honours of a dull disregarded wife: 
 the one spot which spoiled her vision of her new 
 pleasant world, was the sense that she had left 
 her three-year-old boy, who died two years after- 
 wards, and whose first tones saying " Mamma " 
 retained a difference from those of the chil- 
 dren that came after. But now the years had 
 brought many changes besides those in the 
 contour of her cheek and throat; and that 
 Grandcourt should marry her had become her 
 dominant desire. The equivocal position which 
 she had not minded about for herself was now 
 telling upon her through her children, whom she 
 loved with a devotion charged with the added 
 passion of atonement. She had no repentance 
 except in this direction. If Grandcourt married 
 her, the children would be none the worse off 
 for what had passed: they would see their 
 mother in a dignified position, and they would 
 be at no disadvantage with the world: her son 
 could be made his father's heir. It was the 
 yearning for this result which gave the supreme 
 importance to Grandcourt's feeling for her; her 
 love for him had long resolved itself into anxiety 
 that he should give her the unique, permanent 
 
90 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 claim of a wife, and she expected no other happi- 
 ness in marriage than the satisfaction of her 
 maternal love and pride, — including her pride 
 for herself in the presence of her children. For 
 the sake of that result she was prepared even 
 with a tragic firmness to endure anything 
 quietly in marriage; and she had had acuteness 
 enough to cherish Grandcourt's flickering pur- 
 pose negatively, by not molesting him with pas- 
 sionate appeals and with scene-making. In her, 
 as in every one else who wanted anything of him, 
 his incalculable turns, and his tendency to harden 
 under beseeching, had created a reasonable 
 dread, — a slow discovery, of which no presenti- 
 ment had been given in the bearing of a youthful 
 lover with a fine line of face and the softest 
 manners. But reticence had necessarily cost 
 something to this impassioned woman, and she 
 was the bitterer for it. There is no quailing — 
 even that forced on the helpless and injured — 
 which has not an ugly obverse: the withheld 
 sting was gathering venom. She was absolutely 
 dependent on Grandcourt; for though he had 
 been always liberal in expenses for her, he had 
 kept everything voluntary on his part ; and with 
 the goal of marriage before her, she would ask 
 for nothing less. He had said that he would 
 never settle anything except by will; and when 
 she was thinking of alternatives for the future, 
 it often occurred to her that, even if she did not 
 become Grandcourt's wife, he might never have 
 a son who would have a legitimate claim on him, 
 and the end might be that her son would be made 
 heir to the best part of his estates. No son at 
 that early age could promise to have more of his 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 91 
 
 father's physique. But her becoming Grand- 
 court's wife was so far from being an extrava- 
 gant notion of possibihty, that even Lush had 
 entertained it, and had said that he would as soon 
 bet on it as on any other hkehhood with regard 
 to his famihar companion. Lush, indeed, on 
 inferring that Grandcourt had a preconception 
 of using his residence at Diplow in order to win 
 Miss Arrowpoint, had thought it well to fan that 
 project, taking it as a tacit renunciation of the 
 marriage with Mrs. Glasher, which had long 
 been a mark for the hovering and wheeling of 
 Grandcourt's caprice. But both prospects had 
 been negatived by Gwendolen's appearance on 
 the scene; and it was natural enough for Mrs. 
 Glasher to enter with eagerness into Lush's 
 plan of hindering that new danger by setting 
 up a barrier in the mind of the girl who was 
 being sought as a bride. She entered into it with 
 an eagerness which had passion in it as well as 
 purpose, some of the stored-up venom delivering 
 itself in that way. 
 
 After that, she had heard from Lush of Gwen- 
 dolen's departure, and the probability that all 
 danger from her was got rid of; but there 
 had been no letter to tell her that the danger had 
 returned and had become a certainty. She had 
 since then written to Grandcourt as she did 
 habitually, and he had been longer than usual 
 in answering. She was inferring that he might 
 intend coming to Gadsmere at the time when he 
 was actually on the way; and she was not with- 
 out hope — what construction of another's mind 
 is not strong wishing equal to ? — that a certain 
 sickening from that frustrated courtship might 
 
92 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 dispose him to slip the more easily into the old 
 track of intention. 
 
 Grandcourt had two grave purposes in com- 
 ing to Gadsmere: to convey the news of his 
 approaching marriage in person, in order to 
 make this first difficulty final; and to get from 
 Lydia his mother's diamonds, which long ago 
 he had confided to her and wished her to wear. 
 Her person suited diamonds, and made them 
 look as if they were worth some of the money 
 given for them. These particular diamonds were 
 not mountains of light, — they were mere peas 
 and haricots for the ears, neck, and hair; but 
 they were worth some thousands, and Grand- 
 court necessarily wished to have them for his 
 wife. Formerly when he had asked Lydia to 
 put them into his keeping again, simply on the 
 ground that they would be safer and ought to 
 be deposited at the bank, she had quietly but 
 absolutely refused, declaring that they were 
 quite safe; and at last had said, " If you ever 
 marry another woman I will give them up to 
 her: are you going to marry another woman? " 
 At that time Grandcourt had no motive which 
 urged him to persist; and he had this grace in 
 him, that the disposition to exercise power either 
 b}^ cowing or disappointing others or exciting 
 in them a rage which they dared not express, 
 — a disposition which was active in him as other 
 propensities became languid, — had always been 
 in abeyance before Lydia. A severe interpreter 
 might say that the mere facts of their relation 
 to each other, the melancholy position of this 
 woman who depended on his will, made a stand- 
 ing banquet for his delight in dominating. But 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 93 
 
 there was something else than this in his forbear- 
 ance towards her: there was the surviving 
 though metamorphosed effect of the power she 
 had had over him; and it was this effect, the 
 fitful dull lapse towards solicitations that once 
 had the zest now missing from life, which had 
 again and again inclined him to espouse a fa- 
 miliar past rather than rouse himself to the 
 expectation of novelty. But now novelty had 
 taken hold of him and urged him to make the 
 most of it. 
 
 Mrs. Glasher was seated in the pleasant room 
 where she habitually passed her mornings with 
 her children round her. It had a square pro- 
 jecting window and looked on broad gravel and 
 grass, sloping towards a little brook that entered 
 the pool. The top of a low black cabinet, the old 
 oak table, the chairs in tawny leather, were lit- 
 tered with the children's toys, books, and garden 
 garments, at which a maternal lady in pastel 
 looked down from the walls with smiling indul- 
 gence. The children were all there. The three 
 girls, seated round their mother near the win- 
 dow, were miniature portraits of her, — dark- 
 eyed, delicate-featured brunettes with a rich 
 bloom on their cheeks, their little nostrils and 
 eyebrows singularly finished as if they were tiny 
 women, the eldest being barely nine. The boy 
 was seated on the carpet at some distance, bend- 
 ing his blond head over the animals from a 
 Noah's ark, admonishing them separately in a 
 voice of threatening command, and occasionally 
 licking the spotted ones to see if the colours 
 would hold. Josephine, the eldest, was having 
 her French lesson; and the others, with their 
 
94 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 dolls on their laps, sat demurely enough for 
 images of the Madonna. Mrs. Glasher's toilet 
 had been made very carefully, — each day now 
 she said to herself that Grandcourt might come 
 in. Her head, which, spite of emaciation, had 
 an ineffaceable beauty in the fine profile, crisp 
 curves of hair, and clearly marked eyebrows, 
 rose impressively above her bronze-coloured' silk 
 and velvet, and the gold necklace which Grand- 
 court had first clasped round her neck years ago. 
 Not that she had any pleasure in her toilet; her 
 chief thought of herself seen in the glass was, 
 "How changed!" — but such good in life as 
 remained to her she would keep. If her chief 
 wish were fulfilled, she could imagine herself 
 getting the comeliness of a matron fit for the 
 highest rank. The little faces beside her, almost 
 exact reductions of her own, seemed to tell of 
 the blooming curves which had once been where 
 now was sunken pallor. But the children 
 kissed the pale cheeks, and never found them de- 
 ficient. That love was now the one end of her 
 fife. 
 
 Suddenly Mrs. Glasher turned away her head 
 from Josephine's book and listened. " Hush, 
 dear! I think some one is coming." 
 
 Henleigh the boy jumped up and said, 
 " Mamma, is it the miller wdth my donkey? " 
 
 He got no answer, and going up to his 
 mamma's knee, repeated his question in an in- 
 sistent tone. But the door opened, and the ser- 
 vant announced Mr. Grandcourt. Mrs. Glasher 
 rose in some agitation. Henleigh frowned at 
 him in disgust at his not being the miller, and 
 the three little girls lifted up their dark eyes to 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 95 
 
 him timidly. They had none of them any par- 
 ticular liking for this friend of mamma's, — in 
 fact, when he had taken Mrs. Glasher's hand 
 and then turned to put his other hand on Hen- 
 leigh's head, that energetic scion began to beat 
 the friend's arm away with his fists. The little 
 girls submitted bashfully to be patted under the 
 chin and kissed, but on the whole it seemed bet- 
 ter to send them into the garden, where they 
 were presently dancing and chatting with the 
 dogs on the gravel. 
 
 " How far are you come? " said Mrs. Glasher, 
 as Grandcourt put away his hat and overcoat. 
 
 " From Diplow," he answered slowly, seating 
 himself opposite her and looking at her with an 
 unnoting gaze which she noted. 
 
 " You are tired, then." 
 
 " No, I rested at the Junction, — a hideous 
 hole. These railway journeys are always a con- 
 founded bore. But I had coffee and smoked." 
 
 Grandcourt drew out his handkerchief, rubbed 
 his face, and in returning the handkerchief to 
 his pocket looked at his crossed knee and blame^ 
 less boot, as if any stranger were opposite to 
 him, instead of a woman quivering with a sus- 
 pense which every word and look of his was to 
 incline towards hope or dread. But he was 
 really occupied with their interview and what 
 it was likely to include. Imagine the difference 
 in rate of emotion between this woman whom the 
 years had worn to a more conscious dependence 
 and sharper eagerness, and this man whom they 
 were dulling into a more and more neutral 
 obstinacy. 
 
 " I expected to see you — it was so long since 
 
96 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 I had heard from you. I suppose the weeks 
 seem longer at Gadsmere than they do at Dip- 
 low," said jNIrs. Glasher. She had a quick, in- 
 cisive way of speaking that seemed to go with 
 her features, as the tone and timbre of a violin 
 go vrith. its form. 
 
 " Yes," drawled Grandcourt. " But you 
 found the money paid into the bank." 
 
 " Oh, yes," said JNIrs. Glasher, curtly, tin- 
 gling with impatience. Always before — at 
 least she fancied so — Grandcourt had taken 
 more notice of her and the children than he did 
 to-day. 
 
 Yes," he resumed, playing with his whisker, 
 and at first not looking at her, " the time has 
 gone on at rather a rattling pace with me ; gen- 
 erally it is slow enough. But there has been a 
 good deal happening, as you know^ " — here he 
 turned his eyes upon her. 
 
 " What do I know? " said she, sharply. 
 
 He left a pause before he said, without 
 change of manner, " That I was thinking of 
 marrving. You saw Miss Harleth?" 
 
 "She told you that?" 
 
 The pale cheeks looked even paler, perhaps 
 from the fierce brightness in the eyes above 
 them. 
 
 " Xo, Lush told me," was the slow answer. 
 It was as if the thumb-screw and the iron boot 
 were being placed by creeping hands within 
 sight of the expectant victim. 
 
 " Good God! say at once that you are going 
 to marry her," she burst out passionately, her 
 knee shaking and her hands tightly clasped. 
 
 " Of course, this kind of thing must happen 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 97 
 
 some time or other, Lydia," said he; really, now 
 the thumb-screw was on, not wishing to make 
 the pain worse. 
 
 " You did n't always see the necessity." 
 
 " Perhaps not. I see it now." 
 
 Tn those few undertoned words of Grand- 
 court's she felt as absolute a resistance as if her 
 thin fingers had been pushing at a fast-shut iron 
 door. She knew her helplessness, and shrank 
 from testing it by any appeal, — shrank from 
 crying in a dead ear and clinging to dead knees, 
 only to see the immovable face and feel the rigid 
 limbs. She did not weep nor speak: she Avas 
 too hard pressed by the sudden certainty which 
 had as much of chill sickness in it as of thought 
 and emotion. The defeated clutch of struggling 
 hope gave her in these first moments a horrible 
 sensation. At last she rose with a spasmodic 
 effort, and, unconscious of everything but her 
 wretchedness, pressed her forehead against the 
 hard cold glass of the window. The children, 
 playing on the gravel, took this as a sign that 
 she wanted them, and running forward stood 
 in front of her with their sweet faces upturned 
 expectantly. This roused her: she shook her 
 head at them, waved them off, and overcome 
 with this painful exertion, sank back in the 
 nearest chair. 
 
 Grandcourt had risen too. He was doubly 
 annoyed, — at the scene itself, and at the sense 
 that no imperiousness of his could save him 
 from it; but the task had to be gone through, 
 and there was the administrative necessity of 
 arranging things so that there should be as little 
 annoyance as possible in future. He was lean- 
 
 VOL. XIII 7 
 
98 DANIEL DERONDA i 
 
 ing against the corner of the fireplace. She i 
 looked up at him and said bitterly, — 
 
 " All this is of no consequence to you. I ; 
 
 and the children are importunate creatures. \ 
 
 You wish to get away again and be with Miss i 
 
 Harleth." I 
 
 " Don't make the affair more disagreeable 
 
 than it need be, Lydia. It is of no use to harp | 
 
 on things that can't be altered. Of course it 's ' 
 deucedly disagreeable to me to see you making 
 
 yourself miserable. I 've taken this journey to i 
 
 tell you what you must make up your mind to; | 
 
 you and the children will be provided for as \ 
 
 usual, and there 's an end of it." * 
 
 Silence. She dared not answer. This woman ! 
 with the intense eager look had had the iron 
 
 of the mother's anguish in her soul, and it had i 
 
 made her sometimes capable of a repression | 
 
 harder than shrieking and struggle. But under- : 
 
 neath the silence there was an outlash of hatred i 
 
 and vindictiveness : she wished that the mar- | 
 
 riage might make two others wretched, besides ; 
 
 herself. Presently he went on. I 
 
 " It will be better for you. You may go on ; 
 
 living here. But I think of by and by settling ' 
 
 a good sum on you and the children, and you ^ 
 
 can live where you like. There will be nothing ^ 
 
 for you to complain of then. Whatever happens ■ 
 
 you will feel secure. Nothing could be done j 
 beforehand. Everything has gone on in a 
 
 hurry." j 
 
 Grandcourt ceased his slow delivery of sen- | 
 
 tences. He did not expect her to thank him, ; 
 
 but he considered that she might reasonably be \ 
 
 contented; if it were possible for Lydia to be 1 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 99 
 
 contented. She showed no change, and after 
 a minute he said, — 
 
 " You have never had any reason to fear that 
 I should be iUiberal. I don't care a curse about 
 the money." 
 
 " If you did care about it, I suppose you 
 would not give it us," said Lydia. The sarcasm 
 was irrepressible. 
 
 " That 's a devilishly unfair thing to say," 
 Grandcourt replied, in a lower tone; "and I 
 advise you not to say that sort of thing again." 
 
 " Should you punish me by leaving the chil- 
 dren in beggary? " In spite of herself, the one 
 outlet of venom had brought the other. 
 
 " There is no question about leaving the chil- 
 dren in beggary," said Grandcourt, still in his 
 low voice. " I advise you not to say things that 
 you will repent of." 
 
 " I am used to repenting," said she, bitterly. 
 " Perhaps you will repent. You have already ^ 
 repented of loving me." 
 
 " All this will only make it uncommonly diffi- 
 cult for us to meet again. What friend have 
 you besides me? " 
 
 " Quite true." 
 
 The words came like a low moan. . At the 
 same moment there flashed through her the wish 
 that after promising himself a better happiness 
 than that he had had with her, he might feel 
 a misery and loneliness which would drive him 
 back to her to find some memory of a time when 
 he was young, glad, and hopeful. But no! 
 he would go scathless; it was she who had to 
 suffer. 
 
 With this the scorching words were ended. 
 
100 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Grandcourt had meant to stay till evening; he 
 wished to curtail his visit, but there was no 
 suitable train earlier than the one he had ar- 
 ranged to go by, and he had still to speak to 
 Lydia on the second object of his visit, which 
 like a second surgical operation "seemed to re- 
 quire an interval. The hours had to go by; 
 there was eating to be done; the children came 
 in again, — all this mechanism of life had to 
 be gone through with the dreary sense of con- 
 straint which is often felt in domestic quarrels 
 of a commoner kind. To Lydia it was some 
 slight relief for her stifled fury to have the 
 children present: she felt a savage glory in their 
 loveliness, as if it would taunt Grandcourt with 
 his indifference to her and them, — a secret 
 darting of venom which was strongly imagina- 
 tive. He acquitted himself with all the advan- 
 tage of a man whose grace of bearing has long 
 been moulded on an experience of boredom, — 
 nursed the little Antonia, who sat with her 
 hands crossed and eyes upturned to his bald 
 head, which struck her as worthy of observation, 
 — and propitiated Henleigh by promising him 
 a beautiful saddle and bridle. It was only the 
 two eldest girls who had known him as a con- 
 tinual presence; znd the intervening years had 
 overlaid their infantine memories with a bash- 
 fulness which Grandcourt's bearing was not 
 likely to dissipate. He and Lydia occasionally, 
 in the presence of the servants, made a conven- 
 tional remark ; otherwise they never spoke ; and 
 the stagnant thought in Grandcourt's mind all 
 the while was of his own infatuation in having 
 given her those diamonds, which obliged him to 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 101 
 
 incur the nuisance of speaking about them. He 
 had an ingrained care for what he held to belong 
 to his caste, and about property he liked to be 
 lordly; also he had a consciousness of indignity 
 to himself in having to ask for anything in the 
 world. But however he might assert his in- 
 • dependence of Mrs. Glasher's past, he had 
 made a past for himself which was a stronger 
 yoke than any he could impose. He must 
 ask for the diamonds which he had promised to 
 Gwendolen. 
 
 At last they were alone again, with the candles 
 above them, face to face with each other. 
 Grandcourt looked at his watch, and then said, 
 in an apparently indifferent drawl, " There is 
 one thing I had to mention, Lydia. My dia- 
 monds, — you have them." 
 
 " Yes, I have them," she answered promptly, 
 rising and standing with her arms thrust down 
 and her fingers threaded, while Grandcourt sat 
 still. She had expected the topic, and made her 
 resolve about it. But she meant to carry out 
 her resolve, if possible, without exasperating 
 him. During the hours of silence she had longed 
 to recall the words which had only widened the 
 breach between them. 
 
 " They are in this house, I suppose? " 
 
 "No; not in this house." 
 
 " I thought you said you kept them by you." 
 
 " When I said so, it was true. They are in 
 the bank at Dudley." 
 
 " Get them away, will you? I must make an 
 arrangement for your delivering them to some 
 one." 
 
 " Make no arrangement. They shall be de- 
 
102 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 livered to the person you intended them for. I 
 will make the arrangement." 
 
 " What do you mean? " 
 
 " What I say. I have always told you that I 
 would give them up to your wife. I shall keep 
 my word. She is not your wife yet." 
 
 " This is foolery," said Grandcourt, with un- * 
 dertoned disgust. It was too irritating that his 
 indulgence of Lydia had given her a sort of mas- 
 tery over him in spite of her dependent condition. 
 
 She did not speak. He also rose now, but 
 stood leaning against the mantelpiece with his 
 side-face towards her. 
 
 " The diamonds must be delivered to me be- 
 fore my marriage," he began again. 
 
 " What is your wedding-day? " 
 
 " The tenth. There is no time to be lost." 
 
 " And where do you go after the marriage? " 
 
 He did not reply except by looking more 
 sullen. Presently he said, " You must ap- 
 point a day before then, to get them from the 
 bank and meet me, — or somebody else I will 
 commission : it 's a great nuisance. Mention a 
 day." 
 
 "No; I shall not do that. They shall 
 be delivered to her safely. I shall keep my 
 word." 
 
 "Do you mean to say," said Grandcourt, just 
 audibly, turning to face her, " that you will not 
 do as I tell you? " 
 
 " Yes, I mean that," was the answer that 
 leaped out, while her eyes flashed close to him. 
 The poor creature was immediately conscious 
 that if her words had any effect on her own lot, 
 the effect must be mischievous, and might nullify 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 103 
 
 all the remaining advantage of her long patience. 
 But the word had been spoken. 
 
 He was in a position the most irritating to him. 
 He could not shake her nor touch her hostilely; 
 and if he could, the process would not bring the 
 diamonds. He shrank from the only sort of 
 threat that would frighten her, — if she believed 
 it. And in general, there was nothing he hated 
 more than to be forced into anything like vio- 
 lence even in words : his will must impose itself 
 without trouble. After looking at her for a mo- 
 ment, he turned his side-face towards her again, 
 leaning as before, and said, — 
 
 " Infernal idiots that women are! " 
 
 " Why will you not tell me where you are 
 going after the marriage ? I could be at the wed- 
 ding if I liked, and learn in that way," said 
 Lydia, not shrinking from the one suicidal form 
 of threat within her power. 
 
 "Of course, if you like, you can play the mad 
 woman," said Grandcourt, with sotto voce scorn. 
 "It is not to be supposed that you will wait to 
 think what good will come of it, — or what you 
 owe to me." 
 
 He was in a state of disgust and embitterment 
 quite new in the history of their relation to each 
 other. It was undeniable that this woman whose 
 life he had allowed to send such deep suckers into 
 his, had a terrible power of annoyance in her; 
 and the rash hurry of his proceedings had left 
 her opportunities open. His pride saw very 
 ugly possibilities threatening it, and he stood for 
 several minutes in silence reviewing the situa- 
 tion, — considering how he could act upon her. 
 Unlike himself she was of a direct nature, with 
 
104 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ' certain simple strongly coloured tendencies, and 
 there was one often-experienced effect which he 
 thought he could count upon now. As Sir Hugo 
 had said of him, Grandcourt knew how to play 
 his cards upon occasion. 
 
 He did not speak again, but looked at his 
 watch, rang the bell, and ordered the vehicle to be 
 brought round immediately. Then he removed 
 farther from her, walked as if in expectation of 
 a summons, and remained silent without turning 
 his eyes upon her. 
 
 She was suffering the horrible conflict of self- 
 reproach and tenacity. She saw beforehand 
 Grandcourt leaving her without even looking at 
 her again, — herself left behind in lonely un- 
 certainty, — hearing nothing from him, — not 
 knowing whether she had done her children 
 harm, — feeling that she had perhaps made him 
 hate her, — all the wretchedness of a creature 
 who had defeated her own motives. And yet 
 she could not bear to give up a purpose which 
 was a sweet morsel to her vindictiveness. If she 
 had not been a mother she would willingly have 
 sacrificed herself to her revenge, — to what she 
 felt to be the justice of hindering another from 
 getting happiness by willingly giving her over 
 to misery. The two dominant passions were at 
 struggle. She must satisfy them both. 
 
 " Don't let us part in anger, Henleigh," she 
 began, without changing her place or attitude; 
 " it is a very little thing I ask. If I were refus- 
 ing to give anything up that you call yours, it 
 would be different; that would be a reason for 
 treating me as if you hated me. But I ask such 
 a little thing. If you will tell me where you are 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 105 
 
 going on the wedding-day, I will take care that 
 the diamonds shall be delivered to her with- 
 out scandal. Without scandal," she repeated 
 entreatingly. 
 
 " Such preposterous whims make a woman 
 odious," said Grandcourt, not giving way in 
 look or movement. " What is the use of talking 
 to mad people? " 
 
 " Yes, I am foolish, — loneliness has made 
 me foolish — indulge me." Sobs rose as she 
 spoke. "If you will indulge me in this one folly, 
 I will be very meek, — I will never trouble you." 
 She burst into hysterical crying, and said again 
 almost with a scream, — "I will be very meek 
 after that." 
 
 There was a strange mixture of acting and 
 reality in this passion. She kept hold of her pur- 
 pose as a child might tighten its hand over a 
 small stolen thing, crying and denying all the 
 while. Even Grandcourt was wrought upon by 
 surprise: this capricious wish, this childish vio- 
 lence, was as unlike Lydia's bearing as it was 
 incongruous with her person. Both had always 
 had a stamp of dignity on them. Yet she seemed 
 more manageable in this state than in her former 
 attitude of defiance. He came close up to her 
 again, and said, in his low imperious tone, " Be 
 quiet, and hear what I tell you. I will never for- 
 give you if you present yourself again and make 
 a scene." 
 
 She pressed her handkerchief against her face, 
 and when she could speak firmly said, in the 
 muffled voice that follows sobbing, " I will not, 
 — if you will let me have my way, — I promise 
 you not to thrust myself forward again. I have 
 
106 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 never broken my word to you — how many have 
 you broken to me? When you gave me the 
 diamonds to wear, you were not thinking of 
 having another wife. And I now give them up, 
 — I don't reproach you, — I only ask you to let 
 me give them up in my own way. Have I not 
 borne it well? Everything is to be taken away 
 from me, and when I ask for a straw, a chip, — 
 you deny it me." She had spoken rapidly, but 
 after a little pause she said more slowly, her voice 
 freed from its muffled tone: " I will not bear to 
 have it denied me." 
 
 Grandcourt had a baffling sense that he had to 
 deal with something like madness; he could 
 only govern by giving way. The servant came 
 to say the fly was ready. When the door was 
 shut again, Grandcourt said sullenly, " We are 
 going to Ry elands, then." 
 
 " They shall be delivered to her there," said 
 Lydia, with decision. 
 
 " Very well, I am going." He felt no inclina- 
 tion even to take her hand; she had annoyed 
 him too sorely. But now that she had gained her 
 point, she was prepared to humble herself that 
 she might propitiate him. 
 
 " Forgive me; I will never vex you again," 
 she said, with beseeching looks. Her inward 
 voice said distinctly, — "It is only I who have 
 to forgive." Yet she was obliged to ask for- 
 giveness. 
 
 " You had better keep that promise. You 
 have made me feel uncommonly ill with your 
 folly," said Grandcourt, apparently choosing 
 this statement as the strongest possible use of 
 language. 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 107 
 
 " Poor thing! " said Lydia, with a faint smile: 
 was he aware of the minor fact that he had made 
 her feel ill this morning? 
 
 But with the quick transition natural to her, 
 she was now ready to coax him if he would let 
 her, that they might part in some degree rec- 
 onciled. She ventured to lay her hand on his 
 shoulder, and he did not move away from her: 
 she had so far succeeded in alarming him, that he 
 was not sorry for these proofs of returned 
 subjection. 
 
 " Light a cigar," she said soothingly, taking 
 the case from his breast-pocket and opening it. 
 
 Amidst such caressing signs of mutual fear 
 they parted. The effect that clung and gnawed 
 within Grandcourt was a sense of imperfect 
 mastery. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 V A wild dedication ot" yourselves 
 
 To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 ON the day when Gwendolen Harleth was 
 married and became Mrs. Grandcourt, 
 the morning was clear and bright, and 
 while the sun was low a slight frost crisped the 
 leaves. The bridal party was worth seeing, and 
 half Pennicote tm-ned out to see it, lining the 
 pathway up to the church. An old friend of the 
 Rector's performed the marriage ceremony, the 
 Rector himself acting as father, to the great ad- 
 vantage of the procession. Only two faces, it 
 was remarked, showed signs of sadness, — Mrs. 
 Davilow's and Anna's. The mother's delicate 
 eyelids were pink, as if she had been crying half 
 the night ; and no one was surprised that, splen- 
 did as the match was, she should feel the parting 
 from a daughter who was the flower of her chil- 
 dren and of her own life. It was less under- 
 stood why Anna should be troubled when she was 
 being so well set off by the bridesmaid's dress. 
 Every one else seemed to reflect the brilliancy of 
 the occasion, — the bride most of all. Of her it 
 was agreed that as to figure and carriage she was 
 worthy to be a " lady o' title; " as to face, per- 
 haps it might be thought that a title required 
 something more rosy; but the bridegroom him- 
 self not being fresh-coloured — being indeed, as 
 the miller's wife observed, very much of her own 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 109 
 
 husband's complexion — the match was the more 
 complete. Anyhow he must be very fond of her ; 
 and it was to be hoped that he would never cast 
 it up to her that she had been going out to service 
 as a governess, and her mother to live at Sawyer's 
 Cottage, — vicissitudes which had been much 
 spoken of in the village. The miller's daughter 
 of fourteen could not believe that high gentry 
 behaved badly to their wives, but her mother in- 
 structed her, — " Oh, child, men 's men: gentle 
 or simple, they 're much of a muchness. I 've 
 heard my mother say Squire Pelton used to take 
 his dogs and a long whip into his wife's room, 
 and flog 'em there to frighten her; and my 
 mother was lady's-maid there at the very time." 
 
 " That 's unlucky talk for a wedding, Mrs. 
 Girdle," said the tailor. " A quarrel may end 
 wi' the whip, but it begins wi' the tongue, and 
 it 's the women have got the most o' that." 
 
 " The Lord gave it 'em to use, I suppose,", said 
 Mrs. Girdle; " He never meant you to have it 
 all your own way." 
 
 " By what I can make out from the gentle- 
 man as attends to the grooming at Offendene," 
 said the tailor, " this Mr. Grandcourt has won- 
 derful little tongue. Everything must be done 
 dummy-like without his ordering." 
 
 " Then he 's the more whip, I doubt," said 
 Mrs. Girdle. " She 's got tongue enough, I war- 
 rant her. See, there they come out together! " 
 
 " What wonderful long corners she 's got to 
 her eyes! " said the tailor. " She makes you feel 
 comical when she looks at you." 
 
 Gwendolen, in fact, never showed more elas- 
 ticity in her bearing, more lustre in her long 
 
110 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 brown glance: she had the brilliancy of strong 
 excitement, which will sometimes come even from 
 pain. It was not pain, however, that she was 
 feeling : she had wrought herself up to much the 
 same condition as that in which she stood at the 
 gambling-table when Deronda was looking at 
 her, and she began to lose. There was enjoy- 
 ment in it: whatever uneasiness a growing 
 conscience had created, was disregarded as an 
 ailment might have been, amidst the gratification 
 of that ambitious vanity and desire for luxury 
 within her which it would take a great deal of 
 slow poisoning to kill. This morning she could 
 not have said truly that she repented her accept- 
 ance of Grandcourt, or that any fears in hazy 
 perspective could hinder the glowing effects of 
 the immediate scene in which she was the central 
 object. That she was doing something wrong 
 
 — that a punishment might be hanging over her 
 
 — that the woman to whom she had given a 
 promise and broken it, was thinking of her in bit- 
 terness and misery with a just reproach — that 
 Deronda with his way of looking into things very 
 likely despised her for marrying Grandcourt, 
 as he had despised her for gambling — above all, 
 that the cord which united her with this lover and 
 which she had hitherto held by the hand, was now 
 being flung over her neck, — all this yeasty 
 mingling of dimly understood facts with vague 
 but deep impressions, and with images half real, 
 half fantastic, had been disturbing her during 
 the weeks of her engagement. Was that agitat- 
 ing experience nullified this morning? No: it 
 was surmounted and thrust down with a sort of 
 exulting defiance as she felt herself standing at 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 111 
 
 the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring 
 everything to win much — or if to lose, still with 
 eclat and a sense of importance. But this morn- 
 ing a losing destiny for herself did not press 
 upon her as a fear: she thought that she was 
 entering on a fuller power of managing circum- 
 stance, — with all the official strength of mar- 
 riage, which some women made so poor a use of. 
 That intoxication of youthful egoism out of 
 which she had been shaken by trouble, humilia- 
 tion, and a new sense of culpability, had re- 
 turned upon her under the newly fed strength of 
 the old fumes. She did not in the least present 
 the ideal of the tearful, tremulous bride. Poor 
 Gwendolen, whom some had judged much too 
 forward and instructed in the world's ways! — 
 with her erect head and elastic footstep she was 
 walking amid illusions; and yet, too, there was 
 an under-consciousness in her that she was a 
 little intoxicated. 
 
 " Thank God you bear it so well, my darling! " 
 said Mrs. Davilow, when she had helped Gwen- 
 dolen to doff her bridal white and put on her 
 travelling dress. All the trembling had been 
 done by the poor mother, and her agitation 
 urged Gwendolen doubly to take the morning 
 as if it were a triumph. 
 
 " Why, you might have said that, if I had 
 been going to Mrs. Mompert's, you dear, sad, in- 
 corrigible mamma! " said Gwendolen, just put- 
 ting her hands to her mother's cheeks with 
 laughing tenderness, then retreating a little and 
 spreading out her arms as if to exhibit herself. 
 "Here am I, — Mrs. Grandcourt! what else 
 would you have me but what I am sure to be? 
 
112 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 You know you were ready to die with vexation 
 when you thought that I would not be Mrs. 
 Grandcourt." 
 
 " Hush, hush, my child, for heaven's sake! " 
 said Mrs. Davilow, almost in a whisper. " How 
 can I help feeling it when I am parting from 
 you ! But I can bear anything gladly if you are 
 happy." 
 
 " Not gladly, mamma, no! " said Gwendolen, 
 shaking her head with a bright smile. " Will- 
 ingly would you bear it, but always sorrowfully. 
 Sorrowing is your sauce; you can take noth- 
 ing without it." Then, clasping her mother's 
 shoulders and raining kisses first on one cheek 
 and. then on the other between her words, she said 
 gayly, " And you shall sorrow over my having 
 everything at my beck — and enjoying every- 
 thing gloriously — splendid houses — and horses 
 — and diamonds, I shall have diamonds — and 
 going to court — and being Lady Certainly — 
 and Lady Perhaps — and grand here — and 
 tantivy there — and always loving you better 
 than anybody else in the world." 
 
 " My sweet child! — But I shall not be jeal- 
 ous if you love your husband better ; and he will 
 expect to be first." 
 
 Gwendolen thrust out her lips and chin with a 
 pretty grimace, saying, " Rather a ridiculous ex- 
 pectation. However, I don't mean to treat him 
 ill, unless he deserves it." 
 
 Then the two fell into a clinging embrace, and 
 Gwendolen could not hinder a rising sob when 
 she said, " I wish you were going with me, 
 mamma." 
 
 But the slight dew on her long eyelashes 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 113 
 
 only made her the more charming when she 
 gave her hand to Grandcourt to be led to the 
 carriage. 
 
 The Rector looked in on her to give a final 
 "Good-by; God bless you; we shall see you 
 again before long," and then returned to Mrs. 
 Davilow saying half cheerfully, half solemnly, — 
 
 " Let us be thankful, Fanny. She is in a posi- 
 tion well suited to her, and beyond what I should 
 have dared to hope for. And few women can 
 have been chosen more entirely for their own 
 sake. You should feel yourself a happy 
 mother." 
 
 There was a railway journey of some fifty 
 miles before the new husband and wife reached 
 the station near Ryelands. The sky had veiled 
 itself since the morning, and it was hardly more 
 than twilight when they entered the park-gates, 
 but still Gwendolen, looking out of the carriage- 
 window as they drove rapidly along, could see 
 the grand outlines and the nearer beauties of the 
 scene, — the long winding drive bordered with 
 evergreens backed by huge gray stems ; then the 
 opening of wide grassy spaces and undulations 
 studded with dark clumps; till at last came a 
 wide level where the white house could be seen, 
 with a hanging wood for a background and the 
 rising and sinking balustrade of a terrace in 
 front. 
 
 Gwendolen had been at her liveliest during 
 the journey, chatting incessantly, ignoring any 
 change in their mutual position since yesterday ; 
 and Grandcourt had been rather ecstatically 
 quiescent, while she turned his gentle seizure of 
 her hand into a grasp of his hand by both hers, 
 
 VOL. XIII — 8 
 
114 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 with an increased vivacity as of a kitten that will 
 not sit quiet to be petted. She was really getting 
 somewhat febrile in her excitement; and now in 
 this drive through the park her usual suscepti- 
 bility to changes of light and scenery helped to 
 make her heart palpitate newly. Was it at the 
 novelty simply, or the almost incredible fulfil- 
 ment about to be given to her girlish dreams of 
 being " somebody," — walking through her own 
 furlong of corridors and under her own ceilings 
 of an out-of -sight loftiness, where her own 
 painted Spring was shedding painted flowers, 
 and her own foreshortened Zephyrs were blow- 
 ing their trumpets over her; while her own ser- 
 vants, lackeys in clothing but men in bulk and 
 shape, were as naught in her presence, and 
 revered the propriety of her insolence to them, 
 — being, in short, the heroine of an admired 
 play without the pains of art? Was it alone the 
 closeness of this fulfilment which made her heart 
 flutter? or was it some dim forecast, the in- 
 sistent penetration of suppressed experience, 
 mixing the expectation of a triumph with the 
 dread of a crisis? Hers was one of the natures 
 in which exultation inevitably carries an infu- 
 sion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself. 
 
 She fell silent in spite of herself as they ap- 
 proached the gates, and when her husband said, 
 " Here we are at home! " and for the first time 
 kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it : it 
 was no more than the passive acceptance of a 
 greeting in the midst of an absorbing show. 
 Was not all her hurrying life of the last three 
 months a show, in which her consciousness was a 
 wondering spectator? After the half -wilful ex- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 115 
 
 citement of the day, a numbness had come over 
 her personahty. 
 
 But there was a brilhant hght in the hall, — 
 warmth, matting, carpets, full-length portraits, 
 Olympian statues, assiduous servants. Not 
 many servants, however: only a few from Dip- 
 low in addition to those constantly in charge of 
 the house ; and Gwendolen's new maid, who had 
 come with her, was taken under guidance by the 
 housekeeper. Gwendolen felt herself being led 
 by Grandcourt along a subtly scented corridor, 
 then into an anteroom where she saw an open 
 doorway sending out a rich glow of light and 
 colour. 
 
 " These are our dens," said Grandcourt. 
 " You will like to be quiet here till dinner. We 
 shall dine early." 
 
 He pressed her hand to his lips and moved 
 away, more in love than he had ever expected 
 to be. 
 
 Gwendolen, yielding up her hat and mantle, 
 threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, 
 and saw herself repeated in glass panels with all 
 her faint-green satin surroundings. The house- 
 keeper had passed into this boudoir from the ad- 
 joining dressing-room, and seemed disposed to 
 linger, Gwendolen thought, in order to look at 
 the new mistress of Ryelands, who however, 
 being impatient for solitude, said to her, " Will 
 you tell Hudson when she has put out my 
 dress to leave everything? I shall not want her 
 again, unless I ring." 
 
 The housekeeper, coming forward, said, 
 " Here is a packet, madam, which I was ordered 
 to give into nobody's hands but yours, when you 
 
116 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 were alone. The person who brought it said it 
 was a present particularly ordered by Mr. 
 Grandcourt ; but he was not to know of its arri- 
 val till he saw you wear it. Excuse me, madam ; 
 I felt it right to obey orders." 
 
 Gwendolen took the packet and let it lie on 
 her lap till she heard the doors close. It came 
 into her mind that the packet might contain the 
 diamonds which Grandcourt had spoken of as 
 being deposited somewhere and to be given to her 
 on her marriage. In this moment of confused 
 feeling and creeping luxurious languor she was 
 glad of this diversion, — glad of such an event 
 as having her own diamonds to try on. 
 
 Within all the sealed paper coverings was a 
 box, but within the box there was a jewel-case; 
 and now she felt no doubt that she had the dia- 
 monds. But on opening the case, in the same 
 instant that she saw their gleam she saw a letter 
 lying above them. She knew the handwriting 
 of the address. It was as if an adder had lain on 
 them. Her heart gave a leap which seemed to 
 have spent all her strength; and as she opened 
 the bit of thin paper, it shook with the trembling 
 of her hands. But it was legible as print, and 
 thrust its words upon her. 
 
 " These diamonds, which were once given with ardent 
 love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you. You have 
 broken your word to her, that you might possess what 
 was hers. Perhaps you think of being happy, as she 
 once was, and of having beautiful children such as hers, 
 who will thrust hers aside. God is too just for that. 
 The man you have married has a withered heart. His 
 best young love was mine; you could not take that 
 from me when you took the rest. It is dead ; but I am 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 117 
 
 the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried 
 as well as mine. You had your warning. You have 
 chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant 
 to marry me. He would have married me at last, if 
 you had not broken your word. You will have your 
 punishment. I desire it with all my soul. 
 
 " Will you give him this letter to set him against 
 me and ruin us more, — me and my children .^^ Shall you 
 like to stand before your husband with these diamonds 
 on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and 
 yours .^^ Will he think you have any right to complain 
 when he has made you miserable.^ You took him with 
 your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me 
 will be your curse." 
 
 It seemed at first as if Gwendolen's eyes were 
 spell-bound in reading the horrible words of the 
 letter over and over again as a doom of penance ; 
 but suddenly a new spasm of terror made her 
 lean forward and stretch out the paper towards 
 the fire, lest accusation and proof at once should 
 meet all eyes. It flew like a feather from her 
 trembling fingers, and was caught up in the 
 great draught of flame. In her movement the 
 casket fell on the floor, and the diamonds rolled 
 out. She took no notice, but fell back in her 
 chair again helpless. She could not see the re- 
 flections of herself then : they were like so many 
 women petrified white ; but coming near herself, 
 you might have seen the tremor in her lips and 
 hands. She sat so for a long while, knowing 
 little more than that she was feeling ill, and that 
 those written words kept repeating themselves 
 in her. 
 
 Truly here were poisoned gems, and the poison 
 had entered into this poor young creature. 
 
118 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 After that long while there was a tap at the 
 door, and Grandeourt entered, dressed for din- 
 ner. The sight of him brought a new nervous 
 shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again 
 with hysterical violence. He had expected to see 
 her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. 
 He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed, with 
 terror, the jewels scattered around her on the 
 floor. Was it a fit of madness? 
 
 In some form or other the Furies had crossed 
 his threshold. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 "In all ages it hath been a favourite text that a potent love hath the 
 nature of an isolated fatality, whereto the mind's opinions and wonted 
 resolves are altogether alien, as, for example, Daphnis his frenzy, 
 wherein it had little availed him to have been convinced of HeracHtus 
 his doctrine; or the philtre-bred passion of Tristan, who, though he 
 had been as deep as Duns Scotus, would have had his reasoning marred 
 by that cup too much ; or Romeo in his sudden taking for JuHet, wherein 
 any objections he might have held against Ptolemy had made httle dif- 
 ference to his discourse under the balcony. Yet all love is not such, 
 even though potent; nay, this passion hath as large scope as any for 
 allying itself with every operation of the soul : so that it shall acknowl- 
 edge an effect from the imagined light of unproven firmaments, and 
 have its scale set to the grander orbits of what hath been and shall be." 
 
 DERONDA, on his return to town, could 
 assure Sir Hugo of his having lodged 
 in Grandcourt's mind a distinct under- 
 standing that he could get fifty thousand pounds 
 by giving up a prospect which was probably dis- 
 tant, and not absolutely certain; but he had no 
 further sign of Grandcourt's disposition in the 
 matter than that he was evidently inclined to 
 keep up friendly communications. 
 
 " And what did you think of the future bride 
 on a nearer survey? " said Sir Hugo. 
 
 " I thought better of her than I did at Leu- 
 bronn. Roulette was not a good setting for her ; 
 it brought out something of the demon. At Dip- 
 low she seemed much more womanly and attract- 
 ive, — less hard and self-piossessed. I thought 
 her mouth and eyes had quite a different 
 expression." 
 
 " Don't flirt with her too much, Dan," said Sir 
 Hugo, meaning to be agreeably playful. " If 
 
120 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 you make Grandcourt savage when they come 
 to the Abbey at Christmas, it will interfere with 
 my affairs." 
 
 " I can stay in town, sir." 
 
 " No, no. Lady Mallinger and the children 
 can't do without you at Christmas. Only don't 
 make mischief, — unless you can get up a duel, 
 and manage to shoot Grandcourt, which might 
 be worth a little inconvenience." 
 
 " I don't think you ever saw me flirt," said 
 Deronda, not amused. 
 
 "Oh, haven't I, though?" said Sir Hugo, 
 provokingly. " You are always looking ten- 
 derly at the women, and talking to them in a 
 Jesuitical way. You are a dangerous young fel- 
 low, — a kind of Lovelace who will make the 
 Clarissas run after you instead of your running 
 after them." 
 
 What was the use of being exasperated at a 
 tasteless joke? — only the exasperation comes 
 before the reflection on utility. Few friendly 
 remarks are more annoying than the information 
 that we are always seeming to do what we never 
 mean to do. Sir Hugo's notion of flirting, it 
 was to be hoped, was rather peculiar; for his 
 own part, Deronda was sure that he had never 
 flirted. But he was glad that the baronet had no 
 knowledge about the repurchase of Gwendolen's 
 necklace to feed his taste for this kind of rallying. 
 
 He would be on his guard in future; for ex- 
 ample, in his behaviour at Mrs. Meyrick's, where 
 he was about to pay his first visit since his arrival 
 from Leubronn. For Mirah was certainly a 
 creature in whom it was diflicult not to show a 
 tender kind of interest both by looks and speech. 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 121 
 
 Mrs. Meyrick had not failed to send Deronda, 
 a report of Mirah's well-being in her family. 
 " We are getting fonder of her every day," she 
 had written. " At breakfast-time we all look 
 towards the door with expectation to see her 
 come in; and we watch her and listen to her as 
 if she were a native from a new country. I have 
 not heard a word from her lips that gives me a 
 doubt about her. She is quite contented and full 
 of gratitude. My daughters are learning from 
 her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for 
 she is anxious not to eat the bread of idleness, 
 but to work, like my girls. Mab says our life 
 has become like a fairy tale, and all she is afraid 
 of is that Mirah will turn into a nightingale 
 again and fly away from us. Her voice is just 
 perfect : not loud and strong, but searching and 
 melting, like the thoughts of what has been. 
 That is the way old people like me feel a beau- 
 tiful voice." 
 
 But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particu- 
 lars which would have required her to say that 
 Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to 
 the synagogue, found the Jewish faith less recon- 
 cilable with their wishes in her case than in that 
 of Scott's Rebecca. They kept silence out of 
 delicacy to Mirah, with whom her religion was 
 too tender a subject to be touched lightly; but 
 after a while Amy, who was much of a practical 
 reformer, could not restrain a question. 
 
 " Excuse me, Mirah, but does it seem quite 
 right to you that the women should sit behind 
 rails in a gallery apart? " 
 
 " Yes, I never thought of anything else," said 
 Mirah, with mild surprise. 
 
122 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " And you like better to see the men with their 
 hats on? " said Mab, cautiously proposing the 
 smallest item of difference. 
 
 " Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen 
 there, because it brings back to me the same feel- 
 ings, — the feelings I would not part with for 
 anything else in the world." 
 
 After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine 
 or of practice, would have seemed to these gen- 
 erous little people an inhospitable cruelty. 
 Mirah's religion was of one fibre with her 
 affections, and had never presented itself to her 
 as a set of propositions. 
 
 " She says herself she is a very bad Jewess, 
 and does not half know her people's religion," 
 said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. " Per- 
 haps it would gradually melt away from her, and 
 she would pass into Christianity like the rest of 
 the world, if she got to love us very much, and 
 never found her mother. It is so strange to be 
 of the Jews' religion now." 
 
 " Oh, oh, oh! " cried Mab. " I wish I were- 
 not such a hideous Christian. How can an 
 ugly Christian who is always dropping her 
 work convert a beautiful Jewess who has not a 
 fault?" 
 
 " It may be wicked of me," said shrewd Kate, 
 " but I cannot help wishing that her mother may 
 not be found. There might be something 
 unpleasant." 
 
 " I don't think it, my dear," said Mrs. Mey- 
 rick. " I believe Mirah is cut out after the pat- 
 tern of her mother. And what a joy it would be 
 to her to have such a daughter brought back 
 again! But a mother's feelings are not worth 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 123 
 
 reckoning, I suppose" (she shot a mischievous 
 glance at her own daughters), "and a dead 
 mother is worth more than a living one? " 
 
 " Well, and so she may be, little mother," said 
 Kate; " but we would rather hold you cheaper, 
 and have you alive." 
 
 Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowl- 
 edge had been acquired by the irregular foraging 
 to which clever girls have usually been reduced, 
 but Deronda himself, with all his masculine in- 
 struction, had been roused by this apparition of 
 Mirah to the 'eonsciousness of knowing hardly 
 anything about modern Judaism or the inner 
 Jewish history. The Chosen People have been 
 commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake 
 of somebody else; and their thinking as some- 
 thing (no matter exactly what) that ought to 
 have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like 
 his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort 
 of eccentric fossilized form which an accom- 
 plished man might dispense with studying, and 
 leave to specialists. But Mirah, with her terri- 
 fied flight from one parent, and her yearning 
 after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto 
 neglected reality that Judaism was something 
 still throbbing in human lives, still making for 
 them the only conceivable vesture of the world; 
 and in the idling excursion on which he imme- 
 diately afterwards set out with Sir Hugo he 
 began to look for the outsides of synagogues, and 
 the titles of books about the Jews. This waken- 
 ing of a new interest — this passing from the 
 supposition that we hold the right opinions on a 
 subject we are careless about, to a sudden care 
 for it, and a sense that our opinions were igno- 
 
124 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ranee — is an effeetual remedy for ennui j which 
 unhappily cannot be secured on a physician's 
 prescription; but Deronda had carried it with 
 him, and endured his weeks of lounging all the 
 better. It was on this journey that he first en- 
 tered a Jewish synagogue — at Frankfort — 
 where his party rested on a Friday. In explor- 
 ing the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long be- 
 fore, he remembered well enough its picturesque 
 old houses; what his eyes chiefly dwelt on now 
 were the human types there; and his thought, 
 busily connecting them with the past phases of 
 their race, stirred that fibre of historic sympathy 
 which had helped to determine in him certain 
 traits worth mentioning for those who are inter- 
 ested in his future. True, when a young man 
 has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the 
 education of a gentleman, and a present in- 
 come, it is not customary to feel a prying curi- 
 osity about his way of thinking or his peculiar 
 tastes. He may very well be settled in life as an 
 agreeable clever young fellow without passing a 
 special examination on those heads. Later, when 
 he is getting rather slovenly and portly, his 
 peculiarities are more distinctly discerned, and 
 it is taken as a mercy if they are not highly ob- 
 jectionable. But any one wishing to under- 
 stand the effect of after events on Deronda 
 should know a little more of what he was at 
 five-and-twenty than was evident in ordinary 
 intercourse. 
 
 It happened that the very vividness of his im- 
 pressions had often made him the more enig- 
 matic to his friends, and had contributed to an 
 apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 125 
 
 early-wakened sensibility and reflectiveness had 
 developed into a many-sided sympathy, which 
 threatened to hinder any persistent course of 
 action: as soon as he took up any antagonism, 
 though only in thought, he seemed to himself 
 like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story, 
 — with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his 
 flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagina- 
 tion had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing 
 things as they probably appeared to others, that 
 a strong partisanship, unless it were against an 
 immediate oppression, had become an insincerity 
 for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had 
 ended by falling into one current with that re- 
 flective analysis which tends to neutralize sym- 
 pathy. Few men were able to keep themselves 
 clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices 
 mildly, being used to think of them less in the 
 abstract than as a part of mixed human natures 
 having an individual history, which it was the 
 bent of his mind to trace with understanding and 
 pity. With the same innate balance he was fer- 
 vidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, 
 and yet, through his affections and imagination, 
 intensely conservative; voracious of specula- 
 tions on government and religion, yet loath to 
 part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, 
 were quick with memories and sentiments that 
 no argument could lay dead. We fall on the 
 leaning side ; and Deronda suspected himself of 
 loving too well the losing causes of the world. 
 Martyrdom changes sides, and he was in danger 
 of changing with it, having a strong repug- 
 nance to taking up that clew of success which the 
 order of the world often forces upon us and 
 
126 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 makes it treason against the common weal to 
 reject. And yet his fear of falling into an un- 
 reasoning narrow hatred made a check for him: 
 he apologized for the heirs of privilege; he 
 shrank with dislike from the loser's bitterness 
 and the denunciatory tone of the unaccepted in- 
 novator. A too reflective and diffusive sympa- 
 thy was in danger of paralyzing in him that in- 
 dignation against wrong and that selectness of 
 fellowship which are the conditions of mora] 
 force; and in the last few years of confirmed 
 manhood he had become so keenly aware of this 
 that what he most longed for was either some 
 external event, or some inward light, that would 
 urge him into a definite line of action, and com- 
 press his wandering energy. He was ceasing to 
 care for knowledge, — he had no ambition for 
 practice, — unless they could both be gathered 
 up into one current with his emotions; and he 
 dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost 
 souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns 
 the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to 
 queries, and knows, not everything, but every- 
 thing else about everything, — as if one should 
 be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of 
 violets except the scent itself for which one had 
 no nostril. But how and whence was the needed 
 event to come? — the influence that would jus- 
 tify partiality, and make him what he longed to 
 be yet was unable to make himself, — an organic 
 part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a 
 yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a 
 vague social passion, but without fixed local 
 habitation to render fellowship real? To make a 
 little difference for the better was what he was 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 127 
 
 not contented to live without; but how make it? 
 It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it. 
 He found some of the fault in his birth and the 
 way he had been brought up, which had laid no 
 special demands on him and given him no fixed 
 relationship except one of a doubtful kind; but 
 he did not attempt to hide from himself that he 
 had fallen into a meditative numbness, and was 
 gliding farther and farther from that life of 
 practically energetic sentiment which he would 
 have proclaimed (if he had been inclined to pro- 
 claim anything) to be the best of all life, and 
 for himself the only life worth living. He 
 wanted some way of keeping emotion and its 
 progeny of sentiments, — which make the 
 savours of life, — substantial and strong in the 
 face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify 
 all differences. To pound the objects of senti- 
 ment into smaU dust, yet keep sentiment alive 
 and active, was something like the famous recipe 
 for making cannon, — to first take a round hole 
 and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do, 
 keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how 
 distinguish what our will may wisely save in 
 its completeness, from the heaping of cat- 
 mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined 
 putrefactions? 
 
 Something like this was the common under- 
 current in Deronda's mind, while he was reading 
 law, or imperfectly attending to polite conver- 
 sation. Meanwhile he had not set about one 
 function in particular with zeal and steadiness. 
 Not an admirable experience, to be proposed 
 as an ideal; but a form of struggle before 
 break of day which some young men since the 
 
128 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 patriarch have had to pass through, with more 
 or less of bruising if not laming. 
 
 I have said that under his calm exterior he 
 had a fervour which made him easily feel 
 the presence of poetry in every-day events ; and 
 the forms of the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense 
 of union with what is remote, set him musing 
 on two elements of our historic life which that 
 sense raises into the same region of poetry, — 
 the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions, 
 and their obscure lingering decay ; the dust and 
 withered remnants with which they are apt to 
 be covered, only enhancing for the awakened 
 perception the impressiveness either of a sub- 
 limely penetrating life, as in the twin green 
 leaves that will become the sheltering tree, or 
 of a pathetic inheritance in which all the 
 grandeur and the glory have become a sorrow- 
 ing memory. 
 
 This imaginative stirring, as he turned out of 
 the Juden-gasse, and continued to saunter in the 
 warm evening air, meaning to find his way to 
 the synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect 
 of certain ugly little incidents on his way. 
 Turning into an old book- shop to ask the exact 
 time of service at the synagogue, he was affec- 
 tionately directed by a precocious Jewish youth, 
 who entered cordially into his wanting not the 
 fine new building of the reformed but the old 
 Rabbinical school of the orthodox; and then 
 cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with more 
 amenity, in his charge for a book quite out of 
 request as one " nicht so leicht zu bekommen." 
 Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf and 
 grisly tradesman was casting a flinty look at 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 129 
 
 certain cards, apparently combining advantages 
 of business with religion, and shoutingly pro- 
 posed to him in Jew-dialect by a dingy man in 
 a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag in 
 hand, and a broad low hat surmounting his 
 chosen nose, — who had no sooner disappeared 
 than another dingy man of the same pattern 
 issued from the backward glooms of the shop 
 and also shouted in the same dialect. In fact, 
 - Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites 
 not altogether without guile, and just distin- 
 guishable from queer-looking Christians of the 
 same mixed morale. In his anxiety about 
 Mirah's relatives, he had lately been thinking 
 of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. 
 But a little comparison will often diminish our 
 surprise and disgust at the aberrations of Jews 
 and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a 
 consistent or lovely pattern of their creed; and 
 this evening Deronda, becoming more conscious 
 that he was falling into unfairness and ridicu- 
 lous exaggeration, began to use that corrective 
 comparison: he paid his thaler too much, with- 
 out prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew 
 destiny, or his wish to find the Rabbinische 
 Schule, which he arrived at by sunset, and en- 
 tered with a good congregation of men. 
 
 He happened to take his seat in a line with 
 an elderly man from whom he was distant 
 enough to glance at him more than once as 
 rather a noticeable figure, — his ample w^hite 
 beard and felt hat framing a profile of that 
 fine contour which may as easily be Italian as 
 Hebrew. He returned Deronda's notice till at 
 last their eyes met, — an undesirable chance 
 
 VOL. xm — 9 
 
130 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 with unknown persons, and a reason to Deronda 
 for not looking again; but he immediately found 
 an open prayer-book pushed towards him and 
 had to bow his thanks. However, the congre- 
 gation had mustered, the reader had mounted 
 to the almemor, or platform, and the service 
 began. Deronda, having looked enough at the 
 German translation of the Hebrew in the book 
 before him to know that he was chiefly hearing 
 Psalms and Old Testament passages or phrases, 
 gave himself up to that strongest effect of 
 chanted liturgies which is independent of de- 
 tailed verbal meaning, — like the effect of an 
 Allegri's Miserere or a Palestrina's Magnificat. 
 The most powerful movement of feeling with 
 a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing 
 special, but is a yearning to escape from the 
 limitations of our own weakness and an invoca- 
 tion of all Good to enter and abide with us; or 
 else a self -oblivious lifting up of gladness, a 
 Gloria in eoccelsis that such Good exists; both 
 the yearning and the exultation gathering their 
 utmost force from the sense of communion in 
 a form which has expressed them both, for 
 long generations of struggling fellow-men. The 
 Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions 
 of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and 
 blessing; but this evening all were one for De- 
 ronda: the chant of the Chazan's or Reader's 
 grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from 
 monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet 
 boys' voices from the little choir, the devotional 
 swaying of men's bodies backwards and for- 
 wards, the very commonness of the building and 
 shabbiness of the scene where a national faith, 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 131 ^ 
 
 which had penetrated the thinking of half the 
 world, and moulded the splendid forms of that 
 world's religion, was finding a remote, obscure 
 echo, — all were blent for him as one expression 
 of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious. 
 He wondered at the strength of his own feeling; 
 it seemed beyond the occasion, — what one might 
 imagine to be a divine influx in the darkness, 
 before there was any vision to interpret. The 
 whole scene was a coherent strain, its burthen 
 a passionate regret, which, if he had known the 
 liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might 
 have clad in its antithetic burthen: " Happy the 
 eye which saw all these things; but verily to 
 hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the 
 eye that saw our temple and the joy of our 
 congregation; but verily to hear only of them 
 afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw the 
 fingers when tuning every kind of song; but 
 verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul." 
 
 But with the cessation of the devotional sounds 
 and the movement of many indifferent faces and 
 vulgar figures before him, there darted into his 
 mind the frigid idea that he had probably been 
 alone in his feeling, and perhaps the only per- 
 son in the congregation for whom the service 
 was more than a dull routine. There was just 
 time for this chilling thought before he had 
 bowed to his civil neighbour and was moving 
 away with the rest, — when he felt a hand on 
 his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasant 
 sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt 
 to bring, he saw close to him the white-bearded 
 face of that neighbour, who said to him in Ger- 
 man, " Excuse me, young gentleman — allow 
 
132 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 me — what is your parentage — your mother's 
 family — her maiden name? " 
 
 Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling : he 
 was inclined to shake off hastily the touch on 
 his arm; but he managed to slip it away and 
 said coldly, " I am an Englishman." 
 
 The questioner looked at him dubiously still 
 for an instant, then just lifted his hat and turned 
 away, — whether under a sense of having made a 
 mistake or of having been repulsed, Deronda was 
 uncertain. In his walk back to the hotel he tried 
 to still any uneasiness on the subject by re- 
 flecting that he could not have acted differ- 
 ently. How could he say that he did not know 
 the name of his mother's family to that total 
 stranger? — who indeed had taken an unwar- 
 rantable liberty in the abruptness of his ques- 
 tion, dictated probably by some fancy of likeness 
 such as often occurs without real significance. 
 The incident, he said to himself, was trivial; 
 but whatever import it might have, his inward 
 shrinking on the occasion was too strong for 
 him to be sorry that he had cut it short. It was 
 a reason, however, for his not mentioning the 
 synagogue to the Mallingers, — in addition to 
 his usual inclination to reticence on anything 
 that the baronet would have been likely to call 
 Quixotic enthusiasm. Hardly any man could 
 be more good-natured than Sir Hugo; indeed 
 in his kindliness, especially to women, he did 
 actions which others would have called roman- 
 tic; but he never took a romantic view of them, 
 and in general smiled at the introduction of 
 motives on a grand scale, or of reasons that 
 lay very far off. This was the point of strong- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 133 
 
 est difference between him and Deronda, who 
 rarely ate his breakfast without some silent 
 discursive flight after grounds for filling up 
 his day according to the practice of his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 This halt at Frankfort was taken on their way 
 home, and its impressions were kept the more 
 actively vibrating in him by the duty of caring 
 for Mirah's welfare. That question about his 
 parentage, which if he had not both inwardly 
 and outwardly shaken it off as trivial, w^ould 
 have seemed a threat rather than a promise of 
 revelation, had reinforced his anxiety as to the 
 effect of finding Mirah's relatives and his resolve 
 to proceed with caution. If he made any un- 
 pleasant discovery, was he bound to a disclosure 
 that might cast a new net of trouble around 
 her? 
 
 He had written to Mrs. Meyrick to announce 
 his visit at four o'clock, and he found Mirah 
 seated at work with only Mrs. Me5rrick and 
 Mab, the open piano, and all the glorious com- 
 pany of engravings. The dainty neatness of 
 her hair and dress, the glow of tranquil happi- 
 ness in a face where a painter need have changed 
 nothing if he had wanted to put it in front of 
 the host singing " peace on earth and good- will 
 to men," made a contrast to his first vision of her 
 that was delightful to Deronda's eyes. Mirah 
 herself was thinking of it, and immediately on 
 their greeting said, — 
 
 "See how different I am from that miserable 
 creature by the river! — all because you found 
 me and brought me to the very best." 
 
 " It was my good chance to find you," said 
 
134 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Deronda. " Any other man would have been 
 glad to do what I did." 
 
 " That is not the right way of thinking about 
 it," said Mirah, shaking her head with decisive 
 gravity. " I think of what really was. It was 
 you, and not another, who found me, and were 
 good to me." 
 
 " I agree with Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick. ' 
 " Saint Anybody is a bad saint to pray to." 
 
 " Besides, Anybody could not have brought 
 me to you," said Mirah, smiling at Mrs. Mey- 
 rick. " And I would rather be with you than 
 with any one else in the world except my 
 mother. I wonder if ever a poor little bird, 
 that was lost and could not fly, was taken and 
 put into a warm nest where there was a mother 
 and sisters who took to it so that everything 
 came naturally, as if it had been always there. 
 I hardly thought before that the world could 
 ever be as happy and without fear as it is to 
 me now." She looked meditative a moment, and 
 then said, " Sometimes I am a little afraid." 
 
 " What is it you are afraid of ? " said De- 
 ronda, with anxiety. 
 
 " That when I am turning at the corner of 
 a street I may meet my father. It seems 
 dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting 
 him. That is my only sorrow," said Mirah, 
 plaintively. 
 
 "It is surely not very probable," said De- 
 ronda, wishing that it were less so; then, not 
 to let the opportunity escape, — " Would it be 
 a great grief to you now, if you were never to 
 meet your mother? " 
 
 She did not answer immediately, but medi- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 135 
 
 tated again, with her eyes fixed on the opposite 
 wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and 
 said firmly, as if she had arrived at the exact 
 truth, " I want her to know that I have always 
 loved her, and if she is ahve I want to comfort 
 her. She may be dead. If she were, I should 
 long to know where she was buried; and to 
 know whether my brother lives, so that we can 
 remember her together. But I will try not to 
 grieve. I have thought much for so many years 
 of her being dead. And I shall have her with 
 me in my mind, as I have always had. We can 
 never be really parted. I think I have never 
 sinned against her. I have always tried not to 
 do what would hurt her. Only she might be 
 sorry that I was not a good Jewess." 
 
 " In what way are you not a good Jewess? " 
 said Deronda. 
 
 " I am ignorant, and we never observed the 
 laws, but lived among Christians just as they 
 did. But I have heard my father laugh at the 
 strictness of the Jews about their food and all 
 customs, and their not liking Christians. I think 
 my mother was strict ; but she could never want 
 me not to like those who are better to me 
 than any of my own people I have ever known. 
 I think I could obey in other things that she 
 wished, but not in that. It is so much easier to 
 me to share in love than in hatred. I remem- 
 ber a play I read in German — since I have 
 been here, it has come into my mind, — where 
 the heroine says something like that." 
 
 " Antigone," said Deronda. 
 Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that 
 my mother would wish me not to love my best 
 
136 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 friends. She would be grateful to them." Here 
 Mirah had turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a 
 sudden lighting up of her whole countenance 
 she said, " Oh, if we ever do meet and know each 
 other as we are now, so that I could tell what 
 would comfort her, — I should be so full of 
 blessedness, my soul would know no want but 
 to love her! " 
 
 " God bless you, child! " said Mrs. Meyrick, 
 the words escaping involuntarily from her 
 motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of feel- 
 ing she looked at Deronda and said, " It is curi- 
 ous that Mirah, who remembers her mother so 
 well it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her 
 brother the least bit, — except the feeling of 
 having been carried by him when she was tired, 
 and of his being near her when she was in her 
 mother's lap. It must be that he was rarely at 
 home. He was already grown up. It is a pity 
 her brother should be quite a stranger to her." 
 
 " He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good," said 
 Mirah, eagerly. " He loved my mother, — he 
 would take care of her. I remember more of 
 him than that. I remember my mother's voice 
 once calling, ' Ezra! ' and then his answering 
 from the distance, 'Mother!'" — Mirah had 
 changed her voice a little in each of these words, 
 and had given them a loving intonation, — and 
 then he came close to us. I feel sure he is good. 
 I have always taken comfort from that." 
 
 It was impossible to answer this either with 
 agreement or doubt. Mrs. Meyrick and De- 
 ronda exchanged a quick glance: about this 
 brother she felt as painfully dubious as he did. 
 But Mirah went on, absorbed in her memories, — 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 137 
 
 "Is it not wonderful how I remember the 
 voices better than anything else? I think they 
 must go deeper into us than other things. I have 
 often fancied heaven might be made of voices." 
 
 " Like your singing — yes," said Mab, who 
 had hitherto kept a modest silence, and now 
 spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the pres- 
 ence of Prince Camaralzaman, — " Ma, do ask 
 Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard 
 her." 
 
 " Would it be disagreeable to you to sing 
 now? " said Deronda, with a more deferential 
 gentleness than he had ever been conscious of 
 before. 
 
 " Oh, I shall like it," said Mirah. " My voice 
 has come back a little with rest." 
 
 Perhaps her ease of manner was due to some- 
 thing more than the simplicity of her nature. 
 The circumstances of her life had made her think 
 of everything she did as work demanded from 
 her, in which affectation had nothing to do ; and 
 she had begun her work before self -conscious- 
 ness was born. 
 
 She immediately rose and went to the piano, 
 — a somewhat worn instrument that seemed to 
 get the better of its infirmities under the firm 
 touch of her small fingers as she preluded. 
 Deronda placed himself where he could see her 
 while she sang; and she took everything as 
 quietly as if she had been a child going to 
 breakfast. 
 
 Imagine her — it is always good to imagine 
 a human creature in whom bodily loveliness 
 seems as properly one with the entire being as 
 the bodily loveliness of those wondrous trans- 
 
138 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 parent orbs of life that we find in the sea — im- 
 agine her with her dark hair brushed from her 
 temples, but yet showing certain tiny rings there 
 which had cunningly found their own way back, 
 the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape 
 of the little neck in curly fibres, such as renew 
 themselves at their own will after being bathed 
 into straightness like that of water-grasses. 
 Then see the perfect cameo her profile makes, 
 cut in a duskish shell where by some happy for- 
 tune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the 
 eye and eyebrow; the delicate nostrils defined 
 enough to be ready for sensitive movements, the 
 finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck 
 entering into the expression of a refinement 
 which was not feebleness. 
 
 She sang Beethoven's " Per pieta non dirmi 
 addio," with a subdued but searching pathos 
 which had that essential of perfect singing, the 
 making one oblivious of art or manner, and only 
 possessing one with the song. It was the sort 
 of voice that gives the impression of being meant 
 like a bird's wooing for an audience near and 
 beloved. Deronda began by looking at her, but 
 felt himself presently covering his eyes with his 
 hand, wanting to seclude the melody in dark- 
 ness; then he refrained from what might seem 
 oddity, and was ready to meet the look of mute 
 appeal which she turned towards him at the 
 end. 
 
 " I think I never enjoyed a song more than 
 that," he said gratefully. 
 
 " You like my singing? I am so glad," she 
 said, with a smile of delight. " It has been a 
 great pain to me, because it failed in what it was 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 139 
 
 wanted for. But now we think I can use it to 
 get my bread. I have really been taught well. 
 And now I have two pupils, that Miss Meyriek 
 found for me. They pay me nearly twO crowns 
 for their two lessons." 
 
 " I think I know some ladies who would find 
 you many pupils after Christmas," said De- 
 ronda. " You would not mind singing before 
 any one who wished to hear you? " 
 
 " Oh, no, I want to do something to get money. 
 I could teach reading and speaking, Mrs. Mey- 
 riek thinks. But if no one would learn of me, 
 that is difficult." Mir ah smiled with a touch of 
 merriment he had not seen in her before. " I 
 dare say I should find her poor, — I mean my 
 mother. I should want to get money for her. 
 And I cannot always live on charity; though " 
 — here she turned so as to take all three of her 
 companions in one glance — ''it is the sweetest 
 charity in all the world." 
 
 " I should think you can get rich," said De- 
 ronda, smiling. " Great ladies will perhaps like 
 you to teach their daughters. We shall see. 
 But now do sing again to us." 
 
 She went on willingly, singing with ready 
 memory various things by Gordigiani and Schu- 
 bert; then, when she had left the piano, Mab 
 said entreatingly, " Oh, Mirah, if you would 
 not mind singing the little hymn." 
 
 " It is too childish," said Mirah. " It is like 
 lisping." 
 
 " What is the hymn? " said Deronda. 
 
 "It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her 
 mother singing over her when she lay in her cot," 
 ^aid Mrs. Meyriek. 
 
140 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " I should like very much to hear it," said De- 
 ronda, " if you think I am worthy to hear what 
 is so sacred." 
 
 " I will sing it if you like," said jNIirah, " but 
 I don't sing real words — only here and there 
 a syllable like hers — the rest is lisping. Do you 
 know Hebrew? because if you do, my singing 
 will seem childish nonsense." 
 
 Deronda shook his head. " It will be quite 
 good Hebrew to me." 
 
 Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her 
 easiest attitude, and then lifted up her head at 
 an angle which seemed to be directed to some 
 invisible face bent over her, while she sang a 
 little hymn of quaint melancholy intervals, with 
 syllables that really seemed childish lisping to 
 her audience; but the voice in which she gave 
 it forth had gathered even a sweeter, more 
 cooing tenderness than was heard in her other 
 songs. 
 
 " If I were ever to know the real words, I 
 should still go on in my old way with them," 
 said Mirah, when she had repeated the hymn 
 several times. 
 
 "Why not?" said Deronda. "The lisped 
 syllables are very full of meaning." 
 
 " Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Meyrick. " A 
 mother hears something like a lisp in her chil- 
 dren's talk to the very last. Their words are 
 not just what everybody else says, though they 
 may be spelt the same. If I were to live till my 
 Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. 
 A mother's love, I often say, is like a tree that 
 has got aU the wood in it, from the very first it 
 made." 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 141 
 
 " Is not that the way with friendship too? " 
 said Deronda, smiMng. "We must not let 
 mothers be too arrogant." 
 
 The bright Httle woman shook her head over 
 her darning. 
 
 " It is easier to find an old mother than an old 
 friend. Friendships begin with liking or grati- 
 tude, — roots that can be pulled up. Mother's 
 love begins deeper down." 
 
 " Like what you were saying about, the influ- 
 ence of voices," said Deronda, looking at Mirah. 
 " I don't think your hymn would have had more 
 expression for me if I had known the words. 
 I went to the synagogue at Frankfort before 
 I came home, and the service impressed me just 
 as much as if I had followed the words, — per- 
 haps more." 
 
 " Oh, was it great to you? Did it go to your 
 heart? " said Mirah, eagerly. " I thought none 
 but our people would feel that. I thought it 
 was all shut away like a river in a deep valley, 
 where only heaven saw — I mean — " she hesi- 
 tated, feeling that she could not disentangle her 
 thought from its imagery. 
 
 " I understand," said Deronda. " But there 
 is not really such a separation, — deeper down, 
 as Mrs. Meyrick says. Our religion is chiefly a 
 Hebrew religion ; and since Jews are men, their 
 religious feelings must have much in common 
 with those of other men, — just as their poetry, 
 though in one sense peculiar, has a great deal 
 in common with the poetry of other nations. 
 Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel 
 the forms of his people's religion more than one 
 of another race, — and yet " — here Deronda 
 
142 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hesitated in his turn — " that is perhaps not 
 always so." 
 
 " Ah, no," said Mirah, sadly. " I have seen 
 that. I have seen them mock. Is it not like 
 mocking your parents? — like rejoicing in your 
 parents' shame? " 
 
 Some minds naturally rebel against what- 
 ever they were brought up in, and like the oppo- 
 site; they see the faults in what is nearest to 
 them," said Deronda, apologetically. 
 
 " But you are not like that," said Mirah, look- 
 ing at him with unconscious fixedness. 
 
 " No, I think not," said Deronda; " but you 
 know I was not brought up as a Jew." 
 
 " Ah, I am always forgetting," said Mirah, 
 with a look of disappointed recollection, and 
 slightly blushing. 
 
 Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and 
 there was an awkward pause, which he put an 
 end to by saying playfully, — 
 
 Whichever way we take it, we have to toler- 
 ate each other; for if we all went in opposition 
 to our teaching, we must end in difference, just 
 the same." 
 
 " To be sure. We should go on forever in 
 zigzags," said Mrs. Meyrick. " I think it is 
 very weak-minded to make your creed up by the 
 rule of contrar5^ Still one may honour one's 
 parents without following their notions exactly, 
 any more than the exact cut of their clothing. 
 My father was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother 
 was a French Calvinist; I am neither quite 
 Scotch, nor quite French, nor two Calvinists 
 rolled into one, yet I honour my parents' 
 memory." 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 143 
 
 " But I could not make myself not a Jewess," 
 said Mirah, insistently, " even if I changed my 
 belief." 
 
 " No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses 
 went on changing their religion, and making no 
 difference between themselves and Christians, 
 there would come a time when there would be 
 no Jews to be seen," said Mrs. JSIeyrick, taking 
 that consummation very cheerfully. 
 
 " Oh, please not to say that," said Mirah, the 
 tears gathering. "It is the first unkind thing 
 you ever said. I will not begin that. I will 
 never separate myself from my mother's people. 
 I was forced to fly from my father; but if he 
 came back in age and weakness and want, and 
 needed me, should I say, ' This is not my 
 father '? If he had shame, I must share it. It 
 was he who was given to me for my father, and 
 not another. And so it is with my people. I 
 will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians 
 when they are good, like you. But I will always 
 cling to my people. I will always worship with 
 them." 
 
 As Mirah had gona on speaking, she had be- 
 come possessed with a sorrowful passion, — 
 fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands 
 tightly clasped and looking at Mrs. Meyrick 
 with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a per- 
 sonification of that spirit which impelled men 
 after a long inheritance of professed Catholi- 
 cism to leave wealth and high place, and risk their 
 lives in flight, that they might join their own 
 people and say, " I am a Jew." 
 
 " Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake 
 me! " said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed. " God for- 
 
IM DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 bid I should want you to do anything against 
 your conscience. I was only saying what might 
 be if the world went on. But I had better have 
 left the world alone, and not wanted to be over- 
 wise. Eorgive me, come! we will not try to 
 take you from anybody you feel has more right 
 to you." 
 
 " I would do anything else for you. I owe 
 you my life," said Mirah, not yet quite calm. 
 
 " Hush, hush, now! " said Mrs. Meyrick. " I 
 have been punished enough for wagging my 
 tongue foolishly, — making an almanac for the 
 Millennium, as my husband used to say." 
 
 " But everything in the world must come to 
 an end sometime. We must bear to think of 
 that," said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this 
 point. She had already suffered from a bond- 
 age of tongue which threatened to become severe 
 if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this 
 inconvenient susceptibility to innocent remarks. 
 
 Deronda smiled at the irregular, blond face, 
 brought into strange contrast by the side of 
 Mirah's, — smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcas- 
 tically as he said, " That prospect of everything 
 coming to an end will not guide us far in prac- 
 tice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned 
 with what is." 
 
 Mab was confused and wished she had not 
 spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed to think that 
 she had found fault with Mirah; but to have 
 spoken once is a tyrannous reason for speaking 
 again, and she said, — 
 
 " I only meant that we must have courage to 
 hear things, else there is hardly anything we can 
 talk about." Mab felt herself unanswerable here, 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 
 
 145 
 
 inclining to the opinion of Socrates: " What 
 motive has a man to Hve, if not for the pleasures 
 of discourse? " 
 
 Deronda took his leave soon after; and when 
 Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him to exchange 
 a few words about Mirah, he said, " Plans is to 
 share my chambers when he comes at Christmas." 
 
 You have written to Rome about that? " said 
 Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. " How very 
 good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned 
 Mirah, then?" 
 
 " Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew 
 everything from you." 
 
 " I must confess my folly. I have not yet 
 written a word about her. I have always been 
 meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter 
 without saying a word. And I told the girls 
 to leave it to me. However ! — Thank you a 
 thousand times." 
 
 Deronda divined something of what was in 
 the mother's mind, and his divination reinforced 
 a certain anxiety already present in him. His 
 inward colloquy was not soothing. He said to 
 himself that no man could see this exquisite 
 creature without feeling it possible to fall in love 
 with her; but all the fervour of his nature was 
 engaged on the side of precaution. There are 
 personages who feel themselves tragic because 
 they march into a palpable morass, dragging 
 another with them, and then cry out against 
 all the gods. Deronda's mind was strongly set 
 against imitating them. 
 
 " I have my hands on the reins now," he 
 thought, " and I will not drop them. I shall go 
 there as little as possible." 
 
 VOL. XIII — 10 
 
146 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 He saw the reasons acting themselves out 
 before him. How could he be Mirah's guardian 
 and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose 
 charge he had committed her, if he showed him- 
 self as a lover, - — whom she did not love, — 
 whom she would not marry? And if he encour- 
 aged any germ of lover's feeling in himself, it 
 would lead up to that issue. Mirah's was not a 
 nature that would bear dividing against itself; 
 and even if love won her consent to marry a man 
 who was not of her race and religion, she would - 
 never be happy in acting against that strong 
 native bias which would still reign in her con- 
 science as remorse. 
 
 Deronda saw these consequences as we see 
 any danger of marring our own work well 
 begun. It was a delight to have rescued this 
 child acquainted with sorrow, and to think of 
 having placed her little feet in protected paths. 
 The creature we help to save, though only a half- 
 reared linnet, bruised and lost by the wayside, 
 — how we watch and fence it, and dote on its 
 signs of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, 
 our self is a not-self for whose sake we become 
 virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of 
 reclaiming a life from misery and look for our 
 triumph in the secret joy, — " This one is the 
 better for me." 
 
 " I would as soon hold out my finger to be 
 bitten off as set about spoiling her peace," said 
 Deronda. " It was one of the rarest bits of for- 
 tune that I should have had friends like the 
 Meyricks to place her with, — generous, delicate 
 friends without any loftiness in their ways, so 
 that her dependence on them is not only safety 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 147 
 
 but happiness. There could be no refuge to re- 
 place that, if it were broken up. But what is the 
 use of my taking the vows and settling every- 
 thing as it should be, if that marplot Hans comes 
 and upsets it all? " 
 
 Few things were more likely. Hans was made 
 for mishaps: his very limbs seemed more break- 
 able than other people's, — his eyes more of a 
 resort for uninvited flies and other irritating 
 guests. But it was impossible to forbid Hans's 
 coming to London. He was intending to get 
 a studio there and make it his chief home ; and to 
 propose that he should defer coming on some 
 ostensible ground, concealing the real motive of 
 winning time for Mirah's position to become 
 more confirmed and independent, was imprac- 
 ticable. Having no other resource, Deronda 
 tried to believe that both he and Mrs. Meyrick 
 were foolishly troubling themselves about one 
 of those endless things called probabilities, which 
 never occur; but he did not quite succeed in his 
 trying: on the contrary, he found himself going 
 inwardly through a scene where, on the first dis- 
 covery of Hans's inclination, he gave him a very 
 energetic warning, — suddenly checked, how- 
 ever, by the suspicion of personal feeling that 
 his warmth might be creating in Hans. He 
 could come to no result, but that the position was 
 peculiar, and that he could make no further pro- 
 vision against dangers until they came nearer. 
 To save an unhappy Jewess from drowning her- 
 self, would not have seemed a startling variation 
 among police reports; but to discover in her so 
 rare a creature as Mirah, was an exceptional 
 event which might well bring exceptional conse- 
 
148 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 quences. Deronda would not let himself for a 
 moment dwell on any supposition that the conse- 
 quences might enter deeply into his own life. 
 The image of Mirah had never yet had that pene- 
 trating radiation which would have been given 
 to it by the idea of her loving him. When 
 this sort of effluence is absent from the fancy 
 (whether from the fact or not), a man may go 
 far in devotedness without perturbation. 
 
 As to the search for Mirah 's mother and 
 brother, Deronda took what she had said to-day 
 as a warrant for deferring any immediate meas- 
 ures. His conscience was not quite easy in this 
 desire for delay, any more than it was quite easy 
 in his not attempting to learn the truth about 
 his own mother: in both cases he felt that there 
 might be an unfulfilled duty to a parent, but in 
 both cases there was an overpowering repug- 
 nance to the possible truth, which threw a turn- 
 ing weight into the scale of argument. 
 
 " At least, I will look about," was his final 
 determination. " I may find some special Jewish 
 machinery. I will wait till after Christmas." 
 
 What should we all do without the calendar, 
 when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? 
 The admirable arrangements of the solar system, 
 by which our time is measured, always supply 
 us with a term before which it is hardly worth 
 while to set about anything we are disinclined to. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 "'No man,' says a Rabbi, by way of indisputable instance, ' may turn ; 
 the bones of his father and mother into spoons,' — sure that his hearers i 
 felt the checks against that form of economy. The market for spoons ; 
 has never expanded enough for any one to say, ' Why not ? ' and to argue j 
 that human progress lies in such an application of material. The only j 
 check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not \ 
 hold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth." 
 
 DEROND A meanwhile took to a less fash- 
 ionable form of exercise than riding in ■ 
 Rotten Row. He went often rambling 
 in those parts of London which are most inhab- \ 
 ited by common Jews: he walked to the syna- j 
 gogues at times of service, he looked into shops, i 
 he observed faces, — a process not very prom- ; 
 ising of particular discovery. Why did he not . 
 address himself to an influential Rabbi or other ' 
 member of a Jewish community, to consult on 
 the chances of finding a mother named Cohen, 
 with a son named Ezra, and a lost daughter 
 named Mirah ? He thought of doing so — after 
 Christmas. The fact was, notwithstanding all \ 
 his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, 
 where a keen personal interest was aroused, could 
 not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape 
 suffering from the pressure of that hard unac- i 
 commodating Actual, which has never consulted \ 
 our taste and is entirely unselect. Enthusiasm, | 
 we know, dwells at ease among ideas, tolerates 1 
 garlic breathed in the middle ages, and sees no i 
 shabbiness in the official trappings of classic pro- j 
 cessions: it gets squeamish when ideals press '\ 
 
150 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 upon it as something warmly incarnate, and can 
 hardly face them without fainting. Ikying 
 dreamily in a boat, imagining one's self in quest 
 of a beautiful maiden's relatives in Cordova 
 elbowed by Jews in the time of Ibn-Gebirol, all 
 the physical incidents can be borne without shock. 
 Or if the scenery of St. Mary Axe and White- 
 chapel were imaginatively transported to the 
 borders of the Rhine at the end of the eleventh 
 century, when in the ears listening for the sig- 
 nals of the Messiah, the Hep ! Hep ! Hep ! of the 
 Crusaders came like the bay of blood-hounds; 
 and in the presence of those devilish missionaries 
 with sword and firebrand, the crouching figure 
 of the reviled Jew turned round erect, heroic, 
 flashing with sublime constancy in the face of 
 torture and death, — what would the dingy 
 shops and unbeautiful faces signify to the thrill 
 of contemplative emotion? But the fervour of 
 sympathy with which we contemplate a gran- 
 diose martyrdom is feeble compared with the 
 enthusiasm that keeps unslacked where there is 
 no danger, no challenge, — nothing but impar- 
 tial mid-day falling on commonplace, perhaps 
 half -repulsive objects which are really the be- 
 loved ideas made flesh. Here undoubtedly lies 
 the chief poetic energy, — in the force of imagi- 
 nation that pierces or exalts the solid fact, in- 
 stead of floating among cloud pictures. To 
 glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge cover- 
 ing the earth is an easier exercise of believing 
 imagination than to see its beginning in news- 
 paper placards, staring at you from a bridge 
 beyond the cornfields ; and it might well happen 
 to most of us dainty people that we were in the 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 151 
 
 thick of the battle of Armageddon without being 
 aware of anything more than the annoyance of 
 a httle explosive smoke and struggling on the 
 ground immediately about us. 
 
 It lay in Deronda's nature usually to contemn 
 the feeble, fastidious sympathy which shrinks 
 from the broad life of mankind; but now, with 
 Mirah before him as a living reality whose ex- 
 perience he had to care for, he saw every common 
 Jew and Jewess in the light of comparison with 
 her, and had a presentiment of the collision be- 
 tween her idea of the unknown mother and 
 brother and the discovered fact, — a presenti- 
 ment all the keener in him because of a sup- 
 pressed consciousness that a not unlike possibil- 
 ity of collision might lie hidden in his own lot. 
 Not that he would have looked with more com- 
 placency of expectation at wealthy Jews, out- 
 doing the lords of the Philistines in their sports ; 
 but since there was no likelihood of Mirah's 
 friends being found among that class, their 
 habits did not immediately affect him. In this 
 mood he rambled, without expectation of a more 
 pregnant result than a little preparation of his 
 own mind, perhaps for future theorizing as well 
 as practice, — very much as if, Mirah being 
 related to Welsh miners, he had gone to look 
 more closely at the ways of those people, not 
 without wishing at the same time to get a little 
 light of detail on the history of Strikes. 
 
 He really did not long to find anybody in par- 
 ticular ; and when, as his habit was, he looked at 
 the name over a shop-door, he was well content 
 that it was not Ezra Cohen. I confess, he par- 
 ticularly desired that Ezra Cohen should not 
 
152 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 keep a shop. Wishes are held to be ominous; 
 according to which beUef the order of the world 
 is so arranged that if you have an impious objec- 
 tion to a squint, your offspring is the more likely 
 to be born with one ; also, that if you happened 
 to desire a squint, you would not get it. This 
 desponding view of probability the hopeful en- 
 tirely reject, taking their wishes as good and 
 sufficient security for all kindjs of fulfilment. 
 Who is absolutely neutral? Deronda, happen- 
 ing one morning to turn into a little side street 
 out of the noise and obstructions of Holborn, 
 felt the scale dip on the desponding side. 
 
 He was rather tired of the streets and had 
 paused to hail a hansom cab which he saw com- 
 ing, when his attention was caught by some fine 
 old clasps in chased silver displayed in the win- 
 dow at his right hand. His first thought was 
 that Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Prot- 
 estant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like 
 to have these missal-clasps turned into a brace- 
 let; then his eyes travelled over the other con- 
 tents of the window, and he saw that the shop 
 was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead 
 is given to jewellery, lace, and all equivocal 
 objects introduced as bric-a-brac. A placard 
 in one corner announced. Watches and Jewel- 
 lery eocchanged and repaired. But this survey 
 had been noticed from within; and a figure 
 appeared at the door, looking round at him, 
 and saying in a tone of cordial encouragement, 
 " Good day, sir." The instant was enough for 
 Deronda to see that the face, unmistakably 
 Jewish, belonged to a young man about thirty; 
 and wincing from the shopkeeper's persuasive- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 153 
 
 ness that would probably follow, he had no 
 sooner returned the " good day," than he passed 
 to the other side of the street, and beckoned 
 to the cabman to draw up there. From that 
 station he saw the name over the shop -window, 
 — Ezra Cohen. 
 
 There might be a hundred Ezra Cohens let- 
 tered above shop-windows, but Deronda had not 
 seen them. Probably the young man interested 
 in a possible customer was Ezra himself; and 
 he was about the age to be expected in Mirah's 
 brother, who was grown up while she was still 
 a little child. But Deronda's first endeavour 
 as he drove homewards was to convince himself 
 that there was not the slightest warrantable pre- 
 sumption of this Ezra being Mirah's brother; 
 and next, that even if, in spite of good reason- 
 ing, he turned out to be that brother, while on 
 inquiry the mother was found to be dead, it 
 was not his — Deronda's — duty to make known 
 the discovery to Mirah. In inconvenient dis- 
 turbance of this conclusion there came his lately 
 acquired knowledge that Mirah would have a 
 religious desire to know of her mother's death, 
 and also to learn whether her brother were liv- 
 ing. How far was he justified in determining 
 another life by his own notions? Was it not 
 his secret complaint against the way in which 
 others had ordered his own life, that he had 
 not open daylight on all its relations, so that 
 he had not, like other men, the full guidance 
 of primary duties? 
 
 The immediate relief from this inward debate 
 was the reflection that he had not yet made any 
 real discovery, and that by looking into the facts 
 
154 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 more closely he should be certified that there 
 was no demand on him for any decision what- 
 ever. He intended to retm^n to that shop as 
 soon as he could conveniently, and buy the clasps 
 for Lady Mallinger. But he was hindered for 
 several days by Sir Hugo, who, about to make 
 an after-dinner speech on a burning topic, 
 wanted Deronda to forage for him on the legal 
 part of the question, besides wasting time every 
 day on argument which always ended in a drawn 
 battle. As on many other questions, they held 
 different sides ; but Sir Hugo did not mind this, 
 and when Deronda put his point well, said, with 
 a mixture of satisfaction and regret, — 
 
 " Confound it, Dan! why don't you make an 
 opportunity of saying these things in public? 
 You 're wrong, you know. You won't succeed. 
 You 've got the massive sentiment, — the heavy 
 artillery of the country against you. But it 's 
 all the better ground for a young man to dis- 
 play himself on. When I was your age, I 
 should have taken it. And it would be quite 
 as well for you to be in opposition to me here 
 and there. It would throw you more into relief. 
 If you would seize an occasion of this sort to 
 make an impression, you might be in Parliament 
 in no time. And you know that would gratify 
 me." 
 
 " I am sorry not to do what would gratify 
 you, sir," said Deronda. " But I cannot per- 
 suade myself to look at politics as a profession." 
 
 " Why not? If a man is not born into public 
 life by his position in the country, there 's no 
 way for him but to embrace it by his own 
 efforts. The business of the country must be 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 155 
 
 done, — her Majesty's Government carried on, 
 as the old Duke said. And it never could be, 
 my boy, if everybody looked at politics as if 
 they were prophecy, and demanded an inspired 
 vocation. If you are to get into Parliament, it 
 won't do to sit still and wait for a call either 
 from heaven or constituents." 
 
 " I don't want to make a living out of opin- 
 ions," said Deronda; "especially out of bor- 
 rowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame 
 other men. I dare say many better fellows 
 than I don't mind getting on to a platform to 
 praise themselves, and giving their word of 
 honour for a party." 
 
 " I '11 tell you what, Dan," said Sir Hugo, 
 " a man who sets his face against every sort of 
 humbug is simply a three-cornered, impracti- 
 cable fellow. There 's a bad style of humbug, 
 but there is also a good style, — one that oils 
 the wheels and makes progress possible. If you 
 are to rule men, you must rule them through 
 their own ideas; and I agree with the Arch- 
 bishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius pro- 
 cession against the plague. It 's no use having 
 an Order in Council against popular shallow- 
 ness. There is no action possible without a little 
 acting." 
 
 " One may be obliged to give way to an oc- 
 casional necessity," said Deronda. " But it is 
 one thing to say, ' In this particular case I am 
 forced to put on this foolscap and grin,' and 
 another to buy a pocket foolscap and practise 
 myself in grinning. I can't see any real public 
 expediency that does not keep an ideal before 
 it which makes a limit of deviation from the 
 
156 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 direct path. But if I were to set up for a 
 public man I might mistake my own success 
 for pubhc expediency." 
 
 It was after this dialogue, which was rather 
 jarring to him, that Deronda set out on his 
 meditated second visit to Ezra Cohen's. He 
 entered the street at the end opposite to the 
 Holborn entrance, and an inward reluctance 
 slackened his pace while his thoughts were 
 transferring what he had just been saying about 
 public expediency to the entirely private diffi- 
 culty which brought him back again into this 
 unattractive thoroughfare. It might soon be- 
 come an immediate practical question with him 
 how far he could call it a wise expediency to 
 conceal the fact of close kindred. Such ques- 
 tions turning up constantly in life are often 
 decided in a rough-and-ready way ; and to many 
 it will appear an over-refinement in Deronda 
 that he should make any great point of a matter 
 confined to his own knowledge. But we have 
 seen the reasons why he had come to regard 
 concealment as a bane of life, and the necessity 
 of concealment as a mark by which lines of ac- 
 tion were to be avoided. The prospect of being 
 urged against the confirmed habit of his mind 
 was naturally grating. He even paused here 
 and there before the most plausible shop- win- 
 dows for a gentleman to look into, half inclined 
 to decide that he would not increase his knowl- 
 edge about that modern Ezra, who was certainly 
 not a leader among his people, — a hesitation 
 which proved how, in a man much given to 
 reasoning, a bare possibility may weigh more 
 than the best-clad likelihood; for Deronda's 
 
-GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 157 
 
 reasoning had decided that all likelihood was 
 against this man's being Mirah's brother. 
 
 One of the shop- windows he paused before 
 was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, 
 on a narrow table outside, the literature of the 
 ages was represented in judicious mixture, from 
 the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose 
 of the railway novel. That the mixture was 
 judicious was apparent from Deronda's finding 
 in it something that he wanted, — namely, that 
 wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the 
 Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he 
 could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from 
 its place, and entered the shop to pay for, ex- 
 pecting to see behind the counter a grimy per- 
 sonage showing that nonchalance about sales 
 which seems to belong universally to the second- 
 hand book-business. In most other trades you 
 find generous men who are anxious to sell you 
 their wares for your own welfare; but even a 
 Jew will not urge Simson's Euclid on you with 
 an affectionate assurance that you will have 
 pleasure in reading it, and that he wishes he 
 had twenty more of the article, so much is it 
 in request. One is led to fear that a second- 
 hand bookseller may belong to that unhappy 
 class of men who have no belief in the good of 
 what they get their living by, yet keep con- 
 science enough to be morose rather than unctu- 
 ous in their vocation. 
 
 But instead of the ordinary tradesman, he 
 saw, on the dark background of books in the 
 long narrow shop, a figure that was somewhat 
 startling in its unusualness. A man in thread- 
 bare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess, 
 
158 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ■ — from the dead yellowish flatness of the 
 flesh, something like an old ivory carving, — 
 was seated on a stool against some bookshelves 
 that projected beyond the short counter, doing 
 nothing more remarkable than reading the yes- 
 terday's " Times; " but when he let the paper 
 rest on his lap and looked at the incoming cus- 
 tomer, the thought glanced through Deronda 
 that precisely such a physiognomy as that might 
 possibly have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, 
 or in some New Hebrew poet of the mediseval 
 time. It was a finely typical Jewish face, 
 wrought into intensity of expression apparently 
 by a strenuous eager experience in which all 
 the satisfaction had been indirect and far off, 
 and perhaps by some bodily suffering also, 
 which involved that absence of ease in the pres- 
 ent. The features were clear-cut, not large; 
 the brow not high but broad, and fully defined 
 by the crisp black hair. It might never have 
 been a particularly handsome face, but it must 
 always have been forcible; and now with its 
 dark, far-off gaze, and yellow pallor in relief 
 on the gloom of the backward shop, one might 
 have imagined one's self coming upon it in some 
 past prison of the Inquisition, which a mob had 
 suddenly burst open; while the look fixed on 
 an incidental customer seemed eager and ques- 
 tioning enough to have been turned on one who 
 might have been a messenger either of delivery 
 or of death. The figure was probably familiar 
 and unexciting enough to the inhabitants of this 
 street; but to Deronda's mind it brought so 
 strange a blending of the unwonted with the 
 common, that there was a perceptible interval 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 159 
 
 of mutual observation before he asked his ques- 
 tion: " What is the price of this book? " 
 
 After taking the book and examining the fly- 
 leaves without rising, the supposed bookseller 
 said, " There is no mark, and Mr. Ram is not 
 in now. I am keeping the shop while he is gone 
 to dinner. What are you disposed to give for 
 it? " He held the book closed on his lap with 
 his hand on it, and looked examiningly at De- 
 ronda, over whom there came the disagreeable 
 idea, that possibly this striking personage 
 wanted to see how much could be got out of 
 a customer's ignorance of prices. But without 
 further reflection he said, " Don't you know how 
 much it is worth? " 
 
 " Not its market-price. May I ask, have you 
 read it? " 
 
 " No. I have read an account of it, which 
 makes me want to buy it." 
 
 " You are a man of learning, — you are in- 
 terested in Jewish history? " This was said in 
 a deepened tone of eager inquiry. 
 
 " I am certainly interested in Jewish history," 
 said Deronda, quietly, curiosity overcoming his 
 dislike to the sort of inspection as well as ques- 
 tioning he was under. 
 
 But immediately the strange Jew rose from 
 his sitting posture, and Deronda felt a thin 
 hand pressing his arm tightly, while a hoarse, 
 excited voice, not much above a loud whisper, 
 said, — 
 
 " You are perhaps of our race? " 
 
 Deronda coloured deeply, not liking the 
 grasp, and then answered with a slight shake 
 of the head, " No." The grasp was relaxed, 
 
160 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face 
 collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if 
 some possessing spirit which had leaped into 
 the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to 
 the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving 
 further off as he held out the little book, the 
 stranger said in a tone of distant civility, " I 
 believe Mr. Ram will be satisfied with half a 
 crown, sir." 
 
 The effect of this change on Deronda — he 
 afterwards smiled when he recalled it — was 
 oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if 
 some high dignitary had found him deficient 
 and given him his conge. There was nothing 
 further to be said, however: he paid his 
 half-crown and carried off his Salomon Mai- 
 mon's Lebensgeschichte with a mere " good 
 morning." 
 
 He felt some vexation at the sudden arrest 
 of the interview, and the apparent prohibition 
 that he should know more of this man, who was 
 certainly something out of the common way, — 
 as different probably as a Jew could well be 
 from Ezra Cohen, through whose door Deronda 
 was presently entering, and whose flourishing 
 face glistening on the way to fatness was hang- 
 ing over the counter in negotiation with some 
 one on the other side of the partition, concern- 
 ing two plated stoppers and three teaspoons, 
 which lay spread before him. Seeing Deronda 
 enter, he called out, "Mother! Mother!" and 
 then with a familiar nod and smile, said, " Com- 
 ing, sir, — coming directly." 
 
 Deronda could not help looking towards the 
 door from the baclj with some anxiety, which 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 161 
 
 was not soothed when he saw a vigorous woman 
 beyond fifty enter and approach to serve him. 
 Not that there was anything very repulsive 
 about her: the worst that could be said was 
 that she had that look of having made her toilet 
 with little water, and by twilight, which is com- 
 mon to unyouthful people of her class, and of 
 having presumably slept in her large earrings, 
 if not in her rings and necklace. In fact, what 
 caused a sinking of heart in Deronda was, her 
 not being so coarse and ugly as to exclude the 
 idea of her being Mirah's mother. Any one 
 who has looked at a face to try and discern 
 signs of known kinship in it will understand his 
 process of conjecture, — how he tried to think 
 away the fat which had gradually disguised the 
 outlines of youth, and to discern what one may 
 call the elementary expressions of the face. He 
 was sorry to see no absolute negative to his 
 fears. Just as it was conceivable that this Ezra, 
 brought up to trade, might resemble the scape- 
 grace father in everything but his knowledge 
 and talent, so it was not impossible that this 
 mother might have had a lovely refined daugh- 
 ter whose type of feature and expression was 
 like Mirah's. The eyebrows had a vexatious 
 similarity of line; and who shall decide how far 
 a face may be masked when the uncherishing 
 years have thrust it far onward in the ever- 
 new procession of youth and age? The good- 
 humour of the glance remained and shone out 
 in a motherly way at Deronda, as she said, in 
 a mild guttural tone, — 
 
 " How can I serve you, sir? " 
 
 " I should like to look at the silver clasps in 
 
 TOL. XIII— 11 
 
162 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the window," said Deronda; "the larger ones, 
 please, in the corner there." 
 
 They were not quite easy to get at from the 
 mother's station, and the son seeing this called 
 out, " I '11 reach 'em, mother, I '11 reach 'em," 
 running forward with alacrity, and then hand- 
 ing the clasps to Deronda with the smiling 
 remark, — 
 
 " Mother 's too proud: she wants to do every- 
 thing herself. That 's why I called her to wait 
 on you, sir. When there 's a particular gentle- 
 man customer, sir, I dare n't do any other than 
 call her. But I can't let her do herself a mis- 
 chief with stretching." 
 
 Here Mr. Cohen made way again for his 
 parent, who gave a little guttural amiable laugh 
 while she looked at Deronda, as much as to say, 
 " This boy will be at his jokes, but you see he 's 
 the best son in the world; " and evidently the 
 son enjoyed pleasing her, though he also wished 
 to convey an apology to his distinguished cus- 
 tomer for not giving him the advantage of his 
 own exclusive attention. 
 
 Deronda began to examine the clasps as if 
 he had many points to observe before he could 
 come to a decision. 
 
 " They are only three guineas, sir," said the 
 mother, encouragingly. 
 
 " First-rate workmanship, sir, — worth twice 
 the money; only I got 'em a bargain from 
 Cologne," said the son, parenthetically, from a 
 distance. 
 
 Meanwhile two new customers entered, and 
 the repeated call, "Addy!" brought from the 
 back of the shop a group that Deronda turned 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 163 
 
 frankly to stare at, feeling sure that the stare 
 would be held complimentary. The group con- 
 sisted of a black-eyed young woman who car- 
 ried a black-eyed little one, its head already 
 well covered with black curls, and deposited it 
 on the counter, from which station it looked 
 round with even more than the usual intelligence 
 of babies ; also a robust boy of six and a younger 
 girl, both with black eyes and black-ringed hair, 
 — looking more Semitic than their parents, as 
 the puppy lions show the spots of far-off pro- 
 genitors. The young woman answering to 
 " Addy " — a sort of paroquet in a bright blue 
 dress, with coral necklace and earrings, her hair 
 set up in a huge bush — looked as complacently 
 lively and unrefined as her husband; and by 
 a certain difference from the mother deepened 
 in Deronda the unwelcome impression that the 
 latter was not so utterly common a Jewess as 
 to exclude her being the mother of Mirah. 
 While that thought was glancing through his 
 mind, the boy had run forward into the shop 
 with an energetic stamp, and setting himself 
 about four feet from Deronda, with his hands 
 in the pockets of his miniature knickerbockers, 
 looked at him with a precocious air of survey. 
 Perhaps it was chiefly with a diplomatic design 
 to linger and ingratiate himself that Deronda 
 patted the boy's head, saying, — 
 
 " What is your name, sirrah? " 
 
 " Jacob Alexander Cohen," said the small 
 man with much ease and distinctness. 
 
 " You are not named after your father, then? " 
 
 ''No; after my grandfather. He sells knives 
 and razors and scissors, — my grandfather 
 
164 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 does," said Jacob, wishing to impress the 
 stranger with that high connection. " He gave 
 me this knife." Here a pocket-knife was drawn 
 forth ; and the small fingers, both naturally and 
 artificially dark, opened two blades and a cork- 
 screw with much quickness. 
 
 " Is not that a dangerous plaything? " said 
 Deronda, turning to the grandmother. 
 
 ''He'll never hurt himself, bless you!" said 
 she, contemplating her grandson with placid 
 rapture. 
 
 " Have you got a knife? " says Jacob, coming 
 closer. His small voice was hoarse in its glib- 
 ness, as if it belonged to an aged commercial 
 soul, fatigued with bargaining through many 
 generations. 
 
 " Yes. Do you want to see it? " said Deronda, 
 taking a small penknife from his waistcoat- 
 pocket. 
 
 Jacob seized it immediately and retreated a 
 little, holding the two knives in his palms and 
 bending over them in meditative comparison. 
 By this time the other clients were gone, and the 
 whole family had gathered to the spot, centring 
 their attention on the marvellous Jacob: the 
 father, mother, and grandmother behind the 
 counter, with baby held staggering thereon, and 
 the little girl in front leaning at her brother's 
 elbow to assist him in looking at the knives. 
 
 " Mine 's the best," said Jacob, at last, re- 
 turning Deronda's knife as if he had been enter- 
 taining the idea of exchange and had rejected it. 
 
 Father and mother laughed aloud with de- 
 light. " You won't find Jacob choosing the 
 worst," said Mr. Cohen, winking, with much 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 165 
 
 confidence in the customer's admiration. De- 
 ronda, looking at the grandmother, who had 
 only an inward silent laugh, said, — 
 
 " Are these the only grandchildren you 
 have?" 
 
 " All. This is my only son," she answered, 
 in a communicative tone, Deronda's glance and 
 manner as usual conveying the impression of 
 sympathetic interest, — which on this occasion 
 answered his purpose well. It seemed to come 
 naturally enough that he should say, — 
 
 " And you have no daughter? " 
 
 There was an instantaneous change in the 
 mother's face. Her lips closed more firmly, she 
 looked down, swept her hands outward on the 
 counter, and finally turned her back on Deronda 
 to examine some Indian handkerchiefs that 
 hung in pawn behind her. Her son gave a sig- 
 nificant glance, set up his shoulders an instant, 
 and just put his finger to his lips, — then said 
 quickly, " I think you 're a first-rate gentleman 
 in the city, sir, if I may be allowed to guess." 
 
 " No," said Deronda, with a preoccupied air, 
 " I have nothing to do with the city." 
 
 " That 's a bad job. I thought you might be 
 the young principal of a first-rate firm," said 
 Mr. Cohen, wishing to make amends for the 
 check on his customer's natural desire to know 
 more of him and his. " But you understand 
 silver-work, I see." 
 
 " A little," said Deronda, taking up the clasps 
 a moment and laying them down again. That 
 unwelcome bit of circumstantial evidence had 
 made his mind busy with a plan which was cer- 
 tainly more like acting than an\i:hing he had 
 
166 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 been aware of in his own conduct before. But 
 the bare possibility that more knowledge might 
 nullify the evidence, now overpowered the incli- 
 nation to rest in uncertainty. 
 
 " To tell you the truth," he went on, " my 
 errand is not so much to buy as to borrow. I 
 dare say you go into rather heavy transactions 
 occasionally." 
 
 " Well, sir, I 've accommodated gentlemen of 
 distinction, — I 'm proud to say it. I would n't 
 exchange my business with any in the world. 
 There 's none more honourable, nor more char- 
 itable, nor more necessary for all classes, from 
 the good lady who wants a little of the ready for 
 the baker, to a gentleman like yourself, sir, who 
 may want it for amusement. I like my business, 
 I like my street, and I like my shop. I would n't 
 have it a door further down. And I would n't 
 be without a pawn-shop, sir, to be the Lord 
 Mayor. It puts you in connection with the 
 world at large. I say it 's like the Government 
 revenue, — it embraces the brass as well as the 
 gold of the country. And a man who does n't 
 get money, sir, can't accommodate. Now, what 
 can I do for you, sir? " 
 
 If an amiable self-satisfaction is the mark 
 of earthly bliss, Solomon in all his glory was 
 a pitiable mortal compared with Mr. Cohen, — 
 clearly one of those persons who, being in excel- 
 lent spirits about themselves, are willing to cheer 
 strangers by letting them know it. While he 
 was delivering himself with lively rapidity, he 
 took the baby from his wife, and holding it on 
 his arm presented his features to be explored by 
 its small fists. Deronda, not in a cheerful mood. 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 167 
 
 was rashly pronouncing this Ezra Cohen to be 
 the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in 
 books or Hfe: his phraseology was as little as 
 possible like that of the Old Testament; and 
 no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his 
 vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink- 
 and-white huckster of the purest English lin- 
 eage. It is naturally a Christian feeling that a 
 Jew ought not to be conceited. However, this 
 was no reason for not persevering in his project; 
 and he answered at once in adventurous igno- 
 rance of technicalities, — 
 
 " I have a fine diamond ring to offer as secur- 
 ity, — not with me at this moment, unfortu- 
 nately, for I am not in the habit of wearing it. 
 But I will come again this evening and bring 
 it with me. Fifty pounds at once would be a 
 convenience to me." 
 
 " Well, you know, this evening is the Sabbath, 
 young gentleman," said Cohen, " and I go to 
 the Shool. The shop will be closed. But accom- 
 modation is a work of charity; if you can't get 
 here before, and are any ways pressed, — why, 
 I '11 look at your diamond. You 're perhaps 
 from the West End, — a longish drive?" 
 
 " Yes; and your Sabbath begins early at this 
 season. I could be here by five, — will that 
 do? " Deronda had not been without hope that 
 by asking to come on a Friday evening he might 
 get a better opportunity of observing points in 
 the family character, and might even be able to 
 put some decisive question. 
 
 Cohen assented; but here the marvellous 
 Jacob, whose physique supported a precocity 
 that would have shattered a Gentile of his years. 
 
168 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 showed that he had been hstening with much 
 comprehension by saying, " You are coming 
 again. Have you got any more knives at 
 home?" 
 
 " I think I have one," said Deronda, smiUng 
 down at him. 
 
 " Has it two blades and a hook — and a white 
 handle like that?" said Jacob, pointing to the 
 waistcoat-pocket. 
 
 " I dare say it has." 
 
 "Do you like a cork-screw?" said Jacob, 
 exhibiting that article in his own knife again, 
 and looking up with serious inquiry. 
 
 " Yes," said Deronda, experimentally. 
 
 " Bring your knife, then, and we '11 shwop," 
 said Jacob, returning the knife to his pocket, and 
 stamping about with the sense that he had con- 
 cluded a good transaction. 
 
 The grandmother had now recovered her usual 
 manners, and the whole family watched Deronda 
 radiantly when he caressingly lifted the little 
 girl, to whom he had not hitherto given atten- 
 tion, and seating her on the counter, asked for 
 her name also. She looked at him in silence, and 
 put her fingers to her gold earrings, which he 
 did not seem to have noticed. 
 
 " Adelaide Rebekah is her name," said her 
 mother, proudly. " Speak to the gentleman, 
 lovey." 
 
 " Shlav'm Shabbes fyock on," said Adelaide 
 Rebekah. 
 
 " Her Sabbath frock, she means," said the 
 father, in explanation. " She '11 have her Sab- 
 bath frock on this evening." 
 
 " And will you let me see you in it, Adelaide? " 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 169 
 
 said Deronda, with that gentle intonation which 
 came very easily to him. 
 
 " Say yes, lovey, — yes, if you please, sir," 
 said her mother, enchanted with this handsome 
 young gentleman, who appreciated remarkable 
 children. 
 
 " And will you give me a kiss this evening? " 
 said Deronda, with a hand on each of her little 
 brown shoulders. 
 
 Adelaide Rebekah (her miniature crinoline 
 and monumental features corresponded with the 
 combination of her names) immediately put up 
 her lips to pay the kiss in advance; whereupon 
 her father, rising into still more glowing satis- 
 faction with the general meritoriousness of his 
 circumstances, and with the stranger who was 
 an admiring witness, said cordially, — 
 
 " You see there 's somebody will be disap- 
 pointed if you don't come this evening, sir. You 
 won't mind sitting down in our family place and 
 waiting a bit for me, if I 'm not in when you 
 come, sir? I '11 stretch a point to accommodate 
 a gent of your sort. Bring the diamond, and 
 I '11 see what I can do for you." 
 
 Deronda thus left the most favourable im- 
 pression behind him, as a preparation for more 
 easy intercourse. But for his own part those 
 amenities had been carried on under the heaviest 
 spirits. If these were really Mirah's relatives, 
 he could not imagine that even her fervid filial 
 piety could give the reunion with them any 
 sweetness beyond such as could be found in the 
 strict fulfilment of a painful duty. What did 
 this vaunting brother need? And with the most 
 favourable supposition about the hypothetic 
 
170 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 mother, Deronda shrank from the image of a 
 first meeting between her and Mirah, and still 
 more from the idea of Mirah's domestication 
 with this family. He took refuge in disbelief. 
 To find an Ezra Cohen when the name was run- 
 ning in your head was no more extraordinary 
 than to find a Josiah Smith under like circum- 
 stances; and as to the coincidence about the 
 daughter, it would probably turn out to be a 
 difference. If, however, further knowledge 
 confirmed the more undesirable conclusion, what 
 would be wise expediency? — to try and deter- 
 mine the best consequences by concealment, or 
 to brave other consequences for the sake of that 
 openness which is the sweet fresh air of our moral 
 fife. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Er ist geheissen 
 Israel. Ihn hat verwandelt 
 Hexenspruch in einen Hund, 
 
 Aber jeden Freitag Abend, 
 In der Dammrungstunde, plotzlich 
 Weicht der Zauber, und der Hund 
 Wird aufs Neu' ein menschlich Wesen. 
 
 Heine: Prinzessin Sabbath. 
 
 WHEN Deronda arrived at five o'clock, 
 the shop was closed and the door was 
 opened for him by the Christian ser- 
 vant. When she showed him into the room be- 
 hind the shop, he was surprised at the prettiness 
 of the scene. The house was old, and rather 
 extensive at the back: probably the large room 
 he now entered was gloomy by daylight, but 
 now it was agreeably lit by a fine old brass 
 lamp with seven oil-lights hanging above the 
 snow-white cloth spread on the central table. 
 The ceiling and walls were smoky, and all the 
 surroundings were dark enough to throw into 
 relief the human figures, which had a Venetian 
 glow of colouring. The grandmother was ar- 
 rayed in yellowish brown with a large gold 
 chain in lieu of the necklace, and by this light 
 her yellow face with its darkly marked eye- 
 brows and framing roll of gray hair looked as 
 handsome as was necessary for picturesque 
 effect. Young Mrs. Cohen was clad in red and 
 black, with a string of large artificial pearls 
 wound round and round her neck: the baby 
 
172 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 lay asleep in the cradle under a scarlet counter- 
 pane ; Adelaide Rebekah was in braided amber ; 
 and Jacob Alexander was in black velveteen 
 with scarlet stockings. As the four pairs of 
 black eyes all glistened a welcome at Deronda, 
 he was almost ashamed of the supercilious dis- 
 like these happy-looking creatures had raised 
 in him by daylight. Nothing could be more 
 cordial than the greeting he received, and both 
 mother and grandmother seemed to gather more 
 dignity from being seen on the private hearth, 
 showing hospitality. He looked, round with 
 some wonder at the old furniture: the oaken 
 bureau and high side table must surely be mere 
 matters of chance and economy, and not due 
 to the family taste. A large dish of blue-and- 
 yellow ware was set up on the side table, and 
 flanking it were two old silver vessels; in front 
 of them a large volume in darkened vellum with 
 a deep-ribbed back. In the corner at the farther 
 end was an open door into an inner room, where 
 there was also a light. 
 
 Deronda took in these details by parenthetic 
 glances while he met Jacob's pressing solicitude 
 about the knife. He had taken the pains to buy 
 one with the requisites of the hook and white 
 handle, and produced it on demand, saying, — 
 
 "Is that the sort of thing you want, Jacob? " 
 
 It was subjected to a severe scrutiny, the hook 
 and blades were opened, and the article of barter 
 with the corkscrew was drawn forth for com- 
 parison. 
 
 " Why do you like a hook better than a cork- 
 screw? " said Deronda. 
 
 " 'Caush I can get hold of things with a hook. 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 173 
 
 A corkscrew won't go into anything but corks. 
 But it 's better for you, you can draw corks." 
 
 " You agree to change, then? " said Deronda, 
 observing that the grandmother was hstening 
 with dehght. 
 
 " What else have you got in your pockets? " 
 said Jacob, with dehberative seriousness. 
 
 " Hush, hush, Jacob, love," said the grand- 
 mother. And Deronda, mindful of discipline, 
 answered, — 
 
 " I think I must not tell you that. Our busi- 
 ness was with the knives." 
 
 Jacob looked up into his face scanningly for 
 a moment or two, and apparently arriving at 
 his conclusions, said gravely, — 
 
 " I '11 shwop," handing the cork-screw knife 
 to Deronda, who pocketed it with corresponding 
 gravity. 
 
 Immediately the small son of Shem ran off 
 into the next room, whence his voice was heard 
 in rapid chat ; and then ran back again, — when, 
 seeing his father enter, he seized a little velveteen 
 hat which lay on a chair and put it on to ap- 
 proach him. Cohen kept on his own hat, and 
 took no notice of the visitor, but stood still while 
 the two children went up to him and clasped 
 his knees : then he laid his hands on each in turn, 
 and uttered his Hebrew benediction; where- 
 upon the wife, who had lately taken baby from 
 the cradle, brought it up to her husband, and 
 held it under his outstretched hands, to be 
 blessed in its sleep. For the moment Deronda 
 thought that this pawnbroker proud of his voca- 
 tion was not utterly prosaic. 
 
 " Well, sir, you found your welcome in my 
 
174 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 family, I think," said Cohen, putting down his 
 hat and becoming his former self. "And you Ve 
 been punctual. Nothing like a little stress 
 here," he added, tapping his side pocket as he 
 sat down. " It 's good for us all in our turn. 
 I Ve felt it when I 've had to make up payments. 
 I began early, — had to turn myself about and 
 put myself into shapes to fit every sort of box. 
 It 's bracing to the mind. Now then ! let us 
 see, let us see." 
 
 " That is the ring I spoke of," said Deronda, 
 taking it from his finger. " I believe it cost a 
 hundred pounds. It will be a sufficient pledge 
 to you for fifty, I think. I shall probably re- 
 deem it in a month or so." 
 
 Cohen's glistening eyes seemed to get a little 
 nearer together as he met the ingenuous look 
 of this crude young gentleman, who apparently 
 supposed that redemption was a satisfaction to 
 pawnbrokers. He took the ring, examined and 
 returned it, saying with indifference, " Good, 
 good. We '11 talk of it after our meal. Per- 
 haps you '11 join us, if you 've no objection. Me 
 and my wife '11 feel honoured, and so will 
 mother; won't you, mother?" 
 
 The invitation was doubly echoed, and De- 
 ronda gladly accepted it. All now turned and 
 stood round the table. No dish was at present 
 seen except one covered with a napkin; and 
 Mrs. Cohen had placed a china bowl near her 
 husband, that he might wash his hands in it. 
 But after putting on his hat again, he paused, 
 and called in a loud voice, " Mordecai! " 
 
 Can this be part of the religious ceremony? 
 thought Deronda, not knowing what might be 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 175 
 
 expected of the ancient hero. But he heard a 
 " Yes " from the next room, which made him 
 look towards the open door; and there, to his 
 astonishment, he saw the figure of the enigmatic 
 Jew whom he had this morning met with in the 
 book-shop. Their eyes met, and Mordecai 
 looked as much surprised as Deronda, — neither 
 in his surprise making any sign of recognition. 
 But when Mordecai was seating himself at the 
 end of the table, he just bent his head to the 
 guest in a cold and distant manner, as if the dis- 
 appointment of the morning remained a dis- 
 agreeable association with this new acquaintance. 
 
 Cohen now washed his hands, pronouncing 
 Hebrew words the while: afterwards he took 
 off the napkin covering the dish, and disclosed 
 the two long flat loaves besprinkled with seed, 
 — the memorial of the manna that fed the wan- 
 dering forefathers, — and breaking off small 
 pieces gave one to each of the family, including 
 Adelaide Rebekah, who stood on the chair with 
 her whole length exhibited in her amber-coloured 
 garment, her little Jewish nose lengthened by 
 compression of the lip in the effort to make a 
 suitable appearance. Cohen then uttered an- 
 other Hebrew blessing, and after that, the male 
 heads were uncovered, all seated themselves, 
 and the meal went on without any peculiarity 
 that interested Deronda. He was not very 
 conscious of what dishes he ate from, being pre- 
 occupied, with a desire to turn the conversation 
 in a way that would enable him to ask some 
 leading question; and also with thinking of 
 Mordecai, between whom and himself there was 
 an exchange of fascinated, half -furtive glances. 
 
176 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Mordecai had no handsome Sabbath garment, 
 but instead of the threadbare rusty black coat 
 of the morning he wore one of hght drab, which 
 looked as if it had once been a handsome loose 
 paletot now shrunk with washing; and this 
 change of clothing gave a still stronger accen- 
 tuation to his dark-haired, eager face, which 
 might have belonged to the prophet Ezekiel, — 
 also probably not modish in the eyes of con- 
 temporaries. It was noticeable that the thin 
 tails of the fried fish were given to Mordecai; 
 and in general the sort of share assigned to a 
 poor relation — no doubt a " survival " of pre- 
 historic practice, not yet generally admitted to 
 be superstitious. 
 
 Mr. Cohen kept up the conversation with 
 much liveliness, introducing as subjects always 
 in taste (the Jew is proud of his loyalty) the 
 Queen and the Royal Family, the Emperor 
 and Empress of the French, — into which both 
 grandmother and wife entered with zest. Mrs. 
 Cohen the younger showed an accurate memory 
 of distinguished birthdays; and the elder as- 
 sisted her son in informing the guest of what 
 occurred when the Emperor and Empress were 
 in England and visited the city, ten years 
 before. 
 
 " I dare say you know all about it better than 
 we do, sir," said Cohen, repeatedly, by way of 
 preface to full information; and the interesting 
 statements were kept up in a trio. 
 
 " Our baby is named Eugenie Esther," said 
 young Mrs. Cohen, vivaciously. 
 
 " It 's wonderful how the Emperor 's like a 
 cousin of mine in the face," said the grand- 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 177 
 
 mother; "it struck me like lightning when I 
 caught sight of him. I could n't have thought 
 it." 
 
 " Mother and me went to see the Emperor 
 and Empress at the Crystal Palace," said Mr. 
 Cohen. " I had a fine piece of work to take 
 care of mother; she might have been squeezed 
 flat, — though she was pretty near as lusty then 
 as she is now. I said, if I had a hundred mothers 
 I 'd never take one of 'em to see the Emperor 
 and Empress at the Crystal Palace again; and 
 you may think a man can't afford it when he 's 
 got but one mother, — not if he 'd ever so big 
 an insurance on her." He stroked his mother's 
 shoulder affectionately, and chuckled a little at 
 his own humour. 
 
 " Your mother has been a widow a long while, 
 perhaps, said Deronda, seizing his opportunity. 
 " That has made your care for her the more 
 needfuL" 
 
 " Ay, ay, it 's a good many yore-zeit since I 
 had to manage for her and myself," said Cohen, 
 quickly. " I went early to it. It 's that makes 
 you a sharp knife." 
 
 " What does — what makes a sharp knife, 
 father? " said Jacob, his cheek very much swol- 
 len with sweet-cake. 
 
 The father winked at his guest and said, 
 " Having your nose put on the grindstone." 
 
 Jacob slipped from his chair with the piece 
 of sweet-cake in his hand, and going close up 
 to Mordecai, who had been totally silent hitherto, 
 said, " What does that mean, — putting my nose 
 to the grindstone? " 
 
 " It means that you are to bear being hurt 
 
 ; VOL. XIII — 12 
 
178 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 without making a noise," said Mordecai, turning 
 his eyes benignantly on the small face close to 
 his. Jacob put the corner of the cake into 
 Mordecai's mouth as an invitation to bite, say- 
 ing meanwhile, " I sha'n't though," and keep- 
 ing his eyes on the cake to observe how much 
 of it went in this act of generosity. Mordecai 
 took a bite and smiled, evidently meaning to 
 please the lad;' and the little incident made them 
 both look more lovable. Deronda, however, felt 
 with some vexation that he had taken little by 
 his question. 
 
 " I fancy that is the right quarter for learn- 
 ing," said he, carrying on the subject that he 
 might have an excuse for addressing Mordecai, 
 to whom he turned and said, " You have been 
 a great student, I imagine." 
 
 " I have studied," was the quiet answer. 
 " And you? — You know German, by the book 
 you were buying." 
 
 " Yes, I have studied in Germany. Are 
 you generally engaged in bookselling? " said 
 Deronda. 
 
 " No; I only go to Mr. Ram's shop every day 
 to keep it while he goes to meals," said Mor- 
 decai, who was now looking at Deronda with 
 what seemed a revival of his original interest: 
 it seemed as if the face had some attractive 
 indication for him which now neutralized the 
 former disappointment. After a slight pause 
 he said, " Perhaps you know Hebrew? " 
 
 " I am sorry to say, not at all." 
 
 Mordecai's countenance fell : he cast down his 
 eyelids, looking at his hands, which lay crossed 
 before him, and said no more. Deronda had 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 179 
 
 now noticed more decisively than in their former 
 interview a difficulty of breathing, which he 
 thought must be a sign of consumption. 
 
 " I 've had something else to do than to get 
 book-learning," said Mr. Cohen, — " I 've had 
 to make myself knowing about useful things. 
 I know stones well," — here he pointed to De- 
 ronda's ring. " I 'm not afraid of taking that 
 ring of yours at my own valuation. But now," 
 he added, with a certain drop in his voice to 
 a lower, more familiar nasal, " what do you 
 want for it? " 
 
 " Fifty or sixty pounds," Deronda answered, 
 rather too carelessly. 
 
 Cohen paused a little, thrust his hands into 
 his pockets, fixed on Deronda a pair of glisten- 
 ing eyes that suggested a miraculous guinea- 
 pig, and said, " Could n't do you that. Happy 
 to oblige, but could n't go that lengths. Forty 
 pound — say forty — I '11 let you have forty 
 on it." 
 
 ^ Deronda was aware that Mordecai had looked 
 up again at the words implying a monetary 
 affair, and was now examining him again, while 
 he said, " Very well; I shall redeem it in a month 
 or so." 
 
 " Good. I '11 make you out the ticket by and 
 by," said Cohen, indifferently. Then he held up 
 his finger as a sign that conversation must be de- 
 ferred. He, Mordecai, and Jacob put on their 
 hats, and Cohen opened a thanksgiving, which 
 was carried on by responses, till Mordecai de- 
 livered himself alone at some length, in a solemn 
 chanting tone, with his chin slightly uplifted and 
 his thin hands clasped easily before him. Not 
 
180 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 only in his accent and tone, but in his freedom 
 from the self -consciousness which has reference 
 to others' approbation, there could hardly have 
 been a stronger contrast to the Jew at the other 
 end of the table. It was an unaccountable con- 
 junction, — the presence among these common, 
 prosperous, shopkeeping types, of a man who, in 
 an emaciated threadbare condition, imposed a 
 certain awe on Deronda, and an embarrassment 
 at not meeting his expectations. 
 
 No sooner had JMordecai finished his devo- 
 tional strain, than rising, with a slight bend of his 
 head to the stranger, he walked back into his 
 room, and shut the door behind him. 
 
 " That seems to be rather a remarkable man," 
 said Deronda, turning to Cohen, who immedi- 
 ately set up his shoulders, put out his tongue 
 slightly, and tapped his own brow. It was 
 clearly to be understood that Mordecai did not 
 come up to the standard of sanity which was set 
 by Mr. Cohen's view of men and things. 
 
 " Does he belong to your family? " said De^ 
 ronda. This idea appeared to be rather ludi- 
 crous to the ladies as well as to Cohen, and the 
 family interchanged looks of amusement. 
 
 "No, no," said Cohen. "Charity! charity! 
 He worked for me, and when he got weaker and 
 weaker I took him in. He 's an incumbrance; 
 but he brings a blessing down, and he teaches 
 the boy. Besides, he does the repairing at the 
 watches and jewellery." 
 
 Deronda hardly abstained from smiling at this 
 mixture of kindliness and the desire to justify it 
 in the light of a calculation; but his willingness 
 to speak further of Mordecai, whose character 
 
GWENDOLEN'S CHOICE 181 
 
 was made the more enigmatically striking by 
 these new details, was baffled. Mr. Cohen im- 
 mediately dismissed the subject by reverting to 
 the " accommodation," which was also an act of 
 charity, and proceeded to make out the ticket, 
 get the forty pounds, and present them both in 
 exchange for the diamond ring. Deronda, feel- 
 ing that it would be hardly delicate to protract 
 his visit beyond the settlement of the business 
 which was its pretext, had to take his leave, with 
 no more decided result than the advance of forty 
 pounds and the pawn-ticket in his breast-pocket, 
 to make a reason for returning when he came up 
 to town after Christmas. He was resolved that 
 he would then endeavour to gain a little more 
 insight into the character and history of Mor- 
 decai; from whom also he might gather some- 
 thing decisive about the Cohens, — for example, 
 the reason why it was forbidden to ask Mrs. 
 Cohen the elder whether she had a daughter. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 "Were uneasiness of conscience measured by extent of crime, human 
 history had been different, and one should look to see the contrivers of 
 greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the money-market in que 
 troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse 
 and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand. 
 No doubt v/ickedness hath its rewards to distribute; but whoso wins 
 in this devil's game must needs be baser, more cruel, more brutal than 
 the order of this planet will allow for the multitude born of woman, 
 the most of these carrying a form of conscience, — a fear which is the 
 shadow of justice, a pity which is the shadow of love, — that hindereth 
 from the prize of serene wickedness, itself difficult of maintenance in 
 our composite flesh." 
 
 ON the 29th of December Deronda knew 
 that the Grandcourts had arrived at the 
 Abbey, but he had had no ghmpse of 
 them before he went to dress for dinner. There 
 had been a splendid fall of snow, allowing the 
 party of children the rare pleasures of snow- 
 balling and snow-building, and in the Christ- 
 mas holidays the Mallinger girls were content 
 with no amusement unless it were joined in and 
 managed by " cousin," as they had always called 
 Deronda. After that outdoor exertion he had 
 been playing billiards, and thus the hours had 
 passed without his dwelling at all on the prospect 
 of meeting Gwendolen at dinner. Nevertheless 
 that prospect was interesting to him ; and when, 
 a little tired and heated with working at amuse- 
 
MORDECAI 183 
 
 ment, he went to his room before the half -hour 
 bell had rung, he began to think of it with some 
 speculation on the sort of influence her marriage 
 with Grandcourt would have on her, and on the 
 probability that there would be some discernible 
 shades of change in her manner since he saw her 
 at Diplow, just as there had been since his first 
 vision of her at Leubronn. 
 
 " I fancy there are some natures one could see 
 growing or degenerating every day, if one 
 watched them," was his thought. " I suppose 
 some of us go on faster than others; and I am 
 sure she is a creature who keeps strong traces of 
 anything that has once impressed her. That 
 little affair of the necklace, and the idea that 
 somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evi- 
 dently bitten into her. But such impressibility 
 tells both ways : it may drive one to desperation 
 as soon as to anything better. And whatever 
 fascinations Grandcourt may have for capri- 
 cious tastes, good heavens! who can believe 
 that he would call out the tender affections in 
 daily companionship ? One might be tempted to 
 horsewhip him for the sake of getting some show 
 of passion into his face and speech. I 'm afraid 
 she married him out of ambition, — to escape 
 poverty. But why did she run out of his way at 
 first? The poverty came after, though. Poor 
 thing! she' may have been urged into it. How 
 can one feel anything else than pity for a young 
 creature like that — full of unused life — igno- 
 rantly rash — hanging all her blind expectations 
 on that remnant of a human being! " 
 
 Doubtless the phrases which Deronda's medi- 
 tation applied to the bridegroom were the less 
 
184 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 complimentary for the excuses and pity in which 
 it clad the bride. His notion of Grandcourt as a 
 " remnant " was founded on no particular knowl- 
 edge, but simply on the impression which or- 
 dinary polite intercourse had given him that 
 Grandcourt had worn out all his natural healthy 
 interest in things. 
 
 In general, one may be sure that whenever a 
 marriage of any mark takes place, male ac- 
 quaintances are likely to pity the bride, female 
 acquaintances the bridegroom: each, it is 
 thought, might have done better ; and especially 
 where the bride is charming, young gentlemen 
 on the scene are apt to conclude that she can have 
 no real attachment to a fellow so uninteresting 
 to themselves as her husband, but has married 
 him on other grounds. Who under such circum- 
 stances pities the husband? Even his female 
 friends are apt to think his position retributive: 
 he should have chosen some one else. But per- 
 haps Deronda may be excused that he did not 
 prepare any pity for Grandcourt, who had never 
 struck acquaintances as likely to come out of his 
 experiences with more suffering than he inflicted ; 
 whereas for Gwendolen, young, headlong, eager 
 for pleasure, fed with the flattery which makes 
 a lovely girl believe in her divine right to rule, — 
 how quickly might life turn from expectancy to a 
 bitter sense of the irremediable ! After what he 
 had seen of her he must have had rather dull feel- 
 ings not to have looked forward with some inter- 
 est to her entrance into the room. Still, since the 
 honeymoon was already three weeks in the dis- 
 tance, and Gwendolen had been enthroned not 
 only at Ry elands but at Diplow, she was likely 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 185 
 
 to have composed her countenance with suitable 
 manifestation or concealment, not being one who 
 would indulge the curious by a helpless exposure 
 of her feelings. 
 
 A various party had been invited to meet the 
 new couple : the old aristocracy was represented 
 by Lord and Lady Pentreath ; the old gentry by 
 young Mr. and Mrs. Fitzadam of the Worces- 
 tershire branch of the Fitzadams; politics and 
 the public good, as specialized in the cider in- 
 terest, by Mr. Fenn, member for West Orchards, 
 accompanied by his two daughters; Lady Mal- 
 linger's family, by her brother, Mr. Raymond, 
 and his wife ; the useful bachelor element by Mr. 
 Sinker, the eminent counsel, and by Mr. Vander- 
 noodt, whose acquaintance Sir Hugo had found 
 pleasant enough at Leubronn to be adopted in 
 England. 
 
 All had assembled in the drawing-room before 
 the new couple appeared. Meanwhile the time 
 was being passed chiefly in noticing the children, 
 — various little Raymonds, nephews and nieces 
 of Lady Mallinger's, with her own three girls, 
 who were always allowed to appear at this hour. 
 The scene was really delightful, — enlarged by 
 full-length portraits with deep backgrounds, in- 
 serted in the cedar panelling, — surmounted by 
 a ceiling that glowed with the rich colours of the 
 coats of arms ranged between the sockets, — il- 
 luminated almost as much by the red fire of oak- 
 boughs as by the pale wax-lights, — stilled by the 
 deep-piled carpet and by the high English breed- 
 ing that subdues all voices; while the mixture 
 of ages, from the white-haired Lord and Lady 
 Pentreath to the four-year-old Edgar Raymond, 
 
186 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 gave a varied charm to the living groups. Lady 
 Malhnger, with fair matronly roundness and 
 mildly prominent blue eyes, moved about in her 
 black velvet, carrying a tiny white dog on her 
 arm as a sort of finish to her costume; the chil- 
 dren were scattered among the ladies, while most 
 of the gentlemen were standing rather aloof, con- 
 versing with that very moderate vivacity observ- 
 able during the long minutes before dinner. 
 Deronda was a little out of the circle in a dia- 
 logue fixed upon him by Mr. Vandernoodt, a 
 man of the best Dutch blood imported at the rev- 
 olution: for the rest, one of those commodious 
 persons in society who are nothing particular 
 themselves, but are understood to be acquainted 
 with the best in every department ; close-clipped, 
 pale-eyed, nonchalant, as good a foil as could 
 well be found to the intense colouring and vivid 
 gravity of Deronda. 
 
 He was talking of the bride and bridegroom, 
 whose appearance was being waited for. Mr. 
 Vandernoodt was an industrious gleaner of per- 
 sonal details, and could probably tell everything 
 about a great philosopher or physicist except his 
 theories or discoveries: he was now implying 
 that he had learned many facts about Grand- 
 court since meeting him at Leubronn. 
 
 " Men who have seen a good deal of life don't 
 always end by choosing their wives so well. He 
 has had rather an anecdotic history, — gone 
 rather deep into pleasures, I fancy, lazy as he is. 
 But, of course, you know all about him." 
 
 " No, really," said Deronda, in an indifferent 
 tone. " I know little more of him than that he 
 is Sir Hugo's nephew." 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 187 
 
 But now the door opened, and deferred any 
 satisfaction of Mr. Vandernoodt's communica- 
 tiveness. 
 
 The scene was one to set off any figure of dis- 
 tinction that entered on it; and certainly when 
 Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered, no beholder 
 could deny that their figures had distinction. 
 The bridegroom had neither more nor less easy 
 perfection of costume, neither more nor less well- 
 cut impassibility of face, than before his mar- 
 riage. It was to be supposed of him that he 
 would put up with nothing less than the best in 
 outward equipment, wife included ; and the bride 
 was what he might have been expected to choose. 
 " By George, I think she 's handsomer, if any- 
 thing! " said Mr. Vandernoodt. And Deronda 
 was of the same opinion, but he said nothing. 
 The white silk and diamonds — it may seem 
 strange, but she did wear the diamonds on her 
 neck, in her ears, in her hair — might have some- 
 thing to do with the new imposingness of her 
 beauty, which flashed on him as more unquestion- 
 able if not more thoroughly satisfactory than 
 when he had first seen her at the gaming-table. 
 Some faces which are peculiar in their beauty are 
 like original works of art: for the first time they 
 are almost always met with question. But in 
 seeing Gwendolen at Diplow, Deronda had dis- 
 cerned in her more than he had expected of that 
 tender appealing charm which we call womanly. 
 Was there any new change since then? He dis- 
 trusted his impressions ; but as he saw her receiv- 
 ing greetings with what seemed a proud cold 
 quietude and a superficial smile, there seemed to 
 be at work within her the same demonic force 
 
188 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 that had possessed her when she took him in her 
 resolute glance and turned away a loser from the 
 gaming-table. There was no time for more of a 
 conclusion, — no time even for him to give his 
 greeting before the summons to dinner. 
 
 He sat not far from opposite to her at table, 
 and could sometimes hear what she said in answer 
 to Sir Hugo, who was at his liveliest in conversa- 
 tion with her ; but though he looked towards her 
 with the intention of bowing, she gave him no 
 opportunity of doing so for some time. At 
 last Sir Hugo, who might have imagined that 
 they had already spoken to each other, said, 
 " Deronda, you will like to hear what Mrs. 
 Grandcourt tells me about your favourite 
 Klesmer." 
 
 Gwendolen's eyelids had been lowered; and 
 Deronda, already looking at her, thought he dis- 
 covered a quivering reluctance as she was obliged 
 to raise them and return his unembarrassed bow 
 and smile, her own smile being one of the lip 
 merely. It was but an instant, and Sir Hugo 
 continued without pause, — 
 
 " The Arrowpoints have condoned the mar- 
 riage, and he is spending the Christmas with his 
 bride at Quetcham." 
 
 " I suppose he will be glad of it for the sake of 
 his wife, else I dare say he would not have 
 minded keeping at a distance," said Deronda. 
 
 " It 's a sort of troubadour story," said Lady 
 Pentreath, an easy, deep-voiced old lady; " I 'm 
 glad to find a little romance left among us. I 
 think our young people now are getting too 
 worldly wise." 
 
 " It shows the Arrowpoints' good sense, how- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 189 
 
 ever, to have adopted the affair, after the fuss in 
 the papers," said Sir Hugo. " And disowning 
 your own child because of a mesalliance is some- 
 thing hke disowning your one eye: everybody 
 knows it 's yours, and you have no other to make 
 an appearance with." 
 
 " As to mesalliance, there 's no blood on any 
 side," said Lady Pentreath. " Old Admiral Ar- 
 rowpoint was one of Nelson's men, you know, 
 — a doctor's son. And we all know how the 
 mother's money came." 
 
 "If there were any mesalliance in the case, I 
 should say it was on Klesmer's side," said 
 Deronda. 
 
 " Ah, you think it is a case of the immortal 
 marrying the mortal. What is your opinion? " 
 said Sir Hugo, looking at Gwendolen. 
 
 " I have no doubt that Herr Klesmer thinks 
 himself immortal. But I dare say his wife will 
 burn as much incense before him as he requires," 
 said Gwendolen. She had recovered any com- 
 posure that she might have lost. 
 
 " Don't you approve of a wife burning incense 
 before her husband? " said Sir Hugo, with an air 
 of jocoseness. 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, "if it were only 
 to make others believe in him." She paused a 
 moment, and then said with more gayety, 
 " When Herr Klesmer admires his own genius, 
 it will take off some of the absurdity if his wife 
 says Amen." 
 
 " Klesmer is no favourite of yours, I see," said 
 Sir Hugo. 
 
 " I think very highly of him, I assure you," 
 said Gwendolen. " His genius is quite above my 
 
190 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 judgment, and I know him to be exceedingly 
 generous." 
 
 She spoke with the sudden seriousness which is 
 often meant to correct an unfair or indiscreet 
 sally, having a bitterness against Klesmer in her 
 secret soul which she knew herself unable to jus- 
 tify. Deronda was wondering what he should 
 have thought of her if he had never heard of her 
 before : probably that she put on a little hardness 
 and defiance by way of concealing some painful 
 consciousness, — if, indeed, he could imagine her 
 manners otherwise than in the light of his sus- 
 picion. But why did she not recognize him with 
 more friendliness? 
 
 Sir Hugo, by way of changing the subject, 
 said to her: " Is not this a beautiful room? It 
 was part of the refectory of the Abbey. There 
 was a division made by those pillars and the three 
 arches, and afterwards they were built up. Else 
 it was half as large again originally. There used 
 to be rows of Benedictines sitting where we are 
 sitting. Suppose we were suddenly to see the 
 lights burning low and the ghosts of the old 
 monks rising behind all our chairs! " 
 
 " Please don't! " said Gwendolen, with a play- 
 ful shudder. " It is very nice to come after an- 
 cestors and monks, but they should know their 
 places and keep underground. I should be 
 rather frightened to go about this house all alone. 
 I suppose the old generations must be angry with 
 us because we have altered things so much." 
 
 " Oh, the ghosts must be of all political par- 
 ties," said Sir Hugo. " And those fellows who 
 wanted to change things while they lived and 
 could n't do it must be on our side. But if you 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 191 
 
 would not like to go over the house alone, you 
 will like to go in company, I hope. You and 
 Grandcourt ought to see it all. And we will ask 
 Deronda to go round with us. He is more 
 learned about it than I am." The baronet was 
 in the most complaisant of humours. 
 
 Gwendolen stole a glance at Deronda, who 
 must have heard what Sir Hugo said, for he had 
 his face turned towards them, helping himself to 
 an entree; but he looked as impassive as a pic- 
 ture. At the notion of Deronda's showing her 
 and Grandcourt the place which was to be theirs, 
 and which she with painful emphasis remembered 
 might have been his (perhaps, if others had acted 
 differently) , certain thoughts had rushed in, — 
 thoughts often repeated within her, but now re- 
 turning on an occasion embarrassingly new ; and 
 she was conscious of something furtive and awk- 
 ward in her glance, which Sir Hugo must have 
 noticed. With her usual readiness of resource 
 against betrayal, she said playfully, " You don't 
 know how much I am afraid of Mr. Deronda." 
 
 " How 's that? Because you think him too 
 learned? " said Sir Hugo, whom the peculiarity 
 of her glance had not escaped. 
 
 " No. It is ever since I first saw him at Leu- 
 bronn. Because when he came to look on at the 
 roulette-table, I began to lose. He cast an evil 
 eye on my play. He did n't approve it. He has 
 told me so. And now whatever I do before him, 
 I am afraid he will cast an evil eye upon it." 
 
 "Gad! I'm rather afraid of him mj^self 
 when he does n't approve," said Sir Hugo, 
 glancing at Deronda; and then, turning his 
 face towards Gwendolen, he said less audibly, 
 
192 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " I don't think ladies generally object to have 
 his eyes upon them." The baronet's small 
 chronic complaint of facetiousness was at this 
 moment almost as annoying to Gwendolen as 
 it often was to Deronda. 
 
 " I object to any eyes that are critical," she 
 said, in a cool high voice, with a turn of her neck. 
 " Are there many of these old rooms left in the 
 Abbey?" 
 
 " Not many. There is a fine cloistered court 
 with a long gallery above it. But the finest bit 
 of all is turned into stables. It is part of the old 
 church. When I improved the place, I made the 
 most of every other bit; but it was out of my 
 reach to change the stables, so the horses have the 
 benefit of the fine old choir. You must go and 
 see it." 
 
 " I shall Uke to see the horses as well as the 
 building," said Gwendolen. 
 
 " Oh, I have no stud to speak of. Grand- 
 court will look with contempt at my horses," said 
 Sir Hugo. " I 've given up hunting, and go on 
 in a jog-trot way, as becomes an old gentleman 
 with daughters. The fact is, I went in for doing 
 too much at this place. We all lived at Diplow 
 for two years while the alterations were going on. 
 Do you like Diplow? " 
 
 " Not particularly," said Gwendolen, with in- 
 difference. One would have thought that the 
 young lady had all her life had more family seats 
 than she cared to go to. 
 
 " Ah! it will not do after Ryelands," said Sir 
 Hugo, well pleased. " Grandcourt, I know, 
 took it for the sake of the hunting. But he 
 found something so much better there," added 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 193 
 
 the baronet, lowering his voice, " that he might 
 well prefer it to any other place in the world." 
 
 " It has one attraction for me," said Gwendo- 
 len, passing over this compliment with a chill 
 smile, — " that it is within reach of Offendene." 
 
 " I understand that," said Sir Hugo, and then 
 let the subject drop. 
 
 What amiable baronet can escape the effect of 
 a strong desire for a particular possession! Sir 
 Hugo would have been glad that Grandcourt, 
 with or without reason, should prefer any other 
 place to Diplow; but inasmuch as in the pure 
 process of wishing we can always make the con- 
 ditions of our gratification benevolent, he did 
 wish that Grandcourt 's convenient disgust for 
 Diplow should not be associated with his mar- 
 riage of this very charming bride. Gwendolen 
 was much to the baronet's taste; but, as he ob- 
 served afterwards to Lady Mallinger, he should 
 never have taken her for a young girl who had 
 married beyond her expectations. 
 
 Deronda had not heard much of this conversa- 
 tion, having given his attention elsewhere; but 
 the glimpses he had of Gwendolen's manner 
 deepened the impression that it had something 
 newly artificial. 
 
 Later in the drawing-room, Deronda, at some- 
 body's request, sat down to the piano and sang. 
 Afterwards Mrs. Raymond took his place ; and 
 on rising he observed that Gwendolen had left 
 her seat, and had come to this end of the room, as 
 if to listen more fully, but was now standing with 
 her back to every one, apparently contemplating 
 a fine cowled head carved in ivory which hung 
 over a small table. He longed to go to her and 
 
 \0L. Xlll — 13 
 
194 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 speak. Why should he not obey such an impulse, 
 as he would have done towards any other lady 
 in the room? Yet he hesitated some moments, 
 observing the graceful lines of her back, but not 
 moving. 
 
 If you have any reason for not indulging a 
 wish to speak to a fair woman, it is a bad plan to 
 look long at her back: the wish to see what it 
 screens becomes the stronger. There may be a 
 very sweet smile on the other side. Deronda 
 ended by going to the end of the small table, at 
 right angles to Gwendolen's position; but before 
 he could speak she had turned on him no smile, 
 but such an appealing look of sadness, so utterly 
 different from the chill effort of her recognition 
 at table, that his speech was checked. For what 
 was an appreciable space of time to both, though 
 the observation of others could not have meas- 
 ured it, they looked at each other, — she seem- 
 ing to take the deep rest of confession, he with 
 an answering depth of sympathy that neutral- 
 ized other feelings. 
 
 " Will you not join in the music? " he said, by 
 way of meeting the necessity for speech. 
 
 That her look of confession had been involun- 
 tary was shown by that just perceptible shake 
 and change of countenance with which she 
 roused herself to reply calmly, " I join in it by 
 listening. I am fond of music." 
 
 " Are you not a musician? " 
 
 " I have given a great deal of time to music. 
 But I have not talent enough to make it worth 
 while. I shall never sing again." 
 
 " But if you are fond of music, it will always 
 be worth while in private, for your own delight. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 195 
 
 I make it a virtue to be content with my mid- 
 dlingness," said Deronda, smiling ; " it is always 
 pardonable, so that one does not ask others to 
 take it for superiority." 
 
 " I cannot imitate you," said Gwendolen, re- 
 covering her tone of artificial vivacity. " To be 
 middling with me is another phrase for being 
 dull. And the worst fault I have to find with 
 the world is, that it is dull. Do you know, I 
 am going to justify gambling in spite of you. 
 It is a refuge from dulness." 
 
 " I don't admit the justification," said De- 
 ronda. " I think what we call the dulness of 
 things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could 
 any one find an intense interest in life? And 
 many do." 
 
 " Ah, I see! The fault I find in the world is 
 my own fault," said Gwendolen, smiling at him. 
 Then after a moment, looking up at the ivory 
 again, she said, "Do you never find fault with 
 the world or with others? " 
 
 " Oh, yes. When I am in a grumbling mood." 
 
 "And hate people? Confess you hate them 
 when they stand in your way, — when their gain 
 is your loss? That is your own phrase, you 
 know." 
 
 " We are often standing in each other's way 
 when we can't help it. I think it is stupid to 
 hate people on that ground." 
 
 " But if they injure you and could have helped 
 it? " said Gwendolen, with a hard intensity un- 
 accountable in incidental talk like this. 
 
 Deronda wondered at her choice of subjects. 
 A painful impression arrested his answer a mo- 
 ment, but at last he said, with a graver, deeper 
 
196 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 intonation, " Why, then, after all, I prefer my 
 place to theirs." 
 
 " There I believe you are right," said Gwen- 
 dolen, with a sudden little laugh, and turned to 
 join the group at the piano. 
 
 Deronda looked round for Grandcourt, won- 
 dering whether he followed his bride's move- 
 ments with any attention ; but it was rather un- 
 discerning in him to suppose that he could find 
 out the fact. Grandcourt had a delusive mood 
 of observing whatever had an interest for him, 
 which could be surpassed by no sleepy-eyed ani- 
 mal on the watch for prey. At that moment he 
 was plunged in the depth of an easy-chair, being 
 talked to by Mr. Vandernoodt, who apparently 
 thought the acquaintance of such a bridegroom 
 worth cultivating; and an incautious person 
 might have supposed it safe to telegraph secrets 
 in front of him, the common prejudice being that 
 your quick observer is one whose eyes have quick 
 movements. Not at all. If you want a respect- 
 able witness who will see nothing inconvenient, 
 choose a vivacious gentleman, very much on the 
 alert, with two eyes wide open, a glass in one of 
 them, and an entire impartiality as to the purpose 
 of looking. If Grandcourt cared to keep any 
 one under his power, he saw them out of the 
 corners of his long narrow eyes, and if they went 
 behind him, he had a constructive process by 
 which he knew what they were doing there. He 
 knew perfectly well where his wife was, and how 
 she was behaving. Was he going to be a jealous 
 husband? Deronda imagined that to be likely; 
 but his imagination was as much astray about 
 Grandcourt as it would have been about an unex- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 197 
 
 plored continent where all the species were pecu- 
 liar. He did not conceive that he himself was a 
 likely subject of jealousy, or that he should give 
 any pretext for it; but the suspicion that a wife 
 is not happy naturally leads one to speculate on 
 the husband's private deportment; and De- 
 ronda found himself after one o'clock in the 
 morning in the rather ludicrous position of sit- 
 ting up severely holding a Hebrew grammar in 
 his hands (for somehow, in deference to Mor- 
 decai, he had begun to study Hebrew) , with the 
 consciousness that he had been in that attitude 
 nearly an hour, and had thought of nothing but 
 Gwendolen and her husband. To be an unusual 
 young man means for the most part to get a dif- 
 ficult mastery over the usual, which is often like 
 the sprite of ill-luck you pack up your goods to 
 escape from, and see grinning at you from the 
 top of your luggage-van. The peculiarities of 
 Deronda's nature had been acutely touched by 
 the brief incidents and words which made the 
 history of his intercourse with Gwendolen; and 
 this evening's slight addition had given them 
 an importunate recurrence. It was not vanity, 
 — it was ready sympathy that had made him 
 alive to a certain appealingness in her behaviour 
 towards him; and the difficulty with which she 
 had seemed to raise her eyes to bow to him, in 
 the first instance, was to be interpreted now by 
 that unmistakable look of involuntary confidence 
 which she had afterwards turned on him under 
 the consciousness of his approach. 
 
 "What is the use of it all?" thought De- 
 ronda, as he threw down his grammar, and began 
 to undress. " I can't do anything to help her, — 
 
198 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 - nobody can, if she has found out her mistake al- 
 ready. And it seems to me that she has a dreary 
 lack of the ideas that might help her. Strange 
 and piteous to think what a centre of wretched- 
 ness a delicate piece of human flesh like that might 
 be, wrapped round with fine raiment, her ears 
 pierced for gems, her head held loftily, her mouth 
 all smiling pretence, the poor soul within her sit- 
 ting in sick distaste of all things ! But what do I 
 know of her? There may be a demon in her to 
 match the worst husband, for what I can tell. 
 She was clearly an ill-educated, worldly girl: 
 perhaps she is a coquette." 
 
 This last reflection, not much believed in, was 
 a self-administered dose of caution, prompted 
 partly by Sir Hugo's much- contemned joking 
 on the subject of flirtation. Deronda resolved 
 not to volunteer any tete-a-tete with Gwendolen 
 during the few days of her stay at the Abbey; 
 and he was capable of keeping a resolve in spite 
 of much inclination to the contrary. 
 
 But a man cannot resolve about a woman's 
 actions, least of all about those of a woman like 
 Gwendolen, in whose nature there was a combi- 
 nation of proud reserve with rashness, of peri- 
 lously poised terror with defiance, which might 
 alternately flatter and disappoint control. Few 
 words could less represent her than " coquette." 
 She had a native love of homage, and belief in 
 her own power; but no cold artifice for the sake 
 of enslaving. And the poor thing's belief in her 
 power, with her other dreams before marriage, 
 had often to be thrust aside now like the toys of a 
 sick child, which it looks at with dull eyes, and 
 has no heart to play with, however it may try. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 199 
 
 The next day at lunch Sir Hugo said to her, 
 " The thaw has gone on Hke magic, and it 's so 
 pleasant out of doors just now, — shall we go 
 and see the stables and the other old bits about 
 the place? " 
 
 " Yes, pray," said Gwendolen. " You will 
 like to see the stables, Henleigh? " she added, 
 looking at her husband. 
 
 " Uncommonly," said Grandcourt, with an in- 
 difference which seemed to give irony to the 
 word, as he returned her look. It was the first 
 time Deronda had seen them speak to each other 
 since their arrival, and he thought their exchange 
 of looks as cold and official as if it had been a 
 ceremony to keep up a charter. Still, the Eng- 
 lish fondness for reserve will account for much 
 negation; and Grandcourt 's manners with an 
 extra veil of reserve over them might be ex- 
 pected to present the extreme type of the na- 
 tional taste. 
 
 " Who else is inclined to make the tour of the 
 house and premises?" said Sir Hugo. "The 
 ladies must muffle themselves: there is only just 
 about time to do it well before sunset. You will 
 go, Dan, won't you? " 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Deronda, carelessly, knowing 
 that Sir Hugo would think any excuse dis- 
 obliging. 
 
 " All meet in the library, then, when they are 
 ready, — say in half an hour," said the baronet. 
 Gwendolen made herself ready with wonderful 
 quickness, and in ten minutes came down into 
 the library in her sables, plume, and little thick 
 boots. As soon as she entered the room she was 
 aware that some one else was there : it was pre- 
 
200 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 cisely what she had hoped for. Deronda was 
 standing with his back towards her at the far 
 end of the room, and was looking over a news- 
 paper. How could little thick boots make any 
 noise on an Axminster carpet? And to cough 
 would have seemed an intended signalling which 
 her pride could not condescend to; also, she 
 felt bashful about walking up to him and letting 
 him know that she was there, though it was her 
 hunger to speak to him which had set her imagi- 
 nation on constructing this chance of finding 
 him, and had made her hurry down, as birds 
 hover near the water which they dare not drink. 
 Always uneasily dubious about his opinion of 
 her, she felt a peculiar anxiety to-day, lest he 
 might think of her with contempt, as one 
 triumphantly conscious of being Grandcourt'-s 
 wife, the future lady of this domain. It was her 
 habitual effort now to magnify the satisfactions 
 of her pride, on which she nourished her strength ; 
 but somehow Deronda's being there disturbed 
 them all. There was not the faintest touch of 
 coquetry in the attitude of her mind towards 
 him : he was unique to her among men, because 
 he had impressed her as being not her admirer 
 but her superior: in some mysterious way he 
 was becoming a part of her conscience, as one 
 woman whose nature is an object of reverential 
 belief may become a new conscience to a man. 
 
 And now he would not look round and find 
 out that she was there! The paper crackled in 
 his hand, his head rose and sank, exploring those 
 stupid columns, and he was evidently stroking 
 his beard, as if this world were a very easy 
 affair to her. Of course all the rest of the com- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 201 
 
 pany would soon be down, and the opportunity 
 of her saying something to efface her flippancy 
 of the evening before, would be quite gone. She 
 felt sick with irritation, — so fast do young 
 creatures like her absorb misery through invisi- 
 ble suckers of their own fancies, — and her face 
 had gathered that peculiar expression which 
 comes with a mortification to which tears are 
 forbidden. 
 
 At last he threw down the paper and turned 
 round. 
 
 " Oh, you are there already," he said, coming 
 forward a step or two; "I must go and put 
 on my coat:" 
 
 He turned aside and walked out of the room. 
 This was behaving quite badly. Mere politeness 
 would have made him stay to exchange some 
 words before leaving her alone. It was true that 
 Grandcourt came in with Sir Hugo immediately 
 after, so that the words must have been too few 
 to be worth anything. As it was, they saw him 
 walking from the library door. 
 
 "A — you look rather ill," said Grandcourt, 
 going straight up to her, standing in front of 
 her, and looking into her eyes. " Do you feel 
 equal to the walk? " 
 
 " Yes, I shall like it," said Gwendolen, with- 
 out the slightest rnovement except this of the 
 lips. 
 
 " We could put off going over the house, you 
 know, and only go out of doors," said Sir Hugo 
 kindly, while Grandcourt turned aside. 
 
 "Oh dear, no!" said Gwendolen, speaking 
 with determination; "let us put off nothing. 
 I want a long walk." 
 
202 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 The rest of the walking party — two ladies 
 and two gentlemen besides Deronda — had now 
 assembled; and Gwendolen, rallying, went with 
 due cheerfulness by the side of Sir Hugo, pay- 
 ing apparently an equal attention to the com- 
 mentaries Deronda was called upon to give on 
 the various architectural fragments, and to Sir 
 Hugo's reasons for not attempting to remedy 
 the mixture of the undisguised modern with the 
 antique, — which in his opinion only made the 
 place the more truly historical. On their way 
 to the buttery and kitchen they took the outside 
 of the house, and paused before a beautiful 
 pointed doorway, which was the only remnant 
 in the east front. 
 
 " Well, now, to my mind," said Sir Hugo, 
 " that is more interesting standing as it is in 
 the middle of what is frankly four centuries 
 later, than if the whole front had been dressed 
 up in a pretence of the thirteenth century. Ad- 
 ditions ought to smack of the time when they 
 are made, and carry the stamp of their period. 
 I would n't destroy any old bits, but that notion 
 of reproducing the old is a mistake, I think. 
 At least, if a man likes to do it he must pay 
 for his whistle. Besides, where are you to stop 
 along that road, — making loopholes where 
 you don't want to peep, and so on? You may 
 as well ask me to wear out the stones with kneel- 
 ing; eh, Grandcourt? " 
 
 " A confounded nuisance," drawled Grand- 
 court. " I hate fellows wanting to howl litanies, 
 — acting the greatest bores that have ever 
 existed." 
 
 " Well, yes, that 's what their romanticism 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 203 
 
 must come to J' said Sir Hugo, in a tone of con- 
 fidential assent, — " that is, if they carry it out 
 logically." 
 
 " I think that way of arguing against a 
 course because it may be ridden down to an 
 absurdity would soon bring life to a standstill," 
 said Deronda. "It is not the logic of human 
 action, but of a roasting-jack, that must go on 
 to the last turn when it has been once wound up. 
 We can do nothing safely without some judg- 
 ment as to where we are to stop." 
 
 " I find the rule of the pocket the best guide," 
 said Sir Hugo, laughingly. " And as for most 
 of your new-old building, you had need to hire 
 men to scratch and chip it all over artistically 
 to give it an elderly-looking surface; which at 
 the present rate of labour would not answer." 
 
 " Do you want to keep up the old fashions, 
 then, Mr. Deronda? " said Gwendolen, taking 
 advantage of the freedom of grouping to fall 
 back a little, while Sir Hugo and Grandcourt 
 went on. 
 
 " Some of them. I don't see why we should 
 not use our choice there as we do elsewhere, — 
 or why either age or novelty by itself is an argu- 
 ment for or against. To delight in doing things 
 because our fathers did them is good if it shuts 
 out nothing better; it enlarges the range of 
 affection, and affection is the broadest basis of 
 good in life." 
 
 "Do you think so?" said Gwendolen, with 
 a little surprise. " I should have thought you 
 cared most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and 
 all that." 
 
 " But to care about them is a sort of aflPec- 
 
204 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tion," said Deronda, smiling at, her sudden 
 naivete. " Call it attachment, interest, willing- 
 ness to bear a great deal for the sake of being 
 with them and saving them from injury. Of 
 course it makes a difference if the objects of 
 interest are human beings; but generally in all 
 deep affections the objects are a mixture — 
 half persons and half ideas — sentiments and 
 affections flow in together." 
 
 " I wonder whether I understand that," said 
 Gwendolen, putting up her chin in her old 
 saucy manner. " I believe I am not very affec- 
 tionate; perhaps you mean to tell me that is 
 the reason why I don't see much good in 
 life." 
 
 "No, I did not mean to tell you that; but 
 I admit that I should think it true if I believed 
 what you say of yourself," said Deronda, 
 gravely. 
 
 Here Sir Hugo and Grandcourt turned round 
 and paused. 
 
 " I never can get Mr. Deronda to pay me a 
 compliment," said Gwendolen. " I have quite 
 a curiosity to see whether a little flattery can be 
 extracted from him." 
 
 " Ah! " said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda, 
 " the fact is, it is hopeless to flatter a bride. We 
 give it up in despair. She has been so fed on 
 sweet speeches that everything we say seems 
 tasteless." 
 
 " Quite true," said Gwendolen, bending her 
 head and smiling. " Mr. Grandcourt won me 
 by neatly turned compliments. If there had 
 been one word out of place, it would have been 
 fatal." 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 205 
 
 " Do you hear that? " said Sir Hugo, looking 
 at the husband. 
 
 " Yes," said Grandcourt, without change of 
 countenance. "It is a deucedly hard thing to 
 keep up, though." 
 
 All this seemed to Sir Hugo a natural play- 
 fulness between such a husband and wife; but 
 Deronda wondered at the misleading alterna- 
 tions in Gwendolen's manner, which at one 
 moment seemed to invite sympathy by childlike 
 indiscretion, at another to repel it by proud con- 
 cealment. He tried to keep out of her way by 
 devoting himself to Miss Juliet Fenn, a young 
 lady whose profile had been so unfavourably 
 decided by circumstances over which she had 
 no control, that Gwendolen some months ago 
 had felt it impossible to be jealous of her. 
 Nevertheless when they were seeing the kitchen 
 — a part of the original building in perfect 
 preservation — the depth of shadow in the 
 niches of the stone walls and groined vault, the 
 play of light from the huge glowing fire on 
 polished tin, brass, and copper, the fine reso- 
 nance that came with every sound of voice or 
 metal, were all spoiled for Gwendolen, and Sir 
 Hugo's speech about them was made rather im- 
 portunate, because Deronda was discoursing to 
 the other ladies and kept at a distance from her. 
 It did not signify that the other gentlemen took 
 the opportunity of being near her : of what use 
 in the world was their admiration while she had 
 an uneasy sense that there was some standard in 
 Deronda's mind which measured her into little- 
 ness? Mr. Vandernoodt, who had the mania 
 of always describing one thing while you were 
 
206 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 looking at another, was quite intolerable with 
 his insistence on Lord Blough's kitchen, which 
 he had seen in the north. 
 
 " Pray don't ask us to see two kitchens at 
 once. It makes the heat double. I must really 
 go out of it," she cried at last, marching reso- 
 lutely into the open air, and leaving the others 
 in the rear. Grandcourt was already out, and as 
 she joined him, he said, — 
 
 " I wondered how long you meant to stay in 
 that damned place," — one of the freedoms he 
 had assumed as a husband being the use of his 
 strongest epithets. Gwendolen, turning to see 
 the rest of the party approach, said, — 
 
 " It was certainly rather too warm in one's 
 wraps." 
 
 They walked on the gravel across a green 
 court, where the snow still lay in islets on the 
 grass, and in masses on the boughs of the great 
 cedar and the crenelated coping of the stone 
 walls, and then into a larger court, where there 
 was another cedar, to find the beautiful choir 
 long ago turned into stables, in the first instance 
 perhaps after an impromptu fashion by troopers, 
 who had a pious satisfaction in insulting the 
 priests of Baal and the images of Ashtoreth, 
 the queen of heaven. The exterior — its west 
 end, save for the stable door, walled in with 
 brick and covered with ivy — was much defaced, 
 maimed of finial and gurgoyle, the friable lime- 
 stone broken and fretted, and lending its soft 
 gray to a powdery dark lichen; the long win- 
 dows, too, were filled in with brick as far as the 
 springing of the arches, the broad clerestory 
 windows with wire or ventilating blinds. With 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 207 
 
 the low wintry afternoon sun upon it, sending 
 shadows from the cedar boughs, and hghting 
 up the touches of snow remaining on every 
 ledge, it had still a scarcely disturbed aspect of 
 antique solemnity, which gave the scene in the 
 interior rather a startling effect; though, eccle- 
 siastical or reverential indignation apart, the 
 eyes could hardly help dwelling with pleasure 
 on its piquant picturesqueness. Each finely 
 arched chapel was turned into a stall, where 
 in the dusty glazing of the windows there still 
 gleamed patches of crimson, orange, blue, and 
 palest violet; for the rest, the choir had been 
 gutted, the floor levelled, paved, and drained 
 according to the most approved fashion, and a 
 line of loose-boxes erected in the middle : a soft 
 light fell from the upper windows on sleek brown 
 or gray flanks and haunches; on mild equine 
 faces looking out with active nostrils over the 
 varnished brown boarding; on the hay hanging 
 from racks where the saints once looked down 
 from the altar-pieces, and on the pale golden 
 straw scattered or in heaps; on a little white- 
 and-liver-coloured spaniel making his bed on 
 the back of an elderly hackney, and on four 
 ancient angels, still showing signs of devotion 
 like mutilated martyrs, — while over all, the 
 grand pointed roof, untouched by reforming 
 wash, showed its lines and colours mysteriously 
 through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a 
 hoof now and then striking against the boards 
 seemed to fill the vault with thunder, while out- 
 side there was the answering bay of the blood- 
 hounds. 
 
 "Oh, this is glorious!" Gwendolen burst 
 
208 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 forth, in for get fulness of everything but the im- 
 mediate impression: there had been a httle in- 
 toxication for her in the grand spaces of courts 
 and building, and the fact of her being an im- 
 portant person among them. " This glorious! 
 Only I wish there were a horse in every one of 
 the boxes. I would ten times rather have these 
 stables than those at Diplow." 
 
 But she had no sooner said this than some 
 consciousness arrested her, and involuntarily she 
 turned her eyes towards Deronda, who oddly 
 enough had taken off his felt hat and stood hold- 
 ing it before him as if they had entered a room 
 or an actual church. He, like others, happened 
 to be looking at her, and their eyes met — to 
 her intense vexation, for it seemed to her that 
 by looking at him she had betrayed the rever- 
 ence of her thoughts, and she felt herself blush- 
 ing: she exaggerated the impression that even 
 Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of her 
 bad taste in referring to the possession of any- 
 thing at the Abbey: as for Deronda, she had 
 probably made him despise her. Her annoy- 
 ance at what she imagined to be the obviousness 
 of her confusion robbed her of her usual facility 
 in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning 
 up her face to look at the roof, she wheeled away 
 in that attitude. If any had noticed her blush 
 as significant, they had certainly not interpreted 
 it by the secret windings and recesses of her feel- 
 ing. A blush is no language: only a dubious 
 flag-signal, which may mean either of two con- 
 tradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess 
 at , some part of her feeling; but while he was 
 observing her he was himself under observation. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 209 
 
 "Do you take off your hat to the horses?" 
 said Grandcourt, with a sHght sneer. 
 
 " Why not? " said Deronda, covering himself. 
 He had really taken off the hat automatically, 
 and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless 
 have done so with impunity: ugliness having 
 naturally the air of involuntary exposure, and 
 beauty, of display. 
 
 Gwendolen's confusion was soon merged in ^ 
 the survey of the horses, which Grandcourt po- 
 htely abstained from appraising, languidly as- 
 senting to Sir Hugo's alternate depreciation 
 and eulogy of the same animal, as one that he 
 should not have bought when he was younger 
 and piqued himself on his horses, but yet one 
 that had better qualities than many more expen- 
 sive brutes. 
 
 " The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper 
 into the pocket nowadays, and I am very glad 
 to have got rid of that demangeaisonj' said Sir 
 Hugo, as they were coming out. 
 
 " What is a man to do, though? " said Grand- 
 court. " He must ride; I don't see what else 
 there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit 
 astride a set of brutes with every deformity 
 under the sun." 
 
 This delicate diplomatic way of characterizing 
 Sir Hugo's stud did not require direct notice; 
 and the baronet, feeling that the conversation 
 had worn rather thin, said to the party generally, 
 " Now we are going to see the cloister — the 
 finest bit of all — in perfect preservation: the 
 monks might have been walking there yes- 
 terday." 
 
 But Gwendolen had lingered behind to look 
 
 VOL. xm — 14 
 
210 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 at the kennelled blood-hounds, perhaps because 
 she felt a little dispirited; and Grandcourt 
 waited for her. 
 
 " You had better take my arm," he said, in 
 his low tone of command; and she took it. 
 
 " It 's a great bore being dragged about in 
 this way, and no cigar," said Grandcourt. 
 
 " I thought you would like it." 
 
 "Like it! — one eternal chatter. And en- 
 couraging those ugly girls — inviting one to 
 meet such monsters. How that fat Deronda can 
 bear looking at her — " 
 
 " Why do you call him a fat? Do you object 
 to him so much? " 
 
 "Object? no. What do I care about his 
 being a fat? It 's of no consequence to me. I '11 
 invite him to Diplow again if you like." 
 
 " I don't think he would come. He is too 
 clever and learned to care about us J' said Gwen- 
 dolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be 
 told (privately) that it was possible for him to 
 be looked down upon. 
 
 "I never saw that make much difference in 
 a man. Either he is a gentleman or he is not," 
 said Grandcourt. 
 
 That a new husband and wife should snatch 
 a moment's tete-a-tete was what could be under- 
 stood and indulged; and the rest of the party 
 left them in the rear till, re-entering the garden, 
 they all paused in that cloistered court where, 
 among the falling rose-petals thirteen years be- 
 fore, we saw a boy becoming acquainted with 
 his first sorrow. This cloister was built of harder 
 stone than the church, and had been in greater 
 safety from the wearing weather. It was a rare 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 211 
 
 example of a northern cloister with arched and 
 pillared openings not intended for glazing, and 
 the delicately wrought foliage of. the capitals 
 seemed still to carry the very touches of the 
 chisel. Gwendolen had dropped her husband's 
 arm and joined the other ladies, to whom De- 
 ronda was noticing the delicate sense which had 
 combined freedom with accuracy in the imita- 
 tion of natural forms. 
 
 " I wonder whether one oftener learns to love 
 real objects through their representations, or 
 the representations through the real objects," 
 he said, after pointing out a lovely capital made 
 by the curled leaves of greens, showing their 
 reticulated under-side with the firm gradual 
 swell of its central rib. " When I was a little 
 fellow these capitals taught me to observe, and 
 delight in, the structure of leaves." 
 
 " I suppose you can see every line of them 
 with your eyes shut," said Juliet Fenn. 
 
 " Yes. I was always repeating them, because 
 for a good many years this court stood for me 
 as my only image of a convent, and whenever 
 I read of monks and monasteries, this was my 
 scenery for them." 
 
 " You must love this place very much," said 
 Miss Fenn, innocently, not thinking of inherit- 
 ance. " So many homes are like twenty others. 
 But this is unique, and you seem to know every 
 cranny of it. I dare say you could never love 
 another home so well." 
 
 Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda, 
 quietly, being used to all possible thoughts of 
 this kind. " To most men their early home is 
 no more than a memory of their early years, 
 
212 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 and I 'm not sure but they have the best of it. 
 The image is never marred. There 's no dis- 
 appointment in memory, and one's exaggera- 
 tions are always on the good side." 
 
 Gwendolen felt sure that he spoke in that way 
 out of delicacy to her and Grandcourt — be- 
 cause he knew they must hear him ; and that he 
 probably thought of her as a selfish creature 
 who only cared about possessing things in her 
 own person. But whatever he might say, it 
 must have been a secret hardship to him that 
 any circumstances' of his birth had shut him out 
 from the inheritance of his father's position; 
 and if he supposed that she exulted in her hus- 
 band's taking it, what could he feel for her but 
 scornful pity? Indeed it seemed clear to her 
 that he was avoiding her, and preferred talking 
 to others — which nevertheless was not kind in 
 him. 
 
 With these thoughts in her mind she was pre- 
 vented by a mixture of pride and timidity from 
 addressing him again, and when they were look- 
 ing at the rows of quaint portraits in the gallery 
 above the cloisters, she kept up her air of in- 
 terest and made her vivacious remarks without 
 any direct appeal to Deronda. But at the end 
 she was very weary of her assumed spirits, and 
 as Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, 
 she went to the pretty boudoir which had been 
 assigned to her, and shut herself up to look 
 melancholy at her ease. No chemical process 
 shows a more wonderful activity than the trans- 
 forming influence of the thoughts we imagine 
 to be going on in another. Changes in theory, 
 religion, admirations, may begin with a sus- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 213 
 
 picion of dissent or disapproval, even when the 
 grounds of disapproval are but matter of search- 
 ing conjecture. 
 
 Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an un- 
 easy, transforming process, — all the old nature 
 shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleas- 
 ures perturbed, but still showing wholeness and 
 strength in the will to reassert itself. After 
 every new shock of humiliation she tried to ad- 
 just herself and seize her old supports, — proud 
 concealment, trust in new excitements that 
 would make life go by without much thinking; 
 trust in some deed of reparation to nullify her 
 self -blame and shield her from a vague, ever- 
 visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust 
 in the hardening effect of use and wont that 
 would make her indifferent to her miseries. 
 
 Yes, — miseries. This beautiful, healthy 
 young creature, with her two-and-twenty years 
 and her gratified ambition, no longer felt in- 
 clined to kiss her fortunate image in the glass; 
 she looked at it with wonder that she could be so 
 miserable. One belief which had accompanied 
 her through her unmarried life as a self -cajoling 
 superstition, encouraged by the subordination 
 of every one about her — the belief in her own 
 power of dominating — was utterly gone. Al- 
 ready, in seven short weeks, which seemed half 
 her life, her husband had gained a mastery 
 which she could no more resist than she could 
 have resisted the benumbing effect from the 
 touch of a torpedo. Gwendolen's will had 
 seemed imperious in its small girlish sway; but 
 it was the will of a creature with a large dis- 
 course of imaginative fears: a shadow would 
 
214 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 have been enough to relax its hold. And she 
 had found a will like that of a crab or a boa- 
 constrictor which goes on pinching or crushing 
 without alarm at thunder. Not that Grandcourt 
 was without calculation of the intangible effects 
 which were the chief means of mastery; indeed 
 he had a surprising acuteness in detecting that 
 situation of feeling in Gwendolen which made 
 her proud and rebellious spirit dumb and help- 
 less before him. 
 
 She had burnt Lydia Glasher's letter with an 
 instantaneous terror lest other eyes should see 
 it, and had tenaciously concealed from Grand- 
 court that there was any other cause of her vio- 
 lent hysterics than the excitement and fatigue 
 of the day : she had been urged into an implied 
 falsehood. " Don't ask me — it was my feeling 
 about everything — it was the sudden change 
 from home." The words of that letter kept 
 repeating themselves, and hung on her con- 
 sciousness with the weight of a prophetic doom. 
 " I am the grave in which your chance of happi- 
 ness is buried as well as mine. You had your 
 warning. You have chosen to injure me and my - 
 children. He had meant to marry me. He 
 would have married me at last, if you had not 
 broken your word. You will have your punish- 
 ment. I desire it with all my soul. Will you 
 give him this letter to set him against me and 
 ruin us more, — me and my children ? Shall you 
 like to stand before your husband with these 
 diamonds on you, and these words of mine in 
 his thoughts and yours ? Will he think you have 
 any right to complain when he has made you 
 miserable? You took him with your eyes open. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 215 
 
 The willing wrong you have done me will be 
 your curse." 
 
 The words had nestled their venomous life 
 within her, and stirred continually the vision 
 of the scene at the Whispering Stones. That 
 scene ^as now like an accusing apparition: she 
 dreaded that Grandcourt should know of it, — 
 so far out of her sight now was that possibility 
 she had once satisfied herself with, of speaking 
 to him about Mrs. Glasher and her children, 
 and making them rich amends. Any endurance 
 seemed easier than the mortal humiliation of con- 
 fessing that she knew all before she married him, 
 and in marrying him had broken her word. For 
 the reasons by which she had justified herself 
 when the marriage tempted her, and all her 
 easy arrangement of her future power over her 
 husband to make him do better than he might 
 be inclined to do were now as futile as the burnt- 
 out lights which set off a child's pageant. Her 
 sense of being blameworthy was exaggerated 
 by a dread both definite and vague. The defi- 
 nite dread was lest the veil of secrecy should fall 
 between her and Grandcourt, and give him the 
 right to taunt her. With the reading of that 
 letter had begun her husband's empire of fear. 
 
 And her husband all the while knew it. He 
 had not, indeed, any distinct knowledge of her 
 broken promise, and would not have rated highly 
 the effect of that breach on her conscience; but 
 he was aware not only of what Lush had told 
 him about the meeting at the Whispering- 
 Stones, but also of Gwendolen's concealment 
 as to the cause of her sudden illness. He felt 
 sure that Lydia had enclosed something with 
 
216 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the diamonds, and that this something, whatever 
 it was, had at once created in Gwendolen a new 
 repulsion for him and a reason for not daring 
 to manifest it. He did not greatly mind, or feel 
 as many men might have felt, that his hopes 
 in marriage were blighted: he had wanted to 
 marry Gwendolen, and he was not a man to 
 repent. Why should a gentleman whose other 
 relations in life are carried on without the luxury 
 of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require 
 that kind of condiment in domestic life? What 
 he chiefly felt was that a change had come over 
 the conditions of his mastery, which, far from 
 shaking it, might establish it the more thor- 
 oughly. And it was established. He judged 
 that he had not married a simpleton unable to 
 perceive the impossibility of escape, or to see 
 alternative evils : he had married a girl who had 
 spirit and pride enough not to make a fool of 
 herself by forfeiting all the advantages of a 
 position which had attracted her; and if she 
 wanted pregnant hints to help her in making 
 up her mind properly, he would take care not to 
 withhold them. 
 
 Gwendolen, indeed, with all that gnawing 
 trouble in her consciousness, had hardly for a 
 moment dropped the sense that it was her part 
 to bear herself with dignity, and appear what 
 is called happy. In disclosure of disappoint- 
 ment or sorrow she saw nothing but a humilia- 
 tion which would have been vinegar to her 
 wounds. Whatever her husband might come at 
 last to be to her, she meant to wear the yoke so 
 as not to be pitied. For she did think of the 
 coming years with presentiment : she was fright- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 217 
 
 ened at Grandcourt. The poor thing had passed 
 from her girhsh sauciness of superiority over 
 this inert specimen of personal distinction into 
 an amazed perception of her former ignorance 
 about the possible mental attitude of a man 
 towards the woman he sought in marriage, — 
 of her present ignorance as to what their life 
 with each other might turn into. For novelty 
 gives immeasurableness to fear, and fills the 
 early time of all sad changes with phantoms of 
 the future. Her little coquetries, voluntary or 
 involuntary, had told on Grandcourt during 
 courtship, and formed a medium of communica- 
 tion between them, showing him in the light of 
 a creature such as she could understand and 
 manage: but marriage had nullified all such 
 interchange, and Grandcourt had become a 
 blank uncertainty to her in everything but this, 
 that he would do just what he willed, and that 
 she had neither devices at her command to deter- 
 mine his will, nor any rational means of escap- 
 ing it. 
 
 What had occurred between them about her 
 wearing the diamonds was typical. One even- 
 ing, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they 
 were going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. 
 Gwendolen had said to herself that she would 
 never wear those diamonds: they had horrible 
 words clinging and crawling about them, as 
 from some bad dream, whose images lingered on 
 the perturbed sense. She came down dressed 
 in her white, with only a streak of gold and a 
 pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had 
 given her, round her neck, and little emerald 
 stars in her ears. 
 
218 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Grandcourt stood with his back to the fire 
 and looked at her as she entered. 
 
 "Am I altogether as you like?" she said, 
 speaking rather gayly. She was not without 
 enjoyment in this occasion of going to Bracken- 
 shaw Castle with her new dignities upon her, 
 as men whose affairs are sadly involved will 
 enjoy dining out among persons likely to be 
 under a pleasant mistake about them. 
 
 " No," said Grandcourt. 
 
 Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, 
 wondering what was to come. She was not un- 
 prepared for some struggle about the diamonds; 
 jbut suppose he were going to say, in low con- 
 temptuous tones, " You are not in any way what 
 I like." It was very bad for her to be secretly 
 hating him; but it would be much worse when 
 he gave the first sign of hating her. 
 
 " Oh, mercy! " she exclaimed, the pause last- 
 ing till she could bear it no longer. " How am I 
 to alter myself? " 
 
 " Put on the diamonds," said Grandcourt, 
 looking straight at her with his narrow glance. 
 
 Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of show- 
 ing any emotion, and feeling that nevertheless 
 there was some change in her eyes as they met 
 his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as 
 indifferently as she could, " Oh, please not. I 
 don't think diamonds suit me." 
 
 " What you think has nothing to do with it," 
 said Grandcourt, his sotto-vbce imperiousness 
 seeming to have an evening quietude and fin- 
 ish, like his toilet. " I wish you to wear the 
 diamonds." 
 
 " Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds," said 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 219 
 
 Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her prepara- 
 tion. That white hand of his which was touching 
 his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging 
 round her neck and threatening to throttle her ; 
 for her fear of him, mingling with the vague 
 foreboding of some retributive calamity which 
 hung about her life, had reached a superstitious 
 point. 
 
 " Oblige me by telling me your reason for not 
 wearing the diamonds when I desire it," said 
 Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, 
 and she felt her own eyes narrowing under them 
 as if to shut out an entering pain. 
 
 Of what use was the rebellion within her? She 
 could say nothing that would not hurt her worse 
 than submission. Turning slowly and covering 
 herself again, she went to her dressing-room. 
 As she reached out the diamonds, it occurred to 
 her that her unwillingness to wear them might 
 have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt 
 that she had some knowledge about them which 
 he had not given her. She fancied that his 
 eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How 
 could she be defiant? She had nothing to say 
 that would ; touch him, — nothing but what 
 would give him a more painful grasp on her 
 consciousness. 
 
 " He delights in making the dogs and horses 
 quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them 
 his," she said to herself, as she opened the jewel- 
 case with a shivering sensation. " It will come to 
 be so with me ; and I shall quail. What else is 
 there for me? I will not say to the world, ' Pity 
 me.' " 
 
 She was about to ring for her maid when she 
 
220 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 heard the door open behind her. It was Grand- 
 court who came in. 
 
 " You want some one to fasten them," he said, 
 coming towards her. 
 
 She did not answer, but simply stood still, 
 leaving him to take out the ornaments and fasten 
 them as he would. Doubtless he had been used to 
 fasten them on some one else. With a bitter sort 
 of sarcasm against herself, Gwendolen thought, 
 " What a privilege this is, to have robbed another 
 woman of ! " 
 
 " What makes you so cold? " said Grand- 
 court, when he had fastened the last earring. 
 
 Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see 
 a woman come into a room looking frozen. 
 If you are to appear as a bride at all, appear 
 decently." 
 
 This marital speech was not exactly persua- 
 sive, but it touched the quick of Gwendolen's 
 pride and forced her to rally. The words of the 
 bad dream crawled about the diamonds still, 
 but only for her: to others they were brilliants 
 that suited her perfectly, and Grandcourt in- 
 wardly observed that she answered to the rein. 
 
 " Oh, yes, mamma, quite happy," Gwendolen 
 had said on her return to Diplow. " Not at all 
 disappointed in Ryelands. It is a much finer 
 place than this, larger in every way. But don't 
 you want some more money? " 
 
 " Did you not know that Mr. Grandcourt left 
 me a letter on your wedding-day? I am to have 
 eight hundred a-year. He wishes me to keep 
 Offendene for the present, while you are at 
 Diplow. But if there were some pretty cottage 
 near the park at R3"elands, we might live there 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 221 
 
 without much expense, and I should have you 
 most of the year, perhaps." 
 
 " We must leave that to Mr. Grandcourt, 
 mamma." 
 
 " Oh, certainly. It is exceedingly handsome 
 of him to say that he will pay the rent for 
 Offendene till June. And we can go on very 
 well, — without any man-servant except Crane, 
 just for out of doors. Our good Merry will 
 stay with us and help me to manage everything. 
 It is natural that Mr. Grandcourt should wish 
 me to live in a good style of house in your 
 neighbourhood, and I cannot decline. So he 
 said nothing about it to you? " 
 
 "No; he wished me to hear it from you, I 
 suppose." 
 
 Gwendolen, in fact, had been very anxious to 
 have some definite knowledge of what would be 
 done for her mother, but at no moment since 
 her marriage had she been able to overcome the 
 difficulty of mentioning the subject to Grand- 
 court. Now, however, she had a sense of obli- 
 gation which would not let her rest without say- 
 ing to him, "It is very good of you to provide 
 for mamma. You took a great deal on your- 
 self in marrying a girl who had nothing but 
 -relations belonging to her." 
 
 Grandcourt was smoking, and only said care- 
 lessly, "Of course I was not going to let her 
 live like a gamekeeper's mother." 
 
 " At least he is not mean about money," 
 thought Gwendolen, " and mamma is the better 
 off for my marriage." 
 
 She often pursued the comparison between 
 what might have been, if she had not married 
 
222 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Grandcourt, and what actually was, trying to 
 persuade herself that life generally was barren 
 of satisfaction, and that if she had chosen dif- 
 ferently she might now have been looking back 
 with a regret as bitter as the feeling she 'was 
 trying to argue away. Her mother's dulness, 
 which used to irritate her, she was at present 
 inclined to explain as the ordinary result of 
 women's experience. True, she still saw that 
 she would " manage differently^ from mamma; " 
 but her management now only meant that she 
 would carry her troubles with spirit, and let 
 none suspect them. By and by she promised 
 herself that she should get used to her heart- 
 sores, and find excitements that would carry 
 her through life, as a hard gallop carried her 
 through some of the morning hours. There was 
 gambling: she had heard stories at Leubronn 
 of fashionable women who gambled in all sorts 
 of ways. It seemed very fiat to her at this 
 distance; but perhaps if she began to gamble 
 again, the passion might awake. Then there 
 was the pleasure of producing an effect by her 
 appearance in society: what did celebrated 
 beauties do in town when their husbands could 
 afford display? All men were fascinated by 
 them; they had a perfect equipage and toilet, 
 walked into public places, and bowed, and made 
 the usual answers, and walked out again: per- 
 haps they bought china, and practised accom- 
 plishments. If she could only feel a keen ap- 
 petite for those pleasures, — could only believe 
 in pleasure as she used to do! Accomplish- 
 ments had ceased to have the exciting quality 
 of promising any pre-eminence to her; and as 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 223 
 
 for fascinated gentlemen, — adorers who might 
 hover round her with languishment, and diver- 
 sify married life with the romantic stir of 
 mystery, passion, and danger which her French 
 reading had given her some girlish notion of, — 
 they presented themselves to her imagination 
 with the fatal circumstance that, instead of fas- 
 cinating her in return, they were clad in her 
 own weariness and disgust. The admiring male, 
 rashly adjusting the expression of his features 
 and the turn of his conversation to her supposed 
 tastes, had always been an absurd object to her, 
 and at present seemed rather detestable. Many 
 courses are actually pursued, — follies and sins 
 both convenient and inconvenient, — without 
 pleasure or hope of pleasure ; but to solace our- 
 selves with imagining any course beforehand, 
 there must be some foretaste of pleasure in the 
 shape of appetite; and Gwendolen's appetite 
 had sickened. Let her wander over the possi- 
 bilities of her life as she would, an uncertain 
 shadow dogged her. Her confidence in herself 
 and her destiny had turned into remorse and 
 dread; she trusted neither herself nor her 
 future. 
 
 This hidden helplessness gave fresh force to 
 the hold Deronda had from the first taken on 
 her mind, as one who had an unknown standard 
 by which he judged her. Had he some way of 
 looking at things which might be a new footing 
 for her, — an inward safeguard against possible 
 events which she dreaded as stored-up retribu- 
 tion? It is one of the secrets in that change 
 of mental poise which has been fitly named con- 
 version, that to many among us neither heaven 
 
224 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 nor earth has any revelation till some personal- 
 ity touches theirs with a peculiar influence, sub- 
 duing them into receptiveness. It had been 
 Gwendolen's habit to think of the persons around 
 her as stale books, too familiar to be interest- 
 ing. Deronda had lit up her attention with a 
 sense of novelty: not by words only, but by 
 imagined facts, his influence had entered into 
 the current of that self -suspicion and self -blame 
 which awakens a new consciousness. 
 
 " I wish he could know everything about 
 me without my telling him," was one of her 
 thoughts, as she sat leaning over the end of a 
 couch, supporting her head with her hand, and 
 looking at herself in a mirror, — not in admira- 
 tion, but in a sad kind of companionship. " I 
 wish he knew that I am not so contemptible as 
 he thinks me, that I am in deep trouble, and 
 want to be something better if I could." With- 
 out the aid of sacred ceremony or costume, her 
 feelings had turned this man, only a few years 
 older than herself, into a priest; a sort of trust 
 less rare than the fidelity that guards it. Young 
 reverence for one who is also young is the most 
 coercive of all : there is the same level of tempta- 
 tion, and the higher motive is believed in as a 
 fuller force, — not suspected to be a mere resi- 
 due from weary experience. 
 
 But the coercion is often stronger on the one 
 who takes the reverence. Those who trust us 
 educate us. And perhaps in that ideal conse- 
 cration of Gwendolen's, some education was 
 being prepared for Deronda. 
 
 \ 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Rien ne pese tant qu'un secret, 
 
 Le porter loin est difficile aux dames-: 
 
 Et je S9ais mesme sur ce fait 
 
 Bon nombre d'hommes qui sont fenmaes. 
 
 La Fontaine. 
 
 MEANWHILE Deronda had been fas- 
 tened and led off by Mr. Vandernoodt, 
 who wished for a brisker walk, a cigar, 
 and a little gossip. Since we cannot tell a man 
 his own secrets, the restraint of being in his 
 company often breeds a desire to pair off in 
 conversation with some more ignorant person; 
 and Mr. Vandernoodt presently said, — 
 
 " What a washed-out piece of cambric Grand- 
 court is! But if he is a favourite of yours, I 
 withdraw the remark." 
 
 " Not the least in the world," said Deronda. 
 " I thought not. One wonders how he came 
 to have a great passion again; and he must 
 have had, — to marry in this waj^ Though 
 Lush, his old chum, hints that he married this 
 girl out of obstinacy. By George! it was a 
 very accountable obstinacy. A man might make 
 up his mind to marry her without the stimulus 
 of contradiction. But he must have made him- 
 self a pretty large drain of money, eh? " 
 " I know nothing of his affairs." 
 " What ! not of the other establishment he 
 keeps up? " 
 
 "Diplow? Of course. He took that of Sir 
 Hugo. But merely for the year." 
 
 VOL. XIII — 15 
 
226 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 "No, no: notDiplow: Gadsmere. Sir Hugo 
 knows, I '11 answer for it." 
 
 Deronda said nothing. He really began to 
 feel some curiosity, but he foresaw that he should 
 hear what Mr. Vandernoodt had to tell, without 
 the condescension of asking. 
 
 " Lush would not altogether own to it, of 
 course. He 's a confidant and go-between of 
 Grandcourt's. But I have it on the best author- 
 ity. The fact is, there 's another lady with four 
 children at Gadsmere. She has had the upper 
 hand of him these ten years and more, and by 
 what I can understand has it still, — left her 
 husband for him, and used to travel with him 
 everywhere. Her husband 's dead now: I found 
 a fellow who was in the same regiment with him, 
 and knew this Mrs. Glasher before she took 
 wing. A fiery dark-eyed woman, — a noted 
 beauty at that time, — he thought she was dead. 
 They say she has Grandcourt under her thumb 
 still, and it 's a wonder he did n't marry her, 
 for there 's a very fine boy, and I understand 
 Grandcourt can do absolutely as he pleases with 
 the estates. Lush told me as much as that." 
 
 " What right had he to marry this girl? " 
 said Deronda, with disgust. 
 
 Mr. Vandernoodt, adjusting the end of his 
 cigar, shrugged his shoulders and put out his 
 lips. 
 
 ''She can know nothing of it," said Deronda, 
 emphatically. But that positive statement was 
 immediately followed by an inward query, — 
 " Could she have known anything of it? " 
 
 " It 's rather a piquant picture," said Mr. 
 Vandernoodt, — "Grandcourt between two fiery 
 
MORDECAI • 227 
 
 women. For, depend upon it, this light-haired 
 one has plenty of devil in her. I formed that 
 opinion of her at Leubronn. It 's a sort of 
 Medea and Creiisa business. Fancy the two 
 meeting! Grandcourt is a new kind of Jason: 
 I wonder what sort of a part he '11 make of it. 
 It 's a dog's part at best. I think I hear Ris- 
 tori now, saying ' Jasone ! Jasone ! ' These fine 
 women generally get hold of a stick." 
 
 " Grandcourt can bite, I fancy," said De- 
 ronda. " He is no stick." 
 
 "No, no; meant Jason. I can't quite make 
 out Grandcourt. But he 's a keen fellow enough, 
 — uncommonly well built too. And if he comes 
 into all this property, the estates will bear divid- 
 ing. This girl, whose friends had come to beg- 
 gary, I understand, may think herself lucky to 
 get him. I don't want to be hard on a man 
 because he gets involved in an affair of that sort. 
 But he might make himself more agreeable. I 
 was telling him a capital story last night, and 
 he got up and walked away in the middle. I 
 felt inclined to kick him. Do you suppose that 
 is inattention or insolence, now? " 
 
 " Oh, a mixture. . He generally observes the 
 forms; but he doesn't listen much," said De- 
 ronda. Then, after a moment's pause, he went 
 on, " I should think there must be some exag- 
 geration or inaccuracy in what you have heard 
 about this lady at Gadsmere." 
 
 " Not a bit, depend upon it; it has all lain 
 snug of late years. People have forgotten all 
 about it. But there the nest is, and the birds 
 are in it. And I know Grandcourt goes there. 
 I have good evidence that he goes there. How- 
 
228 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ever, that 's nobody's business but his own. The 
 affair has sunk below the surface." 
 
 " I wonder you could have learned so much 
 about it," said Deronda, rather dryly. 
 
 " Oh, there are plenty of people who knew 
 all about it; but such stories get packed away 
 like old letters. They interest me. I like to 
 know the manners of my time, — contemporary 
 gossip, not antediluvian. These Dryasdust fel- 
 lows get a reputation by raking up some small 
 scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then 
 we have a thousand and one poems written upon 
 it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't 
 care a straw about the fauoc pas of the mummies. 
 You do, though. You are one of the historical 
 men, — more interested in a lady when she 's 
 got a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out. 
 Does that flatter your imagination? " 
 
 " Well, if she had any woes in her love, one 
 has the satisfaction of knowing that she 's well 
 out of them." 
 
 " Ah, you are thinking of the Medea, I see." 
 
 Deronda then chose to point to some giant 
 oaks worth looking at in their bareness. He also 
 felt an interest in this piece of contemporary 
 gossip, but he was satisfied that Mr. Vander- 
 noodt had no more to tell about it. 
 
 Since the early days when he tried to construct 
 the hidden story of his own birth, his mind had 
 perhaps never been so active in weaving proba- 
 bilities about any private affair as it had now 
 begun to be about Gwendolen's marriage. This 
 unavowed relation of Grandcourt's, — could she 
 have gained some knowledge of it, which caused 
 her to shrink from the match, — a shrinking 
 
MORDECAI 229 
 
 finally overcome by the urgence of poverty ? He 
 could recall almost every word she had said to 
 him, and in certain of these words he seemed to 
 discern that she was conscious of having done 
 some wrong, — inflicted some injury. His own 
 acute experience made him alive to the form of 
 injury which might affect the unavowed children 
 and their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under 
 all her determined show of satisfaction, gnawed 
 by a double, a treble-headed grief, — self-re- 
 proach, disappointment, jealousy? He dwelt 
 especially on all the slight signs of self-reproach : 
 he was inclined to judge her tenderly, to excuse, 
 to pity. He thought he had found a key now by 
 which to interpret her more clearly: what mag- 
 nifying of her misery might not a young creature 
 get into who had wedded her fresh hopes to old 
 secrets ! He thought he saw clearly enough now 
 why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of 
 this affair to him; and immediately the image 
 of this Mrs. Glasher became painfully associated 
 with his own hidden birth. Gwendolen know- 
 ing of that woman and her children, marrying 
 Grandcourt, and showing herself contented, 
 would have been among the most repulsive of 
 beings to him; but Gwendolen tasting the bit- 
 terness of remorse for having contributed to 
 their injury was brought very near to his fellow- 
 feeling. If it were so, she had got to a common 
 plane of understanding with him on some diffi- 
 culties of life which a woman is rarely able to 
 judge of with any justice or generosity; for, 
 according to precedent, Gwendolen's view of her 
 position might easily have been no other than 
 that her husband's marriage with her was his 
 
230 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs. 
 Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And 
 Deronda had naturally some resentment on be- 
 half of the Hagars and Ishmaels. 
 
 Undeniably Deronda's growing solicitude 
 about Gwendolen depended chiefly on her pecul- 
 iar manner towards him ; and I suppose neither 
 man nor woman would be the better for an utter 
 insensibility to such appeals. One sign that his 
 interest in her had changed its footing was that 
 he dismissed any caution against her being a 
 coquette setting snares to involve him in a vulgar 
 flirtation, and determined that he would not 
 again evade any opportunity of talking with her. 
 He had shaken off Mr. Vandernoodt, and got 
 into a solitary corner in the twilight; but half 
 an hour was long enough to think of those possi- 
 bilities in Gwendolen's position and state of mind, 
 and on forming the determination not to avoid 
 her, he remembered that she was likely to be at 
 tea with the other ladies in the drawing-room. 
 The conjecture was true; for Gwendolen, after 
 resolving not to go down again for the next four 
 hours, began to feel, at the end of one, that in 
 shutting herself up she missed all chances of see- 
 ing and hearing, and that her visit would only 
 last two days more. She adjusted herself, put 
 on her little air of self-possession, and going 
 down, made herself resolutely agreeable. Only 
 ladies were assembled, and Lady Pentreath was 
 amusing them with a description of a drawing- 
 room under the Regency, and the figure that was 
 cut by ladies and gentlemen in 1819, the year 
 she was presented — when Deronda entered. 
 Shall I be acceptable? " he said. " Perhaps 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 231 
 
 I had better go back and look for the others. I 
 suppose they are in the biUiard-room." 
 
 "No, no; stay where you are," said Lady 
 Pentreath. " They were all getting tired of me ; 
 let us hear what you have to say." 
 
 " That is rather an embarrassing appeal," 
 said Deronda, drawing up a chair near Lady 
 Mallinger's elbow at the tea-table. " I think I 
 had better take the opportunity of mentioning 
 our songstress," he added, looking at Lady 
 Mallinger, — " unless you have done so." 
 
 " Oh, the little Jewess! " said Lady Mallinger. 
 " No, I have not mentioned her. It never en- 
 tered my head that any one here wanted singing- 
 lessons." 
 
 " All ladies know some one else who wants 
 singing-lessons," said Deronda. " I have hap- 
 pened to find an exquisite singer; " here he 
 turned to Lady Pentreath. " She is living with 
 some ladies who are friends of mine, — the 
 mother and sisters of a man who was my chum 
 at Cambridge. She was on the stage at Vienna ; 
 but she wants to leave that life, and maintain 
 herself by teaching." 
 
 " There are swarms of those people, are n't 
 there? " said the old lady. " Are her lessons to 
 be very cheap or very expensive ? Those are the 
 two baits I know of." 
 
 " There is another bait for those who hear 
 her," said Deronda. " Her singing is something 
 quite exceptional, I think. She has had such 
 first-rate teaching, — or rather first-rate instinct 
 with her teaching, — that you might imagine her 
 singing all came by nature." 
 
 "Why did she leave the stage, then?" said 
 
232 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Lady Pentreath. " I 'm too old to believe in 
 first-rate people giving up first-rate chances." 
 
 " Her voice was too weak. It is a delicious 
 voice for a room. You who put up with my 
 singing of Schubert would be enchanted with 
 hers," said Deronda, looking at Mrs. Raymond. 
 " And I imagine she would not object to sing at 
 private parties or concerts. Her voice is quite 
 equal to that." 
 
 " I am to have her in my drawing-room when 
 we go up to town," said Lady Mallinger. " You 
 shall hear her then. I have not heard her myself 
 yet; but I trust Daniel's recommendation. I 
 mean my girls to have lessons of her." 
 
 " Is it a charitable affair? " said Lady Pent- 
 reath. " I can't bear charitable music." 
 
 Lady Mallinger, who was rather helpless in 
 conversation, and felt herself under an engage- 
 ment not to tell anything of Mirah's story, had 
 an embarrassed smile on her face, and glanced 
 at Deronda. 
 
 "It is a charity to those who want to have a 
 good model of feminine singing," said Deronda. 
 " I think everybody who has ears would benefit 
 by a little improvement on the ordinary style. 
 If you heard Miss Lapidoth," — here he looked 
 at Gwendolen, — " perhaps you would revoke 
 your resolution to give up singing." 
 
 " I should rather think my resolution would 
 be confirmed," said Gwendolen. " I don't feel 
 able to follow your advice of enjoying my own 
 middlingness." 
 
 " For my part," said Deronda, " people who 
 do anything finely always inspirit me to try. I 
 don't mean that they make me believe I can do 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 233 
 
 it as well. But they make the thing, whatever 
 it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear 
 to think my own music not good for much, but 
 the world would be more dismal if I thought 
 music itself not good for much. Excellence en- 
 courages one about life generally; it shows the 
 spiritual wealth of the world." 
 
 "But then if we can't imitate it? — it only 
 makes our own life seem the tamer," said Gwen- 
 dolen, in a mood to resent encouragement 
 founded on her own insignificance. 
 
 " That depends on the point of view, I think," 
 said Deronda. " We should have a poor life of 
 it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our 
 own performances. A little private imitation 
 of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, 
 and most of us ought to practise art only in the 
 light of private study, — preparation to under- 
 stand and enjoy what the few can do for us. I 
 think Miss Lapidoth is one of the few." 
 
 " She must be a very happy person, don't you 
 think? " said Gwendolen, with a touch of sar- 
 casm, and a turn of her neck towards Mrs. 
 Raymond. 
 
 " I don't know," answered the independent 
 lady; " I must hear more of her before I said 
 that." 
 
 " It may have been a bitter disappointment to 
 her that her voice failed her for the stage," said 
 Juliet Fenn, sympathetically. 
 
 " I suppose she 's past her best, though," said 
 the deep voice of Lady Pentreath. 
 
 " On the contrary, she has not reached it," said 
 Deronda. " She is barely twenty." 
 
 " And very pretty," interposed Lady Mal- 
 
 / 
 
234 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 linger, with an amiable wish to help Deronda. 
 " And she has very good manners. I 'm sorry 
 she is a bigoted Jewess; I should not like it for 
 anything else, but it does n't matter in singing." 
 
 " Well, since her voice is too weak for her to 
 scream much, I '11 tell Lady Clementina to set 
 her on my nine granddaughters," said Lady 
 Pentreath; " and I hope she '11 convince eight of 
 them that they have not voice enough t6 sing 
 anywhere but at church. My notion is, that 
 many of our girls nowadays want lessons not to 
 sing." 
 
 " I have had my lessons in that," said Gwen- 
 dolen, looking at Deronda. " You see Lady 
 Pentreath is on my side." 
 
 While she was speaking. Sir Hugo entered 
 with some of the other gentlemen, including 
 Grandcourt, and standing against the group at 
 the low tea-table said, — 
 
 " What imposition is Deronda putting on you 
 ladies, — slipping in among you by himself? " 
 
 " Wanting to pass off an obscurity on us as 
 better than any celebrity," said Lady Pent- 
 reath, — "a pretty singing Jewess who is to 
 astonish these young people. You and I, who 
 heard Catalani in her prime, are not so easily 
 astonished." 
 
 Sir Hugo listened with his good-humoured 
 smile as he took a cup of tea from his wife, and 
 then said, " Well, you know, a Liberal is bound 
 to think that there have been singers since Cata- 
 lani 's time." 
 
 " Ah, you are younger than I am. I dare say 
 you are one of the men who ran after Alcharisi. 
 But she married off and left you all in the lurch." 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 235 
 
 " Yes, yes ; it 's rather too bad when these great 
 singers marry themselves into silence before they 
 have a crack in their voices. And the husband 
 is a public robber. I remember Leroux saying, 
 ' A man might as well take down a fine peal of 
 church bells and carry them off to the steppes,' " 
 said Sir Hugo, setting down his cup and turning 
 away, while Deronda, who had moved from his 
 place to make room for others, and felt that he 
 was not in request, sat down a little apart. Pres- 
 ently he became aware that, in the general dis- 
 persion of the group, Gwendolen had extricated 
 herself from the attentions of JNIr. Vandernoodt 
 and had walked to the piano, where she stood 
 apparently examining the music which lay on 
 the desk. Will any one be surprised at De- 
 ronda's concluding that she wished him to join 
 her? Perhaps she wanted to make amends for 
 the unpleasant tone of resistance with which she 
 had met his recommendation of Mirah, for he 
 had noticed that her first impulse often was to 
 say what she afterwards wished to retract. He 
 went to her side and said, — 
 
 " Are you relenting about the music and look- 
 ing for something to play or sing? " 
 
 " I am not looking for anything, but I am 
 relenting," said Gwendolen, speaking in a sub- 
 missive tone. 
 
 May I know the reason? " 
 
 " I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have 
 lessons from her, since you admire her so much, 
 — that is, of course, when we go to town. I 
 mean lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and 
 my own deficiency," said Gwendolen, turning 
 on him a sweet open smile. 
 
236 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " I shall be really glad for you to see and 
 hear her," said Deronda, returning the smile in 
 kind. 
 
 " Is she as perfect in everything else as in her 
 music? " 
 
 " I can't vouch for that exactly. I have not 
 seen enough of her. But I have seen nothing in 
 her that I could wish to be different. She has 
 had an unhappy life. Her troubles began in 
 early childhood, and she has grown up among 
 very painful surroundings. But I think you will 
 say that no advantages could have given her 
 more grace and truer refinement." 
 
 " I wonder what sort of troubles hers were? " 
 
 " I have not any very precise knowledge. 
 But I know that she was on the brink of drown- 
 ing herself in despair." 
 
 " And what hindered her? " said Gwendolen, 
 quickly, looking at Deronda. 
 
 " Some ray or other came, — which made her 
 feel that she ought to live, — that it was good 
 to live," he answered quietly. " She is full of 
 piety, and seems capable of submitting to any- 
 thing when it takes the form of duty." 
 
 " Those people are not to be pitied," said 
 Gwendolen, impatiently. " I have no sympathy 
 with women who are always doing right. I 
 don't believe in their great sufferings." Her 
 fingers moved quickly among the edges of the 
 music. 
 
 " It is true," said Deronda, " that the con- 
 sciousness of having done wrong is something 
 deeper, more bitter. I suppose we faulty crea- 
 tures can never feel so much for the irreproach- 
 able as for those who are bruised in the struggle 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 237 
 
 with their own faults. It is a very ancient story, 
 that of the lost sheep, — but it comes up afresh 
 every day." 
 
 " That is a way of speaking, — it is not 
 acted on, it is not real," said Gwendolen, bitterly.. 
 " You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think 
 her blameless, perfect. And you know you 
 would despise a woman who had done something 
 you thought very wrong." 
 
 " That would depend entirely on her own view 
 of what she had done," said Deronda. 
 
 " You would be satisfied if she were very 
 wretched, I suppose? " said Gwendolen, im- 
 petuously. 
 
 " No, not satisfied, — full of sorrow for her. 
 It was not a mere way of speaking. I did not 
 mean to say that the finer nature is not more 
 adorable; I meant that those who would be 
 comparatively uninteresting beforehand may 
 become worthier of sympathy when they do 
 something that awakens in them a keen remorse. 
 Lives are enlarged in different ways. I dare 
 say some would never get their eyes opened if 
 it were not for a violent shock from the conse- 
 quences of their own actions. And when they 
 are suffering in that way one must care for them 
 more than for the comfortably self-satisfied." 
 Deronda forgot everything but his vision of 
 what Gwendolen's experience had probably 
 been, and urged by compassion let his eyes and 
 voice express as much interest as they would. 
 
 Gwendolen had slipped on to the music-stool, 
 and looked up at him with pain in her long eyes, 
 like a wounded animal asking help. 
 
 " Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to 
 
238 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 play to us, Dan? " said Sir Hugo, coming up 
 and putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder 
 with a gentle admonitory pinch. 
 
 " I cannot persuade myself," said Gwendolen, 
 rising. 
 
 Others had followed Sir Hugo's lead, and 
 there was an end of any liability to confidences 
 for that day. But the next was New Year's 
 Eve; and a grand dance, to which the chief 
 tenants were invited, was to be held in the pic- 
 ture-gallery above the cloister, — the sort of 
 entertainment in which numbers and general 
 movement may create privacy. When Gwen- 
 dolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance 
 of Leubronn, to put on the old turquoise neck- 
 lace for her sole ornament; but she dared not 
 offend her husband, by appearing in that shabby 
 way on an occasion when he would demand her 
 utmost splendour. Determined to wear the 
 memorial necklace somehow, she wound it thrice 
 round her wrist and made a bracelet of it, — 
 having gone to her room to put it on just before 
 the time of entering the ball-room. 
 
 It was always a beautiful scene, this dance on 
 New Year's Eve, which had been kept up by 
 family tradition as nearly in the old fashion as 
 inexorable change would allow. Red carpet 
 was laid down for the occasion; hot-house plants 
 and evergreens were arranged in bowers at the 
 extremities and in every recess of the gallery; 
 and the old portraits stretching back through 
 generations even to the pre-portraying period, 
 made a piquant line of spectators. Some neigh- 
 bouring gentry, major and minor, were invited; 
 and it was certainly an occasion when a pro- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 239 
 
 spective master and mistress of Abbot's and 
 King's Topping might see their future glory 
 in an agreeable light, as a picturesque provincial 
 supremacy with a rent-roll personified by the 
 most prosperous-looking tenants. Sir Hugo 
 expected Grandcourt to feel flattered by being 
 asked to the Abbey at a time which included this 
 festival in honour of the family estate; but he 
 also hoped that his own hale appearance might 
 impress his successor with the probable length 
 of time that would, elapse before the succession 
 came, and with the wisdom of preferring a good 
 actual sum to a minor property that must 
 be waited for. All present, down to the least 
 important farmer's daughter, knew that they 
 were to see " young Grandcourt," Sir Hugo's 
 nephew, the presumptive heir and future bar- 
 onet, now visiting the Abbey with his bride after 
 an absence of many years ; any coolness between 
 uncle and nephew having, it was understood, 
 given way to a friendly warmth. The bride 
 opening the ball with Sir Hugo was necessarily 
 the cynosure of all eyes; and less than a year 
 before, if some magic mirror could have shown 
 Gwendolen her actual position, she would have 
 imagined herself moving in it with a glow of 
 triumphant pleasure, conscious that she held in 
 her hands a life full of favourable chances which 
 her cleverness and spirit would enable her to 
 make the best of. And now she was wondering 
 that she could get so little joy out of the exalta- 
 tion to which she had been suddenly lifted, away 
 from the distasteful petty empire of her girl- 
 hood with its irksome lack of distinction and 
 superfluity of sisters. She would have been glad 
 
240 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to be even unreasonably elated, and to forget 
 everything but the flattery of the moment; but 
 she was like one courting sleep, in whom 
 thoughts insist like wilful tormentors. 
 
 Wondering in this way at her own dulness, 
 and all the while longing for an excitement that 
 would deaden importunate aches, she was pass- 
 ing through files of admiring beholders in the 
 country-dance with which it was traditional to 
 open the ball, and was being generally regarded 
 by her own sex as an enviable woman. It was 
 remarked that she carried herself with a wonder- 
 ful air, considering that she had been nobody 
 in particular, and without a farthing to her for- 
 tune. If she had been a duke's daughter or one 
 of the royal princesses, she could not have taken 
 the honours of the evening more as a matter of 
 course. Poor Gwendolen ! It would by and by 
 become a sort of skill in which she was auto- 
 matically practised, to bear this last great gam- 
 bling loss with an air of perfect self-possession. 
 
 The next couple that passed were also worth 
 looking at. Lady Pentreath had said, " I shall 
 stand up for one dance, but I shall choose my 
 partner. Mr. Deronda, you are the youngest 
 man; I mean to dance with you. Nobody is 
 old enough to make a good pair with me. I 
 must have a contrast." And the contrast cer- 
 tainly set off the old lady to the utmost. She 
 was one of those women who are never handsome 
 till they are old, and she had had the wisdom to 
 embrace the beauty of age as early as possible. 
 What might have seemed harshness in her fea- 
 tures when she was young, had turned now into 
 a satisfactory strength of form and expression 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 241 
 
 which defied wrinkles, and was set off by a 
 crown of white hair; her well-built figure was 
 well covered with black drapery, her ears and 
 neck comfortably caressed with lace, showing 
 none of those withered spaces which one would 
 think it a pitiable condition of poverty to expose. 
 She glided along gracefully enough, her dark 
 eyes still with a mischievous smile in them as 
 she observed the company. Her partner's young 
 richness of tint against the flattened hues and 
 rougher forms of her aged head had an effect 
 something like that of a fine flower against a 
 lichenous branch. Perhaps the tenants hardly 
 appreciated this pair. Lady Pentreath was 
 nothing more than a straight, active old lady; 
 Mr. Deronda was a familiar figure regarded 
 with friendliness; but if he had been the heir, 
 it would have been regretted that his face was 
 not as unmistakably English as Sir Hugo's. 
 
 Grandcourt's appearance when he came up 
 with Lady Mallinger was not impeached with 
 foreignness: still the satisfaction in it was not 
 complete. It would have been matter of con- 
 gratulation if one who had the luck to inherit 
 two old family estates had had more hair, a 
 fresher colour, and a look of greater animation; 
 but that fine families dwindled off into females, 
 and estates ran together into the single heirship 
 of a mealy-complexioned male, was a tendency 
 in things which seemed to be accounted for by 
 a citation of other instances. It was agreed that 
 Mr. Grandcourt could never be taken for any- 
 thing but what he was, — a born gentleman ; 
 and that, in fact, he looked like an heir. Per- 
 haps the person least complacently disposed 
 VOL. xm — 16 
 
242 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 towards him at that moment was Lady Mal- 
 hnger, to whom going in procession up this 
 country-dance with Grandcourt was a blazon- 
 ment of -herself as the infelicitous wife who had 
 produced nothing but daughters, little better 
 than no children, poor dear things, except for 
 her own fondness and for Sir Hugo's wonder- 
 ful goodness to them. But such inward discom- 
 fort could not prevent the gentle lady from 
 looking fair and stout to admiration, or her full 
 blue eyes from glancing mildly at her neigh- 
 bours. All the mothers and fathers held it a 
 thousand pities that she had not had a fine 
 boy, or even several, — which might have been 
 expected, to look at her when she was first 
 married. 
 
 The gallery included only three sides of the 
 quadrangle, the fourth being shut off as a lobby 
 or corridor; one side was used for dancing, and 
 the opposite side for the supper-table, while the 
 intermediate part was less brilliantly lit, and 
 fitted with comfortable seats. Later in the even- 
 ing Gwendolen was in one of these seats, and 
 Grandcourt was standing near her. They were 
 not talking to each other : she was leaning back- 
 ward in her chair, and he against the wall; and 
 Deronda, happening to observe this, went up to 
 ask her if she had resolved not to dance any 
 more. Having himself been doing hard duty 
 in this way among the guests, he thought he 
 had earned the right to sink for a little while 
 into the background, and he had spoken little 
 to Gwendolen since their conversation at the 
 piano the day before. Grandcourt's presence 
 would only make it the easier to show that pleas- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 243 
 
 ure in talking to her even about trivialities which 
 would be a sign of friendliness; and he fancied 
 that her face looked blank. A smile beamed over 
 it as she saw him coming, and she raised herself 
 from her leaning posture. Grandcourt had been 
 grumbling at the ennui of staying so long in 
 this stupid dance, and proposing that they should 
 vanish : she had resisted on the ground of polite- 
 ness, — not without being a little frightened at 
 the probability that he was silently angry with 
 her. She had her reason for staying, though 
 she had begun to despair of the opportunity for 
 the sake of which she had put the old necldace 
 on her wrist. But now at last Deronda had 
 come. 
 
 " Yes; I shall not dance any more. Are you 
 not glad? " she said, with some gayety. " You 
 might have felt obliged humbly to offer yourself 
 as a partner, and I feel sure you have danced 
 more than you like already." 
 
 " I will not deny that," said Deronda, " since 
 you have danced as much as you like." 
 
 " But will you take trouble for me in an- 
 other way, and fetch me a glass of that fresh 
 water? " 
 
 It was but a few steps that Deronda had to 
 go for the water. Gwendolen was wrapped in 
 the lightest, softest of white woollen burnouses, 
 under which her hands were hidden. While he 
 was gone she had drawn off her glove, which 
 was finished with a lace ruffle, and when she put 
 up her hand to take the glass and lifted it to 
 her mouth, the necklace-bracelet, which in its 
 triple winding adapted itself clumsily to her 
 wrist, was necessarily conspicuous. Grandcourt 
 
244 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 saw it, and saw that it was attracting Deronda's 
 notice. 
 
 " What is that hideous thing you have got on 
 your wrist? " said the husband. 
 
 " That? " said Gwendolen, composedly, point- 
 ing to the turquoises, while she still held the 
 glass; "it is an old necklace that I like to wear. 
 I lost it once, and some one found it for me." 
 
 With that she gave the glass again to De- 
 ronda, who immediately carried it away, and 
 on returning said, in order to banish any con- 
 sciousness about the necklace, — 
 
 " It is worth while for you to go and look out 
 at one of the windows on that side. You can 
 see the finest possible moonlight on the stone 
 pillars and carving, and shadow^s waving across 
 it in the wind." 
 
 " I should like to see it. Will you go? " said 
 Gwendolen, looking up at her husband. 
 
 He cast his eyes do^Ti at her, and saying, 
 " No, Deronda will take you," slowly moved 
 from his leaning attitude, and slowly walked 
 away. 
 
 Gwendolen's face for a moment showed a 
 fleeting vexation: she resented this show of in- 
 difference towards her. Deronda felt annoyed, 
 chiefly for her sake ; and with a quick sense that 
 it would relieve her most to behave as if nothing 
 peculiar had occurred, he said, " Will you take 
 my arm and go, while only servants are there? " 
 He thought that he understood well her action 
 in drawing his attention to the necklace: she 
 wished him to infer that she had submitted her 
 mind to rebuke, — her speech and manner had 
 from the first fluctuated towards that submis- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 245 
 
 sion, — and that she felt no hngering resent- 
 ment. Her evident confidence in his interpreta- 
 tion of her appealed to him as a peculiar claim. 
 
 When they were walking together, Gwendo- 
 len felt as if the annoyance which had just hap- 
 pened had removed another film of reserve from 
 between them, and she had more right than be- 
 fore to be as open as she wished. She did not 
 speak, being filled with the sense of silent con- 
 fidence, until they were in front of the window 
 looking out on the moonlit court. A sort of 
 bower had been made round the window, turn- 
 ing it into a recess. Quitting his arm, she folded 
 her hands in her burnous, and pressed her brow 
 against the glass. He moved slightly away, 
 and held the lapels of his coat with his thumbs 
 under the collar as his manner was: he had a 
 wonderful power of standing perfect^ still, and 
 in that position reminded one sometimes of 
 Dante's spiriti magni con occhi tardi e gravi. 
 (Doubtless some of these danced in their youth, 
 doubted of their own vocation, and found their 
 own times too modern.) He abstained from re- 
 marking on the scene before them, fearing that 
 any indifferent words might jar on her; already 
 the calm light and shadow, the ancient steadfast 
 forms, had aloofness enough from those inward 
 troubles which he felt sure were agitating her. 
 And he judged aright: she would have been 
 impatient of polite conversation. The incidents 
 of the last minute or two had receded behind 
 former thoughts which she had imagined her- 
 self uttering to Deronda, and which now urged 
 themselves to her lips. In a subdued voice, she 
 said, — 
 
246 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Suppose I had gambled again, and lost the 
 necklace again, what should you have thought 
 of me? " 
 
 " Worse than I do now." 
 
 " Then you are mistaken about me. You 
 wanted me not to do that, — not to make my 
 gain out of another's loss in that way, — and I 
 have done a great deal worse." 
 
 " I can imagine temptations," said Deronda. 
 " Perhaps I am able to understand what you 
 mean. At least I understand self-reproach." In 
 spite of preparation he was almost alarmed at 
 Gwendolen's precipitancy of confidence towards 
 him, in contrast with her habitual resolute 
 concealment. 
 
 " What should you do if you were like me, — 
 feeling that you were wrong and miserable, and 
 dreading everything to come? " It seemed that 
 she was hurrying to make the utmost use of this 
 opportunity to speak as she would. 
 
 " That is not to be amended by doing one 
 thing only, but many," said Deronda, decisively. 
 
 "What?" said Gwendolen, hastily, moving 
 her brow from the glass and looking at him. 
 
 He looked full at her in return, with what 
 she thought was severity. He felt that it was 
 not a moment in which he must let himself be 
 tender, and flinch from implying a hard opinion. 
 
 " I mean there are many thoughts and habits 
 that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. 
 Multitudes have to bear it." 
 
 She turned her brow to the window again, 
 and said impatiently: " You must tell me, then, 
 what to think and what to do; else why did 
 you not let me go on doing as I liked and not 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 247 
 
 minding? If I had gone on gambling I might 
 have won again, arid I might have got not to 
 care for anything else. You would not let me 
 do that. Why should n't I do as I like, and not 
 mind? Other people do." Poor Gwendolen's 
 speech expressed nothing very clearly except 
 her irritation. 
 
 " I don't believe you would ever get not to 
 mind," said Deronda, with deep-toned decision. 
 " If it were true that baseness and cruelty made 
 an escape from pain, what difference would that 
 make to people who can't be quite base or cruel? 
 Idiots escape some pain; but you can't be an 
 idiot. Some may do wrong to another without 
 remorse; but suppose one does feel remorse? I 
 believe you could never lead an injurious life 
 — all reckless lives are injurious, pestilential — 
 without feeling remorse." Deronda's uncon- 
 scious fervour had gathered as he went on: he 
 was uttering thoughts which he had used for 
 himself in moments of painful meditation. 
 
 " Then tell me what better I can do," said 
 Gwendolen, insistently. 
 
 " Many things. Look on other lives besides 
 your own. See what their troubles are, and 
 how they are borne. Try to care about some- 
 thing in this vast world besides the gratification 
 of small selfish desires. Try to care for what 
 is best in thought and action, — something that 
 is good apart from the accidents of your own 
 lot." 
 
 For an instant or two Gwendolen w^as mute. 
 Then, again moving her brow from the glass, 
 she said, — 
 
 " You mean that I am selfish and ignorant." 
 
248 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 He met her fixed look in silence before he 
 answered firmly, — 
 
 " You will not go on being selfish and 
 ignorant." 
 
 She did not turn away her glance or let her 
 eyelids fall, but a change came over her face, — 
 that subtle change in nerve and muscle which 
 will sometirnes give a childlike expression even to 
 the elderly : it is the subsidence of self-assertion. 
 
 " Shall I lead you back? " said Deronda, 
 gently, turning and offering her his arm again. 
 She took it silently, and in that way they came 
 in sight of Grandcourt, who was walking slowly 
 near their former place. Gwendolen went up 
 to him and said, " I am ready to go now. Mr, 
 Deronda will excuse us to Lady Mallinger." 
 
 " Certainly," said Deronda. " Lord and Lady 
 Pentreath disappeared some time ago." 
 
 Grandcourt gave his arm in silent compli- 
 ance, nodding over his shoulder to Deronda, 
 and Gwendolen too only half turned to bow 
 and say, " Thanks." The husband and wife left 
 the gallery and paced the corridors in silence. 
 When the door had closed on them in the 
 boudoir, Grandcourt threw himself into a chair, 
 and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, " Sit 
 down." She, already in the expectation of some- 
 thing unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous 
 with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately 
 obeyed. Turning his eyes towards her, he 
 began, — 
 
 " Oblige me in future by not showing whims 
 like a mad woman in a play." 
 
 "What do you mean?" said Gwendolen. 
 " I suppose there is some understanding be- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 249 
 
 tween you and Deronda about that thing you 
 have on your wrist. If you have anything to 
 say to him, say it; but don't carry on a tele- 
 graphing which other people are supposed not 
 to see. It 's damnably vulgar." 
 
 " You can know all about the necklace," said 
 Gwendolen, her angry pride resisting the night- 
 mare of fear. 
 
 " I don't want to know. Keep to yourself 
 whatever you like." Grandcourt paused between 
 each sentence, and in each his speech seemed 
 to become more preternaturally distinct in its 
 inward tones. " What I care to know, I shall 
 know without your telling me. Only you will 
 please to behave as becomes my wife, and not 
 make a spectacle of yourself." 
 
 "Do you object to my talking to Mr. 
 Deronda? " 
 
 " I don't care two straws about Deronda, or 
 any other conceited hanger-on. You may talk 
 to him as much as you like. He is not going to 
 take my place. You are my wife. And you 
 will either fill your place properly — to the 
 world and to me — or you will go to the devil." 
 
 " I never intended anything but to fill my 
 place properly," said Gwendolen, with bitterest 
 mortification in her soul. 
 
 " You put that thing on your wrist, and hid 
 it from me till you wanted him to see it. Only 
 fools go into that deaf and dumb talk, and think 
 they 're secret. You will understand that you 
 are not to compromise yourself. Behave with 
 dignity. That 's all I have to say." 
 
 With that last word Grandcourt rose, turned 
 his back to the fire and looked down on her. 
 
250 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 She was mute. There was no reproach that she 
 dared to fling at him in return for these insult- 
 ing admonitions, and the very reason she felt 
 them to be insulting was that their purport went 
 with the most absolute dictate of her pride. 
 What she would least like to incur was the mak- 
 ing a fool of herself and being compromised. It 
 was futile and irrelevant to try and explain that 
 Deronda too had only been a monitor, — the 
 strongest of all monitors. Grandcourt was con- 
 temptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain 
 of all the subjection he cared for. Why could 
 she not rebel, and defy him? She longed to do 
 it. But she might as well have tried to defy 
 the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of 
 her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at 
 his back, that could close round her wherever 
 she might turn. She sat in her splendid attire, 
 like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed 
 to gratify himself with looking at her. She 
 could not even make a passionate exclamation, 
 or throw up her arms, as she would have done 
 in her maiden days. The sense of his scorn 
 kept her still. 
 
 " Shall I ring? " he said, after what seemed 
 to her a long while. She moved her head in as- 
 sent, and after ringing he went to his dressing- 
 room. 
 
 Certain words were gnawing within her. 
 " The wrong you have done me will be your 
 own curse." As he closed the door, the bitter 
 tears rose, and the gnawing words provoked an 
 answer: " Why did you put your fangs into me 
 and not into him? " It was uttered in a whisper, 
 as the tears came up silently. But immediately 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 251 
 
 she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, 
 and checked her tendency to sob. 
 
 The next day, recovered from the shuddering 
 fit of this evening scene, she determined to use 
 the charter which Grandcourt had scornfully 
 given her, and to talk as much as she liked with 
 Deronda; but no opportunities occurred, and 
 any little devices she could imagine for creat- 
 ing them were rejected by her pride, which was 
 now doubly active. Not towards Deronda him- 
 self, — she was curiously free from alarm lest 
 he should think her openness wanting in dignity : 
 it was part of his power over her that she be- 
 lieved him free from all misunderstanding as to 
 the way in which she appealed to him ; or rather, 
 that he should misunderstand her had never en- 
 tered into her mind. But the last morning came, 
 and still she had never been able to take up the 
 dropped thread of their talk, and she was with- 
 out devices. She and Grandcourt were to leave 
 at three o'clock. It was too irritating that after 
 a walk in the grounds had been planned in 
 Deronda's hearing, he did not present himself 
 to join in it. Grandcourt was gone with Sir 
 Hugo to King's Topping, to see the old manor- 
 house; others of the gentlemen were shooting; 
 she was condemned to go and see the decoy and 
 the water-fowl, and everything else that she 
 least wanted to see, with the ladies, with old 
 Lord Pentreath and his anecdotes, with Mr. 
 Vandernoodt and his admiring manners. The 
 irritation became too strong for her: without 
 premeditation, she took advantage of the wind- 
 ing road to linger a little out of sight, and then 
 set off back to the house, almost running when 
 
252 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 she was safe from observation. She entered by 
 a side door, and the library was on her left hand : 
 Deronda, she knew, was often there ; why might 
 she not turn in there as well as into any other 
 room in the house? She had been taken there 
 expressly to see the illuminated family tree, and 
 other remarkable things, — what more natural 
 than that she should like to look in again? The 
 thing most to be feared was that the room w^ould 
 be empty of Deronda, for the door was ajar. 
 She pushed it gently, and looked round it. He 
 was there, writing busily at a distant table, with 
 his back vto wards the door (in fact. Sir Hugo 
 had asked him to answer some constituents' 
 letters which had become pressing). An enor- 
 mous log-fire, with the scent of russia from the 
 books, made the great room as warmly odorous 
 as a private chapel in which the censers have 
 been swinging. It seemed too daring to go in, 
 — too rude to speak and interrupt him ; yet she 
 went in on the noiseless carpet, and stood still 
 for two or three minutes, till Deronda, having 
 finished a letter, pushed it aside for signature, 
 and threw himself back to consider whether there 
 were anything else for him to do, or whether he 
 could walk out for the chance of meeting the 
 party which included Gwendolen, when he heard 
 her voice saying, " Mr. Deronda." 
 
 It was certainly startling. He rose hastily, 
 turned round, and pushed away his chair with 
 a strong expression of surprise. 
 
 " Am I wrong to come in? " said Gwendolen. 
 
 " I thought you were far on your walk," said 
 Deronda. 
 
 " I turned back," said Gwendolen. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 253 
 
 "Do you not intend to go out again? I could 
 join you now, if you would allow me." 
 
 " No; I want to say something, and I can't 
 stay long," said Gwendolen, speaking quickly 
 in a subdued tone, while she w^alked forward and 
 rested her arms and muff on the back of the chair 
 he had pushed away from him. " I want to tell 
 you that it is really so, — I can't help feeling 
 remorse for having injured others. That was 
 what I meant when I said that I had done w^orse 
 than gamble again and pawn the necklace again, 
 
 — something more injurious, as you called it. 
 And I can't alter it. I am punished, but I can't 
 alter it. You said I could do many things. Tell 
 me again. What should you do — what should 
 you feel, if you were in my place? " 
 
 The hurried directness with which she spoke 
 
 — the absence of all her little airs, as if she were 
 only concerned to use the time in getting an 
 answer that would guide her, made her appeal 
 unspeakably touching. 
 
 Deronda said, " I should feel something of 
 what you feel, — deep sorrow." 
 
 " But what would you try to do? " said Gwen- 
 dolen, with urgent quickness. 
 
 " Order my life so as to make any possible 
 amends, and keep away from doing any sort of 
 injury again," said Deronda, catching her sense 
 that the time for speech was brief. 
 
 " But I can't, — I can't; I must go on," said 
 Gwendolen, in a passionate loud whisper. " I 
 have thrust out others, — I have made my gain 
 out of their loss, — tried to make it, — tried. 
 And I must go on. I can't alter it." 
 
 It was impossible to answer this instantane- 
 
254 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ously. Her words had confirmed his conjecture, 
 and the situation of all concerned rose in swift 
 images before him. His feeling for those who 
 had been " thrust out " sanctioned her remorse; 
 he could not try to nullify it, yet his heart was 
 full of pity for her. But as soon as he could 
 he answered, taking up her last words, — 
 
 " That is the bitterest of all, — to wear the 
 yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you sub- 
 mitted to that, as men submit to maiming or a 
 lifelong incurable disease? — and make the un- 
 alterable wrong a reason for more effort towards 
 a good that may do something to counterbalance 
 the evil? One who has committed irremediable 
 errors may be scourged by that consciousness 
 into a higher course than is common. There are 
 many examples. Feeling^what it is to have 
 spoiled one life may well make us long to save 
 other lives from being spoiled." 
 
 " But you have not wronged any one, or 
 spoiled their lives," said Gwendolen, hastily. 
 "It is only others who have wronged you/' 
 
 Deronda coloured slightly, but said immedi- 
 ately, " I suppose our keen feeling for ourselves 
 might end in giving us a keen feeling for others, 
 if, when we are suffering acutely, we were to 
 consider that others go through the same sharp 
 experience. That is a sort of remorse before 
 commission. Can't you understand that? " 
 
 " I think I do, — now," said Gwendolen. 
 " But you were right, — I am selfish. I have 
 never thought much of any one's feelings, ex- 
 cept my mother's. I have not been fond of 
 people. — But what can I do?" she went on, 
 more quickly. " I must get up in the morning 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 255 
 
 and do what every one else does. It is all like 
 a dance set beforehand. I seem to see all that 
 can be, — and I am tired and sick of it. And 
 the world is all confusion to me," — she made a 
 gesture of disgust. " You say I am ignorant. 
 But what is the good of trying to know more, 
 unless life were worth more? " 
 
 " This good," said Deronda, promptly, with 
 a touch of indignant severity, which he was in- 
 clined to encourage as his own safeguard: "life 
 would be worth more to you; some real knowl- 
 edge would give you an interest in the world 
 beyond the small drama of personal desires. It 
 is the curse of your life, — forgive me, — of so 
 many lives, that all passion is spent in that nar- 
 row round, for want of ideas and sympathies to 
 make a larger home for it. Is there any single 
 occupation of mind that you care about with pas- 
 sionate delight or even independent interest? " 
 
 Deronda paused; but Gwendolen, looking 
 startled and thrilled as by an electric shock, said 
 nothing, and he went on more insistently, — 
 
 " I take what you said of music for a small 
 example, — it answers for all larger things, — 
 you will not cultivate it for the sake of a pri- 
 vate joy in it. What sort of earth or heaven 
 would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls 
 pauperized by inaction? If one firmament has 
 no stimulus for our attention and awe, I don't 
 see how four would have it. We should stamp 
 every possible world with the flatness of our own 
 insanity, — which is necessarily impious, without 
 faith or fellowship. The refuge you are needing 
 from personal trouble is the higher, the religious 
 life, which holds an enthusiasm for something 
 
256 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 more than our own appetites and vanities. The 
 few may find themselves in it simply by an ele- 
 vation of feeling; but for us who have to strug- 
 gle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a 
 region in which the affections are clad with 
 knowledge." 
 
 The half -indignant remonstrance that vi- 
 brated in Deronda's voice came, as often hap- 
 pens, from the habit of inward argument with 
 himself rather than from severity towards Gwen- 
 dolen ; but it had a more beneficent effect on her 
 than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than 
 the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be 
 roused into self -judgment is comparative activ- 
 ity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child, 
 shaken out of its wailings into awe, and she 
 said humbly, — 
 
 " I will try. I will think." 
 
 They both stood silent for a minute, as if 
 some third presence had arrested them, — for 
 Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure 
 which is apt to come when our own winged 
 words seem to be hovering around us, — till 
 Gwendolen began again, — 
 
 " You said affection was the best thing, and 
 I have hardly any, — none about me. If I 
 could, I would have mamma; but that is impos- 
 sible. Things have changed to me so, — in such 
 a short time. What I used not to like, I long 
 for now. I think I am almost getting fond of 
 the old things now they are gone." Her lip 
 trembled. 
 
 " Take the present suffering as a painful let- 
 ting in of light," said Deronda, more gently. 
 " You are conscious of more beyond the round 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 257 
 
 of your own inclinations, — you know more of 
 the way in which your hfe presses on others, and 
 their Ufe on yours. I don't think you could 
 have escaped the painful process in some form 
 or other." 
 
 " But it is a very cruel form," said Gwendolen, 
 beating her foot on the ground with returning 
 agitation. " I am frightened at everything. I 
 am frightened at myself. When my blood is 
 fired I can do daring things, — take any leap ; 
 but that makes me frightened at myself." She 
 was looking at nothing outside her ; but her eyes 
 were directed toward the window, away from 
 Deronda, who with quick comprehension said, — 
 
 " Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep 
 your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that 
 remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed medi- 
 tation may do a great deal towards defining our 
 longing or dread. We are not always in a state 
 of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can 
 use our memories and gradually change the bias 
 of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear 
 as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. 
 It may make consequences passionately present 
 to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, 
 and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision." 
 Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; 
 ^he felt as if he were seizing a faint chance of 
 rescuing her from some indefinite danger. 
 
 "Yes, I know; I understand what you 
 mean," said Gwendolen, in her loud whisper, 
 not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small 
 gloved hand and waving it in deprecation of the 
 notion that it was easy to obey that advice. 
 " But if feelings rose, — there are some feelings, 
 
 VOL. XIII 17 
 
258 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 — hatred and anger, — how can I be good when 
 they keep rising? And if there came a moment 
 when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer 
 — " She broke off, and with agitated lips 
 looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face 
 pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He 
 was under the baffling difficulty of discerning 
 that what he had been urging on her was thrown 
 into the pallid distance of mere thought before 
 the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was 
 as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were 
 bound. The pained compassion which was 
 spread over his features as he watched her 
 affected her with a compunction unlike any she 
 had felt before, and in a changed, imploring 
 tone she said, — 
 
 " I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You 
 can help me. I will think of everything. I will 
 try. Tell me — it will not be a pain to you that 
 I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? 
 You began it, you know, when you rebuked 
 me." There was a melancholy smile on her lips 
 as she said that, but she added more entreat- 
 ingly, " It will not be a pain to you? " 
 
 " Not if it does anything to save you from an 
 evil to come," said Deronda, with strong em- 
 phasis; " otherwise it will be a lasting pain." 
 
 " No — no — it shall not be. It may be — it 
 shall be better with me because I have known 
 you." She turned immediately, and quitted the 
 room. 
 
 When she was on the first landing of the 
 staircase. Sir Hugo passed across the hall on 
 his way to the library, and saw her. Grandcourt 
 was not with him. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 259 
 
 Deronda, when the baronet entered, was 
 standing in his ordinary attitude, grasping his 
 coat-collar, with his back to the table, and with 
 that indefinable expression by which we judge 
 that a man is still in the shadow of a scene which 
 he has just gone through. He moved, however, 
 and began to arrange the letters. 
 
 " Has Mrs. Grandcourt been in here? " said 
 Sir Hugo. 
 
 " Yes, she has." 
 
 "Where are the others?" 
 
 " I believe she left them somewhere in the 
 grounds." 
 
 After a moment's silence, in which Sir Hugo 
 looked at a letter without reading it, he said, 
 " I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan, — 
 you understand me? " 
 
 " I believe I do, sir," said Deronda, after a 
 slight hesitation, which had some repressed 
 anger in it. " But there is nothing answering to 
 your metaphor, — no fire, and therefore no 
 chance of scorching." 
 
 Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then 
 said, " So much the better. For between our- 
 selves, I fancy there may be some hidden gun- 
 powder in that establishment." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 "Aspem. Pardon, my lord — 1 speak for Sigismund. 
 
 Fronsberg. For him ? Oh, ay — for him I always hold 
 A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw 
 Sooner or later on me. What his need ? 
 Mad project broken ? fine mechanic wings 
 That would not fly ? durance, assault on watch, 
 Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat ? 
 
 Aspem. Oh, none of these, my lord ; he has escaped 
 From Circe's herd, and seeks to win the love 
 Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win 
 First your consent. You frown. 
 
 Fronsberg. Distinguish words. 
 
 I said I held a pardon, not consent." • 
 
 IN spite of Deronda's reasons for wishing to 
 be in town again, — reasons in which his 
 anxiety for Mirah was blent with curiosity 
 to know more of the enigmatic Mordecai, — he 
 did not manage to go up before Sir Hugo, who 
 preceded his family that he might be ready for 
 the opening of Parliament on the 6th of Febru- 
 ary. Deronda took up his quarters in Park 
 Lane, aware that his chambers were sufficiently 
 tenanted by Hans Meyrick. This was what he 
 expected; but he found other things not alto- 
 gether according to his expectations. 
 
 Most of us remember Retzsch's drawing of 
 destiny in the shape of Mephistopheles playing 
 at chess with man for his soul, a game in which 
 we may imagine the clever adversary making 
 a feint of unintended moves so as to set the be- 
 guiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces 
 away from the true point of attack. The fiend 
 makes preparation his favourite object of mock- 
 ery, that he may fatally persuade us against 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 261 
 
 our best safeguard: he even meddles so far as 
 to suggest our taking out waterproofs when he 
 is well aware the sky is going to clear, foreseeing 
 that the imbecile will turn this delusion into a 
 prejudice against waterproofs instead of giving 
 a closer study to the weather-signs. It is a 
 peculiar test of a man's metal when, after he 
 has painfully ' adjusted himself to what seems 
 a wise provision, he finds all his mental precau- 
 tion a little beside the mark, and his excellent 
 intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, 
 accurately cut from a wrong starting-point. 
 His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet 
 misbehaviour, and finds quite a different call 
 upon it. Something of this kind happened to 
 Deronda. 
 
 His first impression was one of pure pleasure 
 and amusement at finding his sitting-room 
 transformed into an atelier strewed with miscel- 
 laneous drawings and with the contents of two 
 chests from Rome, the lower half of the windows 
 darkened with baize, and the blond Hans in 
 his weird youth as the presiding genius of the 
 littered place, — his hair longer than of old, his 
 face more whimsically creased, and his high 
 voice as usual getting higher under the excite- 
 ment of rapid talk. The friendship of the two 
 had been kept up warmly since the memorable 
 Cambridge time, not only by correspondence 
 but by little episodes of companionship abroad 
 and in England, and the original relation of con- 
 fidence on one side and indulgence on the other 
 had been developed in practice, as is wont to 
 be the case where such spiritual borrowing and 
 lending has been well begun. 
 
262 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " I knew you would like to see my casts and 
 antiquities," said Hans, after the first hearty 
 greetings and inquiries, " so I did n't scruple to 
 unlade my chests here. But I Ve found two 
 rooms at Chelsea not many hundred yards from 
 my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready 
 to hang out there, — when they 've scraped the 
 walls and put in some new lights. That 's all 
 I 'm waiting for. But you see I don't wait to 
 begin work: you can't conceive what a great 
 fellow I 'm going to be. The seed of immor- 
 tality has sprouted within me." 
 
 " Only a fungoid growth, I dare say, — a 
 crowing disease in the lungs," said Deronda, 
 accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fashion. 
 He was walking towards some drawings 
 propped on the ledge of his bookcases: five 
 rapidly sketched heads, — different aspects of 
 the same face. He stood at a convenient dis- 
 tance from them, without making any remark. 
 Hans, too, was silent for a minute, took up his 
 palette, and began touching the picture on his 
 easel. 
 
 " What do you think of them? " he said at 
 last. 
 
 " The full face looks too massive; otherwise 
 the likenesses are good," said DerOnda, more 
 coldly than was usual with him. 
 
 " No, it is not too massive," said Hans, de- 
 cisively. " I have noted that. There is always 
 a little surprise when one passes from the pro- 
 file to the full face. But I shall enlarge her 
 scale for Berenice. I am making a Berenice 
 series, — look at the sketches along there, — • 
 and now I think of it, you are just the model 
 
MORDECAI 263 
 
 I want for the Agrippa." Hans, still with 
 pencil and palette in hand, had moved to De- 
 ronda's side while he said this; but he added 
 hastily, as if conscious of a mistake, "No, no, 
 I forgot; you don't like sitting for your por- 
 trait, confound you! However, I 've picked up 
 a capital Titus. There are to be five in the 
 series. The first is Berenice clasping the knees 
 of Gessius Florus and beseeching him to spare 
 her people; I Ve got that on the easel. Then 
 this, where she is standing on the Xystus with 
 Agrippa, entreating the people not to injure 
 themselves by resistance." 
 
 " Agrippa's legs will never do," said De- 
 ronda. 
 
 " The legs are good realistically," said Hans, 
 his face creasing drolly; " public men are often 
 shaky about the legs, — ' Their legs, the em- 
 blem of their various thought,' as somebody says 
 in the * Rehearsal.' " 
 
 " But these are as impossible as the legs of 
 Raphael's Alcibiades," said Deronda. 
 
 " Then they are good ideally," said Hans. 
 "Agrippa's legs were possibly bad; I idealize 
 that, and make them impossibly bad. Art, my 
 Eugenius, must intensify. But never mind the 
 legs now: the third sketch in the series is Bere- 
 nice exulting in the prospect of being Empress 
 of Rome, when the news has come that Ves- 
 pasian is declared Emperor and her lover Titus 
 his successor." 
 
 " You must put a scroll in her mouth, else 
 people will not understand that. You can't tell 
 that in a picture." 
 
 " It will make them feel their ignorance then. 
 
264 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 — an excellent aesthetic effect. The fourth is, 
 Titus sending Berenice away from Rome after 
 she has shared his palace for ten years, — both 
 reluctant, both sad, — invitus invitam, as Sue- 
 tonius hath it. I 've found a model for the 
 Roman brute." 
 
 " Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She 
 must have been that." 
 
 " No, no; a few mature touches to show the 
 lapse of time. Dark-eyed beauty wears well, 
 hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth: 
 Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. 
 That is pure imagination. That is what ought 
 to have been — perhaps was. Now, see how 
 I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what 
 became of her: that is finely indicated by the 
 series coming to a close. There is no sixth pic- 
 ture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a 
 gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his 
 head with a frown, as if looking for a like im- 
 pression on Deronda. " I break off in the 
 Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so 
 to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into 
 nothing, — le neant; can anything be more sub- 
 lime, especially in French? The vulgar would 
 desire to see her corpse and burial — perhaps 
 her will read and her linen distributed. But now 
 come and look at this on the easel. I have made 
 some way there." 
 
 " That beseeching attitude is really good," 
 said Deronda, after a moment's contemplation. 
 " You have been very industrious in the Christ- 
 mas holidays; for I suppose you have taken 
 up the subject since you came to London." 
 Neither of them had yet mentioned Mirah. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 265 
 
 " No," said Hans, putting touches to his pic- 
 ture, " I made up my mind to the subject before. 
 I take that lucky chance for an augury that I am 
 going to burst on the world as a great painter. 
 I saw a splendid woman in the Trastevere, — 
 the grandest women there are half Jewesses, 
 
 — and she set me hunting for a fine situation 
 of a Jewess at Rome. Like other men of vast 
 learning, I ended by taking what lay on the 
 surface. I '11 show you a sketch of the Traste- 
 verina's head when I can lay my hands on it." 
 
 " I should think she would be a more suitable 
 model for Berenice," said Deronda, not knowing 
 exactly how to express his discontent. 
 
 " Not a bit of it. The model ought to be the 
 most beautiful Jewess in the world, and I have 
 found her." 
 
 Have you made yourself sure that she would 
 like to figure in that character? I should think 
 no woman would be more abhorrent to her. 
 Does she quite know what you are doing? " 
 
 " Certainly. I got her to throw herself pre- 
 cisely into this attitude. Little mother sat for 
 Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees." 
 
 — Here Hans went a little way off and looked 
 at the effect of his touches. 
 
 " I dare say she knows nothing about Bere- 
 nice's history," said Deronda, feeling more in- 
 dignation than he would have been able to 
 justify. 
 
 " Oh, yes, she does, — ladies' edition. Bere- 
 nice was a fervid patriot, but was beguiled by 
 love and ambition into attaching herself to the 
 arch-enemy of her people. Whence the Neme- 
 sis. Mirah takes it as a tragic parable, and cries 
 
266 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to think what the penitent Berenice suffered 
 as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat des- 
 olate amidst desolation. That was her own 
 phrase. I could n't find in my heart to tell her 
 I invented that part of the story." 
 
 " Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, 
 chiefly in order to hinder himself from saying 
 something else. 
 
 " Shall you mind turning over that folio?" 
 said Hans. " My studies of heads are all there. 
 But they are in confusion. You will perhaps 
 find her next to a crop-eared undergraduate." 
 
 After Deronda had been turning over the 
 drawings a minute or two, he said, — 
 
 " These seem to be all Cambridge heads and 
 bits of country. Perhaps I had better begin at 
 the other end." 
 
 "No; you'll find her about the middle. I 
 emptied one folio into another." 
 
 " Is this one of your undergraduates? " said 
 Deronda, holding up a drawing. " It 's an un- 
 usually agreeable face." 
 
 " That? Oh, that 's a man named Gascoigne, 
 — Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly good fel- 
 low; his upper lip, too, is good. I coached him 
 before he got his scholarship. He ought to have 
 taken honours last Easter. But he was ill, and 
 has had to stay up another year. I must look 
 him up. I want to know how he 's going on." 
 
 " Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, hold- 
 ing up a sketch of the Trasteverina. 
 
 " Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather con- 
 temptuously, " too coarse. I was unregenerate 
 then." 
 
 Deronda was silent while he closed the folio. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 267 
 
 leaving the Trasteverina outside. Then grasp- 
 ing his coat-collar, and turning towards Hans, 
 he said, " I dare say my scruples are excessive, 
 Meyrick, but I must ask you to oblige me by 
 giving up this notion." 
 
 Hans threw himself into a tragic attitude, and 
 screamed: "What! my series — my immortal 
 Berenice series ? Think of what you are saying, 
 man, — destroying, as Milton says, not a life 
 but an immortality. Wait before you answer, 
 that I may deposit the implements of my art 
 and be ready to uproot my hair." 
 
 Here Hans laid down his pencil and palette, 
 threw himself backward into a great chair, and 
 hanging limply over the side, shook his long hair 
 half over his face, lifted his hooked fingers on 
 each side his head, and looked up with comic 
 terror at Deronda, who was obliged to smile as 
 he said, — 
 
 " Paint as many Berenices as you like, but I 
 wish you could feel with me — perhaps you will, 
 on reflection — that you should choose another 
 model." 
 
 " Why? " said Hans, standing up, and look- 
 ing serious again. 
 
 Because she may get into such a position 
 that her face is likely to be recognized. Mrs. 
 Meyrick and I are anxious for her that she 
 should be known as an admirable singer. It is 
 right, and she wishes it, that she should make 
 herself independent. And she has excellent 
 chances. One good introduction is secured al- 
 ready. And I am going to speak to Klesmer. 
 Her face may come to be very well known, 
 and — well, it is useless to attempt to explain, 
 
268 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 unless you feel as I do. I believe that if 
 Mirah saw the circumstances clearly, she would 
 strongly object to being exhibited in this way, 
 — to allowing herself to be used as a model for 
 a heroine of this sort." 
 
 As Hans stood with his thumbs in the belt 
 of his blouse listening to this speech, his face 
 showed a growing surprise melting into amuse- 
 ment, that at last would have its way in an 
 explosive laugh ; but seeing that Deronda looked 
 gravely offended, he checked himself to say: 
 " Excuse my laughing, Deronda. You never 
 gave me an advantage over you before. If it 
 had been about anything but my own pictures, 
 I should have swallowed every word because 
 you said it. And so you actually believe that 
 I should get my five pictures hung on the line 
 in a conspicuous position, and carefully studied 
 by the public? Zounds, man! cider-cup and 
 conceit never gave me half such a beautiful 
 dream. My pictures are likely to remain as 
 private as the utmost hypersensitiveness could 
 desire." 
 
 Hans turned to paint again as a way of fill- 
 ing up awkward pauses. Deronda stood per- 
 fectly still, recognizing his mistake as to pub- 
 licity, but also conscious that his repugnance 
 was not much diminished. He was the reverse 
 of satisfied either with himself or with Hans; 
 but the power of being quiet carries a man well 
 through moments of embarrassment. Hans had 
 a reverence for his friend which made him feel 
 a sort of shyness at Deronda's being in the 
 wrong; but it was not in his nature to give up 
 anything readily, though it were only a whim 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 269 
 
 — or rather, especially if it were a whim, — and 
 he presently went on, painting the while : — 
 
 " But even supposing I had a public rushing 
 after my pictures as if they were a railway 
 series including nurses, babies, and bonnet-boxes, 
 I can't see any justice in your objection. Every 
 painter worth remembering has painted the face 
 he admired most, as often as he could. It is 
 a part of his soul that goes out into his pic- 
 tures. He diffuses its influence in that way. 
 He puts what he hates into a caricature. He 
 puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic 
 form. If a man could paint the woman he loves 
 a thousand times as the Stella Maris to put 
 courage into the sailors on board a thousand 
 ships, so much the more honour to her. Is n't 
 that better than painting a piece of staring im- 
 modesty and calling it by a worshipful name? " 
 
 " Every objection can be answered if you take 
 broad ground enough, Hans: no special ques- 
 tion of conduct can be properly settled in that 
 way," said Deronda, with a touch of peremptori- 
 ness. " I might admit all your generalities, and 
 yet be right in saying you ought not to publish 
 Mirah's face as a model for Berenice. But I 
 give up the question of publicity. I was un- 
 reasonable there." Deronda hesitated a mo- 
 ment. " Still, even as a private affair, there 
 might be good reasons for your not indulging 
 yourself too much in painting her from the point 
 of view you mention. You must feel that her 
 situation at present is a very delicate one; and 
 until she is in more independence, she should 
 be kept as carefully as a bit of Venetian glass, 
 for fear of shaking her out of the safe place 
 
270 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 she is lodged in. Are you quite sure of your 
 own discretion? Excuse me, Hans. My having 
 found her binds me to watch over her. Do you 
 understand me? " 
 
 " Perfectly," said Hans, turning his face into 
 a good-humoured smile. " You have the very 
 justifiable opinion of me that I am likely to 
 shatter all the glass in my way, and break my 
 own skull into the bargain. Quite fair. Since 
 I got into the scrape of being born, everything 
 I have liked best has been a scrape either for 
 myself or somebody else. Everything I have 
 taken to heartily has somehow turned into a 
 scrape. My painting is the last scrape; and 
 I shall be all my life getting out of it. You 
 think now I shall get into a scrape at home. 
 No; I am regenerate. You think I must be 
 over head and ears in love with Mirah. Quite 
 right; so I am. But you think I shall scream 
 and plunge and spoil everything. There you 
 are mistaken, — excusably but transcendently 
 mistaken. I have undergone baptism by im- 
 mersion. Awe takes care of me. Ask the little 
 mother." 
 
 " You don't reckon a hopeless love among 
 your scrapes, then? " said Deronda, whose voice 
 seemed to get deeper as Hans's went higher. 
 
 " I don't mean to call mine hopeless," said 
 Hans, with provoking coolness, laying down his 
 tools, thrusting his thumbs into his belt, and 
 moving away a little, as if to contemplate his 
 picture more deliberately. 
 
 " My dear fellow, you are only preparing 
 misery for yourself," said Deronda, decisively. 
 " She would not marry a Christian, even if she 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 271 
 
 loved him. Have you heard her — of course 
 you have — heard her speak of her people and 
 her religion? " 
 
 " That can't last," said Hans. " She will see 
 no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that 
 race is insupportable, — ' insupportably advanc- 
 ing ' — his nose." 
 
 " She may rejoin her family. That is what 
 she longs for. Her mother and brother are 
 probably strict Jews." 
 
 " I '11 turn proselyte if she wishes it," said 
 Hans, with a shrug and a laugh. 
 
 " Don't talk nonsense, Hans. I thought you 
 professed a serious love for her," said Deronda, 
 getting heated. 
 
 " So I do. You think it desperate, but I 
 don't." 
 
 " I know nothing; I can't tell what has hap- 
 pened. We must be prepared for surprises. 
 But I can hardly imagine a greater surprise to 
 me than that there should have seemed to be 
 anything in Mirah's sentiments for you to found 
 a romantic hope on." Deronda felt that he was 
 too contemptuous. 
 
 " I don't found my romantic hopes on a 
 woman's sentiments," said Hans, perversely in- 
 clined to be the merrier when he was addressed 
 with gravity. " I go to science and philosophy 
 for my romance. Nature designed Mirah to 
 fall in love with me. The amalgamation of 
 races demands it — the mitigation of human 
 ugliness demancjs it — the affinity of contrasts 
 assures it. I am the utmost contrast to Mirah, 
 — a bleached Christian who can't sing two notes 
 in tune. Who has a chance against me? " 
 
272 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 "I see now; it was all persiflage. You don't 
 mean a word of what you say, Meyriek," said 
 Deronda, laying his hand on Meyrick's shoulder, 
 and speaking in a tone of cordial relief. " I 
 was a wiseacre to answer you seriously." 
 
 " Upon my honour I do mean it, though," 
 said Hans, facing round and laying his left 
 hand on Deronda's shoulder, so that their eyes 
 fronted each other closely. " I am at the con- 
 fessional. I meant to tell you as soon as you 
 came. My mother says you are Mir ah' s guard- 
 ian, and she thinks herself responsible to you 
 for every breath that falls on Mirah in her house. 
 Well, I love her — I worship her — I won't 
 despair — I mean to deserve her." 
 
 " My dear fellow, you can't do it," said De- 
 ronda, quickly. 
 
 " I should have said, I mean to try." 
 
 " You can't keep your resolve, Hans. You 
 used to resolve what you would do for your 
 mother and sisters." 
 
 " You have a right to reproach me, old fel- 
 low," said Hans, gently. 
 
 " Perhaps I am ungenerous," said Deronda, 
 not apologetically, however. " Yet it can't be 
 ungenerous to warn you that you are indulg- 
 ing mad. Quixotic expectations." 
 
 " Who will be hurt but myself, then? " said 
 Hans, putting out his lip. " I am not going 
 to say anything to her, unless I felt sure of the 
 answer. I dare not ask the oracles: I prefer 
 a cheerful caliginosity, as Sir Thomas Browne 
 might say. I would rather run my chance there 
 and lose, than be sure of winning anywhere else. 
 And I don't mean to swallow the poison of 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 273 
 
 despair, though you are disposed to thrust it 
 on me. I am giving up wine; so let me get a 
 httle drunk on hope and vanity." 
 
 " With all my heart, if it will do you any 
 good," said Deronda, loosing Hans's shoulder 
 with a little push. He made his tone kindly, 
 but his words were from the lip only. As to 
 his real feeling he was silenced. 
 
 He was conscious of that peculiar irritation 
 which will sometimes befall the man whom 
 others are inclined to trust as a mentor, — the 
 irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be 
 entirely off the same plane of desire and tempta- 
 tion as those who confess to him. Our guides, 
 we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were 
 not often the best teachers who only yester- 
 day got corrected for their mistakes. Through- 
 out their friendship Deronda had been used to 
 Hans's egotism, but he had never before felt 
 intolerant of it: when Hans, habitually pour- 
 ing out his own feenngs and affau's, had never 
 cared for any detail in return, and, if he chanced 
 to know any, had soon forgotten it. Deronda 
 had been inwardly as well as outwardly indul- 
 gent, — nay, satisfied. But now he noted with 
 some indignation, all the stronger because it 
 must not be betrayed, Hans's evident assump- 
 tion that for any danger of rivalry or jealousy 
 in relation to Mirah, Deronda was as much out 
 of the question as the angel Gabriel. It is one 
 thing to be resolute in placing one's self out of 
 the question, and another to endure that others 
 should perform that exclusion for us. He had 
 expected that Hans would give him trouble: 
 what he had not expected was that the trouble 
 
 VOL. XIII — 18 
 
274 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 would have a strong element of personal feeling. 
 And he was rather ashamed that Hans's hopes 
 caused him uneasiness in spite of his well-war- 
 ranted conviction that they would never be ful- 
 filled. They had raised an image of Mirah 
 changing; and however he might protest that 
 the change would not happen, the protest kept 
 up the unpleasant image. Altogether, poor 
 Hans seemed to be entering into Deronda's 
 experience in a disproportionate manner, — 
 going beyond his part of rescued prodigal, and 
 rousing a feeling quite distinct from compas- 
 sionate affection. 
 
 When Deronda went to Chelsea he was not 
 made as comfortable as he ought to have been 
 by Mrs. Meyrick's evident release from anxiety 
 about the beloved but incalculable son. Mirah 
 seemed livelier than before, and for the first 
 time he saw her laugh. It was when they 
 were talking of Hans, he being naturally the 
 mother's first topic. Mirah wished to know if 
 Deronda had seen Mr. Hans going through 
 a sort of character piece without changing his 
 dress. 
 
 " He passes from one figure to another as if 
 he were a bit of flame where you fancied the 
 figures without seeing them," said Mirah, full 
 of her subject; "he is so wonderfully quick. 
 I used never to like comic things on the stage, 
 — they were dwelt on too long ; but all in one 
 minute Mr. Hans makes himself a blind bard, 
 and then Rienzi addressing the Romans, . and 
 then an opera-dancer, and then a desponding 
 young gentleman, — I am sorry for them all, 
 and yet I laugh, all in one " — here Mirah gave 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 275 
 
 a little laugh that might have entered into a 
 song. 
 
 " We hardly thought that Mirah could laugh 
 till Hans came," said Mrs. Meyrick, seeing that 
 Deronda, like herself, was observing the pretty 
 picture. 
 
 Hans seems in great force just now," said 
 Deronda, in a tone of congratulation. " I don't 
 wonder at his enlivening you." 
 
 " He 's been just perfect ever since he came 
 back," said Mrs. Meyrick, keeping to herself 
 the next clause, — "if it will but last." 
 
 " It is a great happiness," said Mirah, " to see 
 the son and brother come into this dear home. 
 And I hear them all talk about what they did 
 together when they were little. That seems like 
 heaven, to have a mother and brother who talk in 
 that way. I have never had it." 
 
 " Nor I," said Deronda, involuntarily. 
 
 " No? " said Mirah, regretfully. " I wish you 
 had. I wish you had had every good." The last 
 words were uttered with a serious ardour as if 
 they had been part of a litany, while her eyes 
 were fixed on Deronda, who with his elbow on 
 the back of his chair was contemplating her by 
 the new light of the impression she had made on 
 Hans, and the possibility of her being attracted 
 by that extraordinary contrast. It was no more 
 than what had happened on each former visit of 
 his, that Mirah appeared to enjoy speaking of 
 what she felt very much as a little girl fresh 
 from school pours forth spontaneously all the 
 long-repressed chat for which she has found will- 
 ing ears. For the first time in her life Mirah 
 was among those whom she entirely trusted, and 
 
276 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her original visionary impression that Deronda 
 was a divinely sent messenger hung about his 
 image still, stirring always anew the disposition 
 to reliance and openness. It was in this way she 
 took what might have been the injurious flattery 
 of admiring attention into which her helpless de- 
 pendence had been suddenly transformed ; every 
 one around her watched for her looks and words, 
 and the effect on her was simply that of having 
 passed from a stifling imprisonment into an ex- 
 hilarating air which made speech and action a 
 delight. To her mind it was all a gift from 
 others' goodness. But that word of Deronda's 
 implying that there had been some lack in his 
 life which might be compared with anything she 
 had known in hers, was an entirely new inlet of 
 thought about him. After her first expression 
 of sorrowful surprise she went on, — 
 
 " But Mr. Hans said yesterday that you 
 thought so much of others you hardly wanted 
 anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful 
 story of Bouddha giving himself to the famished 
 tigress to save her and her little ones from starv- 
 ing. And he said you were like Bouddha. That 
 is what we all imagine of you." 
 
 " Pray don't imagine that," said Deronda, 
 who had lately been finding such suppositions 
 rather exasperating. " Even if it were true that 
 I thought so much of others, it would not follow 
 that I had no wants for myself. When Bouddha 
 let the tigress eat him, he might have been very 
 hungry himself." 
 
 " Perhaps if he was starved he would not 
 mind so much about being eaten," said Mab, 
 shyly. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 277 
 
 " Please don't think that, Mab ; it takes away 
 the beauty of the action," said Mirah. 
 
 " But if it were true, Mirah? " said the rational 
 Amy, having a half -holiday from her teaching; 
 " you always take what is beautiful as if it were 
 true." 
 
 " So it is," said Mirah, gently. " If people 
 have thought what is the most beautiful and the 
 best thing, it must be true. It is always there." 
 
 " Now, Mirah, what do you mean? " said 
 Amy. 
 
 " I understand her," said Deronda, coming 
 to the rescue. " It is a truth in thought, though 
 it may never have been carried out in action. It 
 lives as an idea. Is that it?" He turned to 
 Mirah, who was listening with a blind look in 
 her lovely eyes. 
 
 It must be that, because you understand 
 me, but I cannot quite explain," said Mirah, 
 rather abstractedly, — still searching for some 
 expression. 
 
 " But was it beautiful for Bouddha to let the 
 tiger eat him? " said Amy, changing her ground. 
 " It would be a bad pattern." 
 
 " The world would get full of fat tigers," said 
 Mab. 
 
 Deronda laughed, but defended the myth. 
 "It is like a passionate word," he said; "the 
 exaggeration is a flash of fervour. It is an ex- 
 treme image of what is happening every day, — 
 the transmutation of self." 
 
 " I think I can say what I mean now," said 
 Mirah, who had not heard the intermediate talk. 
 " When the best thing comes into our thoughts, 
 it is like what my mother has been to me. She 
 
278 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 has been just as really with me as all the 
 other people about me, — often more really 
 with me." 
 
 Deronda, inwardly wincing under this illus- 
 tration, which brought other possible realities 
 about that mother vividly before him, presently 
 turned the conversation by saying : " But we 
 must not get too far away from practical mat- 
 ters. I came, for one thing, to tell of an inter- 
 view I had yesterday, which I hope Mirah will 
 find to have been useful to her. It was with 
 Klesmer, the great pianist." 
 
 " Ah? " said Mrs. Meyrick, with satisfaction. 
 " You think he will help her? " 
 
 " I hope so. He is very much occupied, but 
 has promised to fix a time for receiving and hear- 
 ing Miss Lapidoth, as we must learn to call her," 
 — here Deronda smiled at Mirah, — " if she 
 consents to go to him." 
 
 " I shall be very grateful," said Mirah, calmly. 
 
 He wants to hear me sing, before he can judge 
 whether I ought to be helped." 
 
 Deronda was struck with her plain sense about 
 these matters of practical concern. 
 
 " It will not be at all trying to you, I hope, if 
 Mrs. Meyrick will kindly go with you to Kles- 
 mer's house." 
 
 " Oh, no, not at all trying. I have been doing 
 that all my life, — I mean, told to do things that 
 others may judge of me. And I have gone 
 through a bad trial of that sort. I am prepared 
 to bear it, and do some very small thing. Is 
 Klesmer a severe man? " 
 
 " He is peculiar, but I have not had experi- 
 ence enough of him to know whether he would 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 279 
 
 be what you would call severe. I know he is 
 kind-hearted, — kind in action, if not in speech." 
 
 " I have been used to be frowned at and not 
 praised," said Mirah. 
 
 " By the by, Klesmer frowns a good deal," 
 said Deronda, " but there is often a sort of smile 
 in his eyes all the while. Unhappily he wears 
 spectacles, so you must catch him in the right 
 light to see the smile." 
 
 I shall not be frightened," said Mirah. " If 
 he were like a roaring lion, he only wants me to 
 sing. I shall do what I can." 
 
 " Then I feel sure you will not mind being 
 invited to sing in Lady Mallinger's drawing- 
 room," said Deronda. " She intends to ask you 
 next month, and will imdte many ladies to hear 
 you, who are likely to want lessons from you for 
 their daughters." 
 
 " How fast we are mounting! " said Mrs. 
 Meyrick, with delight. " You never thought of 
 getting grand so quickly, Mirah." 
 
 " I am a little frightened at being called Miss 
 Lapidoth," said Mirah, colouring with a new 
 unea;siness. " Might I be called Cohen? " 
 
 I understand you," said Deronda, promptly. 
 " But, I assure you, you must not be called 
 Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. 
 This is one of the trifles in which we must con- 
 form to vulgar prejudice. We could choose 
 some other name, however, — such as singers 
 ordinarily choose, — an Italian or Spanish name, 
 which would suit your physique T 
 
 To Deronda just now the name Cohen was 
 equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges. 
 
 Mirah reflected a little, anxiously, then said: 
 
280 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " No. If Cohen will not do, I will keep the name 
 I have been called by. I will not hide myself. 
 I have friends to protect me. And now, — if my 
 father were very miserable and wanted help, — 
 no," she said, looking at Mrs. Meyrick, "I 
 should think then, that he was perhaps crying 
 as I used to see him, and had nobody to pity him, 
 and I had hidden myself from him. He had 
 none belonging to him but me. Others that 
 made friends with him always left him." 
 
 " Keep to what you feel right, my dear child," 
 said Mrs. Meyrick. " I would not persuade you 
 to the contrary." For her own part she had no 
 patience or pity for that father, and would have 
 left him to his crying. 
 
 Deronda was saying to himself, " I am rather 
 base to be angry with Hans. How can he help 
 being in love with her? But it is too absurdly 
 presumptuous for him even to frame the idea 
 of appropriating her, and a sort of blasphemy 
 to suppose that she could possibly give herself 
 to him." 
 
 What would it be for Daniel Deronda to en- 
 tertain such thoughts? He was not one who 
 could quite naively introduce himself where he 
 had just excluded his friend, yet it was undeni- 
 able that what had just happened made a new 
 stage in his feeling towards Mirah. But apart 
 from other grounds for self -repression, reasons 
 both definite and vague made him shut away that 
 question as he might have shut up a half-opened 
 writing that would have carried his imagination 
 too far and given too much shape to presenti- 
 ments. Might there not come a disclosure which 
 would hold the missing determination of his 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 281 
 
 course? What did he really know about his 
 origin? Strangely in these latter months when 
 it seemed right that he should exert his will in 
 the choice of a destination, the passion of his 
 nature had got more and more locked by this 
 uncertainty. The disclosure might bring its 
 pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to him to be 
 all on that side ; but if it helped him to make his 
 life a sequence which would take the form of 
 duty, — if it saved him from having to make an 
 arbitrary selection where he felt no preponder- 
 ance of desire? Still more he wanted to escape 
 standing as a critic outside the activities of men, 
 stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of self- 
 assigned superiority. His chief tether was his 
 early inwrought affection for Sir Hugo, making 
 him gratefully deferential to wishes with which 
 he had little agreement ; but gratitude had been 
 sometimes disturbed by doubts which were near 
 reducing it to a fear of being ungrateful. Many 
 of us complain that half our birthright is sharp 
 duty: Deronda was more inclined to complain 
 that he was robbed of this half; yet he accused 
 himself, as he would have accused another, of 
 being weakly self-conscious and wanting in re- 
 solve. He was the reverse of that type painted 
 for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, 
 whose coarse ambition for personal success is in- 
 flamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. 
 To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the 
 altar-fire in them ; and the thought of all closest 
 relations of our nature held still something of 
 the mystic power which had made his neck and 
 ears burn in boyhood. The average man may 
 regard this sensibility on the question of birth as 
 
282 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 preposterous and hardly credible; but with the 
 utmost respect for his knowledge as the rock 
 from which all other knowledge is hewn, it must 
 be admitted that many well-proved facts are 
 dark to the average man, even concerning the 
 action of his own heart and the structure of his 
 own retina. A century ago he and all his fore- 
 fathers had not had the slightest notion of that 
 electric discharge by means of which they had all 
 wagged their tongues mistakenly; any more 
 than they were awake to the secluded anguish 
 of exceptional sensitiveness into which many a 
 carelessly begotten child of man is born. 
 
 Perhaps the ferment was all the stronger in 
 Deronda's mind because he had never had a con- 
 fidant to whom he could open himself on these 
 delicate subjects. He had always been leaned 
 on instead of being invited to lean. Sometimes 
 he had longed for the sort of friend to whom he 
 might possibly unfold his experience: a young 
 man like himself who sustained a private grief 
 and was not too confident about his own career; 
 speculative enough to understand every moral 
 difficulty, yet socially susceptible, as he himself 
 was, and having every outward sign of equality 
 either in bodily or spiritual wrestling, — for he 
 had found it impossible to reciprocate confi- 
 dences with one who looked up to him. But he 
 had no expectation of meeting the friend he im- 
 agined. Deronda's was not one of those quiver- 
 ingly poised natures that lend themselves to 
 second-sight. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 "There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus 
 Bound not after but before he had well got the celestial fire into the 
 vdpdr)^ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals : thrust by the Kratos 
 and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised ideas, fastened 
 in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of poverty and disease, — 
 a sohtude where many pass by, but none regard." 
 
 SECOND-SIGHT " is a flag over dis- 
 puted ground. But it is matter of 
 knowledge that there are persons whose 
 yearnings, conceptions, — nay, travelled con- 
 clusions, — continually take the form of images 
 which have a foreshadowing power: the deed 
 they would do starts up before them in complete 
 shape, making a coercive type; the event they 
 hunger for or dread rises into vision with a seed- 
 like growth, feeding itself fast on unnumbered 
 impressions. They are not always the less ca- 
 pable of the argumentative process, nor less sane 
 than the commonplace calculators of the market : 
 sometimes it may be that their natures have man- 
 ifold openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, 
 where there may naturally be a greater and more 
 miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow 
 beadle-watched portal. No doubt there are ab- 
 ject specimens of the visionary, as there is a 
 minim mammal which you might imprison in the 
 finger of your glove. That small relative of the 
 elephant has no harm in him; but what great 
 mental or social type is free from specimens 
 whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? 
 One is afraid to think of all that the genus pa- 
 triot " embraces; or of the elbowing there might 
 
284 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 be at the day of judgment for those who ranked » 
 as authors, and brought volumes either in their 
 hands or on trucks. 
 
 This apology for inevitable kinship is meant 
 to usher in some facts about Mordecai, whose 
 figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as 
 a new question which he felt an interest in getting 
 answered. But the interest was no more than a 
 vaguely expectant suspense: the consumptive- 
 looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some 
 kind, getting his crust by a quiet handicraft, 
 like Spinoza, fitted into none of Deronda's 
 anticipations. 
 
 It was otherwise with the effect of their meet- 
 ing on Mordecai. For many winters, while he 
 had been conscious of an ebbing physical life and 
 a widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate 
 desire had concentred itself in the yearning for 
 some young ear into which he could pour his 
 mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough 
 to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, 
 painful life, as a mission to be executed. It was 
 remarkable that the hopefulness which is often 
 the beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, 
 was in Mordecai wholly diverted from the pros- 
 pect of bodily recovery and carried into the cur- 
 rent of this yearning for transmission. The 
 yearning, which had panted upward from out of 
 overwhelming discouragements, had grown into 
 a hope, — the hope into a confident belief, which, 
 instead of being checked by the clear conception 
 he had of his hastening decline, took rather the 
 intensity of expectant faith in a prophecy which 
 has only brief space to get fulfilled in. 
 
 Some years had now gone since he had first 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 285 
 
 begun to measure men with a keen glance search- 
 ing for a possibihty which became more and 
 more a distinct conception. Such distinctness as 
 it had at first was reached chiefly by a method of 
 contrast : he wanted to find a man who differed 
 from himself. Tracing reasons in that self for 
 the rebuffs he had met with and the hindrances 
 that beset him, he imagined a man who would 
 have all the elements necessary for sympathy 
 with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own : 
 he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, mor- 
 ally fervid — in all this a nature ready to be 
 plenished from Mordecai's; but his face and 
 frame must be beautiful and strong, he must 
 have been used to all the refinements of social 
 life, his voice must flow mth a full and easy 
 current, his circumstances be free from sordid 
 need; he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, 
 not sit and wander as Mordecai did, bearing the 
 stamp of his people amid the signs of poverty 
 and waning breath. Sensitive to physical, char- 
 acteristics, he had, both abroad and in England, 
 looked at pictures as well as men, and in a vacant 
 hour he had sometimes lingered in the National 
 Gallery in search of paintings which might feed 
 his hopefulness with grave and noble types of the 
 human form, such as might well belong to men 
 of his own race. But he returned in disappoint- 
 ment. The instances are scattered but thinly 
 over the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune 
 or selection even of the chief masters has given 
 to Art a face at once young, grand, and beauti- 
 ful, where, if there is any melancholy, it is no 
 feeble passivity, but enters into the foreshadowed 
 capability of heroism. 
 
286 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Some observant persons may perhaps remem- 
 ber his emaciated figure, and dark eyes deep in 
 their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture 
 that had touched him either to new or habitual 
 meditation : he commonly wore a cloth cap with 
 black fur round it, which no painter would have 
 asked him to take off. But spectators would be 
 likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew, 
 who probably got money out of pictures; and 
 Mordecai, when he noticed them, was perfectly 
 aware of the impression he made. Experience 
 had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of 
 a man's poverty and other physical disadvan- 
 tages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are 
 those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for 
 the rabble. But he was too sane and generous 
 to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to the 
 excusable prejudices of others: certain inca- 
 pacities of his own had made the sentence of ex- 
 clusion; and, hence it was that his imagination 
 had constructed another man who would be 
 something more ample than the second soul be- 
 stowed, according to the notion of the Cabalists, 
 to help out the insufficient first, — who would 
 be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate 
 all that was worthiest in an existence whose vis- 
 ible, palpable part was burning itself fast away. 
 His inward need for the conception of this ex- 
 panded, prolonged self was reflected as an out- 
 ward necessity. The thoughts of his heart (that 
 ancient phrase best shadows the truth) seemed 
 to him too precious, too closely inwoven with the 
 growth of things not to have a further destiny. 
 And as the more beautiful, the stronger, the 
 more executive self took shape in his mind, he 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 287 
 
 loved it beforehand with an affection half iden- 
 tifying, half contemplative and grateful. 
 
 Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in 
 images, that his coherent trains of thought often 
 resembled the significant dreams attributed to 
 sleepers by waking persons in their most inven- 
 tive moments; nay, they often resembled gen- 
 uine dreams in their way of breaking off the 
 passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, 
 for a long while, he habitually thought of the 
 Being answering to his need as one distantly 
 approaching or turning his back towards him, 
 darkly painted against a golden sky. The rea- 
 son of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's 
 habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic 
 aspects of London; and a favourite resort of 
 his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to 
 some one of the bridges, especially about sunrise 
 or sunset. Even when he was bending over 
 watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small 
 upper room looking out on dingy bricks and 
 dingy cracked windows, his imagination sponta- 
 neously planted him on some spot where he had 
 a far-stretching scene; his thought went on in 
 wide spaces ; and whenever he could, he tried to 
 have in reality the influences of a large sky. 
 Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge, 
 and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm 
 of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half 
 luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of 
 buildings which were the signs of world-com- 
 merce, the oncoming of boats and barges from 
 the still distance into sound and colour, entered 
 into his mood and blent themselves indistinguish- 
 ably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to 
 
288 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 which we can hardly be said to Hsten makes a 
 medium that bears up our spiritual wings. Thus 
 it happened that the figure representative of 
 Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened 
 by the excess of light in the aerial background. 
 But in the inevitable progress of his imagina- 
 tion towards fuller detail, he ceased to see the 
 figure with its back towards him. It began to 
 advance, and a face became discernible; the 
 words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, 
 noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but 
 typical form and colour: gathered from his 
 memory of faces seen among the Jews of Hol- 
 land and Bohemia, and from the paintings which 
 revived that memory. Reverently let it be said 
 of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to 
 the boy's and girl's picturing of the future be- 
 loved ; but the stirrings of such young desire are 
 feeble compared with the passionate current of 
 an ideal life straining to embody itself, made in- 
 tense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The 
 visionary form became a companion and auditor; 
 keeping a place not only in the waking imagina- 
 tion, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of 
 which it is truest to say, " I sleep, but my heart 
 waketh " — when the disturbing trivial story of 
 yesterday is charged, with the impassioned pur- 
 pose of years. 
 
 Of late the urgency of irredeemable time, 
 measured by the gradual choking of life, had 
 turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch 
 for the fulfilment that must be at hand. Was 
 the bell on the verge of tolling, the sentence 
 about to be executed? The deliverer's footstep 
 must be near, — the deliverer who was to rescue 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 289 
 
 Mordecai's spiritual travail from oblivion, and 
 give it an abiding place in the best heritage of 
 his people. An insane exaggeration of his own 
 value, even if his ideas had been as true and 
 precious as those of Columbus or Newton, many 
 would have counted this yearning, taking it as 
 the sublimer part for a man to say, " If not I, 
 then another," and to hold cheap the meaning 
 of his own life. But the fuller nature desires to 
 be an agent, to create, and not merely to look on : 
 strong love hungers to bless, and not merely to 
 behold blessing. And while there is warmth 
 enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, 
 there will still be men to feel, " I am lord of 
 this moment's change, and will charge it with 
 my soul." 
 
 But with that mingling of inconsequence 
 which belongs to us all, and not unhappily, 
 since it saves us from many effects of mistake, 
 Mordecai's confidence in the friend to come did 
 not suffice to make him passive, and he tried 
 expedients, pathetically humble, such as hap- 
 pened to be within his reach, for communicating 
 something of himself. It was now two years 
 since he had taken up his abode under Ezra 
 Cohen's roof, where he was regarded with much 
 good-will as a compound of workman, dominie, 
 vessel of charity, inspired idiot, man of piety, 
 and (if he were inquired into) dangerous heretic. 
 During that time little Jacob had advanced into 
 knickerbockers, and into that quickness of ap- 
 prehension which has been already made mani- 
 fest in relation to hardware and exchange. He 
 had also advanced in attachment to Mordecai, 
 regarding him as an inferior, but liking him 
 
 VOL. XIII 19 
 
290 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 none the worse, and taking his helpful clever- 
 ness as he might have taken the services of an 
 enslaved Djinn. As for Mordecai, he had given 
 Jacob his first lessons, and his habitual tender- 
 ness easily turned into the teacher's fatherhood. 
 Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual 
 distance between the parents and himself, and 
 would never have attempted any conmiunication 
 to them from his peculiar world, the boy moved 
 him with that idealizing affection which merges 
 the qualities of the individual child in the glory 
 of childhood and the possibilities of a long future. 
 And this feeling had drawn him on, at first 
 without premeditation, and afterwards with con- 
 scious purpose, to a sort of outpouring in the 
 ear of the boy which might have seemed wild 
 enough to any excellent man of business who 
 overheard it. But none overheard when Jacob 
 went up to Mordecai's room on a day, for ex- 
 ample, in which there was little work to be done, 
 or at an hour when the work was ended, and 
 after a brief lesson in English reading or in 
 numeration, was induced to remain standing at 
 his teacher's knees, or chose to jump astride 
 them, often to the patient fatigue of the wasted 
 limbs. The inducement was perhaps the mend- 
 ing of a toy, or some little mechanical device in 
 which Mordecai's well-practised finger-tips had 
 an exceptional skill; and with the boy thus 
 tethered, he would begin to repeat a Hebrew 
 poem of his own, into which years before he 
 jhad poured his first youthful ardours for that 
 conception of a blended past and future which 
 was the mistress of his soul, telling Jacob to 
 say the words after him. 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 291 
 
 " The boy will get them engraved within him," 
 thought Mordecai; "it is a way of printing." 
 
 None readier than Jacob at this fascinating 
 game of imitating unintelligible words; and if 
 no opposing diversion occurred, he would some- 
 times carry on his share in it as long as the 
 teacher's breath would last out. For Mordecai 
 threw into each repetition the fervour befitting 
 a sacred occasion. In such instances Jacob 
 would show no other distraction than reaching 
 out and surveying the contents of his pockets; 
 or drawing down the skin of his cheeks to make 
 his eyes look awful, and rolling his head to 
 complete the effect; or alternately handling his 
 own nose and Mordecai's, as if to test the rela- 
 tion of their masses. Under all this the fervid 
 reciter would not pause, satisfied if the young 
 organs of speech would submit themselves. But 
 most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob 
 leaping away into some antic or active anmse- 
 ment, when, instead of following the recitation, 
 he would return upon the foregoing words most 
 ready to his tongue, and mouth or gabble, with 
 a see-saw suited to the action of his limbs, a 
 verse on which Mordecai had spent some of his 
 too scanty heart's blood. Yet he waited with 
 such patience as a prophet needs, and began his 
 strange printing again undiscouraged on the 
 morrow, saying inwardly, — 
 
 " My words may rule him some day. Their 
 meaning may flash out on him. It is so with 
 a nation, — after many days." 
 
 Meanwhile Jacob's sense of power was in- 
 creased and his time enlivened by a store of 
 magical articulation with which he made the 
 
292 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 baby crow, or drove the large cat into a dark 
 corner, or promised himself to frighten any in- 
 cidental Christian of his own years. One week 
 he had unfortunately seen a street mountebank, 
 and this carried off his muscular imitativeness 
 in sad divergence from New Hebrew poetry 
 after the model of Jehuda ha-Levi. Mordecai 
 had arrived at a fresh passage in his poem; for 
 as soon as Jacob had got well used to one por- 
 tion, he was led on to another, and a fresh com- 
 bination of sounds generally answered better in 
 keeping him fast for a few minutes. The con- 
 sumptive voice, originally a strong high bary- 
 tone with its variously mingling hoarseness, like 
 a haze amidst illuminations, and its occasional 
 incipient gasp, had more than the usual excite- 
 ment, while it gave forth Hebrew verses with 
 a meaning something like this : — 
 
 "Away from me the garment of forgetfulness, 
 Withering the heart; 
 
 The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim, 
 Poisoned with scorn. 
 SoUtude is on the sides of Mount Nebo, 
 In its heart a tomb: 
 
 There the buried ark and golden cherubim 
 Make hidden light: 
 
 There the solemn faces gaze unchanged, 
 The wings are spread unbroken: 
 Shut beneath in silent awful speech 
 The Law lies graven. 
 Solitude and darkness are my covering, 
 And my heart a tomb ; 
 Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel ! 
 Shatter it as the clay of the founder 
 ' Around the golden image." 
 
 In the absorbing enthusiasm with which Mor- 
 decai had intoned rather than spoken this last 
 invocation, he was unconscious that Jacob had 
 ceased to follow him and had started away from 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 293 
 
 his knees; but pausing he saw, as by a sudden 
 flash, that the lad had thrown himself on his 
 hands with his feet in the air, mountebank 
 fashion, and was picking up with his lips a 
 bright farthing which was a favourite among 
 his pocket treasures. This might have been reck- 
 oned among the tricks Mordecai was used to, but 
 at this moment it jarred him horribly, as if it had 
 been a Satanic grin upon his prayer. 
 
 " Child! child! " he called out with a strange 
 cry that startled Jacob to his feet, and then he 
 sank backward with a shudder, closing his eyes. 
 
 "What?" said Jacob, quickly. Then not 
 getting an immediate answer, he pressed Mor- 
 decai' s knees with a shaking movement, in order 
 to rouse him. Mordecai opened his eyes with 
 a fierce expression in them, leaned forward, 
 grasped the little shoulders, and said in a quick, 
 hoarse whisper, — 
 
 " A curse is on your generation, child. They 
 will open the mountain and drag forth the golden 
 wings and coin them into money, and the sol- 
 emn faces they will break up into earrings for 
 wanton women ! And they shall get themselves 
 a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with 
 the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart 
 shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their 
 life to rottenness." 
 
 The aspect and action of Mordecai were so 
 new and mysterious to Jacob — they carried 
 such a burthen of obscure threat — it was as if 
 the patient, indulgent companion had turned 
 into something unknown and terrific : the sunken 
 dark eyes and hoarse accents close to him, the 
 thin grappling fingers, shook Jacob's little frame 
 
294 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 into awe, and while Mordecai was speaking he 
 stood trembling with a sense that the house was 
 tumbling in and they were not going to have 
 dinner any more. But when the terrible speech 
 had ended and the pinch was relaxed, the shock 
 resolved itself into tears; Jacob lifted up his 
 small patriarchal countenance and wept aloud. 
 This sign of childish grief at once recalled Mor- 
 decai to his usual gentle self: he was not able 
 to speak again at present, but with a maternal 
 action he drew the curly head towards him and 
 pressed it tenderly against his breast. On this 
 Jacob, feeling the danger well-nigh over, howled 
 at ease, beginning to imitate his own perform- 
 ance and improve upon it, — a sort of transition 
 from impulse into art often observable. Indeed, 
 the next day he undertook to terrify Adelaide 
 Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded very well. 
 
 But Mordecai suffered a check which lasted 
 long, from the consciousness of a misapplied 
 agitation; sane as well as excitable, he judged 
 severely his moments of aberration into futile 
 eagerness, and felt discredited with himself. All 
 the more his mind was strained towards the dis- 
 cernment of that friend to come, with whom he 
 would have a calm certainty of fellowship and 
 understanding. 
 
 It was just then that, in his usual mid-day 
 guardianship of the old book-shop, he was struck 
 by the appearance of Deronda, and it is perhaps 
 comprehensible now why Mordecai's glance took 
 on a sudden eager interest as he looked at the 
 new-comer: he saw a face and frame which 
 seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type. 
 But the disclaimer of Jewish birth was for the 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 295 
 
 moment a backward thrust of double severity, 
 the particular disappointment tending to shake 
 his confidence in the more indefinite expectation. 
 Nevertheless, when he found Deronda seated at 
 the Cohens' table, the disclaimer was for the 
 moment nullified: the first impression returned 
 with added force, seeming to be guaranteed by 
 this second meeting under circumstances more 
 peculiar than the former; and in asking De- 
 ronda if he knew Hebrew, Mordecai was so 
 possessed by the new inrush of belief, that he 
 had forgotten the absence of any other condi- 
 tion to the fulfilment of his hopes. But the 
 answering " No " struck them all down again, 
 and the frustration was more painful than be- 
 fore. After turning his back on the visitor that 
 Sabbath evening, Mordecai went through days 
 of a deep discouragement, like that of men on 
 a doomed ship, who, having strained their eyes 
 after a sail, and beheld it with rejoicing, behold 
 it never advance, and say, Our sick eyes make 
 it." But the long-contemplated figure had come 
 as an emotional sequence of Mordecai's firmest 
 theoretic convictions ; it had been wrought from 
 the imagery of his most passionate life; and it 
 inevitably reappeared, — reappeared in a more 
 specific self -asserting form than ever. Deronda 
 had that sort of resemblance to the preconceived 
 type which a finely individual bust or portrait 
 has to the more generalized copy left in our 
 minds after a long interval: we renew our 
 memory with delight, but we hardly know with 
 how much correction. And now his face met 
 Mordecai's inward gaze as if it had always be- 
 longed to the awaited friend, raying out, more- 
 
296 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 over, some of that influence which belongs to 
 breathing flesh; till by and by it seemed that 
 discouragement had turned into a new obsti- 
 nacy of resistance, and the ever-recurrent vision 
 had the force of an outward call to disregard 
 counter-evidence, and keep expectation awake. 
 It was Deronda now who was seen in the often 
 painful night-watches, when we are all liable to 
 be held with the clutch of a single thought, — 
 whose figure, never with its back turned, was 
 seen in moments of soothed reverie or soothed 
 dozing, painted on that golden sky which was 
 the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day 
 and of approaching rest. 
 
 Mordecai knew that the nameless stranger 
 was to come and redeem his ring; and in spite 
 of contrary chances, the wish to see him again 
 was growing into a belief that he should see 
 him. In the January weeks, he felt an increas- 
 ing agitation of that subdued hidden quality 
 which hinders nervous people from any steady 
 occupation on the eve of an anticipated change. 
 He could not go on with his printing of He- 
 brew on little Jacob's mind; or with his attend- 
 ance at a weekly club, which was another effort 
 of the same forlorn hope: something else was 
 coming. The one thing he longed for was to 
 get as far as the river, which he could do but 
 seldom and with difliculty. He yearned with 
 a poet's yearning for the wide sky, the far- 
 reaching vista of bridges, the tender and fluc- 
 tuating lights on the water which seems to 
 breathe with a life that can shiver and mourn, 
 be comforted and rejoice. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Vor den Wissenden sich stellen 
 Sicher ist 's in alien Fallen ! 
 Wenn du lange dich gequalet 
 Weiss er gleich wo dir es fehlet; 
 Auch auf Beifall darfst du hoffen, 
 Denn er weiss wo du 's getroffen. 
 
 Goethe: West-ostlicher Divan» 
 
 MOMENTOUS things happened to De- 
 ronda the very evening of that visit to 
 the small house at Chelsea, when there 
 was the discussion about Mirah's public name. 
 But for the family group there, what appeared 
 to be the chief sequence connected with it oc- 
 curred two days afterwards. About four o'clock 
 wheels paused before the door, and there came 
 one of those knocks with an accompanying ring 
 which serve to magnify the sense of social ex- 
 istence in a region where the most enlivening 
 signals are usually those of the muffin-man. All 
 the girls were at home, and the two rooms were 
 thrown together to make space for Kate's draw- 
 ing, as well as a great length of embroidery 
 which had taken the place of the satin cushions, 
 — a sort of piece de resistance in the courses of 
 needlework, taken up by any clever fingers that 
 happened to be at liberty. It stretched across 
 the front room picturesquely enough, Mrs. Mey- 
 rick bending over it at one corner, Mab in the 
 middle, and Amy at the other end. Mirah, 
 whose performances in point of sewing were 
 on the makeshift level of the tailor-bird's, her 
 
208 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 education in that branch having been much 
 neglected, was acting as reader to the party, 
 seated on a camp-stool; in which position she 
 also served Kate as model for a titlepage vign- 
 ette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the 
 successive volumes of the Family Tea-table. 
 She was giving forth with charming distinct- 
 ness the delightful Essay of Elia, " The Praise 
 of Chimney- Sweeps," and all were smiling over 
 the " innocent blacknesses," when the imposing 
 knock and ring called their thoughts to loftier 
 spheres, and they looked up in wonderment. 
 
 " Dear me! " said Mrs. Meyrick; " can it be 
 Lady Mallinger? Is there a grand carriage, 
 Amy? " 
 
 " No, — only a handsome cab. It must be a 
 gentleman." 
 
 " The Prime Minister, I should think," said 
 Kate, dryly. " Hans says the greatest man in 
 London may get into a handsome cab." 
 
 "Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "Suppose it 
 should be Lord Russell!" 
 
 The five bright faces were all looking amused 
 when the old maid-servant bringing in a card 
 distractedly left the parlour door open, and 
 there was seen bowing towards Mrs. Meyrick 
 a figure quite unlike that of the respected Pre- 
 mier, — tall and physically impressive even in 
 his kid and kerseymere, with massive face, 
 flamboyant hair, and gold spectacles: in fact, 
 as Mrs. Meyrick saw from the card, Julius 
 Klesmer. 
 
 Even embarrassment could hardly have made 
 the " little mother " awkward, but quick in her 
 perceptions she was at once aware of the situa- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 299 
 
 tion, and felt well satisfied that the great per- 
 sonage had come to Mirah instead of requiring 
 her to come to him; taking it as a sign of ac- 
 tive interest. But when he entered, the rooms 
 shrank into closets, the cottage piano, Mab 
 thought, seemed a ridiculous toy, and the entire 
 family existence as petty and private as an es- 
 tablishment of mice in the Tuileries. Klesmer's 
 personality, especially his way of glancing round 
 him, immediately suggested vast areas and a 
 multitudinous audience, and probably they made 
 the usual scenery of his consciousness, for we 
 all of us carry on our thinking in some habitual 
 locus where there is a presence of other souls, 
 and those who take in a larger sweep than their 
 neighbours are apt to seem mightily vain and 
 affected. Klesmer was vain, but not more so 
 than many contemporaries of heavy aspect, 
 whose vanity leaps out and startles one like a 
 spear out of a walking-stick; as to his carriage 
 and gestures, these were as natural to him as 
 the length of his fingers ; and the rankest affec- 
 tation he could have shown would have been to 
 look diffident and demure. While his grandiose 
 air was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy 
 to match the cottage piano, he was taking in the 
 details around him with a keen and thoroughly 
 kind sensibility. He remembered a home no 
 larger than this on the outskirts of Bohemia; 
 and in the figurative Bohemia too he had had 
 large acquaintance with the variety and romance 
 which belong to small incomes. He addressed 
 Mrs. Meyrick with the utmost deference. 
 
 " I hope I have not taken too great a free- 
 dom. Being in the neighbourhood, I ventured 
 
300 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to save time by calling. Our friend Mr. 
 Deronda mentioned to me an understanding 
 that I was to have the honour of becoming 
 acquainted with a young lady here, — Miss 
 Lapidoth." 
 
 Klesmer had really discerned Mirah in the 
 first moment of entering, but with subtle polite- 
 ness he looked round bowingly at the three 
 sisters, as if he were uncertain which was the 
 young lady in question. 
 
 " Those are my daughters: this is Miss Lapi- 
 doth," said Mrs. Meyrick, waving her hand 
 towards Mirah. 
 
 " Ah," said Klesmer, in a tone of gratified 
 expectation, turning a radiant smile and deep 
 bow to Mirah, who, instead of being in the least 
 taken by surprise, had a calm pleasure in her 
 face. She liked the look of Klesmer, feeling 
 sure that he would scold her, like a great musi- 
 cian and a kind man. 
 
 " You will not object to beginning our ac- 
 quaintance by singing to me," he added, aware 
 that they would all be relieved by getting rid 
 of preliminaries. 
 
 " I shall be very glad. It is good of you 
 to be willing to listen to me," said Mirah, 
 moving to the piano. " Shall I accompany 
 myself? " 
 
 " By all means," said Klesmer, seating him- 
 self, at Mrs. Meyrick's invitation, where he could 
 have a good view of the singer. The acute little 
 mother would not have acknowledged the weak- 
 ness, but she really said to herself, " He will 
 like her singing better if he sees her." 
 
 All the feminine hearts except Mirah's were 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 301 
 
 beating fast with anxiety, thinking Klesmer ter- 
 rific as he sat with his listening frown on, and 
 only daring to look at him furtively. If he did 
 say anything severe, it would be so hard for 
 them all. They could only comfort themselves 
 with thinking that Prince Camaralzaman, who 
 had heard the finest things, preferred Mirah's 
 singing to any other: also she appeared to be 
 doing her very best, as if she were more instead 
 of less at ease than usual. 
 
 The song she had chosen was a fine setting 
 of some words selected from Leopardi's grand 
 Ode to Italy : — 
 
 "O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi 
 E le colonne e i simulaeri e rerme 
 Torri degli avi nostri " — 
 
 This was recitative; then followed, — 
 
 "Ma la gloria non vedo," — 
 
 a mournful melody, a rhythmic plaint. After 
 this came a climax of devout triumph, — pass- 
 ing from the subdued adoration of a happy 
 Andante in the words, — 
 
 "Beatissimi vol, 
 Che offriste il petto alle nemiche lance 
 Per amor di costei che al sol vi diede," — 
 
 to the joyous outburst of an exultant Allegro 
 in — 
 
 "Oh viva, oh viva: 
 Beatissimi voi 
 
 Mentre nel mondo si favelli o seriva." 
 
 When she had ended, Klesmer said after a 
 moment, 
 
 " That is Joseph Leo's music." 
 
302 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 "Yes, he was my last master, — at Vienna: 
 so fierce and so good," said Mirah, with a mel- 
 ancholy smile. " He prophesied that my voice 
 would not do for the stage. And he was right." 
 
 " Continue, if you please," said Klesmer, put- 
 ting out his lips and shaking his long fingers, 
 while he went on with a smothered articulation 
 quite unintelligible to the audience. 
 
 The three girls detested him unanimously for , 
 not saying one word of praise. Mrs. Meyrick 
 was a little alarmed. 
 
 Mirah, simply bent on doing what Klesmer 
 desired, and imagining that he would now like 
 to hear her sing some German, went through 
 Prince Radzivill's music to Gretchen's songs in 
 the " Faust," one after the other, without any 
 interrogatory pause. When she had finished he 
 rose and walked to the extremity of the small 
 space at command, then walked back to the 
 piano, where Mirah had risen from her seat and 
 stood looking towards him with her little hands 
 crossed before her, meekly awaiting judgment; 
 then with a sudden unknitting of his brow and 
 with beaming eyes, he put out his hand and 
 said abruptly, "Let us shake hands: you are 
 a musician." 
 
 Mab felt herself beginning to cry, and all the 
 three girls held Klesmer adorable. Mrs. Mey- 
 rick took a long breath. 
 
 But straightway the frown came again, the 
 long hand, back uppermost, was stretched out 
 in quite a different sense to touch with finger- 
 tip the back of Mirah's, and with protruded lip 
 he said, — 
 
 " Not for great tasks. No high roofs. We 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 303 
 
 are no skylarks. We must be modest." Kles- 
 mer paused here. And Mab ceased to think him 
 adorable: " As if Mirah had shown the least sign 
 of conceit! " 
 
 Mirah was silent, knowing that there was a 
 specific opinion to be waited for, and Klesmer 
 presently went on, — 
 
 " I would not advise — I would not further 
 your singing in any larger space than a private 
 drawing-room. But you will do there. And 
 here in London that is one of the best careers 
 open. Lessons will follow. Will you come 
 and sing at a private concert at my house on 
 Wednesday? " 
 
 " Oh, I shall be grateful," said Mirah, putting 
 her hands together devoutly. " I would rather 
 get my bread in that way than by anything more 
 public. I will try to improve. What should 
 I work at most? " 
 
 Klesmer made a preliminary answer in noises 
 which sounded like words bitten in two and swal- 
 lowed before they were half out, shaking his 
 fingers the while, before he said, quite distinctly, 
 " I shall introduce you to Astorga ; he is the 
 foster-father of good singing, and will give you 
 advice." Then addressing Mrs. Meyrick, he 
 added, " Mrs. Klesmer will call before Wednes- 
 day, with your permission." 
 
 " We shall feel that to be a great kindness," 
 said Mrs. Meyrick. 
 
 " You will sing to her," said Klesmer, turning 
 again to Mirah. " She is a thorough musician, 
 and has a soul with more ears to it than you will 
 often get in a musician. Your singing will 
 satisfy her: — 
 
304 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 'Vor den Wissenden sich stellen:* 
 
 you know the rest? " 
 
 " ' Sicher ist 's in alien Fallen,' " 
 
 said Mirah, promptly. And Klesmer, saying 
 " Schon!" put out his hand again as a good- 
 bye. 
 
 He had certainly chosen the most delicate way 
 of praising Mirah, and the Meyrick girls had 
 now given him all their esteem. But imagine 
 Mab's feeling when, suddenly fixing his eyes on 
 her, he said decisively, "That young lady is musi- 
 cal, I see! " She was a mere blush and sense of 
 scorching. 
 
 " Yes," said Mirah, on her behalf. " And she 
 has a touch." 
 
 " Oh, please, Mirah, — a scramble, not a 
 touch," said Mab, in anguish, with a horrible fear 
 of what the next thing might be : this dreadfully 
 divining personage — - evidently Satan in gray 
 trousers — might order her to sit down to the 
 piano, and her heart was like molten wax in the 
 midst of her. But this was cheap payment for 
 her amazed joy when Klesmer said benignantly, 
 turning to Mrs. Meyrick, " Will she like to ac- 
 company Miss Lapidoth and hear the music on 
 Wednesday? " 
 
 " There could hardly be a greater pleasure for 
 her," said Mrs. Meyrick. " She will be most 
 glad and grateful." 
 
 Thereupon Klesmer bowed round to the three 
 sisters more grandly than they had ever been 
 bowed to before. Altogether it was an amusing 
 picture, — the little room with so much of its 
 diagonal taken up in Klesmer's magnificent 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 305 
 
 bend to the small feminine figures like images a 
 little less than life-size, the grave Holbein faces 
 on the walls, as many as were not otherwise oc- 
 cupied, looking hard at this stranger who by his 
 face seemed a dignified contemporary of their 
 own, but whose garments seemed a deplorable 
 mockery of the human form. 
 
 Mrs. Meyrick could not help going out of the 
 room with Klesmer and closing the door behind 
 her. He understood her, and said with a frown- 
 ing nod: " She will do: if she does n't attempt 
 too much and her voice holds out, she can make 
 an income. I know that is the great point : De- 
 ronda told me. You are taking care of her. She 
 looks like a good girl." 
 
 " She is an angel," said the warm-hearted 
 woman. 
 
 "No," said Klesmer, with a playful nod; 
 " she is a pretty Jewess : the angels must not get 
 the credit of her. But I think she has found a 
 guardian angel," he ended, bowing himself out 
 in this amiable way. 
 
 The four young creatures had looked at each 
 other mutely till the door banged and Mrs. Mey- 
 rick re-entered. Then there was an explosion. 
 Mab clapped her hands and danced everywhere 
 inconveniently ; Mrs. Meyrick kissed Mirah and 
 blessed her; Amy said emphatically, " We can 
 never get her a new dress before Wednesday! " 
 and Kate exclaimed, " Thank heaven, my table 
 is not knocked over! " 
 
 Mirah had reseated herself on the music-stool 
 without speaking, and the tears were rolling 
 down her cheeks as she looked at her friends. 
 
 "Now, now, Mab!" said Mrs. Meyrick; 
 
 VOL. XIII — 20 
 
306 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " come and sit down reasonably and let us 
 talk." 
 
 " Yes, let us talk," said Mab, cordially, coming 
 back to her low seat and caressing her knees. " I 
 am beginning to feel large again. Hans said he 
 was coming this afternoon. I wish he had been 
 here — only there would have been no room for 
 him. Mirah, what are you looking sad for? " 
 
 " I am too happy," said Mirah. " I feel so 
 full of gratitude to you all; and he was so very 
 kind." 
 
 " Yes, at last," said Mab, sharply. " But he 
 might have said something encouraging sooner. 
 I thought him dreadfully ugly when he sat 
 frowning, and only said, ' Continue.' I hated 
 him all the long way from the top of his hair to 
 the toe of his polished boot." 
 
 " Nonsense, Mab ; he has a splendid profile," 
 said Kate. 
 
 " Now, but not then, I cannot bear people to 
 keep their minds bottled up for the sake of let- 
 ting them off with a pop. They seem to grudge 
 making you happy unless they can make you 
 miserable beforehand. However, I forgive him 
 everything," said Mab, with a magnanimous air, 
 " because he has invited me. I wonder why he 
 fixed on me as the musical one ? Was it because 
 I have a bulging forehead, ma, and peep from 
 under it like a newt from under a stone? " 
 
 " It was your way of listening to the singing, 
 child," said Mrs. Meyrick. " He has magic spec- 
 tacles, and sees everything through them, depend 
 upon it. But what was that German quotation 
 you were so ready with, Mirah, — you learned 
 puss? " 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 807 
 
 " Oh, that was not learning," said Mir ah, her 
 tearful face breaking into an amused smile. " I 
 said it so many times for a lesson. It means that 
 it is safer to do anything — singing or anything 
 else — before those who know and understand all 
 about it." 
 
 " That was why you were not one bit fright- 
 ened, I suppose," said Amy. " But now, what 
 we have to talk about is a dress for you on 
 Wednesday." 
 
 " I don't want anything better than this black 
 merino," said Mir ah, rising to show the effect. 
 " Some white gloves and some new bottines,'' 
 She put out her little foot, clad in the famous felt 
 slipper. 
 
 " There comes Hans," said Mrs. Meyrick. 
 " Stand still, and let us hear what he says about 
 the dress. Artists are the best people to consult 
 about such things." 
 
 " You don't consult me, ma," said Kate, lift- 
 ing up her eyebrow with a playful complaining- 
 ness. " I notice mothers are like the people I 
 deal with, — the girls' doings are always priced 
 low." 
 
 " My dear child, the boys are such a trouble, 
 — we could never put up with them, if we did n't 
 make believe they were worth more," said Mrs. 
 Meyrick, just as her boy entered. " Hans, we 
 want your opinion about Mirah's dress. A great 
 event has happened. Klesmer has been here, and 
 she is going to sing at his house on Wednesday 
 among grand people. She thinks this dress will 
 do." 
 
 " Let me see," said Hans. Mirah in her child- 
 like way turned towards him to be looked at; 
 
308 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 and he, going to a little further distance, knelt 
 with one knee on a hassock to survey her. 
 
 " This would be thought a very good stage- 
 dress for me," she said pleadingly, " in a part 
 where I was to come on as a poor Jewess and 
 sing to fashionable Christians." 
 
 " It would be effective," said Hans, with a 
 considering air; " it would stand out well among 
 the fashionable chiffons'' 
 
 " But you ought not to claim all the poverty 
 on your side, Mir ah," said Amy. " There are 
 plenty of poor Christians and dreadfully rich 
 Jews and fashionable Jewesses." 
 
 " I did n't mean any harm," said Mirah. 
 " Only I have been used to thinking about my 
 dress for parts in plays. And I almost always 
 had a part with a plain dress." 
 
 " That makes me think it questionable," said 
 Hans, who had suddenly become as fastidious 
 and conventional on this occasion as he had 
 thought Deronda was, apropos of the Berenice- 
 pictures. " It looks a little too theatrical. We 
 must not make you a role of the poor Jewess, 
 — or of being a Jewess at all." Hans had a 
 secret desire to neutralize the Jewess in private 
 life, which he was in danger of not keeping 
 secret. 
 
 " But it is what I am really. I am not pre- 
 tending anything. I shall never be anything 
 else," said Mirah. " I always feel myself a 
 Jewess." 
 
 " But we can't feel that about you," said Hans, 
 with a devout look. " What does it signify 
 whether a perfect woman is a Jewess or not? " 
 
 " That is your kind way of praising me; I 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 809 
 
 never was praised so before," said Mirah, with a 
 smile, which was rather maddening to Hans, and 
 made him feel still more of a cosmopolitan. 
 
 " People don't think of me as a British Chris- 
 tian," he said, his face creasing merrily. " They 
 think of me as an imperfectly handsome young 
 man and an unpromising painter." 
 
 " But you are wandering from the dress," said 
 Amy. "If that will not do, how are we to get 
 another before Wednesday? and to-morrow 
 Sunday? " 
 
 " Indeed this will do," said Mirah, entreat- 
 ingly. "It is all real, you know," — here she 
 looked at Hans, — " even if it seemed theatri- 
 cal. Poor Berenice sitting on the ruins, — any 
 one might say that was theatrical, but I know 
 that is just what she would do." 
 
 " I am a scoundrel," said Hans, overcome by 
 this misplaced trust. " That is my invention. 
 Nobody knows that she did that. Shall you for- 
 give me for not saying so before? " 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Mirah, after a momentary 
 pause of surprise. " You knew it was what she 
 would be sure to do, — a Jewess who had not 
 been faithful, — who had done what she did and 
 was penitent. She could have no joy but to 
 afflict herself; and where else would she go? I 
 think it is very beautiful that you should enter 
 so into what a Jewess would feel." 
 
 " The Jewesses of that time sat on ruins," said 
 Hans, starting up with a sense of being check- 
 mated. " That makes them convenient for 
 pictures." 
 
 " But the dress, — the dress," said Amy; " is 
 it settled? " 
 
310 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Yes; is it not? " said Mirah, looking doubt- 
 fully at Mrs. Meyrick, who in her turn looked 
 up at her son, and said, " What do you think, 
 Hans?" 
 
 " That dress will not do," said Hans, deci- 
 sively. " She is not going to sit on ruins. You 
 must jump into a cab with her, little mother, and 
 go to Regent Street. It 's plenty of time to get 
 anything you like, — a black silk dress such as 
 ladies wear. She must not be taken for an ob- 
 ject of charity. She has talents to make people 
 indebted to her." 
 
 " I think it is what Mr. Deronda would like, 
 — for her to have a handsome dress," said Mrs. 
 Meyrick, deliberating. 
 
 " Of course it is," said Hans, with some sharp- 
 ness. " You may take my word for what a 
 gentleman would feel." 
 
 " I wish to do what Mr. Deronda would like 
 me to do," said Mirah, gravely, seeing that Mrs. 
 Meyrick looked towards her; and Hans, turn- 
 ing on his heel, went to Kate's table and took up 
 one of her drawings, as if his interest needed a 
 new direction. 
 
 " Should n't you like to make a study of Kles- 
 mer's head, Hans? " said Kate. " I suppose you 
 have often seen him? " 
 
 "Seen him!" exclaimed Hans, immediately 
 throwing back his head and mane, seating him- 
 self at the piano and looking round him as if he 
 were surveying an amphitheatre, while he held 
 his fingers down perpendicularly towards the 
 keys. But then in another instant he wheeled 
 round on the stool, looked at Mirah and said, 
 half timidly, " Perhaps you don't like this mim- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 311 
 
 icry; you must always stop my nonsense when 
 you don't like it." 
 
 Mirah had been smiling at the swiftly made 
 image, and she smiled still, but with a touch of 
 something else than amusement, as she said: 
 " Thank you. But you have never done any- 
 thing I did not like. I hardly think he could, 
 belonging to you," she added, looking at Mrs. 
 Meyrick. 
 
 In this way Hans got food for his hope. How 
 could the rose help it when several bees in suc- 
 cession took its sweet odour as a sign of personal 
 attachment ? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Within the soul a faculty abides. 
 That with interpositions, which would hide 
 And darken, so can deal, that they become 
 Contingencies of pomp ; and serve to exalt 
 Her native brightness, as the ample moon. 
 In the deep stillness of a summer even. 
 Rising behind a thick and lofty grove. 
 Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light. 
 In the green trees ; and, kindling on all sides 
 Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil 
 Into a substance glorious as her own. 
 Yea, with her own incorporated, by power 
 Capacious and serene. 
 
 Wordsworth: Excursion, B. IV. 
 
 DERONDA came out of the narrow house 
 at Chelsea in a frame of mind that made 
 him long for some good bodily exercise 
 to carry off what he was himself inclined to call 
 the fumes of his temper. He was going towards 
 the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs 
 with the waiting boats at once determined him to 
 avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in a 
 cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar. 
 
 His errand was to go to Ram's book-shop, 
 where he had yesterday arrived too late for Mor- 
 decai's mid-day watch, and had been told that he 
 invariably came there again between five and six. 
 Some further acquaintance with this remark- 
 able inmate of the Cohens was particularly de- 
 sired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming 
 his ring: he wished that their conversation 
 should not again end speedily with that drop of 
 Mordecai's interest which w^as like the removal 
 of a drawbridge, and threatened to shut out any 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 313 
 
 easy communication in future. As he got warmed 
 with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the 
 errand before him and the ends he wanted to 
 achieve on Mirah's account, he experienced, as 
 was wont with him, a quick change of mental 
 light, shifting his point of view to that of the 
 person whom he had been thinking of hitherto 
 chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and 
 was inclined to taunt himself with being not 
 much better than an enlisting sergeant, who 
 never troubles himself with the drama that 
 brings him the needful recruits. 
 
 " I suppose if I got from this man the infor- 
 mation I am most anxious about," thought De- 
 ronda, " I should be contented enough if he 
 felt no disposition to tell me more of himself, 
 or why he seemed to have some expectation 
 from me which was disappointed. The sort of 
 curiosity he stirs would die out; and yet it 
 might be that he had neared and parted as one 
 can imagine two ships doing, each freighted 
 with an exile who would have recognized the 
 other if the two could have looked out face to 
 face. Not that there is any likelihood of a pecu- 
 liar tie between me and this poor fellow, whose 
 voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I 
 wonder whether there is much of that momentous 
 mutual missing between people who interchange 
 blank looks, or even long for one another's ab- 
 sence in a crowded place. However, one makes 
 one's self chances of missing by going on the 
 recruiting-sergeant's plan." 
 
 When the wherry was approaching Black- 
 friars Bridge, where Deronda meant to land, 
 it was half -past four, and the gray day was 
 
314 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken 
 into narrowing purple strata before a wide- 
 spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky 
 had a monumental calm, but on the river, with 
 its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous 
 movement, the alternate flash of ripples or cur- 
 rents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the pas- 
 sage of laden barges from blackness into colour, 
 making an active response to that brooding glory. 
 
 Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda 
 gave up the oar and drew over him again his 
 Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while 
 fastening the topmost button, his eyes caught 
 a well-remembered face looking towards him 
 over the parapet of the bridge, — brought out 
 by the western light into startling distinctness 
 and brilliancy, — an illuminated type of bodily 
 emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the 
 face of Mordecai, who also, in his watch towards 
 the west, had caught sight of the advancing 
 boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first 
 simply because it was advancing, then with a 
 recovery of impressions that made him quiver 
 as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing 
 figure lifted up its face towards him — the face 
 of his visions — and then immediately, with 
 white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again. 
 
 For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should 
 recognize and await him, had lost no time before 
 signalling, and the answer came straightway. 
 Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it, — feeling 
 in that moment that his inward prophecy was 
 fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted 
 into the sense of completion with which his soul 
 was flooded by this outward satisfaction of his 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 315 
 
 longing. His exultation was not widely differ- 
 ent from that of the experimenter, bending over 
 the first stirrings of change that correspond to 
 what in the fervour of concentrated prevision 
 his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured 
 friend had come from the golden background, 
 and had signalled to him: this actually was: 
 the rest was to be. 
 
 In three minutes Deronda had landed, had 
 paid his boatman, and was joining Mordecai, 
 whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and 
 wait for him. 
 
 " I was very glad to see you standing here," 
 said Deronda, ''for I was intending to go on 
 to the book-shop and look for you again. I was 
 there yesterday, — perhaps they mentioned it 
 to you." 
 
 "Yes," said Mordecai; "that was the rea- 
 son I came to the bridge." 
 
 This answer, made with simple gravity, was 
 startlingly mysterious to Deronda. Were the 
 peculiarities of this man really associated with 
 any sort of mental alienation, according to 
 Cohen's hint? 
 
 " You knew nothing of my being at Chel- 
 sea? " he said, after a moment. 
 
 " No : but I expected you to come down the 
 river. I have been waiting for you these five 
 years." Mordecai's deep-sunk eyes were fixed 
 on those of the friend who had at last arrived 
 with a look of affectionate dependence, at once 
 pathetic and solemn. Deronda's sensitiveness 
 was not the less responsive because he could not 
 but believe that this strangely disclosed relation 
 was founded on an illusion. 
 
316 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " It will be a satisfaction to me if I can be 
 of any real use to you," he answered, very ear- 
 nestly. " Shall we get into a cab and drive to 
 — wherever you wish to go? You have prob- 
 ably had walking enough with your short 
 breath." 
 
 " Let us go to the book-shop. It will soon be 
 time for me to be there. But now look up the 
 river," said Mordecai, turning again towards it, 
 and speaking in undertones of what may be 
 called an excited calm, — so absorbed by a sense 
 of fulfilment that he was conscious of no barrier 
 to a complete understanding between him and 
 Deronda. "See the sky, how it is slowly fading. 
 I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it 
 when I was a little boy. It is a meeting-place 
 for the spiritual messengers. It is true — what 
 the Masters said — that each order of things 
 has its angel: that means the full message of 
 each from what is afar. Here I have listened to 
 the messages of earth and sky; when I was 
 stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars 
 in the deep heavens. But this time just about 
 sunset was always what I loved best. It has 
 sunk into me and dwelt with me, — fading, 
 slowly fading: it was my own decline: it 
 paused, — it waited, till at last it brought me 
 my new life — my new self — who will live 
 when this breath is all breathed out." 
 
 Deronda did not speak. He felt himself 
 strangely wrought upon. The first-prompted 
 suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to hallu- 
 cinations of thought, — might have become a 
 monomaniac on some subject which had given 
 too severe a strain to his diseased organism, — 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 air 
 
 gave way to a more submissive expectancy. 
 His nature was too large, too ready to conceive 
 regions beyond his own experience, to rest at 
 once in the easy explanation, " madness," when- 
 ever a consciousness showed some fulness and 
 conviction where his own was blank. It ac- 
 corded with his habitual disposition that he 
 should meet rather than resist any claim on him 
 in the shape of another's need; and this claim 
 brought with it a sense of solemnity which 
 seemed a radiation from Mordecai, as utterly 
 nullifying his outward poverty and lifting him 
 into authority as if he had been that preter- 
 natural guide seen in the universal legend, who 
 suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands a 
 manifest Power. That impression was the more 
 sanctioned by a sort of resolved quietude which 
 the persuasion of fulfilment had produced in 
 Mordecai's manner. After they had stood a ^ 
 moment in silence he said, " Let us go now; " 
 and when they were walking he added, " We will 
 get down at the end of the street and walk to 
 the shop. You can look at the books, and Mr. 
 Ram will be going away directly and leave us 
 alone." 
 
 It seemed that this enthusiast was just as 
 cautious, just as much alive to judgments in 
 other minds as if he had been that antipole 
 of all enthusiasm called " a man of the 
 world." 
 
 While they were rattling along in the cab, 
 Mirah was still present with Deronda in the 
 midst of this strange experience, but he foresaw 
 that the course of conversation would be deter- 
 mined by Mordecai, not by himself : he was no 
 
318 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 longer confident what questions he should be 
 able to ask ; and with a reaction on his own mood, 
 he inwardly said : "I suppose I am in a state 
 of complete superstition, just as if I were await- 
 ing the destiny that could interpret the oracle. 
 But some strong relation there must be between 
 me and this man, since he feels it strongly. 
 Great heaven! what relation has proved itself 
 more potent in the world than faith even when 
 mistaken, — than expectation even when per- 
 petually disappointed? Is my side of the rela- 
 tion to be disappointing or fulfilling? — well, 
 if it is ever possible for me to fulfil, I will not 
 disappoint." 
 
 In ten minutes the two men, with as intense 
 a consciousness as if they had been two unde- 
 clared lovers, felt themselves alone in the small 
 gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each 
 ^ baring his head from an instinctive feeling that 
 they wished to see each other fully. Mordecai 
 came forward to lean his back against the little 
 counter, while Deronda stood against the oppo- 
 site wall hardly more than four feet off. I wish 
 I could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian's 
 " Tribute Money " has perpetuated two types 
 presenting another sort of contrast. Imagine 
 
 — we all of us can — the pathetic stamp of con- 
 sumption with its brilliancy of glance, to which 
 the sharply defined structure of features, remind- 
 ing one of a forsaken temple, give already a far- 
 off look as of one getting unwillingly out of 
 reach ; and imagine it on a Jewish face naturally 
 accentuated for the expression of an eager mind, 
 
 — the face of a man little above thirty, but with 
 that age upon it which belongs to time length- 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 319 
 
 ened by suffering, the hair and beard still black 
 throwing out the yellow pallor of the skin, the 
 difficult breathing giving more decided marking 
 to the mobile nostril, the wasted yellow hands 
 conspicuous on the folded arms: then give to 
 the yearning consumptive glance something of 
 the slowly dying mother's look when her one 
 loved son visits her bedside, and the flickering 
 power of gladness leaps out as she says, " My 
 boy! " — for the sense of spiritual perpetuation 
 in another resembles that maternal transference 
 of self. 
 
 Seeing such a portrait, you would see Mor- 
 decai. And opposite to him was a face not more 
 distinctively oriental than many a type seen 
 among what we call the Latin races: rich in 
 youthful health, and with a forcible masculine 
 gravity in its repose, that gave the value of 
 judgment to the reverence with which he met the 
 gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who 
 claimed him as a long-expected friend. The 
 more exquisite quality of Deronda's nature — 
 that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness 
 which ran along with his speculative tendency 
 — was never more thoroughly tested. He felt 
 nothing that could be called belief in the validity 
 of Mordecai's impressions concerning him, or 
 in the probability of any greatly effective issue: 
 what he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry 
 from the depths of another soul; and accom- 
 panying that, the summons to be receptive in- 
 stead of superciliously prejudging. Receptive- 
 ness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude; 
 and this state of mind now gave Deronda's face 
 its utmost expression of calm, benignant force, 
 
320 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 — an expression which nourished Mordecai's 
 confidence and made an open way before him. 
 He began to speak. 
 
 " You cannot know what has guided me to 
 you and brought us together at this moment. 
 You are wondering." 
 
 " I am not impatient," said Deronda. " I 
 am ready to Hsten to whatever you may wish 
 to disclose." 
 
 " You see some of the reasons why I needed 
 you," said Mordecai, speaking quietly, as if he 
 wished to reserve his strength. " You see that 
 I am dying. You see that I am as one shut up 
 behind bars by the wayside, who if he spoke to 
 any would be met only by head-shaking and 
 pity. The day is closing, — the light is fading, 
 
 — soon we should not have been able to discern 
 each other. But you have come in time." 
 
 " I rejoice that I am come in time," said De- 
 ronda, feelingly. He would not say, " I hope 
 you are not mistaken in me," — the very word 
 " mistaken," he thought, would be a cruelty at 
 that moment. 
 
 " But the hidden reasons why I need you be- 
 gan afar off," said Mordecai; "began in my 
 early years when I was studying in another land. 
 Then ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because 
 I was a Jew. They were a trust to fulfil, be- 
 cause I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, 
 because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my 
 race beating within me. They were my life; 
 I was not fully born till then. I counted this 
 heart 5 and this breath, and this right hand " — 
 Mordecai had pathetically pressed his hand 
 against his breast, and then stretched its wasted 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 321 
 
 fingers out before him, — "I counted my sleep 
 and my waking, and the work I fed my body 
 with, and the sight that fed my eyes, — I counted 
 them but as fuel to the divine flame. But I had 
 done as one who wanders and engraves his 
 thought in rocky solitudes, and before I could 
 change my course came care and labour and dis- 
 ease, and blocked the way before me, and bound 
 me with the iron that eats itself into the soul. 
 Then I said, ' How shall I save the life within 
 me from being stifled with this stifled breath? ' " 
 
 Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath 
 which had been taxed by the rising excitement 
 of his speech. And also he wished to check that 
 excitement. Deronda dared not speak: the 
 very silence in the narrow space seemed alive 
 with mingled awe and compassion before this 
 struggling fervour. And presently Mordecai 
 went on, — 
 
 " But you may misunderstand me. I speak 
 not as an ignorant dreamer, — as one bred up 
 in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts 
 anew, and not knowing them ancient, never hav- 
 ing stood by the great waters where the world's 
 knowledge passes to and fro. English is my 
 mother-tongue, England is the native land of 
 this body, which is but as a breaking pot of earth 
 around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might 
 make the desert rejoice. But my true life was 
 nourished in Holland, at the feet of my mother's 
 brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning ; and 
 when he died I went to Hamburg to study, and 
 afterwards to Gottingen, that I might take a 
 larger outlook on my people and on the Gentile 
 world, and drink knowledge at all sources. I 
 
 VOL. XIII — 21 
 
322 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 was a youth; I felt free; I saw our chief seats 
 in Germany; I was not then in utter poverty. 
 And I had possessed myself of a handicraft. 
 For I said, I care not if my lot be as that of 
 Joshua ben Chananja: after the last destruc- 
 tion he earned his bread by making needles, but 
 in his youth he had been a singer on the steps of 
 the Temple, and had a memory of what was, 
 before the glory departed. I said, let my body 
 dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands 
 of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of 
 remembrance where the treasures of knowledge 
 enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. I knew 
 what I chose. They said, ' He feeds himself on 
 visions,' and I denied not; for visions are the 
 creators and feeders of the world. I see, I 
 measure the world as it is, which the vision will 
 create anew. You are not listening to one who 
 raves aloof from the lives of his fellows." 
 
 Mordecai paused; and Deronda, feeling that 
 the pause was expectant, said: "Do me the 
 justice to believe that I was not inclined to call 
 your words raving. I listen that I may know, 
 without prejudgment. I have had experience 
 which gives me a keen interest in the story of a 
 spiritual destiny embraced willingly, and em- 
 braced in youth." 
 
 " A spiritual destiny embraced willingly — in 
 youth? " Mordecai repeated in a corrective. tone. 
 *' It was the soul fully born within me, and it 
 came in my boyhood. It brought its own world, 
 — a mediaeval world, where there were men who 
 made the ancient language live again in new 
 psalms of exile. They had absorbed the philoso- 
 phy of the Gentile into the faith of the Jew, 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 323 
 
 and they still yearned toward a centre for our 
 race. One of their souls was born again within 
 me, and awaked amid the memories of their 
 world. It travelled into Spain and Provence; 
 it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with 
 Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Cru- 
 saders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And 
 when its dumb tongue was loosed, it spoke the 
 speech they had made alive with the new blood 
 of their ardour, their sorrow, and their martyred 
 trust: it sang with the cadence of their strain." 
 
 Mordecai paused again, and then said in a 
 loud, hoarse whisper, — 
 
 " While it is imprisoned in me, it will never 
 learn another." 
 
 " Have you written entirely in Hebrew, 
 then? " said Deronda, remembering with some 
 anxiety the former question as to his own knowl- 
 edge of that tongue. 
 
 " Yes — yes," said Mordecai, in a tone of 
 deep sadness; " in my youth I wandered toward 
 that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. 
 I had the ranks of the great dead around me; 
 the martyrs gathered and listened. But soon 
 I found that the living were deaf to me. At first 
 I saw my life spread as a long future: I said, 
 part of my Jewish heritage is an unbreaking 
 patience; part is skill to seek divers methods 
 and find a rooting-place where the planters de- 
 spair. But there came new messengers from the 
 Eternal. I had to bow under the yoke that 
 presses on the great multitude born of woman: 
 family troubles called me, — I had to work, 
 to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary 
 again; but already the angel of death had 
 
324 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 turned to me and beckoned, and I felt his skirts 
 continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. 
 I besought hearing and help. I spoke ; I went 
 to men of our people, — to the rich in influence 
 or knowledge, to the rich in other wealth. But 
 I found none to listen with understanding. I 
 was rebuked for error; I was offered a small 
 sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor^ I 
 carried a bundle of Hebrew manuscript with 
 me; I said, our chief teachers are misleading 
 the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant were 
 both too busy to listen. Scorn stood as inter- 
 preter between me and them. One said, ' The 
 Book of Mormon would never have answered 
 in Hebrew; and if you mean to address our 
 learned men, it is not likely you can teach them 
 anything.' He touched a truth there." 
 
 The last word;s had a perceptible irony in their 
 hoarsened tone. 
 
 " But though you had accustomed yourself 
 to write in Hebrew, few, surely, can use Eng- 
 lish better," said Deronda, wanting to hint con- 
 solation in a new effort for which he could smooth 
 the way. 
 
 Mordecai shook his head slowly, and an- 
 swered, — 
 
 " Too late, — too late. I can write no more. 
 My writing would be like this gasping breath. 
 But the breath may wake the fount of pity, — 
 the writing not. If I could write now and used 
 English, I should be as one who beats a board 
 to summon those who have been used to no sig- 
 nal but a bell. My soul has an ear to hear the 
 faults of its own speech. New writing of mine 
 would be like this body," — Mordecai spread 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 325 
 
 his arms, — " within it there might be the Ruach- 
 ha-kodesh, — the breath of divine thought — but 
 men would smile at it and say, ' A poor Jew ! ' — 
 and the chief smilers would be of my own people." 
 
 Mordecai let his hands fall, and his head sink 
 in melancholy ; for the moment he had lost hold 
 of his hope. Despondency, conjured up by his 
 own words, had floated in and hovered above 
 him with eclipsing wings. He had sunk into 
 momentary darkness. 
 
 " I feel with you, — I feel strongly with you," 
 said Deronda, in a clear deep voice which was 
 itself a cordial, apart from the words of sym- 
 pathy. " But — forgive me if I speak hastily 
 — for what you have actually written there need 
 be no utter burial. The means of publication 
 are within reach. If you will rely on me, I can 
 assure you of all that is necessary to that end." 
 
 " That is not enough," said Mordecai, quickly, 
 looking up again with the flash of recovered 
 memory and confidence. " That is not all my 
 trust in you. You must be not only a hand to 
 me, but a soul — believing my belief — being 
 moved by my reasons — hoping my hope — 
 seeing the vision I point to — beholding a glory 
 where I behold it!" — Mordecai had taken a 
 step nearer as he spoke, and now laid his hand 
 on Deronda's arm with a tight grasp; his face 
 little more than a foot off had something like 
 a pale flame in it, — an intensity of reliance 
 that acted as a peremptory claim, while he went 
 on: "You will be my life; it will be planted 
 afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inher- 
 itance; it has been gathering for ages. The 
 generations are crowding on my narrow life as 
 
326 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 a bridge : what has been and what is to be are 
 meeting there ; and the bridge is breaking. But 
 I have found you. You have come in time. 
 You will take the inheritance which the base son 
 refuses because of the tombs which the plough 
 and harrow may not pass over or the gold-seeker 
 disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of 
 the Jew." * 
 
 Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. 
 Quick as an alarm of flood or fire, there spread 
 within him not only a compassionate dread of 
 discouraging this fellow-man who urged a 
 prayer as of one in the last agony, but also the 
 opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, 
 and being hurried on to a self -committal which 
 might turn into a falsity. The peculiar appeal 
 to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that 
 most of us experience under a grasp and speech 
 which assume to dominate. The difficulty to 
 him was to inflict the accents of hesitation and 
 doubt on this ardent suffering creature, who was 
 crowding too much of his brief being into a 
 moment of perhaps extravagant trust. With 
 exquisite instinct, Deronda, before he opened 
 his lips, placed his palm gently on Mordecai's 
 straining hand, — an act just then equal to 
 many speeches. And after that he said, with- 
 out haste, as if conscious that he might be 
 wrong, — 
 
 "Do you forget what I told you when we 
 first saw each other? Do you remember that I 
 said I was not of your race? " 
 
 " It can't be true," Mordecai whispered im- 
 mediately, with no sign of shock. The sym- 
 pathetic hand, still upon him had fortified the 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 327 
 
 feeling which was stronger than those words of 
 denial. There was a perceptible pause, De- 
 ronda feeling it impossible to answer, conscious 
 indeed that the assertion, " It can't be true," had 
 the pressure of argument for him. Mordecai, 
 too entirely possessed by the supreme impor- 
 tance of the relation between himself and De- 
 ronda to have any other care in his speech, 
 followed up that assertion by a second, which 
 came to his lips as a mere sequence of his 
 long-cherished conviction, — 
 
 " You are not sure of your own origin." 
 
 " How do you know that? " said Daniel, with 
 an habitual shrinking which made him remove his 
 hand from Mordecai's, who also relaxed his hold, 
 and fell back into his former leaning position. 
 
 "I know it, — I know it; what is my life 
 else? " said Mordecai, with a low cry of im- 
 patience. " Tell me everything: tell me why 
 you deny." 
 
 He could have no conception what that de- 
 mand was to the hearer, — how probingly it 
 touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly con- 
 scious reticence of years; how the uncertainty 
 he was insisting on as part of his own hope had 
 always for Daniel been a threatening possibility 
 of painful revelation about his mother. But the 
 moment had influences which were not only new 
 but solemn to Deronda : any evasion here might 
 turn out to be a hateful refusal of some task that 
 belonged to him, some act of due fellowship; 
 in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a being 
 who was appealing to him as a forlorn hope 
 under the shadow of a coming doom. After a 
 few moments he said, with a great effort over 
 
328 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 himself, — determined to tell all the truth 
 briefly, — 
 
 " I have never known my mother. I have no 
 knowledge about her. I have never called any 
 man father. But I am convinced that my father 
 is an Englishman." 
 
 Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them 
 as he uttered this confession; and all the while 
 there was an undercurrent of amazement in him 
 at the strange circumstances under which he 
 uttered it. It seemed as if Mordecai were hardly 
 overrating his own power to determine the action 
 of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen. 
 
 " It will be seen, — it will be declared," said 
 Mordecai, triumphantly. " The world grows, 
 and its frame is knit together by the growing 
 soul; dim, dim at first, then clearer and more 
 clear, the consciousness discerns remote stirrings. 
 As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake 
 us before they are fully discerned, — so events, 
 so beings: they are knit with us in the growth 
 of the world. You have risen within me like a 
 thought not fully spelled: my soul is shaken 
 before the words are all there. The rest will 
 come, — it will come." 
 
 " We must not lose sight of the fact that the 
 outward event has not always been a fulfilment 
 of the firmest faith," said Deronda, in a tone that 
 was made hesitating by the painfully conflicting 
 desires, not to give any severe blow to Mordecai, 
 and not to give his confidence a sanction which 
 might have the severest of blows in reserve. 
 
 Mordecai's face, which had been illuminated 
 to the utmost in that last declaration of his con- 
 fidence, changed under Deronda's words, but 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 829 
 
 not into any show of collapsed trust: the force 
 did not disappear from the expression, but 
 passed from the triumphant into the firmly 
 resistant. 
 
 " You would remind me that I may be under 
 an illusion, — that the history of our people's 
 trust has been full of illusion. I face it all." 
 Here Mordecai paused a moment. Then bend- 
 ing his head a little forward, he said, in his 
 hoarse whisper, "So it might be with my trust, 
 if you would make it an illusion. But you will 
 notr 
 
 The very sharpness with which these words 
 penetrated Deronda, made him feel the more 
 that here was a crisis in which he must be firm. 
 
 " What my birth was does not lie in my will," 
 he answered. " My sense of claims on me can- 
 not be independent of my knowledge there. 
 And I cannot promise you that I will try to 
 hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have struck 
 root through half my life may still hinder me 
 from doing what I have never yet been able to 
 do. Everything must be waited for. I must 
 know more of the truth about my own life, and 
 I must know more of what it would become if it 
 were made a part of yours." 
 
 Mordecai had folded his arms again while De- 
 ronda was speaking, and now answered with 
 equal firmness, though with difficult breathing, — 
 
 " You shall know. What are we met for, but 
 that you should know? Your doubts lie as 
 light as dust on my belief. I know the philoso- 
 phies of this time and of other times : if I chose 
 I could answer a summons before their tribunals. 
 I could silence the beliefs which are the mother- 
 
330 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tongue of my soul, and speak with the rote- 
 learned language of a system that gives you 
 the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet 
 covering them all. I could silence them: may 
 not a man silence his awe or his love and take 
 to finding reasons, which others demand? But 
 if his love lies deeper than any reasons to be 
 found? Man finds his pathways: at first they 
 were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the 
 wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: 
 his thought dives through the ocean, and his 
 wishes thread the air: has he found all the path- 
 ways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, 
 rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its 
 pathway. Say, my expectation of you has 
 grown but as false hopes grow. That doubt 
 is in your mind? Well, my expectation was 
 there, and you are come. Men have died of 
 thirst. But I was thirsty, and the water is on 
 my lips. What are doubts to me? In the hour 
 when you come to me and say, ' I reject your 
 soul: I know that I am not a Jew: we have 
 no lot in common,' — I shall not doubt. I shall 
 be certain, — certain that I have been deluded. 
 That hour will never come! " 
 
 Deronda felt a new chord sounding in this 
 speech : it was rather imperious than appealing, 
 — had more of conscious power than of the 
 yearning need which had acted as a beseeching 
 grasp on him before. And usually, though he 
 was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change 
 of attitude towards him would have weakened 
 his inclination to admit a claim. But here there 
 was something that balanced his resistance and 
 kept it aloof. This strong man whose gaze was 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 331 
 
 sustainedly calm and his finger-nails pink with 
 health, who was exercised in all questioning, 
 and accused, of excessive mental independence, 
 still felt a subduing influence over him in the 
 tenacious certitude of the fragile creature before 
 him, whose pallid yellow nostril was tense with 
 effort as his breath laboured under the burthen 
 of eager speech. The influence seemed to 
 strengthen the bond of sympathetic obligation. 
 In Deronda at this moment the desire to escape 
 what might turn into a trying embarrassment 
 was no more likely to determine action than the 
 solicitations of indolence are likely to determine 
 it in one with whom industry is a daily law. He 
 answered simply, — 
 
 " It is my wish to meet . and satisfy your 
 wishes wherever that is possible to me. It is 
 certain to me at least that I desire not to under- 
 value your toil and your suffering. Let me 
 know your thoughts. But where can we meet? " 
 
 I have thought of that," said Mordecai. 
 " It is not hard for you to come into this neigh- 
 bourhood later in the evening? You did so 
 once." 
 
 " I can manage it very well occasionally," 
 said Deronda. " You live under the same roof 
 with the Cohens, I think? " 
 
 Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re- 
 entered to take his place behind the counter. He 
 was an elderly son of Abraham, whose childhood 
 had fallen on the evil times at the beginning of 
 this century, and who remained amid this smart 
 and instructed generation as a preserved speci- 
 men, soaked through and through with the effect 
 of the poverty and contempt which were the 
 
332 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 common heritage of most English Jews seventy 
 years ago. He had none of the oily cheerfulness 
 observable in Mr. Cohen's aspect: his very 
 features — broad and chubby — showed that 
 tendency to look mongrel without due cause 
 which in a miscellaneous London neighbourhood 
 may perhaps be compared with the marvels of 
 imitation in insects, and may have been nature's 
 imperfect effort on behalf of the purer Cau- 
 casian to shield him from the shame and spitting 
 to which purer features would have been exposed 
 in the times of zeal. Mr. Ram dealt ably in 
 books in the same way that he would have dealt 
 in tins of meat and other commodities, — with- 
 out knowledge or responsibility as to the pro- 
 portion of rottenness or nourishment they might 
 contain. But he believed in Mordecai's learning 
 as something marvellous, and was not sorry that 
 his conversation should be sought by a bookish 
 gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a 
 purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed 
 good-will, and, putting on large silver specta- 
 cles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the 
 daily accounts. 
 
 But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the 
 street together, and, without any explicit agree- 
 ment as to their direction, were walking towards 
 Ezra Cohen's. 
 
 " We can't meet there: my room is too nar- 
 row," said Mordecai, taking up the thread of 
 talk where they had dropped it. " But there is 
 a tavern not far from here where I sometimes 
 go to a club. It is the Hand and Banner, in 
 the street at the next turning, five doors down. 
 We can have the parlour there any evening." 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 333 
 
 " We can try that for once," said Deronda. 
 " But you will perhaps let me provide you with 
 some lodging, which would give you more free- 
 dom and comfort than where you are." 
 
 " No ; I need nothing. My outer life is as 
 naught. I will take nothing less precious from 
 you than your soul's brotherhood. I will think 
 of nothing else yet. But I am glad you are 
 rich. You did not need money on that diamond 
 ring. You had some other motive for bring- 
 ing it." 
 
 Deronda was a little startled by this clear- 
 sightedness; but before he could reply, Mor- 
 decai added: " It is all one. Had you been in 
 need of the money, the great end would have 
 been that we should meet again. But you are 
 rich? " he ended, in a tone of interrogation. 
 
 " Not rich, except in the sense that every 
 one is rich who has more than he needs for 
 himself." 
 
 " I desired that your Ufe should be free," 
 said Mordecai, dreamily, — " mine has been a 
 bondage." 
 
 It was clear that he had no interest in the fact 
 of Deronda's appearance at the Cohens' beyond 
 its relation to his own ideal purpose. Despair- 
 ing of leading easily up to the question he wished 
 to ask, Deronda determined to put it abruptly, 
 and said, — 
 
 " Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the 
 mother, must not be spoken to about her 
 daughter? " 
 
 There was no immediate answer, and he 
 thought that he should have to repeat the ques- 
 tion. The fact was that Mordecai had heard 
 
334 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the words, but had to drag his mind to a new 
 subject away from his passionate preoccupation. 
 After a few moments, he replied with a careful 
 effort such as he would have used if he had been 
 asked the road to Holborn, — 
 
 " I know the reason. But I will not speak 
 even of trivial family affairs which I have heard 
 in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their 
 tent as in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as 
 they injure none other, is their own possession." 
 
 Deronda felt the blood mounting to his 
 cheeks as a sort of rebuke he was little used to, 
 and he also found himself painfully baffled where 
 he had, reckoned with some confidence on getting 
 decisive knowledge. He became the more con- 
 scious of emotional strain from the excitements 
 of the day; and although he had the money in 
 his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled from 
 the further task of a visit to the Cohens', which 
 must be made not only under the former uncer- 
 tainty, but under a new disappointment as to 
 the possibility of its removal. 
 
 " I will part from you now," he said, just 
 before they could reach Cohen's door ; and Mor- 
 decai paused, looking up at him with an anxious 
 fatigued face under the gaslight. 
 
 "When will you come back? " he said, with 
 slow emphasis. 
 
 " May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for 
 you at the Cohens' any evening after your hour 
 at the book-shop? There is no objection, I sup- 
 pose, to their knowing that you and I meet in 
 private? " 
 
 " None," said Mordecai. " But the days I 
 wait now are longer than the years of my 
 
MORDECAI 
 
 335 
 
 strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe 
 is now the half. My hope abides in you." 
 
 " I will be faithful," said Deronda, — he 
 could not have left those words unuttered. I 
 will come the first evening I can after seven: 
 on Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me." 
 
 He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, 
 clasping it eagerly, seemed to feel a new in- 
 streaming of confidence, and he said with some 
 recovered energy, " This is come to pass, and the 
 rest will come." 
 
 That was their good-by. 
 
Book §)tjc 
 
 REVELATIONS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 This, too, is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: "It is a 
 part of probabihty that many improbable thmgs will happen." — 
 Aristotle: Poetics. 
 
 IMAGINE the conflict in a mind like De- 
 ronda's, given not only to feel strongly but 
 to question actively, on the evening after 
 that interview with Mordecai. To a young man 
 of much duller susceptibilities the adventure 
 might have seemed enough out of the common 
 way to divide his thoughts; but it had stirred 
 Deronda so deeply, that with the usual reaction 
 of his intellect he began to examine the grounds 
 of his emotion, and consider how far he must 
 resist its guidance. The consciousness that he 
 was half dominated by Mordecai's energetic 
 certitude, and still more by his fervent trust, 
 roused his alarm. It was his characteristic bias 
 to shrink from the moral stupidity of valuing 
 lightly what had come close to him, and of miss- 
 ing blindly in his own life of to-day the crisis 
 which he recognized as momentous and sacred in 
 the historic life of men. If he had read of this 
 incident as having happened centuries ago in 
 Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Cairo, to 
 some man young as himself, dissatisfied with 
 
REVELATIONS 337 
 
 his neutral life, and wanting some closer fellow- 
 ship, some more special duty to give him ardour 
 for the possible consequences of his work, it 
 would have appeared to him quite natural that 
 the incident should have created a deep impres- 
 sion on that far-off man, whose clothing and 
 action would have been seen in his imagination 
 as part of an age chiefly known to us through 
 its more serious effects. Why should he be 
 ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely be- 
 cause he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and 
 lived among people who might laugh at his own- 
 ing any conscience in the matter as the solemn 
 folly of taking himself too seriously? — that 
 bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave 
 emotion passes for wit. From such cowardice 
 before modish ignorance and obtuseness, De- 
 ronda shrank. But he also shrank from having 
 his course determined by mere contagion, with- 
 out consent of reason; or from allowing a 
 reverential pity for spiritual struggle to hurry 
 him along a dimly seen path. 
 
 What, after all, had really happened? He 
 knew quite accurately the answer Sir Hugo 
 would have given: "A consumptive Jew, pos- 
 sessed by a fanaticism which obstacles and has- 
 tening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda 
 as the anti-type of some visionary image, the 
 offspring of wedded hope and despair: despair 
 of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propaga- 
 tion of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was 
 perhaps odd, exceptional in its form, but substan- 
 tially it was not rare. Fanaticism was not so 
 common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its as- 
 pects it was abundant enough. While Mordecai 
 
 VOL. XIII — 22 
 
338 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 was waiting on the bridge for the fulfilment of 
 his visions, another man was convinced that he 
 had the mathematical key of the universe which 
 would supersede Newton, and regarded all 
 known physicists as conspiring to stifle his dis- 
 covery and keep the universe locked; another, 
 that he had the metaphysical key, with just that 
 hair's-breadth of difference from the old wards 
 which would make it fit exactly. Scattered here 
 and there in every direction you might find a ter- 
 rible person, with more or less power of speech, 
 and with an eye either glittering or preternat- 
 urally dull, on the look-out for the man who must 
 hear him; and in most cases he had volumes 
 which it was diflScult to get printed, or if printed 
 to get read. This Mordecai happened to have a 
 more pathetic aspect, a more passionate, pene- 
 trative speech than was usual with such mono- 
 maniacs: he was more poetical than a social 
 reformer with coloured views of the new moral 
 world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast 
 in sewage ; still he came under the same class. It 
 would be only right and kind to indulge him a 
 little, to comfort him with such help as was prac- 
 ticable; but what likelihood was there that his 
 notions had the sort of value he ascribed to them? 
 In such cases a man of the world knows what to 
 think beforehand. And as to Mordecai's convic- 
 tion that he had found a new executive self, it 
 might be preparing for him the worst of disap- 
 pointments, — that which presents itself as final." 
 
 Deronda's ear caught all these negative whis- 
 perings ; nay, he repeated them distinctly to him- 
 self. It was not the first but it was the most 
 pressing occasion on which he had had to face this 
 
REVELATIONS 339 
 
 question of the family likeness among the heirs 
 of enthusiasm, whether prophets, or dreamers of 
 dreams, whether the 
 
 "Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers," 
 
 or the devotees of phantasmal discovery, — from 
 the first believer in his own unmanif ested inspira- 
 tion, down to the last inventor of an ideal 
 machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The 
 kinship of human passion, the sameness of mor- 
 tal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque and 
 parody. Error and folly have had their heca- 
 tombs of martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of 
 man hitherto known to an abstract statement of 
 his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dan- 
 gerous company : say that, like Copernicus and 
 Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face 
 of hissing incredulity ; but so is the contriver of 
 perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the 
 spirits by this sort of test. If we want to avoid 
 giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of 
 banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do 
 but a capacity to understand the subject-matter 
 on which the immovable man is convinced, and 
 fellowship with human travail, both near and 
 afar, to hinder us from scanning any deep ex- 
 perience lightly. Shall we say, "Let the ages 
 try the spirits, and see what they are worth " ? 
 Why, we are the beginning of the ages, which 
 can only be just by virtue of just judgments in 
 separate human breasts, — separate yet com- 
 bined. Even steam-engines could not have got 
 made without that condition, but must have 
 stayed in the mind of James Watt. 
 
 This track of thinking was familiar enough to 
 
340 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Deronda to have saved him from any contemp- 
 tuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their 
 communication had been free from that pecuHar 
 claim on himself strangely ushered in by some 
 long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated 
 mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is 
 called a rational way, might seem justifiably dis- 
 missed as illusory and even preposterous ; but it 
 was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on 
 him from an appeal to his ready sympathy into 
 a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our con- 
 sciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner 
 deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of 
 sensibilities as various as our memories (which 
 also have their kinship and likeness) . And De- 
 ronda's conscience included sensibilities beyond 
 the common, enlarged by his early habit of think- 
 ing himself imaginatively into the experience of 
 others. 
 
 What was the claim this eager soul made upon 
 him? — "You must beheve my beliefs — be 
 moved by my reasons — hope my hopes — see 
 the vision I point to — behold a glory where I 
 behold it! " To take such a demand in the light 
 of an obligation in any direct sense would have 
 been preposterous, — to have seemed to admit 
 it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda, 
 looking on the agitation of those moments, felt 
 thankful that in the midst of his compassion he 
 had preserved himself from the bondage of false 
 concessions. The claim hung, too, on a supposi- 
 tion which might be — nay, probably was — in 
 discordance with the full fact: the supposition 
 that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood. Was 
 there ever a more hypothetic appeal? 
 
REVELATIONS 341 
 
 But since the age of thirteen Deronda had 
 associated the deepest experience of his affec- 
 tions with what was a pure supposition, namely, 
 that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypoth- 
 esis which had been the source of passionate 
 struggle within him ; by its light he had been ac- 
 customed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. 
 He had been well used to find a motive in a con- 
 ception which might be disproved; and he had 
 been also used to think of some revelation that 
 might influence his view of the particular duties 
 belonging to him. To be in a state of suspense 
 which was also one of emotive activity and scru- 
 ple was a familiar attitude of his conscience. 
 
 And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in 
 his Jewish birth, and that extravagant demand 
 of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an 
 actual discovery and a genuine spiritual result: 
 suppose that Mordecai's ideas made a real con- 
 quest over Deronda's conviction? Nay, it was 
 conceivable that as Mordecai needed and believed 
 that he had found an active replenishment of 
 himself, so Deronda might receive from Morde- 
 cai's mind the complete ideal shape of that per- 
 sonal duty and citizenship which lay in his own 
 thought like sculptured fragments certifying 
 some beauty yearned after but not traceable by 
 divination. 
 
 As that possibility presented itself in his medi- 
 tations, he was aware that it would be called 
 dreamy, and began to defend it. If the influence 
 he imagined himself submitting to had been that 
 of some honoured professor, some authority in a 
 seat of learning, some philosopher who had been 
 accepted as a voice of the age, would a thorough 
 
342 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 receptiveness towards direction have been ridi- 
 culed ? Only by those who hold it a sign of weak- 
 ness to be obliged for an idea, and prefer to hint 
 that they have implicitly held in a more correct 
 form whatever others have stated with a sadly 
 short-coming explicitness. After all, what was 
 there but vulgarity in taking the fact that Mor- 
 decai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he 
 was to be met perhaps on a sanded floor in the 
 parlour of the Hand and Banner, as a reason 
 for determining beforehand that there was not 
 some spiritual force within him that might have 
 a determining effect on a white-handed gentle- 
 man? There is a legend told of the Emperor 
 Domitian, that having heard of a Jewish family, 
 of the house of David, whence the ruler of the 
 world was to spring, he sent for its members in 
 alarm, but quickly released them on observing 
 that they had the hands of work-people, — 
 being of just the opposite opinion with that 
 Rabbi who stood waiting at the gate of Rome in 
 confidence that the Messiah would be found 
 among the destitute who entered there. Both 
 Emperor and Rabbi were wrong in their trust 
 of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are 
 no sign of inspiration, said Deronda to his in- 
 ward objector, but they have gone with it in some 
 remarkable cases. And to regard discipleship 
 as out of the question because of them, would be 
 mere dulness of imagination. 
 
 A more plausible reason for putting disciple- 
 ship out of the question was the strain of vision- 
 ary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his 
 wishes into overmastering impressions, and made 
 him read outward facts as fulfilment. Was such 
 
REVELATIONS 343 
 
 a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise 
 estimate of consequences which is the only safe- 
 guard from fatal error, even to ennobling mo- 
 tive? But it remained to be seen whether that 
 rare conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: per- 
 haps his might be one of the natures where a wise 
 estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of 
 that passionate belief which determines the con- 
 sequences it believes in. The inspirations of the 
 world have come in that way too: even strictly 
 measuring science could hardly have got on with- 
 out that forecasting ardour which feels the agita- 
 tions of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in 
 its preconception that surmounts many failures 
 of experiment. And in relation to human mo- 
 tives and actions, passionate belief has a fuller 
 efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity 
 of proof, and, happening in one soul, give the 
 type of what will one day be general. 
 
 At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's vision- 
 ary excitability was hardly a reason for conclud- 
 ing beforehand that he was not worth listening 
 to except for pity's sake. Suppose he had intro- 
 duced himself as one of the strictest reasoners: 
 do they form a body of men hitherto free from 
 false conclusions and illusory speculations? The 
 driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily 
 concluding that its net will now at last be large 
 enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in 
 demonstrations, and cut out ah illusory world in 
 the shape of axioms, definitions, and proposi- 
 tions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q. E. 
 D. No formulas for thinking will save us mor- 
 tals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension 
 of the matter to be thought about. And since the 
 
344 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathe- 
 matical dreamland where nothing is but what is 
 not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have ab- 
 sorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities 
 some truth of what will be, — the more compre- 
 hensive massive life feeding theory with new 
 material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes 
 combinations which science explains and justi- 
 fies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary 
 are not to be trusted. We must be patient with 
 the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, 
 whether in its sum total or in the separate minds 
 that have made the sum. Columbus had some 
 impressions about himself which we call supersti- 
 tions, and used some arguments which we dis- 
 approve; but he had also some true physical 
 conceptions, and he had the passionate patience 
 of genius to make them tell on mankind. The 
 world has made up its mind rather contemptu- 
 ously about those who were deaf to Columbus. 
 
 " My contempt for them binds me to see that 
 I don't adopt their mistake on a small scale," said 
 Deronda, " and make myself deaf with the as- 
 sumption that there cannot be any momentous 
 relation between this Jew and me, simply be- 
 cause he has clad it in illusory notions. What I 
 can be to him, or he to me, may not at all depend 
 on his persuasion about the way we came to- 
 gether. To me the way seems made up of plainly 
 discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is 
 probable that I should not have begun to be 
 specially interested in the Jews, and certainly I 
 should not have gone on that loitering search 
 after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at 
 Ram's book-shop and ask the price of Maimon. 
 
REVELATIONS 345 
 
 Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disci- 
 ple, and he saw me by their light ; I corresponded 
 well enough with the image his longing had 
 created. He took me for one of his race. Sup- 
 pose that his impression, — the elderly Jew at 
 Frankfort seemed to have something like it, — 
 suppose, in spite of all presumptions to the con- 
 trary, that his impression should somehow be 
 proved true, and that I should come actually to 
 share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This is 
 the only question which really concerns the effect 
 of our meeting on my life. 
 
 " But if the issue should be quite different? — 
 well, there will be something painful to go 
 through. I shall almost inevitably have to be an 
 active cause of that poor fellow's crushing disap- 
 pointment. Perhaps this issue is the one I had 
 need prepare myself for. I fear that no tender- 
 ness of mine can make his suffering lighter. 
 Would the alternative — that I should not dis- 
 appoint him — be less painful to me? " 
 
 Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately 
 been at work within him which had very much 
 modified the reluctance he would formerly have 
 had to think of himself as probably a Jew. And, 
 if you like, he was romantic. That young energy 
 and spirit of adventure which have helped to 
 create the world-wide legends of youthful heroes 
 going to seek the hidden tokens of their birth and 
 its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quiver- 
 ing interest in the bare possibility that he was 
 entering on a like track, — all the more because 
 the track was one of thought as well as action. 
 
 " The bare possibility." He could not admit it 
 to be more. The belief that his father was an 
 
346 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Englishman only grew firmer under the weak as- 
 saults of unwarranted doubt. And that a mo- 
 ment should ever come in which that belief was 
 declared a delusion, was something of which De- 
 ronda would not say, " I should be glad." His 
 lifelong affection for Sir Hugo, stronger than all 
 his resentment, made him shrink from admitting 
 that wish. 
 
 Which way soever the truth might lie, he re- 
 peated to himself what he had said to Mordecai, 
 — that he could not without farther reason un- 
 dertake to hasten its discovery. Nay, he was 
 tempted now to regard his uncertainty as a con- 
 dition to be cherished for the present. If further 
 intercourse revealed nothing but illusions as what 
 he was expected to share in, the want of any valid 
 evidence that he was a Jew might save Mordecai 
 the worst shock in the refusal of fraternity. It 
 might even be justifiable to use the uncertainty 
 on this point in keeping up a suspense which 
 would induce Mordecai to accept those offices of 
 friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him. 
 
 These were the meditations that busied De- 
 ronda in the interval of four days before he could 
 fulfil his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra 
 Cohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often last- 
 ing to an hour so late as to put the evening expe- 
 dition to Holborn out of the question. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Wenn es eine Stufenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die hochste 
 Staffel erstiegen ; wenn die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit 
 welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den 
 Hochgeborenen aller Lander auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt 
 wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz gebiihrt 
 dann einer Tragddie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt, gedichtet und 
 dargestelit von den Helden selber ? — Zunz : Die Synagogale Poesie 
 desMittelalters. 
 
 " TT F there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes 
 I precedence of all the nations, — if the dura- 
 tion of sorrows and the patience with which 
 they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the 
 aristocracy of every land, — if a literature is 
 called rich in the possession of a few classic trage- 
 dies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy 
 lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the 
 poets and the actors were also the heroes? " 
 
 Deronda had lately been reading that passage 
 of Zunza, and it occurred to him by way of con- 
 trast when he was going to the Cohens, who cer- 
 tainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in 
 sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra 
 Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the 
 martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed 
 to be favoured with that success which has been 
 the most exasperating difference in the greed of 
 Jews during all the ages of their dispersion. 
 This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a sym- 
 bol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was 
 there not something typical in the fact that a life 
 like Mordecai's — a frail incorporation of the 
 national consciousness, breathing with difficult 
 
348 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 breath — was nested in the self-gratulating ig- 
 norant prosperity of the Cohens? 
 
 GHstening was the gladness in their faces 
 when Deronda reappeared among them. Cohen 
 himself took occasion to intimate that although 
 the diamond ring, let alone a little longer, would 
 have bred more money, he did not mind that^ — 
 not a sixpence, — when compared with the pleas- 
 ure of the women and children in seeing a young 
 gentleman whose first visit had been so agreeable 
 that they had " done nothing but talk of it ever 
 since." Young Mrs. Cohen was very sorry that 
 baby was asleep, and then very glad that Ade- 
 laide was not yet gone to bed, entreating De- 
 ronda not to stay in the shop but to go forthwith 
 into the parlour to see " mother and the chil- 
 dren." He willingly accepted the invitation, 
 having provided himself with portable presents, 
 — a set of paper figures for Adelaide, and an 
 ivory cup and ball for Jacob. 
 
 The grandmother had a pack of cards before 
 her, and was making " plates " with the children. 
 A plate had just been thrown down and kept 
 itself whole. 
 
 " Stop! " said Jacob, running up to Deronda 
 as he entered. " Don't tread on my plate. Stop 
 and see me throw it up again." 
 
 Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of 
 understanding with the grandmother, and the 
 plate bore several tossings before it came to 
 pieces; then the visitor was allowed to come 
 forward and seat himself. He observed that 
 the door from which Mordecai had issued on 
 the former visit was now closed, but he wished 
 to show his interest in the Cohens before dis- 
 
REVELATIONS 349 
 
 closing a yet stronger interest in their singular 
 inmate. 
 
 It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, 
 and was setting up the paper figures in their 
 dance on the table, while Jacob was already 
 practising with the cup and ball, that Deronda 
 said, — 
 
 " Is Mordecai in just now? " 
 
 " Where is he, Addy? " said Cohen, who had 
 seized an interval of business to come and look 
 on. 
 
 " In the workroom there," said his wife, nod- 
 ding towards the closed door. 
 
 " The fact is, sir," said Cohen, " we don't 
 know what 's come to him this last day or two. 
 He 's always what I may call a little touched, 
 you know," — here Cohen pointed to his own 
 forehead, — " not quite to say rational in all 
 things, like you and me ; but he 's mostly won- 
 derful regular and industrious as far as a poor 
 creature can be, and takes as much delight in 
 the boy as anybody could. But this last day or 
 two he 's been moving about like a sleep-walker, 
 or else sitting as still as a wax figure." 
 
 " It 's the disease, poor dear creature," said 
 the grandmother, tenderly. " I doubt whether 
 he can stand long against it." 
 
 "No; I think it's only something he's got 
 in his head," said Mrs. Cohen the younger. 
 " He 's been turning over writing continually, 
 and when I speak to him it takes him ever so 
 long to hear and answer." 
 
 " You may think us a little weak ourselves," 
 said Cohen, apologetically. " But my wife and 
 mother would n't part with him if he was a still 
 
350 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 worse encumbrance. It is n't that we don't know 
 the long and short of matters, but it 's our prin- 
 ciple. There 's fools do business at a loss and 
 don't know it. I 'm not one of 'em." 
 
 " Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him," 
 said the grandmother. 
 
 " He 's got something the matter inside him," 
 said Jacob, coming up to correct this erratum of 
 his grandmother's. " He said he could n't talk 
 to me, and he would n't have a bit o' bun." 
 
 "So far from wondering at your feeling for 
 him," said Deronda, " I already feel something 
 of the same sort myself. I have lately talked 
 to him at Ram's book-shop, — in fact, I prom- 
 ised to call for him here, that we might go out 
 together." 
 
 " That 's it, then! " said Cohen, slapping his 
 knee. " He 's been expecting you, and it 's 
 taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his 
 learning to you. It 's imcommonly kind of you^ 
 sir; for I don't suppose there 's much to be got 
 out of it, else it would n't have left him where 
 he is. But there 's the shop." Cohen hurried 
 out, and Jacob, who had been listening incon- 
 veniently near to Deronda's elbow, said to him 
 with obliging familiarity, " I '11 call Mordecai 
 for you, if you like." 
 
 "No, Jacob," said his mother; "open the 
 door for the gentleman, and let him go in him- 
 self. Hush! don't make a noise." 
 
 Skilful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, 
 and turned the handle of the door as noiselessly 
 as possible, while Deronda went behind him and 
 stood on the threshold. The small room was lit 
 only by a dying fire and one candle with a shade 
 
REVELATIONS 351 
 
 over it. On the board fixed under the window, 
 various objects of jewellery were scattered: 
 some books were heaped in the corner beyond 
 them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at 
 the board with his back to the door, his hands 
 resting on each other and on the board, a watch 
 propped on a stand before him. He was in a 
 state of expectation as sickening as that of a 
 prisoner listening for the delayed deliverance, 
 — when he heard Deronda's voice saying, " I 
 am come for you. Are you ready? " 
 
 Immediately he turned without speaking, 
 seized his furred cap which lay near, and moved 
 to join Deronda. It was but a moment before 
 they were both in the sitting-room, and Jacob, 
 noticing the change in his friend's air and expres- 
 sion, seized him by the arm and said, " See my 
 cup and ball! " sending the ball up close to Mor- 
 decai's face, as something likely to cheer a conva- 
 lescent. It was a sign of the relieved tension in 
 Mordecai's mind that he could smile and say, 
 " Fine, fine!" 
 
 " You have forgotten your great-coat and 
 comforter," said young Mrs. Cohen; and he 
 went back into the workroom and got them. 
 
 " He 's come to life again, do you see? " said 
 Cohen, who had re-entered, — speaking in an 
 undertone. " I told you so : I 'm mostly right." 
 Then in his usual voice, " Well, sir, we must n't 
 detain you now, I suppose ; but I hope this is n't 
 the last time we shall see you." 
 
 " Shall you come again? " said Jacob, advanc- 
 ing. " See, I can catch the ball; I '11 bet I catch 
 it without stopping, if you come again." 
 
 " He has clever hands," said Deronda, looking 
 
352 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 at the grandmother, " Which side of the family 
 does he get them from? " 
 
 But the grandmother only nodded towards her 
 son, who said promptly: " My side. My wife's 
 family are not in that line. But, bless your soul! 
 ours is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta 
 percha; you can twist it which way you like. 
 There 's nothing some old gentlemen won't do if 
 you set 'em to it." Here Cohen winked down at 
 Jacob's back, but it was doubtful whether this 
 judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for 
 its subject gave a nasal whinnying laugh and 
 stamped about, singing, " Old gentlemen, old 
 gentlemen," in chiming cadence. 
 
 Deronda thought, " I shall never know any- 
 thing decisive about these people until I ask 
 Cohen point-blank whether he lost a sister named v 
 Mirah when she was six years old." The decisive 
 moment did not yet seem easy for him to face. 
 Still his first sense of repulsion at the common- 
 ness of these people was beginning to be tem- 
 pered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined 
 their airs and speech might be, he was forced to 
 admit some moral refinement in their treatment 
 of the consumptive workman, whose mental dis- 
 tinction impressed them chiefly as a harmless, 
 silent raving. 
 
 " The Cohens seem to have an affection for 
 you," said Deronda, as soon as he and Mordecai 
 were off the doorstep. 
 
 " And I for them," was the immediate an- 
 swer. " They have the heart of the Israelite 
 within them, though they are as the horse and the 
 mule, without understanding beyond the narrow 
 path they tread." 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 353 
 
 " I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear," 
 said Deronda, " by my slowness in fulfilling my 
 promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I 
 found it impossible." 
 
 " Yes — yes, I trusted you. But it is true I 
 have been uneasy, for the spirit of my youth has 
 been stirred within me, and this body is not 
 strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. 
 I am as a man bound and imprisoned through 
 long years : behold him brought to speech of his 
 fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he tot- 
 ters, the joy within him threatens to break and 
 overthrow the tabernacle of flesh." 
 
 " You must not speak too much in this even- 
 ing air," said Deronda, feeling Mordecai's words 
 of reliance like so many cords binding him pain- 
 fully. " Cover your mouth with the woollen 
 scarf. We are going to the Hand and Banner j 
 I suppose, and shall be in private there? " 
 
 " No, that is my trouble that you did not come 
 yesterday. For this is the evening of the club I 
 spoke of, and we might not have any minutes 
 alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Per- 
 haps we had better seek another place. But I 
 am used to that only. In new places the outer 
 world presses on me and narrows the inward 
 vision. And the people there are familiar with 
 my face." 
 
 " I don't mind the club if I am allowed to 
 go in," said Deronda. "It is enough that you 
 like this place best. If we have not enough 
 time, I will come again. What sort of club 
 is it? " 
 
 " It is called ' The Philosophers.' They are 
 few — like the cedars of Lebanon — poor men 
 
 VOL. XIII — 23 
 
354 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 given to thought. But none so poor as I am; 
 and sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank 
 have been brought. We are allowed to intro- 
 duce a friend who is interested in our topics. 
 Each orders beer or some other kind of drink, in 
 payment for the room. Most of them smoke. I 
 have gone when I could, for there are other men 
 of my race who come, and sometimes I have 
 broken silence. I have pleased myself with a 
 faint likeness between these poor philosophers 
 and the Masters who handed down the thought 
 of our race, — the great Transmitters, who la- 
 boured with their hands for scant bread, but 
 preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of 
 memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as 
 a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases 
 itself with faint resemblances." 
 
 " I shall be very glad to go and sit among 
 them, if that will suit you. It is a sort of meeting 
 I should like to join in," said Deronda, not with- 
 out relief in the prospect of an interval before he 
 went through the strain of his next private con- 
 versation with Mordecai. 
 
 In three minutes they had opened the glazed 
 door with the red curtain, and were in the little 
 parlour, hardly much more than fifteen feet 
 square, where the gaslight shone through a 
 slight haze of smoke on what to Deronda was a 
 new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of 
 various ages, from between twenty and thirty 
 to fifty, all shabbily dressed, most of them with 
 clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a 
 look of concentrated intelligence to a man in a 
 pepper-and-salt dress, with blond hair, short 
 nose, broad forehead, and general breadth, who. 
 
REVELATIONS 355 
 
 holding his pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, 
 and beating his knee with the right, was just 
 finishing a quotation from Shelley (the compari- 
 son of the avalanche in his " Prometheus 
 Unbound"),— 
 
 "As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 
 Is loosened, and the nations echo round." 
 
 The entrance of the new-comers broke the fix- 
 ity of attention, and called for a re-arrangement 
 of seats in the too narrow semicircle round the 
 fireplace and the table holding the glasses, spare 
 pipes, and tobacco. This was the soberest of 
 clubs; but sobriety is no reason why smoking 
 and " taking something " should be less imperi- 
 ously needed as a means of getting a decent 
 status in company and debate. Mordecai was 
 received with welcoming voices which had a 
 slight cadence of compassion in them, but natu- 
 rally all glances passed immediately to his com- 
 panion. 
 
 " I have brought a friend who is interested in 
 our subjects," said Mordecai. " He has trav- 
 elled and studied much." 
 
 " Is the gentleman anonymous? Is he a great 
 Unknown? " said the broad-chested quoter of 
 Shelley, with a humorous air. 
 
 " My name is Daniel Deronda. I am un- 
 known, but not in any sense great." The smile 
 breaking over the stranger's grave face as he 
 said this was so agreeable that there was a gen- 
 eral indistinct murmur, equivalent to a " Hear, 
 hear; " and the broad man said, — 
 
 " You recommend the name, sir, and are wel- 
 come. Here, Mordecai, come to this corner 
 
356 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 against me," he added, evidently wishing to give 
 the cosiest place to the one who most needed it. 
 
 Deronda w^as well satisfied to get a seat on the 
 opposite side, w^here his general survey of the 
 party easily included JNIordecai, who remained 
 an eminently striking object in this group of 
 sharply characterized figures, more than one of 
 whom, even to Daniel's little exercised discrimi- 
 nation, seemed probably of Jewish descent. 
 
 In fact, pure English blood (if leech or lancet 
 can furnish us with the precise product) did not 
 declare itself predominantly in the party at pres- 
 ent assembled. Miller, the broad man, an ex- 
 ceptional second-hand bookseller who knew the 
 insides of books, had at least grandparents who 
 called themselves German, and possibly far- 
 away ancestors who denied themselves to be 
 Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, 
 the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, 
 triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the optical-instru- 
 ment maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, 
 generous-featured type easily passing for Eng- 
 lishmen of unusually cordial manners; and 
 Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably 
 more Celtic than he knew. Only three would 
 have been discernible everywhere as English- 
 men: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, 
 open-faced, pleasant-voiced; the florid labora- 
 tory assistant JNIarrables; and Lilly, the pale, 
 neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown 
 hair was set up in a small parallelogram above 
 his well-filled forehead, and whose shirt, taken 
 with an otherwise seedy costume, had a fresh- 
 ness that might be called insular, and perhaps 
 even something narrow^er. 
 
REVELATIONS 357 
 
 Certainly a company select of the select among 
 poor men, being drawn together by a taste not 
 prevalent even among the privileged heirs of 
 learning and its institutions; and not likely to 
 amuse any gentleman in search of crime or low 
 comedy as the ground of interest in people whose 
 weekly income is only divisible into shillings. 
 Deronda, even if he had not been more than 
 usually inclined to gravity under the influence 
 of what was pending between him and Morde- 
 cai, would not have set himself to find food for 
 laughter in the various shades of departure from 
 the tone of polished society sure to be observable 
 in the air and talk of these men who had prob- 
 ably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch 
 indulgences, making the utmost of scant oppor- 
 tunity. He looked around him with the quiet 
 air of respect habitual to him among equals, 
 ordered whiskey and water, and offered the con- 
 tents of his cigar-case, which, characteristicall}^ 
 enough, he always carried and hardly ever used 
 for his own behoof, having reasons for not smok- 
 ing himself, but liking to indulge others. Per- 
 haps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming 
 strait-laced, and turning himself into a sort of 
 diagram instead of a growth which can exercise 
 the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he 
 made a decidedly winning impression on the 
 company was proved by their showing them- 
 selves no less at ease than before, and desirous 
 of quickly resuming their interrupted talk. 
 
 " This is what I call one of our touch-and-go 
 nights, sir," said Miller, who was implicitly ac- 
 cepted as a sort of moderator, — addressing 
 Deronda by way of explanation, and nodding 
 
358 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 toward each person whose name he mentioned. 
 " Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. 
 But to-night our friend Pash, there, brought 
 up the law of progress, and Vv^e got on statistics ; 
 then Lilly, there, saying we knew well enough 
 before counting that in the same state of so- 
 ciety the same sort of things would happen, and 
 it was no more wonder that quantities should 
 remain the same than that qualities should re- 
 main the same, for in relation to society num- 
 bers are qualities — the number of drunkards is 
 a quality in society — the numbers are an index 
 to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only 
 setting us to consider the causes of -difference 
 between different social states — Lilly saying 
 this, we went off on the causes of social change, 
 and when you came in I was going upon the 
 power of ideas, which I hold to be the main 
 transforming cause." 
 
 " I don't hold with you there. Miller," said 
 Goodwin, the inlayer, more concerned to carry 
 on the subject than to wait for a word from the 
 new guest. " For either you mean so many 
 sorts of things by ideas that I get no knowledge 
 by what you say, any more than if you said light 
 was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort 
 of ideas, and then I go against your meaning 
 as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all 
 actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas, 
 — say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or bak- 
 ing clay; and such ideas as these work them- 
 selves into life and go on growing with it, but 
 they can't go apart from the material that set 
 them to work and makes a medium for them. 
 It 's the nature of wood and stone yielding to 
 
REVELATIONS 359 
 
 the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, 
 and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping 
 will go on. I look at it that such ideas as are 
 mixed straight away with all the other elements 
 of life are powerful along with 'em. The slower 
 the mixing, the less power they have. And as 
 to the causes of social change, I look at it in 
 this way, — ideas are a sort of parliament, but 
 there 's a commonwealth outside, and a good 
 deal of the commonwealth is working at change 
 without knowing what the parliament is doing." 
 
 " But if you take ready mixing as your test 
 of power," said Pash, " some of the least practi- 
 cal ideas beat everything. They spread without 
 being understood, and enter„into the language 
 without being thought of." 
 
 " They may act by changing the distribu- 
 tion of gases," said Marrables; "instruments 
 are getting so fine now, men may come to 
 register the spread of a theory by observed 
 changes in the atmosphere and corresponding 
 changes in the nerves." 
 
 " Yes," said Pash, his dark face lighting up 
 rather impishly, " there is the idea of nationali- 
 ties; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it, 
 and getting more gregarious." 
 
 " You don't share that idea? " said Deronda, 
 finding a piquant incongruity between Pash's 
 sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his 
 features. 
 
 " Say rather, he does not share that spirit," 
 said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy 
 glance on Pash. " Unless nationality is a feel- 
 ing, what force can it have as an idea? " 
 
 " Granted, Mordecai," said Pash, quite good- 
 
360 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 humouredly. " And as the feeling of nationality- 
 is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a 
 ghost, already walking to announce the death." 
 
 " A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet 
 revive into strong life," said Deronda. " Na- 
 tions have revived. We may live to see a great 
 outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being 
 inspired with a new zeal." 
 
 " Amen, amen," said Mordecai, looking at 
 Deronda with a delight which was the begin- 
 ning of recovered energy : his attitude was more 
 upright, his face was less worn. 
 
 " That may hold with backward nations," said 
 Pash, " but with us in Europe the sentiment of 
 nationality is destined to die out. It will last 
 a little longer in the quarters where oppression 
 lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of 
 progress is setting against it." 
 
 " Ay," said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch 
 tone which was like the letting in of a little cool 
 air on the conversation, " ye 've done well to 
 bring us round to the point. Ye 're all agreed 
 that societies change — not always and every- 
 where — but on the whole and in the long-run. 
 Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe 
 that we have got to examine the nature of 
 changes before we have a warrant to call them 
 progress, which word is supposed to include a 
 bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill chosen 
 for that purpose, since mere motion onward may 
 carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the ques- 
 tions I would put are three: Is all change in 
 the direction of progress? if not, how shall we 
 discern which change is progress and which not? 
 and thirdly, how far and in what ways can we 
 
REVELATIONS 361 
 
 act upon the course of change so as to promote 
 it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it 
 is injurious? " 
 
 But Buchan's attempt to impose his method 
 on the talk was a failure. Lilly immediately 
 said, — 
 
 " Change and progress are merged in the idea 
 of development. The laws of development are 
 being discovered, and changes taking place ac- 
 cording to them are necessarily progressive ; that 
 is to say, if we have any notion of progress or 
 improvement opposed to them, the notion is a 
 mistake." 
 
 " I really can't see how you arrive at that sort 
 of certitude about changes by calling them de- 
 velopment," said Deronda. " There will still re- 
 main the degrees of inevitableness in relation to 
 our own will and acts, and the degrees of wisdom 
 in hastening or retarding; there will still re- 
 main the danger of mistaking a tendency which 
 should be resisted for an inevitable law that we 
 must adjust ourselves to, — which seems to me 
 as bad a superstition or false god as any that 
 has been set up without the ceremonies of 
 philosophizing." \ 
 
 " That is a truth," skid Mordecai. " Woe to 
 the men who see no place for resistance in this 
 generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, 
 and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed 
 is more perfect, more charged with the elements 
 that are pregnant with diviner form. The life 
 of a people grows, it is knit together and yet 
 expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and 
 action; it absorbs the thought of other nations 
 into its own forms, and gives back the thought 
 
362 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 as new wealth to the world; it is a power and _ 
 an organ in the great body of the nations. But 
 there may come a check, an arrest; memories 
 may be stifled, and love may be faint for the 
 lack of them; or memories may shrink into 
 withered relics, — the soul of a people, whereby 
 they know themselves to be one, may seem to 
 be dying for want of common action. But who 
 shall say, ' The fountain of their life is dried 
 up, they shall forever cease to be a nation ' ? 
 Who shall say it? Not he who feels the life 
 of his people stirring within his own. Shall he 
 say, ' That way events are wending, I will not 
 resist ' ? His very soul is resistance, and is as 
 a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of 
 multitudes, and make a new pathway for 
 events." 
 
 " I don't deny patriotism," said Gideon, " but 
 we all know you have a particular meaning, 
 Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of think- 
 ing, I suppose." Here Gideon had turned to 
 Deronda, who sat next to him; but without 
 waiting for an answer, he went on: "I'm a 
 rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as 
 a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping 
 up our worship in a rational way. I don't ap- 
 prove of our people getting baptized, because 
 1 don't believe in a Jew's conversion to the 
 Gentile part of Christianity. And now we have 
 political equality, there 's no excuse for a pre- 
 tence of that sort. But I am for getting rid of 
 all our superstitions and exclusiveness. There 's 
 no reason now why we should n't melt gradually 
 into the populations we live among. That 's the 
 order of the day in point of progress. I would 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 363 
 
 as soon my children married Christians as Jews. 
 And I 'm for the old maxim, ' A man's country 
 is where he 's well off.' " 
 
 " That country 's not so easy to find, Gideon," 
 said the rapid Pash, with a shrug and grimace. 
 " You get ten shillings a week more than I do, 
 and have only half the number of children. If 
 somebody will introduce a brisk trade in watches 
 among the ' Jerusalem wares,' I '11 go — eh, 
 Mordecai, what do you say?" 
 
 Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai' s 
 opinion, was inwardly wondering at his persist- 
 ence in coming to this club. For an enthusiastic 
 spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference 
 of men familiar with the object of his enthusi- 
 asm is the acceptance of a slow^ martyrdom, be- 
 side which the fate of a missionary tomahawked 
 without any considerate rejection of his doc- 
 trines seems hardly worthy of compassion. But 
 Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: this was 
 a moment of spiritual fulness, and he cared more 
 for the utterance of his faith than for its im- 
 mediate reception. With a fervour which had no 
 temper in it, but seemed rather the rush of feel- 
 ing in the opportunity of speech, he answered 
 Pash: — 
 
 " What I say is, let every man keep far away 
 from the brotherhood and the inheritance he 
 despises. Thousands on thousands of our race 
 have mixed with the Gentile as Celt with Saxon, 
 and they may inherit the blessing that belongs 
 to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You 
 are one of the multitudes over this globe who 
 must walk among the nations and be known as 
 Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 
 
364 DANIEL DEKONDA 
 
 ' I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown 
 any bond with the long travail of my race, I 
 will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our sepa- 
 rateness,' they all the while feel breathing on 
 them the breath of contempt because they are 
 J ews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. 
 Can a fresh-made garment of citizenship weave 
 itself straightway into the flesh and change the 
 slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the 
 citizenship of him who walks among a people 
 he has no hearty kindred and fellowship with, 
 and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his 
 own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition 
 and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien in 
 spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks 
 the blood of mankind, he is not a man. Shar- 
 ing in no love, sharing in no subjection of the 
 soul, he mocks at all. Is it not truth I speak, 
 Pash?" 
 
 " Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, " if you 
 mean that I think the worse of myself for 
 being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for 
 is that there are fewer blockheads among us 
 than among other races. But perhaps you are 
 right in thinking the Christians don't like me 
 so well for it." 
 
 " Catholics and Protestants have not liked 
 each other much better," said the genial Gideon. 
 " We must wait patiently for prejudices to die 
 out. Many of our people are on a footing with 
 the best, and there 's been a good filtering of our 
 blood into high families. I am for making our 
 expectations rational." 
 
 " And so am I ! " said Mordecai, quickly, 
 leaning forward with the eagerness of one who 
 
REVELATIONS 365 
 
 pleads in some decisive crisis, his long thin hands 
 clasped together on his lap. " I too claim to be 
 a rational Jew. But what is it to be rational, — 
 what is it to feel the light of the divine reason 
 growing stronger within and without? It is to 
 see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind 
 and consecrate change as a dependent growth, — 
 yea, consecrate it with kinship : the past becomes 
 my parent, and the future stretches towards me 
 the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to 
 drain away the sap of special kindred that makes 
 the families of man rich in interchanged wealth, 
 and various as the forests are various with the 
 glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is 
 rational to say, ' I know not my father or my 
 mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no 
 prayer of mine may touch them,' then it will be 
 rational for the Jew to say, ' I will seek to know 
 no difference between me and the Gentile, I will 
 not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our 
 nationality, — let the Hebrew cease to be, and 
 let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead 
 as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. Yet 
 let his child learn by rote the speech of the Greek, 
 where he adjures his fellow-citizens by the 
 bravery of those who fought foremost at Mara- 
 thon, — let him learn to say, that was noble in 
 the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal 
 nation! But the Jew has no memories that bind 
 him to action; let him laugh that his nation is 
 degraded from a nation; let him hold the monu- 
 ments of his law which carried within its frame 
 the breath of social justice, of charity, and of 
 household sanctities, — let him hold the energy 
 of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, 
 
366 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere 
 stuff for a professorship. The business of the 
 Jew in all things is to be even as the rich 
 Gentile.' " 
 
 Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and 
 there was a moment's silence. Not one member 
 of the club shared his point of view or his emo- 
 tion; but his whole personality and speech had 
 on them the effect of a dramatic representation 
 which had some pathos in it, though no practical 
 consequences; and usually he was at once in- 
 dulged and contradicted. Deronda's mind went 
 back on what must have been the tragic pressure 
 of outward conditions hindering this man, whose 
 force he felt to be telling on himself, from mak- 
 ing any world for his thought in the minds of 
 others, — like a poet among people of a strange 
 speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but 
 have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill 
 to his discovery of latent virtues in his mother 
 tongue. 
 
 The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and 
 hint the loss of time. " I submit," said he, " that 
 ye 're travelling away from the questions I put 
 concerning progress." 
 
 "Say they 're levanting, Buchan," said Miller, 
 who liked his joke, and would not have objected 
 to be called Voltairian. " Never mind. Let us 
 have a Jewish night; we 've not had one for a 
 long while. Let us take the discussion on Jewish 
 ground. I suppose we've no prejudice here; 
 we 're all philosophers; and we like our friends 
 Mordecai, Pash, and Gideon, as well as if they 
 were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of us. 
 We 're all related through Adam, until further 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 367 
 
 showing to the contrary, and if you look into his- 
 tory we Ve all got some discreditable forefathers. 
 So I mean no offence when I say I don't think 
 any great things of the part the Jewish people 
 have played in the world. What then? I think 
 they were iniquitously dealt by in past time^. 
 And I suppose we don't want any men to be 
 maltreated, white, black, brown, or yellow, — 
 I know I 've just given my half-crown to the 
 contrary. And that reminds me, I 've a curious 
 old German book, — I can't read it myself, but 
 a friend was reading out of it to me the other 
 day, — about the prejudices against the Jews, 
 and the stories used to be told against 'em, and 
 what do you think one was ? Why, that they 're 
 punished with a bad odour in their bodies; and 
 that, says the author, date 1715 (I 've just been 
 pricing and marking the book this very morning) 
 — that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But 
 then, he says, the other things are fables, such as 
 that the odour goes away all at once when 
 they 're baptized, and that every one of the ten 
 tribes, mind you, all the ten being concerned in 
 the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment 
 over and above the smell; Asher, I remember, 
 has the right arm a handbreadth shorter than the 
 left, and Naphtali has pigs' ears and a smell of 
 live pork. What do you think of that ? There 's 
 been a good deal of fun made of rabbinical 
 fables, but in point of fables my opinion is, that 
 all over the world it 's six of one and half-a-dozen 
 of the other. However, as I said before, I hold 
 with the philosophers of the last century that the 
 Jews have played no great part as a people, 
 though Pash will have it they 're clever enough 
 
/ 
 
 368 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to beat all the rest of the world. But if so, I ask, 
 why have n't they done it? " 
 
 "For the same reason that the cleverest men 
 in the country don't get themselves or their ideas 
 into Parliament," said the ready Pash; ''be- 
 cause the blockheads are too many for 'em." 
 
 " That is a vain question," said Mordecai, 
 " whether our people would beat the rest of the 
 world. Each nation has its own work, and is a 
 member of the world, enriched by the work of 
 each. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, 
 that Israel is the heart of mankind^ if we mean 
 by heart the core of affection which binds a race 
 and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence 
 for the human body which lifts the needs of our 
 animal life into religion, and the tenderness 
 which is merciful to the poor and weak and to 
 the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us." 
 
 " They 're not behind any nation in arro- 
 gance," said Lilly; "and if they have got in 
 the rear, it has not been because they were over- 
 modest." 
 
 " Oh, every nation brags in its turn," said 
 Miller. 
 
 " Yes," said Pash; " and some of them in the 
 Hebrew text." 
 
 " Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one 
 time, they are a stand-still people," said Lilly. 
 " They are the type of obstinate adherence to 
 the superannuated. They may show good abili- 
 ties when they take up liberal ideas, but as a 
 race they have no development in them." 
 
 " That is false! " said Mordecai, leaning for- 
 ward again with his former eagerness. " Let 
 their history be known and examined; let the 
 
REVELATIONS 369 
 
 seed be sifted, let its beginning be traced to the 
 weed of the wilderness, — the more glorious will 
 be the energy that transformed it. Where else 
 is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said 
 that their religion and law and moral life mingled 
 as the stream of blood in the heart and made one 
 growth, — where else a people who kept and en- 
 larged their spiritual store at the very time when 
 they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the 
 forest fires that chase the wild beast from his 
 covert? There is a fable of the Roman, that 
 swimming to save his life he held the roll of his 
 writings between his teeth and saved them from 
 the waters. But how much more than that is 
 true of our race? They struggled to keep their 
 place among the nations like heroes, — yea, 
 when the hand was hacked off, they clung with 
 the teeth; but when the plough and the harrow 
 had passed over the last visible signs of their 
 national covenant, and the fruit fulness of their 
 land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and 
 planters, they said, ' The spirit is alive, let us 
 make it a lasting habitation, — lasting because 
 movable, — so that it may be carried from gen- 
 eration to generation, and our sons unborn may 
 be rich in the things that have been, and possess 
 a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.' 
 They said it and they wrought it, though often 
 breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as 
 lying wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted 
 and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew 
 made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, 
 and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile 
 luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; 
 his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working 
 
 VOL. xni — 24) 
 
370 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the mines of Greece and carrying their products 
 to the world. The native spirit of our tradition 
 was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed, 
 and draw out the compressed virtues of law and 
 prophecy ; and while the Gentile, who had said, 
 ' What is yours is ours, and no longer yours,' 
 was reading the letter of our law as a dark in- 
 scription, or was turning its parchments into 
 shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cru- 
 elty, our Masters were still enlarging and illum- 
 inating with fresh- fed interpretation. But the 
 dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was 
 a spiked torture as well as a load; the exile was 
 forced afar among brutish people, where the con- 
 sciousness of his race was no clearer to him than 
 the light of the sun to our fathers in the Roman 
 persecution, who had their hiding-place in a cave, 
 and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer 
 burning of their candles. What wonder that 
 multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow, 
 superstitious? What wonder? " 
 
 Here Mordecai, whose seat was next the fire- 
 place, rose and leaned his arm on the little shelf ; 
 his excitement had risen, though his voice, which 
 had begun with unusual strength, was getting 
 hoarser. 
 
 " What wonder? The night is unto them, that . 
 they have no vision; in their darkness they are 
 unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the 
 prophets, and the day is dark above them ; their 
 observances are as nameless relics. But which 
 among the chief of the Gentile nations has not 
 an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's 
 ignorant observance; but the most accursed ig- 
 norance is that which has no observance, — sunk 
 
REVELATIONS 871 
 
 to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law 
 is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying 
 hound. There is a degradation deep down below 
 the memory that has withered into superstition. 
 In the multitudes of the ignorant on three conti- 
 nents who observe our rites and make the confes- 
 sion of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is 
 not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the 
 unity of Israel which has made the growth and 
 form of its religion be an outward reality. Look- 
 ing towards a land and a polity, our dispersed 
 people in all the ends of the earth may share the 
 dignity of a national life which has a voice among 
 the peoples of the East and the West, — which 
 will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so 
 that it may be, as of old, a medium of trans- 
 mission and understanding. Let that come to 
 pass, and the living warmth will spread to the 
 weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will 
 vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, 
 but in the illumination of great facts which widen 
 feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the 
 young offspring of beloved memories." 
 
 Mordecai's voice had sunk, but with the hectic 
 brilliancy of his gaze it was not the less im- 
 pressive. His extraordinary excitement was 
 certainly due to Deronda's presence: it was to 
 Deronda that he was speaking, and the moment 
 had a testamentary solemnity for him, which 
 rallied all his powers. Yet the presence of those 
 other familiar men promoted expression, for 
 they embodied the indifference which gave a re- 
 sistant energy to his speech. Not that he looked 
 at Deronda: he seemed to see nothing immedi- 
 ately around him, and if any one had grasped 
 
372 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 him he would probably not have known it. 
 Again the former words came back to Deronda's 
 mind.: " You must hope my hopes — see the 
 vision I point to — behold a glory where I be- 
 hold it." They came now with gathered pathos. 
 Before him stood, as a living, suffering reality, 
 what hitherto he had only seen as an effort of 
 imagination, which, in its comparative faintness, 
 yet carried a suspicion of being exaggerated: 
 a man steeped in poverty and obscurity weak- 
 ened by disease, consciously within the shadow 
 of advancing death, but living an intense life in 
 an invisible past and future, careless of his per- 
 sonal lot, except for its possibly making some 
 obstruction to a conceived good which he would 
 never share except as a brief inward vision, — 
 a day afar off, whose sun would never warm him, 
 but into which he threw his soul's desire, with a 
 passion often wanting to the personal motives 
 of healthy youth. It was something more than 
 a grandiose transfiguration of the parental love 
 that toils, renounces, endures, resists the suicidal 
 promptings of despair, — all because of the little 
 ones, whose future becomes present to the yearn- 
 ing gaze of anxiety. 
 
 All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat 
 down again, and none with unkindness: but it 
 happened that the one who felt the most kindly 
 was the most prompted to speak in opposition. 
 This was the genial and rational Gideon, who 
 also was not without a sense that he was address- 
 ing the guest of the evening. He said, — 
 
 " You have your own way of looking at things, 
 Mordecai, and, as you say, your own way seems 
 to you rational. I know you don't hold with the 
 
REVELATIONS 373 
 
 restoration to Judaea by miracle, and so on; but 
 you are as well aware as I am that the subject 
 has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by 
 Jews and Christians. And as to the connection 
 of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted 
 by superstition till it 's as demoralizing as the 
 old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be 
 maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be 
 taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when 
 they die. It 's no use fighting against facts. 
 We must look where they point : that 's what 
 I call rationality. The most learned and liberal 
 men among us who are attached to our religion 
 are for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as 
 a literal fulfilment of the prophecies about resto- 
 ration, and so on. Prune it of a few useless rites 
 and literal interpretations of that sort, and our 
 religion is the simplest of all religions, and 
 makes no barrier, but a union, between us and the 
 rest of the world." 
 
 " As plain as a pike-staff," said Pash, with an 
 ironical laugh. " You pluck it up by the roots, 
 strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the knots, 
 and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where 
 you will, it will do no harm, it will never sprout. 
 You may make a handle of it, or you may throw 
 it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don't see 
 why our rubbish is to be held sacred any more 
 than the rubbish of Brahmanism or Bouddhism." 
 
 " No," said Mordecai, " no, Pash, because you 
 have lost the heart of the Jew. Community was 
 felt before it was called good. I praise no super- 
 stition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging 
 belief. What is growth, completion, develop- 
 ment? You began with that question, I apply 
 
( 
 
 374 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 it to the history of our people. I say that the 
 effect of our separateness will not be completed 
 and have its highest transformation unless our 
 race takes on again the character of a nationality. 
 That is the fulfilment of the religious trust that 
 moulded them into a people, whose life has made 
 half the inspiration of the world. What is it to 
 me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or 
 that multitudes of the children of Judah have 
 mixed themselves with the Gentile populations 
 as a river with rivers? Behold our people still! 
 Their skirts spread afar ; they are torn and soiled 
 and trodden on; but there is a jewelled breast- 
 plate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of 
 commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skil- 
 ful in all arts, the speakers, the political coun- 
 sellors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood 
 which has maintained its vigour in all climates, 
 and the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which 
 difficulty means new device, — let them say, 
 ' We will lift up a standard, we will unite in a 
 labour hard but glorious like that of Moses and 
 Ezra, a labour which shall be a worthy fruit of 
 the long anguish whereby our fathers main- 
 tained their separateness, refusing the ease of 
 falsehood.' They have wealth enough to redeem 
 the soil from debauched and paupered con- 
 querors ; they have the skill of the statesman to 
 devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And 
 is there no prophet or poet among us to make the 
 ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at 
 the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the 
 Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to 
 which he has lent an arena? There is store of 
 wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, 
 
REVELATIONS 375 
 
 grand, simple, just, like the old, — a republic 
 where there is equality of protection, an equality 
 which shone like a star on the forehead of our 
 ancient community, and gave it more than the 
 brightness of Western freedom amid the despot- 
 isms of the East. Then our race shall have an 
 organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and 
 guide and execute ; the outraged Jew shall have 
 a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged 
 Englishman or American. And the world will 
 gain as Israel gains. For there will be a com- 
 munity in the van of the East which carries the 
 culture and the sympathies of every great nation 
 in its bosom ; there will be a land set for a halting- 
 place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East 
 as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I 
 know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of 
 sublime achievement move in the great among 
 our people, and the work will begin." 
 
 " Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai," 
 said Pash. " When there are great men on 
 'Change, and high-flying professors converted 
 to your doctrine, difficulties will vanish like 
 smoke." 
 
 Deronda, inclined by nature to take the side 
 of those on whom the arrows of scorn were fall- 
 ing, could not help replying to Pash's outfling, 
 and. said, — 
 
 " If we look back to the history of efforts 
 which have made great changes, it is astonishing 
 how many of them seemed hopeless to those who 
 looked on in the beginning. Take what we have 
 all heard and seen something of, — the effort 
 after the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon 
 to see accomplished to the very last boundary. 
 
376 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Look into Mazzini's account of his first yearn- 
 ing, when he was a boy, after a restored great- 
 ness and a new freedom to Italy, and of his first 
 efforts as a young man to rouse the same feel- 
 ings in other young men, and get them to work 
 towards a united nationality. Almost every- 
 thing seemed against him : his countrymen were 
 ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, 
 Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners 
 often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy 
 lay with him. As long as there is a remnant 
 of national consciousness, I suppose nobody 
 will deny that there may be a new stirring of 
 memories and hopes which may inspire arduous 
 action." 
 
 " Amen," said Mordecai, to whom Deronda's 
 words were a cordial. " What is needed is the 
 leaven, — what is needed is the seed of fire. The 
 heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of mil- 
 lions; it lives in their veins as a power without 
 understanding, like the morning exultation of 
 herds ; it is the inborn half of memory, moving 
 as in a dream among writings on the walls, which 
 it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let 
 the torch of visible community be lit! Let the 
 reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward 
 deed, and let there be another great migration, 
 another choosing of Israel to be a nationality 
 whose members may still stretch to the ends of 
 the earth, even as the sons of England and Ger- 
 many, whom enterprise carries afar, but who 
 still have a national hearth and a tribunal of na- 
 tional opinion. Will any say ' It cannot be ' ? 
 Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, 
 though he had sucked the life of his intellect at 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 377 
 
 the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his 
 father's nakedness and said, ' They who scorn 
 him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch 
 Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should 
 not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the 
 history and literature of our race are dead ? Are 
 they not as living as the history and literature of 
 Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolu- 
 tions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and 
 made the unrighteous powers tremble? These 
 were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours 
 is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver 
 in millions of human frames." 
 
 Mordecai had stretched his arms upward, and 
 his long thin hands quivered in the air for a 
 moment after he had ceased to speak. Gideon 
 was certainly a little moved, for though there 
 was no long pause before he made a remark in 
 objection, his tone was more mild and depreca- 
 tory than before; Pash, meanwhile, pressing his 
 lips together, rubbing his black head with both 
 his Ijands, and wrinkling his brow horizontally, 
 with the expression of one who differs from 
 every speaker, but does not think it worth while 
 to say so. There is a sort of human paste that 
 when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only 
 baked into harder shape. 
 
 " It may seem well enough on one side to 
 make so much of our memories and inheritance 
 as you do, Mordecai," said Gideon; " but there 's 
 another side. It is n't all gratitude and harmless 
 glory. Our people have inherited a good deal 
 of hatred. There 's a pretty lot of curses still 
 flying about, and stiff settled rancour inherited 
 from the times of persecution. How will you 
 
378 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 justify keeping one sort of memory and throw- 
 ing away the other? There are ugly debts stand- 
 ing on both sides." 
 
 " I justify the choice as all other choice is jus- 
 tified," said Mordecai. " I cherish nothing for 
 the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but 
 the good which promises good to all the nations. 
 The spirit of our religious life, which is one with 
 our national life, is not hatred of aught but 
 wrong. The Masters have said, an offence 
 against man is worse than an offence against 
 God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the 
 breasts of Jews, who are children of the igno- 
 rant and oppressed, — what wonder, since there 
 is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our na- 
 tional life was a growing light. Let the central 
 fire be kindled again, and the light will reach 
 afar. The degraded and scorned of our race 
 will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a 
 place for saintly beggary to await death in loath- 
 some idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish 
 spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on 
 the old, purified, enriched by the experience our 
 greatest sons have gathered from the life of the 
 ages. How long is it? — only two centuries 
 since a vessel carried over the ocean the begin- 
 ning of the great North American nation. The 
 people grew like meeting waters, — they were 
 various in habit and sect, — there came a time, 
 a century ago, when they needed a polity, and 
 there were heroes of peace among them. What 
 had they to form a polity with but memories of 
 Europe, corrected by the vision of a better? Let 
 our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. 
 They have the memories of the East and West, 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 379 
 
 and they have the full vision of a better. A new 
 Persia with a purified religion magnified itself 
 in art and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised 
 between East and West, — a covenant of recon- 
 ciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of 
 your race has been hopelessly mixed with folly 
 and bigotry; the angel of progress has no mes- 
 sage for Judaism, — it is a half -buried city for 
 the paid workers to lay open, — the waters are 
 rushing by it as a forsaken field? I say that the 
 strongest principle of growth lies in human 
 choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that 
 God may again choose them. The Messianic 
 time is the time when Israel shall will the plant- 
 ing of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed 
 and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not 
 choose the overflow, but he chose to work and 
 make channels for the fructifying waters, and 
 Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, 
 whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment 
 and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an on- 
 looker, ask no choice or purpose of me ? That is 
 the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle 
 of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. 
 Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to 
 will our own better future and the better future 
 of the world, — not renounce our higher gift 
 and say, ' Let us be as if we were not among 
 the populations,' but choose our full heritage, 
 claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry 
 into it a new brotherhood with the nations of 
 the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be 
 fulfilled." 
 
 With the last sentence, which was no more 
 than a loud whisper, Mordecai let his chin sink 
 
380 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 on his breast and his eyelids fall. No one 
 spoke. It was not the first time that he had 
 insisted on the same ideas, but he was seen to- 
 night in a new phase. The quiet tenacity of 
 his ordinary self differed as much from his pres- 
 ent exaltation of mood as a man in private talk, 
 giving reasons for a revolution of which no sign 
 is discernible, differs from one who feels him- 
 self an agent in a revolution begun. The dawn 
 of fulfilment brought to his hope by Deronda's 
 presence had wrought Mordecai's conception 
 into a state of impassioned conviction, and he 
 had found strength in his excitement to pour 
 forth the unlocked floods of emotive argument, 
 with a sense of haste as at a crisis which must 
 be seized. But now there had come with the 
 quiescence of fatigue a sort of thankful wonder 
 that he had spoken, — a contemplation of his 
 life as a journey which had come at last to this 
 bourne. After a great excitement, the ebbing 
 strength of impulse is apt to leave us in this 
 aloofness from our active self. And in the 
 moments after Mordecai had sunk his head, his 
 mind was wandering along the paths of his 
 youth, and all the hopes which had ended in 
 bringing him hither. 
 
 Every one felt that the talk was ended, and 
 the tone of phlegmatic discussion made unsea- 
 sonable, by Mordecai's high-pitched solemnity. 
 It was as if they had come together to hear 
 the blowing of the shophar, and had nothing 
 to do now but to disperse. The movement 
 was unusually general, and in less than ten 
 minutes the room was empty of all except 
 Mordecai and Deronda. " Good-nights " had 
 
REVELATIONS 381 
 
 been given to Mordecai, but it was evident he 
 had not heard them, for he remained rapt and 
 motionless. Deronda would not disturb this 
 needful rest, but waited for a spontaneous 
 movement. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 My spirit is too weak; mortaUty 
 Weighs heavily on me like unwilUng sleep. 
 And each imagined pinnacle and steep 
 Of godUke hardship tells me I must die 
 Like a sick eagle looking at the sky. 
 
 FTER a few minutes the unwonted still- 
 
 ness had penetrated Mordecai's conscious 
 
 ness, and he looked up at Deronda, not 
 in the least with bewilderment and surprise, but 
 with a gaze full of reposing satisfaction. De- 
 ronda rose and placed his chair nearer, where 
 there could be no imagined need for raising the 
 voice. Mordecai felt the action as a patient feels 
 the gentleness that eases his pillow. He began 
 to speak in a low tone, as if he were only think- 
 ing articulately, not trying to reach an audience. 
 
 " In the doctrine of the Cabala, souls are born 
 again and again in new bodies till they are per- 
 fected and purified, and a soul liberated from 
 a worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that 
 needs it, that they may be perfected together, 
 and their earthly work accomplished. Then 
 they will depart from the mortal region, and 
 leave place for new souls to be born out of the 
 store in the eternal bosom. It is the lingering 
 imperfection of the souls already born into the 
 mortal region that hinders the birth of new souls 
 and the preparation of the Messianic time : thus 
 the mind has given shape to what is hidden, as 
 the shadow of what is known, and has spoken 
 
 Keats. 
 
REVELATIONS 383 
 
 truth, though it were only in parable. When 
 my long-wandering soul is liberated from this 
 weary body, it will join yours, and its work will 
 be perfected." 
 
 Mordecai's pause seemed an appeal which 
 Deronda's feeling would not let him leave un- 
 answered. He tried to make it truthful; but 
 for Mordecai's ear it was inevitably filled with 
 unspoken meanings. He only said, — 
 
 " Everything I can in conscience do to make 
 your life effective I will do." 
 
 " I know it," said Mordecai, in the tone of 
 quiet certainty which dispenses with further 
 assurance. " I heard it. You see it all, — you 
 are by my side on the mount of vision, and 
 behold the paths of fulfilment which others 
 deny." 
 
 He was silent a moment or two, and then 
 went on meditatively, — 
 
 " You will take up my life where it was 
 broken. I feel myself back in that day when 
 my life was broken. The bright morning sun 
 was on the quay — it was at Trieste — the gar- 
 ments of men from all nations shone like jewels 
 — the boats were pushing off — the Greek vessel 
 that would land us at Beyrout was to start in 
 an hour. I was going with a merchant as his 
 clerk and companion. I said, I shall behold the 
 lands and people of the East, and I shall speak 
 with a fuller vision. I breathed then as you 
 do, without labour; I had the light step and 
 the endurance of youth; I could fast, I could 
 sleep on the hard ground. I had wedded pov- 
 erty, and I loved my bride — for poverty to 
 me was freedom. My heart exulted as if it had 
 
384 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 been the heart of Moses ben Maimon, strong 
 with the strength of threescore years, and know- 
 ing the work that was to fill them. It was the 
 first time I had been south: the soul within 
 me felt its former sun; and standing on the 
 quay, where the ground I stood on seemed to 
 send forth light, and the shadows had an azure 
 glory as of spirits become visible, I felt myself 
 in the flood of a glorious life, wherein my own 
 small year-counted existence seemed to melt, 
 so that I knew it not; and a great sob arose 
 within me as at the rush of waters that were 
 too strong a bliss. So I stood there awaiting 
 my companion; and I saw him not till he said: 
 * Ezra, I have been to the post and there is your 
 letter.' " 
 
 " Ezra ! " exclaimed Deronda, unable to eon- 
 tain himself. 
 
 " Ezra," repeated Mordecai, affirmatively, en- 
 grossed in memory. " I was expecting a letter; 
 for I wrote continually to my mother. And 
 that sound of my name was like the touch of 
 a wand that recalled me to the body wherefrom 
 I had been released as it were to mingle with 
 the ocean of human existence, free from the 
 pressure of individual bondage. I opened the 
 letter; and the name came again as a cry that 
 would have disturbed me in the bosom of 
 heaven, and made me yearn to reach where that 
 sorrow was, — ' Ezra, my son ! ' " 
 
 Mordecai paused again, his imagination ar- 
 rested by the grasp of that long-past moment. 
 Deronda's mind was almost breathlessly sus- 
 pended on what was coming. A strange possi- 
 bility had suddenly presented itself. Mordecai's 
 
REVELATIONS 385 
 
 eyes were cast down in abstracted contempla- 
 tion, and in a few moments he went on, — 
 
 " She was a mother of whom it might have 
 come, — yea, might have come to be said, ' Her 
 children arise up and call her blessed.' In her 
 I understood the meaning of that Master who, 
 perceiving the footsteps of his mother, rose up 
 and said, ' The majesty of the Eternal cometh 
 near ! ' And that letter was her cry from the 
 depths of anguish and desolation — the cry of 
 a mother robbed of her little one. I was her 
 eldest. Death had taken four babes, one after 
 the other. Then came late my little sister, who 
 was more than all the rest the desire of her 
 mother's eyes; and the letter was a piercing 
 cry to me, — ' Ezra, my son, I am robbed of her. 
 He has taken her away and left disgrace be- 
 hind. They will never come again.' " — Here 
 Mordecai lifted his eyes suddenly, laid his hand 
 on Deronda's arm, and said: " Mine was the lot 
 of Israel. For the sin of the father my soul 
 must go into exile. For the sin of the father 
 the work was broken, and the day of fulfilment 
 delayed. She who bore me was desolate, dis- 
 graced, destitute. I turned back. On the in- 
 stant I turned, — her spirit, and the spirit of 
 her fathers, who had worthy Jewish hearts, 
 moved within me, and drew me. God, in whom 
 dwells the universe, was within me as the 
 strength of obedience. I turned and travelled 
 with hardship — to save the scant money which 
 she would need. I left the sunshine, and trav- 
 elled into freezing cold. In the last stage I 
 spent a night in exposure to cold and snow. 
 And that was the beginning of this slow death." 
 
 VOL. XIII — 25 
 
386 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Mordecai let his eyes wander again, and re- 
 moved his hand. Deronda resolutely repressed 
 the questions which urged themselves within him. 
 While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, no 
 other confidence must be sought than what came 
 spontaneously: nay, he himself felt a kindred 
 emotion which made him dread his own speech 
 as too momentous. 
 
 " But I worked. We were destitute — every- 
 thing had been seized. And she was ill: the 
 clutch of anguish was too strong for her, and 
 wrought with some lurking disease. At times 
 she could not stand for the beating of her heart, 
 and the images in her brain became as cham- 
 bers of terror, where she beheld my sister reared 
 in evil. In the dead of night I head her crying 
 for her child. Then I rose, and we stretched 
 forth our arms together and prayed. We poured 
 forth our souls in desire that Mirah might be 
 delivered from evil." 
 
 " Mirah? " Deronda repeated, wishing to as- 
 sure himself that his ears had not been deceived 
 by a forecasting imagination. " Did you say 
 Mirah?" 
 
 " That was my little sister's name. After we 
 had prayed for her my mother would rest awhile. 
 It lasted hardly four years, and in the minutes 
 before she died, we were praying the same 
 prayer, — I aloud, she silently. Her soul went 
 out upon its wings." 
 
 " Have you never since heard of your sister? " 
 said Deronda, as quietly as he could. 
 
 " Never. Never have I heard whether she 
 was delivered according to our prayer. I know 
 not, I know not. Who shall say where the path- 
 
REVELATIONS 387 
 
 V 
 
 ways lie? The poisonous will of the wicked is 
 strong. It poisoned my life — it is slowly sti- 
 fling this breath. Death delivered my mother, 
 and I felt it a blessedness that I was alone in 
 the winters of suffering. But what are the 
 winters now? — they are far off " — here Mor- 
 decai again rested his hand on Deronda's arm, 
 and looked at him with that joy of the hectic 
 patient which pierces us to sadness, — " there is 
 nothing to wail in the withering of my body. 
 The work will be the better done. Once I said, 
 the work of this beginning is mine, I am born 
 to do it. Well, I shall do it. I shall live in 
 you. I shall live in you." 
 
 His grasp had become convulsive in its force ; 
 and Deronda, agitated as he had never been 
 before, — the certainty that this was Mirah's 
 brother suffusing his own strange relation to 
 Mordecai with a new solemnity and tenderness, 
 — felt his strong young heart beating faster 
 and his lips paling. He shrank from speech. 
 He feared, in Mordecai's present state of ex- 
 altation (already an alarming strain on his 
 feeble frame), to utter a word of revelation 
 about Mirah. He feared to make an answer 
 below that high pitch of expectation which re- 
 sembled a flash from a dying fire, making 
 watchers fear to see it dying the faster. His 
 dominant impulse was to do as he had once 
 done before: he laid his firm gentle hand on the 
 hand that grasped him. Mordecai's, as if it 
 had a soul of its own, — for he was not distinctly 
 willing to do what he did, — relaxed its grasp, 
 and turned upward under Deronda's. As the 
 two palms met and pressed each other, Mordecai 
 
388 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 recovered some sense of his surroundings and 
 said, — 
 
 " Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer." 
 
 And in fact they parted at Cohen's door 
 without having spoken to each other again, — 
 merely with another pressure of the hands. 
 
 Deronda felt a weight on him which was half 
 joy, half anxiety. The joy of finding in Mirah's 
 brother a nature even more than worthy of that 
 relation to her, had the weight of solenmity and 
 sadness: the reunion of brother and sister was 
 in reality the first stage of a supreme parting, 
 — like that farewell kiss which resembles greet- 
 ing, that last glance of love which becomes the 
 sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there was the 
 weight of anxiety about the revelation of the 
 fact on both sides, and the arrangements it 
 would be desirable to make beforehand. I sup- 
 pose we. should all have felt as Deronda did, 
 without sinking into snobbishness or the notion 
 that the primal duties of life demand a morn- 
 ing and an evening suit, that it was an admis- 
 sible desire to free Mirah's first meeting with 
 her brother from all jarring outward conditions. 
 His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded 
 relationship of the other Cohens, notwithstand- 
 ing their good nature, made him resolve if pos- 
 sible to keep them in the background for Mirah, 
 until her acquaintance with them would be an 
 unmarred rendering of gratitude for any kind- 
 ness they had shown towards her brother. On 
 all accounts he wished to give Mordecai sur- 
 roundings not only more suited to his frail bodily 
 condition, but less of a hindrance to easy inter- 
 course, even apart from the decisive prospect of 
 
REVELATIONS 389 
 
 Mirah's taking up her abode with her brother, 
 and tending him through the precious remnant 
 of his life. In the heroic drama, great recogni- 
 tions are not encumbered with these details ; and 
 certainly Deronda had as reverential an interest 
 in Mordecai and Mirah as he could have had in 
 the offspring of Agamemnon; but he was car- 
 ing for destinies still moving in the dim streets 
 of our earthly life, not yet lifted among the 
 constellations, and his task presented itself to 
 him as difficult and delicate, especially in per- 
 suading Mordecai to change his abode and habits. 
 Concerning Mirah's feeling and resolve he had 
 no doubt: there would be a complete union of 
 sentiment towards the departed mother, and 
 Mirah would understand her brother's great- 
 ness. Yes, greatness : that was the word which 
 Deronda now deliberately chose to signify the 
 impression that Mordecai made on Jiim. He 
 said to himself, perhaps rather defiantly towards 
 the more negative spirit within him, that this 
 man, however erratic some of his interpretations 
 might be, — this consumptive Jewish workman 
 in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, de- 
 livering himself to hearers who took his thoughts 
 without attaching more consequences to them 
 than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ring- 
 ing above their market-places, — had the chief 
 elements of greatness: a mind consciously, en- 
 ergetically moving with the larger march of 
 human destinies, but not the less full of con- 
 science and tender heart for the footsteps that 
 tread near and need a leaning-place; capable 
 of conceiving and choosing a life's task with 
 far-off issues, yet capable of the unapplauded 
 
390 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 heroism which turns off the road of achievement 
 at the call of the nearer duty whose effect lies 
 within the beatings of the hearts that are close 
 to us, as the hunger of the unfledged bird to 
 the breast of its parent. 
 
 Deronda to-night was stirred with the feeling 
 that the brief remnant of this fervid life had 
 become his charge. He had been peculiarly 
 wrought on by what he had seen at the club of 
 the friendly indifference which JNIordecai must 
 have gone on encountering. His own experi- 
 ence of the small room that ardour can make 
 for itself in ordinary minds had had the effect 
 of increasing his reserve; and while tolerance 
 was the easiest attitude to him, there was an- 
 other bent in him also capable of becoming a 
 weakness, — the dislike to appear exceptional 
 or to risk an ineffective insistence on his own 
 opinion. But such caution appeared contempt- 
 ible to him just now, when he for the first time 
 saw in a complete picture and felt as a reahty 
 the lives that burn themselves out in solitary 
 enthusiasm: martyrs of obscure circumstance, 
 exiled in the rarity of their o^vn minds, whose 
 deliverances in other ears are no more than a 
 long passionate soliloquy, — unless perhaps at 
 last, when they are nearing the invisible shores, 
 signs of recognition and fulfilment may pene- 
 trate the cloud of loneliness ; or perhaps it may 
 be with them as with the dying Copernicus 
 made to touch the first printed copy of bis book 
 when the sense of touch was gone, seeing it 
 only as a dim object through the deepening 
 dusk. 
 
 Deronda had been brought near to one of 
 
REVELATIONS 391 
 
 those spiritual exiles, and it was in his nature 
 to feel the relation as a strong claim, nay, to 
 feel his imagination moving without repugnance 
 in the direction of Mordecai's desires. With all 
 his latent objection to schemes only definite in 
 their generality and nebulous in detail, — in the 
 poise of his sentiments he felt at one with this 
 man who had made a visionary selection of him : 
 the lines of what may be called their emotional 
 theory touched. He had not the Jewish con- 
 sciousness, but he had a yearning, grown the 
 stronger for the denial which had been his griev- 
 ance, after the obligation of avowed filial and 
 social ties. His feeling was ready for difficult 
 obedience. In this way it came that he set 
 about his new task ungrudgingly; and again 
 he thought of Mrs. Meyrick as his chief helper. 
 To her first he must make known the discovery 
 of Mirah's brother, and with her he must con- 
 sult on all preliminaries of bringing the mu- 
 tually lost together. Happily the best quarter 
 for a consumptive patient did not lie too far off 
 the small house at Chelsea, and the first office 
 Deronda had to perform for this Hebrew 
 prophet who claimed him as a spirtual inheritor 
 was to get him a healthy lodging. Such is the 
 irony of earthly mixtures, that the heroes have 
 not always had carpets and teacups of their 
 own; and, seen through the open window by 
 the mackerel-vender, may have been invited with 
 some hopefulness to pay three hundred per cent 
 in the form of fourpence. However, Deronda's 
 mind was busy with a prospective arrangement 
 for giving a furnished lodging some faint like- 
 ness to a refined home by dismantling his own 
 
392 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 chambers of his best old books in vellum, his 
 easiest chair, and the bas-reliefs of Milton and 
 Dante. 
 
 But was not Mirah to be there? What furni- 
 ture can give such finish to a room as a tender 
 woman's face? — and is there any harmony of 
 tints that has such stirrings of delight as the 
 sweet modulations of her voice? Here is one 
 good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes to 
 Mordecai from his having fixed his imagination 
 on me. He has recovered a perfect sister, whose 
 affection is waiting for him. 
 
 END OF VOLUME II DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A. 
 
THE COMPLETE W O R K S O F 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 WITH LIFE BY J. W. CROSS 
 
 With Pih)T()gi?a\ uki: Ili.us thations fko.m 
 Xeav Dkaavixgs 
 
 GKirrRUDK Dkmain ITamaiom), R.T. 
 
 AND 
 
 FKi:j)EniCK Jj. 8t()I)1)ai?i) 
 
DEATH OF GONCOURT 
 
 ^^He cried again — and I held my hand, and my heart 
 said, 'Die!'' — and he sank " 
 
 (Page 218) 
 
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 VOLUME XIV 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 VOLUME THREE 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 CHARLES E. LAURIAT COMPANY 
 1908 
 
Contents 
 
 BOOK SIX {Continued) 
 
 Page 
 
 Revelations V . . 1 
 
 BOOK SEVEN 
 The Mother and the Son 102 
 
 BOOK EIGHT 
 Fruit and Seed 228 
 
Daniel Deronda 
 
 ^00& ^iy. {Continued) 
 
 REVELATIONS 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 *• Fairy folk a-listening 
 Hear the seed sprout in the spring, 
 And for music to their dance 
 Hear the hedgerows wake from trance. 
 Sap that trembles into buds 
 Sending httle rhythmic floods 
 Of fairy sound in fairy ears. 
 Thus all beauty that appears 
 Has birth as sound to finer sense 
 And lighter-clad intelligence," 
 
 ND Gwendolen? — She was thinking of 
 
 Deronda much more than he was think- 
 
 ing of her, — often wondering what were 
 his ideas " about things," and how his life was 
 occupied. But a lap-dog would be necessarily 
 at a loss in framing to itself the motives and 
 adventures of doghood at large; and it was as 
 far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's 
 life could be determined by the historical des- 
 tiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the 
 air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her 
 horizon in the form of a twinkling star. 
 
 With all the sense of inferiority that had 
 
 VOL. XIV — 1 
 
2 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she 
 should imagine a larger place for herself in his 
 thoughts than she actually possessed. They 
 must be rather old and wise persons who are 
 not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about 
 themselves reflected in other minds ; and Gwen- 
 dolen, with her youth and inward solitude, may 
 be excused for dwelling on signs of special in- 
 terest in her shown by the one person who had 
 impressed her with the feeling of submission, 
 and for mistaking the colour and proportion of 
 those signs in the mind of Deronda. 
 
 Meanwhile, what would he tell her that she 
 ought to do? " He said, I must get more in- 
 terest in others, and more knowledge, and that 
 I must care about the best things, — but how 
 am I to begin? " She wondered what books he 
 would tell her to take up to her own room, and 
 recalled the famous writers that she had either 
 not looked into or had found the most unread- 
 able, with a half -smiling wish that she could 
 mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the 
 books called " medicine for the mind." Then 
 she repented of her sauciness, and when she was 
 safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous 
 selection, — Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Butler, 
 Burke, Guizot, — knowing, as a clever young 
 lady of education, that these authors were or- 
 naments of mankind, feeling sure that Deronda 
 had read them, and hoping that by dipping into 
 them all in succession, with her rapid under- 
 standing she might get a point of view nearer 
 to his level. 
 
 But it was astonishing how little time she 
 found for these vast mental excursions. Con- 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 3 
 
 stantly she had to be on the scene as Mrs. 
 Grandcourt, and to feel herself watched in that 
 part by the exacting eyes of a husband, who had 
 found a motive to exercise his tenacity, — that 
 of making his marriage answer all the ends he 
 chose, and with the more completeness the more 
 he discerned any opposing will in her. And she 
 herself, whatever rebellion might be going on 
 within her, could not have made up her mind 
 to failure in her representation. No feeling had 
 yet reconciled her for a moment to any act, 
 word, or look that would be a confession to the 
 world; and what she most dreaded in herself 
 was any violent impulse that would make an 
 involuntary confession: it was the will to be 
 silent in every other direction that had thrown 
 the more impetuosity into her confidences 
 towards Deronda, to whom her thought con- 
 tinually turned as a help against herself. Her 
 riding, her hunting, her visiting and receiving 
 of visits, were all performed in a spirit of achieve- 
 ment which served instead of zest and young- 
 gladness, so that all round Diplow, in those 
 weeks of the New Year, Mrs. Grandcourt was 
 regarded as wearing her honours with triumph. 
 
 " She disguises it under an air of taking 
 everything as a matter of course," said Mrs. 
 Arrowpoint. " A stranger might suppose that 
 she had condescended rather than risen. I al- 
 ways noticed that doubleness in her." 
 
 To her mother most of all Gwendolen was 
 bent on acting complete satisfaction, and poor 
 Mrs. Davilow was so far deceived that she took 
 the unexpected distance at which she was kept, 
 in spite of what she felt to be Grandcourt's 
 
4 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 handsome behaviour in providing for her, as a 
 comparative indifference in her daughter, now 
 that marriage had created new interests. To 
 be fetched to lunch and then to dinner along 
 with the Gascoignes, to be driven back soon 
 after breakfast the next morning, and to have 
 brief calls from Gwendolen in which her hus- 
 band waited for her outside either on horseback 
 or sitting in the carriage, was all the intercourse 
 allowed to the mother. 
 
 The truth was that the second time Gwendo- 
 len proposed to invite her mother with Mr. and 
 Mrs. Gascoigne, Grandcourt had at first been 
 silent, and then drawled, " We can't be having 
 those people always. Gascoigne talks too much. 
 Country clergy are always bores, — with their 
 confounded fuss about everything." 
 
 That speech was full of foreboding for Gwen- 
 dolen. To have her mother classed under " those 
 people " was enough to confirm the previous 
 dread of bringing her too near. Still, she could 
 not give the true reasons, — she could not say 
 to her mother, " Mr. Grandcourt wants to rec- 
 ognize you as little as possible; and besides it 
 is better you should not see much of my married 
 life, else you might find out that I am miser- 
 able." So she waived as lightly as she could 
 every allusion to the subject; and when Mrs. 
 Davilow again hinted the possibility of her hav- 
 ing a house close to Ryelands, Gwendolen said : 
 " It would not be so nice for you as being near 
 the Rectory here, mamma. We shall perhaps 
 be very little at Ryelands. You would miss my 
 aunt and uncle." 
 
 And all the while this contemptuous veto of 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 5 
 
 her husband's on any intimacy with her family, 
 making her proudly shrink from giving them 
 the aspect of troublesome pensioners, was rous- 
 ing more inward inclination towards them. She 
 had never felt so kindly towards her uncle, so 
 much disposed to look back on his cheerful, 
 complacent activity and spirit of kind manage- 
 ment, even when mistaken, as more of a comfort 
 than the neutral loftiness which was every day 
 chilling her. And here perhaps she was uncon- 
 sciously finding some of that mental enlarge- 
 ment which it was hard to get from her occasional 
 dashes into difficult authors, who instead of 
 blending themselves with her daily agitations 
 required her to dismiss them. 
 
 It was a delightful surprise one day when 
 Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne were at Offendene to 
 see Gwendolen ride up without her husband, — 
 with the groom only. All, including the four 
 girls and Miss Merry, seated in the dining- 
 room at lunch, could see the welcome approach; 
 and even the elder ones were not without some- 
 thing of Isabel's romantic sense that the beau- 
 tiful sister on the splendid chestnut, which held 
 its head as if proud to bear her, was a sort of 
 Harriet Byron or Miss Wardour reappearing 
 out of her " happiness ever after." 
 
 Her uncle went to the door to give her his 
 hand, and she sprang from her horse with an 
 air of alacrity which might well encourage that 
 notion of guaranteed happiness; for Gwendo- 
 len was particularly bent to-day on setting her 
 mother's heart at rest, and her unusual sense 
 of freedom in being able to make this visit alone 
 enabled her to bear up under the pressure of 
 
6 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 painful facts which were urging themselves 
 anew. The seven family kisses were not so 
 tiresome as they used to be. 
 
 " Mr. Grandcourt is gone out, so I deter- 
 mined to fill up the time by coming to you, 
 mamma," said Gwendolen, as she laid down her 
 hat and seated herself next to her mother; and 
 then looking at her with a playfully monitory 
 air : " That is a punishment to you for not 
 wearing better lace on your head. You did n't 
 think I should come and detect you, — you 
 dreadfully careless-about-yourself mamma ! " 
 She gave a caressing touch to the dear 
 head. 
 
 " Scold me, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, her 
 delicate worn face flushing with delight. " But 
 I wish there was something you could eat after 
 your ride, — instead of these scraps. Let Jo- 
 cosa make you a cup of chocolate in your old 
 way. You used to like that." 
 
 Miss Merry immediately rose and went out, 
 though Gwendolen said, " Oh, no, a piece of 
 bread, or one of those hard biscuits. I can't 
 think about eating. I am come to say good- 
 ly-" 
 
 "What! going to Ry elands again?" said 
 Mr. Gascoigne. 
 
 " No, we are going to town," said Gwendolen, 
 beginning to break up a piece of bread, but 
 putting no morsel into her mouth. 
 
 " It is rather early to go to town," said 
 Mrs. Gascoigne, " and Mr. Grandcourt not in 
 Parliament." 
 
 " Oh, there is only one more day's hunting 
 to be had, and Henleigh has some business in 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 7 
 
 town with lawyers, I think," said Gwendolen. 
 " I am very glad. I shall like to go to town." 
 
 " You will see your house in Grosvenor 
 Square," said Mrs. Davilow. She and the girls 
 were devouring with their eyes every movement 
 of their goddess, soon to vanish. 
 
 " Yes," said Gwendolen, in a tone of assent 
 to the interest of that expectation. " And there 
 is so much to be seen and done in town." 
 
 " I wish, my dear Gwendolen," said Mr. Gas- 
 coigne, in a tone of cordial advice, " that you 
 would use your influence with Mr. Grandcourt 
 to induce him to enter Parliament. A man of 
 his position should make his weight felt in poli- 
 tics. The best judges are confident that the 
 ministry will have to appeal to the country on 
 this question of further Reform, and Mr. Grand- 
 court should be ready for the opportunity. I 
 am not quite sure that his opinions and mine 
 accord entirely; I have not heard him express 
 himself very fully. But I don't look at the 
 matter from that point of view. I am think- 
 ing of your husband's standing in the country. 
 And he has now come to that stage of life when 
 a man like him should enter into public affairs. 
 I A wife has great influence with her husband. 
 Use yours in that direction, my dear." 
 
 The Rector felt that he was acquitting him- 
 self of a duty here, and giving something like 
 the aspect of a public benefit to his niece's 
 niatch. To Gwendolen the whole speech had 
 the flavour of bitter comedy. If she had been 
 merry, she must have laughed at her uncle's 
 explanation to her that he had not heard 
 Grandcourt express himself very fully on poli- 
 
8 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tics. And the wife's great influence! General 
 maxims about husbands and wives seemed now 
 of a precarious usefulness. Gwendolen herself 
 had once believed in her future influence as an 
 omnipotence in managing — she did not know 
 exactly what. But her chief concern at pres- 
 ent was to give an answer that would be felt 
 appropriate. 
 
 " I should be very glad, uncle. But I think 
 Mr. Grandcourt would not like the trouble of 
 an election, — at least, unless it could be with- 
 out his making speeches. I thought candidates 
 always made speeches." 
 
 Not necessarily, — to any great extent," 
 said Mr. Gascoigne. " A man of position and 
 weight can get on without much of it. A county 
 member need have very little trouble in that 
 way, and both out of the House and in it is 
 liked the better for not being a speechifier. Tell 
 Mr. Grandcourt that I say so." 
 
 " Here comes Jocosa with my chocolate, after 
 all," said Gwendolen, escaping from a promise 
 to give information that would certainly have 
 been received in a way inconceivable to the good 
 Rector, who, pushing his chair a little aside from 
 the table and crossing his leg, looked as well 
 as felt like a worthy specimen of a clergyman 
 and magistrate giving experienced advice. Mr. 
 Gascoigne had come to the conclusion that 
 Grandcourt was a proud man, but his own self- 
 love, calmed through life by the consciousness 
 of his general value and personal advantages, 
 was not irritable enough to prevent him from 
 hoping the best about his niece's husband be- 
 cause her uncle was kept rather haughtily at a 
 
REVELATIONS 9 
 
 distance. A certain aloofness must be allowed 
 to the representative of an old family; you 
 would not expect him to be on intimate terms 
 even with abstractions. But Mra,^ Gascoigne 
 was less dispassionate on her husband's account, 
 and felt Grandcourt's haughtiness as something 
 a little blamable in Gwendolen. 
 
 " Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in 
 town about Easter," she said, with a vague sense 
 of expressing a slight discontent. " Dear Rex 
 hopes to come out with honours and a fellow- 
 ship, and he wants his father and Anna to meet 
 him in London, that they may be jolly together, 
 as he says. I should n't wonder if Lord Brack- 
 enshaw invited them, he has been so very kind 
 since he came back to the Castle." 
 
 I hope my uncle will bring Anna to stay in 
 Grosvenor Square," said Gwendolen, risking 
 herself so far, for the sake of the present mo- 
 ment, but in reality wishing that she might never 
 be obliged to bring any of her family near 
 Grandcourt again. " I am very glad of Rex's 
 good fortune." 
 
 " We must not be premature, and rejoice too 
 much beforehand," said the Rector, to whom this 
 topic was the happiest in the world, and al- 
 together allowable, now that the issue of that 
 little affair about Gwendolen had been so satis- 
 factory. " Not but that I am in correspondence 
 with impartial judges, who have the highest 
 hopes about my son, as a singularly clear-headed 
 young man. And of his excellent disposition and 
 principle I have had the best evidence." 
 
 " We shall have him a great lawyer some 
 time," said Mrs. Gascoigne. 
 
10 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " How very nice ! " said Gwendolen, with a 
 concealed scepticism as to niceness in general, 
 which made the word quite applicable to 
 lawyers. 
 
 " Talking of Lord Brackenshaw's kindness," 
 said Mrs. Davilow, " you don't know how de- 
 lightful he has been, Gwendolen. He has 
 begged me to consider myself his guest in this 
 house till I can get another that I like, — he did 
 it in the most graceful way. But now a house 
 has turned up. Old Mr. Jodson is dead, and we 
 can have his house. It is just what I want; 
 small, but with nothing hideous to make you 
 miserable thinking about it. And it is only a 
 mile from the Rectory. You remember the low 
 white house nearly hidden by the trees, as we 
 turn up the lane to the church? " 
 
 " Yes, but you have no furniture, poor 
 mamma," said Gwendolen, in a melancholy tone. 
 
 " Oh, I am saving money for that. You know 
 who has made me rather rich, dear," said Mrs. 
 Davilow, laying her hand on Gwendolen's. 
 " And Jocosa really makes so little do for house- 
 keeping, — it is quite wonderful." 
 
 " Oh, please let me go upstairs with you and 
 arrange my hat, mamma," said Gwendolen, sud- 
 denly putting up her hand to her hair and per- 
 haps creating a desired disarrangement. Her 
 heart was swelling, and she was ready to cry. 
 Her mother must have been worse off, if it had 
 not been for Grandcourt. " I suppose I shall 
 never see all this again," said Gwendolen, look- 
 ing round her, as they entered the black and 
 yellow bedroom, and then throwing herself into 
 a chair in front of the glass with a little groan 
 
REVELATIONS 11 
 
 as of bodily fatigiie. In the resolve not to cry 
 she had become very pale. 
 
 " You are not well, dear? " said Mrs. Davilow. 
 
 " No; that chocolate has made me sick," said 
 Gwendolen, putting up her hand to be taken. 
 
 " I should be allowed to come to you if you 
 were ill, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, rather 
 timidly, as she pressed the hand to her bosom. 
 Something had made her sure to-day that her 
 child loved her, — needed her as much as ever. 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, leaning her head 
 against her mother, though speaking as lightly 
 as she could. " But you know I never am ill. 
 I am as strong as possible; and you must not 
 take to fretting about me, but make yourself as 
 happy as you can with the girls. They are 
 better children to you than I have been, you 
 know." She turned up her face with a smile. 
 
 " You have always been good, my darling. 
 I remember nothing else." 
 
 " Why, what did I ever do that was good 
 to you, except marry Mr. Grandcourt? " said 
 Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve 
 to be playful, and keep no more on the perilous 
 edge of agitation. " And I should not have 
 done that unless it had pleased myself." She 
 tossed up her chin, and reached her hat. 
 
 " God forbid, child! I would not have had 
 you marry for my sake. Your happiness by 
 itself is half mine." 
 
 " Very well," said Gwendolen, arranging her 
 hat fastidiously, " then you will please to con- 
 sider that you are half happy, which is more than 
 I am used to seeing you." With the last words 
 she again turned with her old playful smile to 
 
12 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her mother. "Now I am ready; but oh, 
 mamma, Mr. Grandcourt gives me a quantity 
 of money, and expects me to spend it, and I can't 
 spend it; and you know I can't bear charity chil- 
 dren and all that; and here are thirty pounds, 
 I wish the girls would spend it for me on little 
 things for themselves when you go to the new 
 house. Tell them so." Gwendolen put the 
 notes into her mother's hand, and looked away 
 hastily, moving towards the door. 
 
 " God bless you, dear," said Mrs. Davilow. 
 " It will please them so that you should have 
 thought of them in particular." 
 
 " Oh, they are troublesome things ; but they 
 don't trouble me now," said Gwendolen, turning 
 and nodding playfully. She hardly understood 
 her own feeling in this act towards her sisters, 
 but at any rate she did not wish it to be taken as 
 anything serious. She was glad to have got out 
 of the bedroom without showing more signs of 
 emotion, and she went through the rest of her 
 visit and all the good-byes with a quiet propriety 
 that made her say to herself sarcastically as she 
 rode away, " I think I am making a very good 
 Mrs. Grandcourt." 
 
 She believed that her husband was gone to 
 Gadsmere that day, — had inferred this, as she 
 had long ago inferred who were the inmates of 
 what he had described as " a dog-hutch of a place 
 in a black country; " and the strange conflict of 
 feeling within her had had the characteristic 
 effect of sending her to Offendene with a tight- 
 ened resolve, — a form of excitement which was 
 native to her. 
 
 She wondered at her own contradictions. 
 
REVELATIONS 13 
 
 Why should she feel it bitter to her that Grand- 
 court showed concern for the beings on whose 
 account she herself was undergoing remorse? 
 Had she not before her marriage inwardly deter- 
 mined to speak and act on their behalf ? — and 
 since he had lately implied that he wanted to be 
 in town because he was making arrangements 
 about his will, she ought to have been glad of any 
 sign that he kept a conscience awake towards 
 those at Gadsmere; and yet, now that she was 
 a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to 
 Gadsmere was like red heat near a burn. She 
 had brought on herself this indignity in her ovv n 
 eyes, — this humiliation of being doomed to a 
 terrified silence lest her husband should discover 
 with what sort of consciousness she had married 
 him; and as she had said to Deronda, she " must 
 go on." After the intensest moments of secret 
 hatred towards this husband who from the very 
 first had cowed her, there always came back the 
 spiritual pressure which made submission inev- 
 itable. There was no effort at freedom that 
 would not bring fresh and worse humiliation. 
 Gwendolen could dare nothing except in im- 
 pulsive action, — least of all could she dare pre- 
 meditatedly a vague future in which the only 
 certain condition was indignity. In spite of 
 remorse, it still seemed the worst result of her 
 marriage that she should in any way make a 
 spectacle of herself ; and her humiliation was 
 lightened by her thinking that only Mrs. Glasher 
 was aware of the fact which caused it. For 
 Gwendolen had never referred the interview at 
 the Whispering Stones to Lush's agency; her 
 disposition to vague terror investing with 
 
14 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 shadowy omnipresence any threat of fatal power 
 over her, and so hindering her from imagining 
 plans and channels by which news had been con- 
 veyed to the woman who had the poisoning skill 
 of a sorceress. To Gwendolen's mind the secret 
 lay with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in 
 the horrible letter which implied that Mrs. 
 Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband 
 as much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt. 
 
 Something else, too, she thought of as more 
 of a secret from her husband than it really was, 
 — namely, that suppressed struggle of desper- 
 ate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grand- 
 court could not indeed fully imagine how things 
 affected Gwendolen; he had no imagination of 
 anything in her but what affected the gratifica- 
 tion of his own will ; but on this point he had the 
 sensibility which seems like divination. What 
 we see exclusively we are apt to see with some 
 mistake of proportions and Grandcourt was 
 not likely to be infallible in his judgments con- 
 cerning this wife who was governed by many 
 shadowy powers, to him non-existent. He mag- 
 nified her inward resistance, but that did not 
 lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 "Behold my lady's carriage stop the way, 
 With powdered lackey and with champing bay: 
 She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair. 
 Her arduous function solely 'to be there.' 
 Like Sirius rising o'er the silent sea, 
 She hides her heart in lustre loftily." 
 
 SO the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor 
 Square in time to receive a card for the 
 musical party at Lady MalHnger's, there 
 being reasons of business which made Sir Hugo 
 know beforehand that his ill-beloved nephew was 
 coming up. It was only the third evening after 
 their arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an 
 absent-minded acquaintance with her new ceil- 
 ings and furniture, preoccupied with the cer- 
 tainty that she was going to speak to Deronda 
 again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth who 
 had gone through so much, and was " capable 
 of submitting to anything in the form of duty." 
 For Gwendolen had remembered nearly every 
 word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and 
 especially that phrase, which she repeated to her- 
 self bitterly, having an ill-defined consciousness 
 that her own submission was something very 
 different. She would have been obliged to allow, 
 if any one had said it to her, that what she suby 
 mitted to could not take the shape of duty, but 
 was submission to a yoke drawn on her by an 
 action she was ashamed of, and worn with a 
 strength of selfish motives that left no weight 
 for duty to carry. 
 
16 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, all white, 
 gold, and pale crimson, were agreeably fur- 
 nished, and not crowded with guests, before Mr. 
 and Mrs. Grandcourt entered; and more than 
 half an hour of instrumental music was being 
 followed by an interval of movement and chat. 
 Klesmer was there with his wife, and in his gen- 
 erous interest for Mirah he proposed to accom- 
 pany her singing of Leo's O patria mia, which 
 he had before recommended her to choose, as 
 more distinctive of her than better known music. 
 He was already at the piano, and Mirah was 
 standing there conspicuously, when Gwendolen, 
 magnificent in her pale green velvet and poi- 
 soned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honour 
 well in view of them. With her long sight and 
 self-command she had the rare power of quickly 
 distinguishing persons and objects on entering 
 a full room, and while turning her glance 
 towards Mirah she did not neglect to exchange 
 a bow and smile with Klesmer as she passed. 
 The smile seemed to each a lightning-flash back 
 on that morning when it had been her ambition 
 to stand as the " little Jewess " was standing, 
 and survey a grand audience from the higher 
 rank of her talent, — instead of which she was 
 one of the ordinary crowd in silk and gems, 
 whose utmost performance it must be to admire 
 or find fault. " He thinks I am in the right road 
 now," said the lurking resentment within her. 
 
 Gwendolen had not caught sight of Deronda 
 in her passage, and while she was seated acquit- 
 ting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced 
 round her with careful ease, bowing a recognition 
 here and there, and fearful lest an anxious- 
 
REVELATIONS 17 
 
 looking exploration in search of Deronda might 
 be observed by her husband, and afterwards re- 
 buked as something " damnably vulgar." But 
 all travelling, even that of a slow gradual glance 
 round a room, brings a liability to undesired 
 encounters, and amongst the eyes that met 
 Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were 
 those of the " amateur too fond of Meyerbeer," 
 Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to find 
 useful as a half-caste among gentlemen. He 
 was standing near her husband, who, however, 
 turned a shoulder towards him, and was being 
 understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How 
 was it that at this moment, for the first time, 
 there darted through Gwendolen, like a dis- 
 agreeable sensation, the idea that this man knew 
 all about her husband's life? He had been ban- 
 ished from her sight, according to her will, and 
 she had been satisfied ; he had sunk entirely into 
 the background of her thoughts, screened away 
 from her by the agitating figures that kept up 
 an inward drama in which Lush had no place. 
 Here suddenly he reappeared at her husband's 
 elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an in- 
 stantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, 
 the sense of his being connected with the secrets 
 that made her wretched. She was conscious of 
 effort in turning her head away from him, try- 
 ing to continue her wandering survey as if she 
 had seen nothing of more consequence than the 
 picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. 
 But he was not looking towards her, and she 
 withdrew her eyes from him, without having 
 got any recognition, consohng herself with the 
 assurance that he must have seen her come in. 
 
 VOL. XIV — 2 
 
18 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 In fact, he was standing not far from the door 
 with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful 
 to bring into Lady Mallinger's list. They were 
 both a little more anxious than was comfortable 
 lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. 
 Deronda even felt himself on the brink of be- 
 traying emotion, Mirah's presence now being 
 linked with crowding images of what had gone ' 
 before and was to come after, — all centring in 
 the brother whom he was soon to reveal to her; 
 and he had escaped as soon as he could from 
 the side of Lady Pentreath, who had said in 
 her violoncello voice, — 
 
 " Well, your Jewess is pretty, — there 's no 
 denying that. But where is her Jewish impu- 
 dence? She looks as demure as a nun. I sup- 
 pose she learned that on the stage." 
 
 He was beginning to feel on Mirah's behalf 
 something of what he had felt for himself in his 
 seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him 
 if he would like to be a great singer, — an in- 
 dignant dislike to her being remarked on in a 
 free and easy way, as if she were an imported 
 commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashion- 
 able public; and he winced the more because 
 Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name 
 " Jewess " was taken as a sort of stamp like 
 the lettering of Chinese silk. In this susceptible 
 mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was 
 immediately appealed to by Hans about " that 
 Vandyke duchess of a beauty." Pray excuse 
 Deronda that in this moment he felt a transient 
 renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, 
 as if she and her beauty and her failings were 
 to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah as a 
 
REVELATIONS 19 
 
 woman, — a feeling something like class ani- 
 mosity, which affection for what is not fully 
 recognized by others, whether in persons or in 
 poetry, rarely allows us to escape. To Hans ad- 
 miring Gwendolen with his habitual hyperbole, 
 he answered, with a sarcasm that was not quite 
 good-humoured, — 
 
 " I thought you could admire no style of 
 woman but your Berenice." 
 
 " That is the style I worship, — not admire," 
 said Hans. " Other styles of woman I might 
 make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I 
 could make myself — well, pretty good, which 
 is something much more difficult." 
 
 "Hush!" said Deronda, under the pretext 
 that the singing was going to begin. He was 
 not so delighted with the answer as might have 
 been expected, and was relieved by Hans's 
 movement to a more advanced spot. 
 
 Deronda had never before heard Mirah sing 
 O patria mia. He knew well Leopardi's fine 
 Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate 
 mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees 
 and weeping), and the few selected words were 
 filled for him with the grandeur of the whole, 
 which seemed to breathe as inspiration through 
 the music. Mirah singing this, made Mordecai 
 more than ever one presence with her. Certain 
 words not included in the song nevertheless 
 rang within Deronda as harmonies from one 
 invisible — 
 
 "Non ti difende 
 Nessun de' tuoi ? L'armi, qua rarmi : io solo 
 Combattero procombero sol io " ^ — 
 
 ^ " Do none of thy children defend thee ? Arms ! bring me anns ! 
 alone I will fight, alone I will fall." 
 
20 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion 
 which is falsely said to devote itself in vain when 
 it achieves the godlike end of manifesting un- 
 selfish love. And that passion was present to 
 Deronda now as the vivid image of a man 
 dying helplessly away from the possibility of 
 battle. 
 
 Mir ah was equal to his wishes. While the gen- 
 eral applause was sounding, Klesmer gave a 
 more valued testimony, audible to her only, — 
 " Good, good, — the crescendo better than be- 
 fore." But her chief anxiety was to know that 
 she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on 
 her part this evening would have pained her as 
 an especial injury to him. Of course all her 
 prospects were due to what he had done for her; 
 still this occasion of singing in the house that was 
 his home brought a peculiar demand. She 
 looked towards him in the distance, and he could 
 see that she did ; but he remained where he was, 
 and watched the stream of emulous admirers 
 closing round her, till presently they parted to 
 make way for Gwendolen, who was taken up 
 to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier 
 now about " the little Jewess," Daniel relented 
 towards poor Gwendolen in her splendour, and 
 his memory went back, with some penitence for 
 his momentary hardness, over all the signs and 
 confessions that she too needed a rescue, and one 
 much more difficult than that of the wanderer 
 by the river, — a rescue for which he felt himself 
 helpless. The silent question, " But is it not 
 cowardly to make that a reason for turning 
 away? " was the form in which he framed his 
 resolve to go near her on the first opportunity, 
 
REVELATIONS 21 
 
 and show his regard for her past confidence, in 
 spite of Sir Hugo's unwelcome hints. 
 
 Klesmer, having risen to Gwendolen as she 
 approached, and being included by her in the 
 opening conversation with Mirah, continued 
 near them a little while, looking down with a 
 smile, which was rather in his eyes than on his 
 lips, at the piquant contrast of the two charming 
 young creatures seated on the red divan. The 
 solicitude seemed to be all on the side of the 
 splendid one. 
 
 " You must let me say how much I am obliged 
 to you," said Gwendolen. " I had heard from 
 Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat 
 in your singing; but I was too ignorant to 
 imagine how great." 
 
 " You are very good to say so," answered 
 Mirah, her mind chiefly occupied in contemplat- 
 ing Gwendolen. It was like a new kind of stage- 
 experience to her to be close to genuine grand 
 ladies with genuine brilliants and complexions, 
 and they impressed her vaguely as coming out 
 of some unknown drama, in which their parts 
 perhaps got more tragic as they went on. 
 
 " We shall all want to learn of you, — I, at 
 least," said Gwendolen. " I sing very badly, 
 as Herr Klesmer will tell you," — here she 
 glanced upward to that higher power rather 
 archly, and continued, — " but I have been re- 
 buked for not liking to be middling, since I 
 can be nothing more. I think that is a different 
 doctrine from yours? " She was still looking at 
 Klesmer, who said quickly, — 
 
 " Not if it means that it would be worth while 
 for you to study further, and for Miss Lapidoth 
 
22 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to have the pleasure of helping you." With that 
 he moved, away, and Mirah, taking everything 
 with naive seriousness, said, — 
 
 " If you think I could teach you, I shall be 
 very glad. I am anxious to teach, but I have 
 only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by 
 remembering how my master taught me." 
 
 Gwendolen was in reality too uncertain about 
 herself to be prepared for this simple prompti- 
 tude of Mirah's, and in her wish to change the 
 subject, said, with some lapse from the good 
 taste of her first address, — 
 
 " You have not been long in London, I think? 
 — but you were perhaps introduced to Mr. De- 
 ronda abroad? " 
 
 " No," said Mirah; " I never saw him before 
 I came to England in the summer." 
 
 " But he has seen you often and heard you 
 sing a great deal, has he not? " said Gwendolen, 
 led on partly by the wish to hear anything about 
 Deronda, and partly by the awkwardness which 
 besets the readiest person in carrying on a dia- 
 logue when empty of matter. " He spoke of 
 you to me with the highest praise. He seemed 
 to know you quite well." 
 
 " Oh, I was poor and needed help," said 
 Mirah, in a new tone of feeling, and Mr. De- 
 ronda has given me the best friends in the world. 
 That is the only way he came to know anything 
 about me, — because he was sorry for me. I 
 had no friends when I came. I was in distress. 
 I owe everything to him." 
 
 Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a 
 struggling artist herself, could nevertheless not 
 escape the impression that a mode of inquiry 
 
REVELATIONS 23 
 
 which would have been rather rude towards her- 
 self was an amiable condescension to this Jewess 
 who was ready to give her lessons. The only 
 effect on Mirah, as always on any mention of 
 Deronda, was to stir reverential gratitude and 
 anxiety that she should be understood to have 
 the deepest obligation to him. 
 
 But both he and Hans, who were noticing the 
 pair from a distance, would have felt rather in- 
 dignant if they had known that the conversation 
 had led up to Mirah's representation of herself 
 in this light of neediness. In the movement that 
 prompted her, however, there was an exquisite 
 delicacy, which perhaps she could not have stated 
 explicitly, — the feeling that she ought not to 
 allow any one to assume in Deronda a relation of 
 more equality or less generous interest towards 
 her than actually existed. Her answer was de- 
 lightful to Gwendolen: she thought of nothing 
 but the ready compassion which in another form 
 she had trusted in and found for herself; and 
 on the signals that Klesmer was about to play 
 she moved away in much content, entirely with- 
 out presentiment that this Jewish protegee 
 would ever make a more important difference in 
 her life than the possible improvement of her 
 singing, — if the leisure and spirits of a Mrs. 
 Grandcourt would allow of other lessons than 
 such as the world was giving her at rather a 
 high charge. 
 
 With her wonted alternation from resolute 
 care of appearances to some rash indulgence of 
 an impulse, she chose, under the pretext of get- 
 ting farther from the instrument, not to go 
 again to her former seat, but placed herself on 
 
24 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 a settee where she could only have one neighbour. 
 She was nearer to Deronda than before: was it 
 surprising that he came up in time to shake 
 hands before the music began, — then, that after 
 he had stood a little while by the elbow of the 
 settee at the empty end, the torrent-like conflu- 
 ences of bass and treble seemed, like a convulsion 
 of nature, to cast the conduct of petty mortals 
 into insignificance, and to warrant his sitting 
 down? 
 
 But when at the end of Klesmer's playing 
 there came the outburst of talk under which 
 Gwendolen had hoped to speak as she would to 
 Deronda, she observed that Mr. Lush was within 
 hearing, leaning against the wall close by them. 
 She could not help her flush of anger, but she 
 tried to have only an air of polite indifference 
 in saying, — 
 
 " Miss Lapidoth is everything you described 
 her to be." 
 
 " You have been very quick in discovering 
 that," said Deronda, ironically. 
 
 " I have not found out all the excellences you 
 spoke of, — I don't mean that," said Gwen- 
 dolen; ''but I think her singing is charming, 
 and herself too. Her face is lovely, — not in 
 the least common; and she is such a complete 
 little person. I should think she will be a great 
 success." 
 
 This speech was grating to Deronda, and he 
 would not answer it, but looked gravely before 
 him. She knew that he was displeased with her, 
 and she was getting so impatient under the 
 neighbourhood of Mr. Lush, which prevented 
 her from saying any word she wanted to say. 
 
REVELATIONS 25 
 
 that she meditated some desperate step to get 
 rid of it, and remained silent too. That con- 
 straint seemed to last a long while, neither Gwen- 
 dolen nor Deronda looking at the other, till 
 Lush slowly relieved the wall of his weight, and 
 joined some one at a distance. 
 
 Gwendolen immediately said, " You despise 
 me for talking artificially." 
 
 " No," said Deronda, looking at her coolly; 
 " I think that is quite excusable sometimes. But 
 I did not think what you were last saying was 
 altogether artificial." 
 
 " There was something in it that displeased 
 you," said Gwendolen. "What was it?" 
 
 " It is impossible to explain such things," said 
 Deronda. "One can never communicate nice- 
 ties of feeling about words and manner." 
 
 " You think I am shut out from understand- 
 ing them," said Gwendolen, with a slight tremor 
 in her voice which she was trying to conquer. 
 " Have, I shown myself so very dense to every- 
 thing you have said? " There was an inde- 
 scribable look of suppressed tears in her eyes, 
 which were turned on him. 
 
 " Not at all," said Deronda, with some soften- 
 ing of voice. " But experience differs for differ- 
 ent people. We don't all wince at the same 
 things. I have had plenty of proof that you 
 are not dense." He smiled at her. 
 
 " But one may feel things and not be able to 
 do anything better for all that," said Gwen- 
 dolen, not smiling in return, — the distance to 
 which Deronda's words seemed to throw her 
 chilling her too much. " I begin to think we can 
 only get better by having people about us who 
 
26 DAXIEL DEROXDA 
 
 raise good feelings. You must not be surprised 
 at an\i:hing in me. I think it is too late for me 
 to alter. I don't know how to set about being 
 wise, as you told me to be." 
 
 " I seldom find I do any good by my preach- 
 ing. I might as well have kept from meddling," 
 said Deronda, thinking rather sadly that his 
 interference about that unfortunate necklace 
 might end in nothing but an added pain to him 
 in seeing her after all hardened to another sort 
 of gambhng than roulette. 
 
 " Don't say that," said Gwendolen, hurriedly, 
 feehng that this might be her only chance of get- 
 ting the words uttered, and dreading the increase 
 of her own agitation. If you despair of me, 
 I shall despair. Your saying that I should not 
 go on being selfish and ignorant has been some 
 strength to me. If you say you wish you had 
 not meddled, — that means, you despau- of me 
 and forsake me. And then you wdll decide for 
 me that I shall not be good. It is you who will 
 decide; because you might have made me differ- 
 ent by keeping as near to me as you could, and 
 believing in me." 
 
 She had not been looking at him as she spoke, 
 but at the handle of the fan which she held 
 closed. With the last vrords she rose and left 
 him, returning to her former place, wliich had 
 been left vacant; while every one was settling 
 into quietude in expectation of Mii'ah's voice, 
 which presently, with that wonderful, searching 
 quality of subdued song in which the melody 
 seems simply an effect of the emotion, gave 
 forth, Per pieta non dirmi addio. 
 
 In Deronda's ears the strain was for the mo- 
 
REVELATIONS 27 
 
 ment a continuance of Gwendolen's pleading, 
 — a painful urging of something vague and 
 difficult, irreconcilable with pressing conditions, 
 and yet cruel to resist. However strange the 
 mixture in her of a resolute pride and a pre- 
 cocious air of knowing the world, with a pre- 
 cipitate, guileless indiscretion, he was quite sure 
 now that the mixture existed. Sir Hugo's hints 
 had made him alive to dangers that his own dis- 
 position might have neglected; but that Gwen- 
 dolen's reliance on him was unvisited by any 
 dream of his being a man who could misinterpret 
 her was as manifest as morning, and made an 
 appeal which wrestled with his sense of present 
 dangers, and with his foreboding of a growing 
 incompatible claim on him in her mind. There 
 was a foreshadowing of some painful collision: 
 on the one side the grasp of Mordecai's dying 
 hand on him, with all the ideals and prospects it 
 aroused; on the other this fair creature in silk 
 and gems, with her hidden wound and her self- 
 dread, making a trustful effort to lean and find 
 herself sustained. It was as if he had a vision 
 of himself besought with outstretched arms and 
 cries, while he was caught by the waves and com- 
 pelled to mount the vessel bound for a far-off 
 coast. That was the strain of excited feeling in 
 him that went along with the notes of Mirah's 
 song; but when it ceased he moved from his 
 seat with the reflection that he had been falling 
 into an exaggeration of his own importance, and 
 a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's 
 view of himself, as if he could really have any 
 decisive power over her. 
 
 " What an enviable fellow you are," said Hans 
 
28 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to him, " sitting on a sofa with that young 
 duchess, and having an interesting quarrel with 
 her!" 
 
 " Quarrel with her? " repeated Deronda, 
 rather uncomfortably. 
 
 " Oh, about theology, of course; nothing per- 
 sonal. But she told you what you ought to 
 think, and then left you with a grand air which 
 was admirable. Is she an Antinomian? — if so, 
 tell her I am an Antinomian painter, and intro- 
 duce me. I should like to paint her and her 
 husband. He has the sort of handsome physique 
 that the Duke ought to have in Lucrezia Borgia, 
 
 — if it could go with a fine barytone, which it 
 can't." 
 
 Deronda devoutly hoped that Hans's account 
 of the impression his dialogue with Gv>^endolen 
 had made on a distant beholder was no more 
 than a bit of fantastic representation, such as 
 was common with him. 
 
 And Gwendolen was not without her after- 
 thoughts that her husband's eyes might have 
 been on her, extracting something to reprove, 
 
 — some offence against her dignity as his wife ; 
 her consciousness telling her that she had not 
 kept up the perfect air of equability in public 
 which was her own ideal. But Grandcourt made 
 no observation on her behaviour. All he said as 
 they were driving home was, — 
 
 " Lush will dine with us among the other peo- 
 ple to-morrow. You will treat him civilly." 
 
 Gwendolen's heart began to beat violently. 
 The words that she wanted to utter, as one wants 
 to return a blow, were, " You are breaking your 
 promise to me, — the first promise you made 
 
 \ 
 
REVELATIONS 29 
 
 me." But she dared not utter them. She was 
 as frightened at a quarrel as if she had foreseen 
 that it would end with throttling fingers on her 
 neck. After a pause, she said, in the tone rather 
 of defeat than resentment, — 
 
 I thought you did not intend him to fre- 
 quent the house again." 
 
 I want him just now. He is useful to me; 
 and he must be treated civilly." 
 
 Silence. There may come a moment when 
 even an excellent husband who has dropped 
 smoking under more or less of a pledge during 
 courtship, for the first time will introduce his 
 cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with 
 the tacit understanding that she will have to put 
 up with it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very 
 large cigar. 
 
 If these are the sort of lovers' vows at which 
 J ove laughs, he must have a merry time of it. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, 
 I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, "Be- 
 cause it was he; because it was I." There is, beyond what I am able 
 to say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought 
 on this union. — Montaigne: On Friendship. 
 
 THE time had come to prepare Mordecai 
 for the revelation of the restored sister 
 and for the change of abode which was 
 desirable before Mirah's meeting with her 
 brother. Mrs. Meyrick, to whom Deronda had 
 confided everything except Mordecai's peculiar 
 relation to himself, had been active in helping 
 him to find a suitable lodging in Brompton, not 
 many minutes' walk from her own house, so that 
 the brother and sister would be within reach of 
 her motherly care. Her happy mixture of Scot- 
 tish caution with her Scottish fervour and Gallic 
 liveliness had enabled her to keep the secret 
 close from the girls as well as from Hans, any 
 betrayal to them being likely to reach Mirah in 
 some way that would raise an agitating suspi- 
 cion^ and spoil the important opening of that 
 work which was to secure her independence, as 
 we rather arbitrarily call one of the more arduous 
 and dignified forms of our dependence. And 
 both Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda had more rea- 
 sons than they could have expressed for desiring 
 that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. 
 Perhaps " the little mother " was rather helped 
 in her secrecy by some dubiousness in her senti- 
 ment about the remarkable brother described to 
 
\ 
 
 REVELATIONS 31 
 
 her? and certainly^ if she felt any joy and antici- 
 patory admiration, it was due to her faith in 
 Deronda's judgment. The consumption was a 
 sorrowful fact that appealed to her tenderness; 
 but how was she to be very glad of an enthusiasm 
 which, to tell the truth, she could only contem- 
 plate as Jewish pertinacity, and as rather an 
 undesirable introduction among them all of a 
 man whose conversation would not be more 
 modern and encouraging than that of Scott's 
 Covenanters? Her mind was anything but 
 prosaic, and she had her soberer share of Mab's 
 delight in the romance of Mirah's story and of 
 her abode with them; but the romantic or un- 
 usual in real life requires some adaptation. We 
 sit up at night to read about Sakya-Mouni, Saint 
 Francis, or Oliver Cromwell; but whether we 
 should be glad for any one at all like them to 
 call on us the next morning, still more, to reveal 
 himself as a new relation, is quite another affair. 
 Besides, Mrs. Meyrick had hoped, as her chil- 
 dren did, that the intensity of Mirah's feeling 
 about Judaism would slowly subside, and be 
 merged in the gradually deepening current of 
 loving interchange with her new friends. In 
 fact, her secret favourite continuation of the 
 romance had been no discovery of Jewish rela- 
 tions, but something much more favourable to 
 the hopes she discerned in Hans. And now — 
 here was a brother who would dip Mirah's mind 
 over again in the deepest dye of Jewish senti- 
 ment. She could not help saying to Deronda, — 
 " I am as glad as you are that the pawn- 
 broker is not her brother: there are Ezras and 
 Ezras in the world; and really it is a comfort 
 
32 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to think that all Jews are not like those shop- 
 keepers who will not let you get out of their 
 shops; and besides, what he said to you about 
 his mother and sister makes me bless him. I am 
 sure he 's good. But I never did like anything 
 fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much 
 preaching in my youth, and lost my palate for 
 
 it. 
 
 " I don't think you will find that Mordecai 
 obtrudes any preaching," said Deronda. " He 
 is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man 
 fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and 
 hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of propor- 
 tions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic 
 to men who are out of his own track. Mordecai 
 is an enthusiast : I should like to keep that word 
 for the highest order of minds, — those who care 
 supremely for grand and general benefits to 
 mankind. He is not a strictly orthodox Jew, 
 and is full of allowances for others; his con- 
 formity in many things is an allowance for the 
 condition of other Jews. The people he lives 
 with are as fond of him as possible, and they 
 can't in the least understand his ideas." 
 
 " Oh, well, I can live up to the level of the 
 pawnbroker's mother, and like him for what I 
 see to be good in him; and for what I don't see 
 the merits of I will take your word. According 
 to your definition, I suppose one might be fanat- 
 ical in worshipping common-sense; for my hus- 
 band used to say the world would be a poor 
 place if there were nothing but common-sense in 
 it. However, Mirah's brother will have good 
 bedding, — that I have taken care of ; and I 
 shall have this extra window pasted up with 
 
REVELATIONS 33 
 
 paper to prevent draughts." ( The conversation 
 was taking place in the destined lodging.) " It 
 is a comfort to think that the people of the house 
 are no strangers to me, — no hypocritical har- 
 pies. And when the children know, we shall be 
 able to make the rooms much prettier." 
 
 " The next stage of the affair is to tell all to 
 Mordecai, and get him to move, which may be 
 a more difficult business," said Deronda. 
 
 " And will you tell Mirah before I say any- 
 thing to the children? " said Mrs. Meyrick. But 
 Deronda hesitated, and she went on in a tone of 
 persuasive deliberation, " No, I think not. Let 
 me tell Hans and the girls the evening before, 
 and they will be away the next morning." 
 
 " Yes, that will be best. But do justice to 
 my account of Mordecai — or Ezra, as I sup- 
 pose Mirah will wish to call him: don't assist 
 their imagination by referring to Habakkuk 
 Muckle wrath," said Deronda, smiling, — Mrs. 
 Meyrick herself having used the comparison of 
 the Covenanters. 
 
 " Trust me, trust me," said the little mother. 
 " I shall have to persuade them so hard to be 
 glad, that I shall convert mj^self . When I am 
 frightened I find it a good thing to have some- 
 body to be angry with for not being brave: it 
 warms the blood." 
 
 Deronda might have been more argumenta- 
 tive or persuasive about the view to be taken of 
 Mirah's brother, if he had been less anxiously 
 preoccupied with the more important task im- 
 mediately before him, which he desired to acquit 
 himself of without wounding the Cohens. Mor- 
 decai, by a memorable answer, had made it 
 
 VOL. XIV — 3 
 
34 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 evident that he would be keenly alive to any in- 
 advertence in relation to their feelings. In the 
 interval he had been meeting Mordecai at the 
 Hand and Banner, but now after due reflection 
 he wrote to him saying that he had particular 
 reasons for wishing to see him in his own home 
 the next evening, and would beg to sit with him 
 in his workroom for an hour, if the Cohens would 
 not regard it as an intrusion. He would call 
 with the understanding that if there were any 
 objection, Mordecai would accompany him else- 
 where. Deronda hoped in this way to create 
 a little expectation that would have a prepara- 
 tory effect. 
 
 He was received with the usual friendliness, 
 some additional costume in the women and chil- 
 dren, and in all the elders a slight air of won- 
 dering which even in Cohen was not allowed to 
 pass the bounds of silence, — the guest's trans- 
 actions with Mordecai being a sort of mystery 
 which he was rather proud to think lay outside 
 the sphere of light which enclosed his own under- 
 standing. But when Deronda said, " I suppose 
 Mordecai is at home and expecting me," Jacob, 
 who had profited by the family remarks, went 
 up to his knee, and said, " What do you want to 
 talk to Mordecai about? " 
 
 " Something that is very interesting to him," 
 said Deronda, pinching the lad's ear, " but that 
 you can't understand." 
 
 " Can you say this? " said Jacob, immediately 
 giving forth a string of his rote-learned Hebrew 
 verses with a wonderful mixture of the throaty 
 and the nasal, and nodding his small head at his 
 hearer, with a sense of giving formidable evi- 
 
REVELATIONS 35 
 
 dence which might rather alter their mutual 
 position. 
 
 "No, really," said Deronda, keeping grave; 
 " I can't say anything like it." 
 
 " I thought not," said Jacob, performing a 
 dance of triumph with his small scarlet legs, 
 while he took various objects out of the deep 
 pockets of his knickerbockers and returned them 
 thither, as a slight hint of his resources; after 
 which running to the door of the workroom, he 
 opened it wide, set his back against it, and said, 
 " Mordecai, here 's the young swell," — a copy- 
 ing of his father's phrase which seemed to him 
 well fitted to cap the recitation of Hebrew. 
 
 He was called back with hushes by mother 
 and grandmother, and Deronda, entering and 
 closing the door behind him, saw that a bit of 
 carpet had been laid down, a chair placed, and 
 the fire and lights attended to, in sign of the 
 Cohens' respect. As Mordecai rose to greet him, 
 Deronda was struck with the air of solemn ex- 
 pectation in his face, such as would have seemed 
 perfectly natural if his letter had declared that 
 some revelation was to be made about the lost 
 sister. Neither of them spoke, till Deronda, 
 with his usual tenderness of manner, had drawn 
 the vacant chair from the opposite side of the 
 hearth and had seated himself near to Mordecai, 
 who then said, in a tone of fervid certainty, — 
 
 " You are come to tell me something that my 
 soul longs for." 
 
 "It is true that I have something very 
 weighty to tell you, — something, I trust, that 
 you will rejoice in," said Deronda, on his guard 
 against the probability that Mordecai had been 
 
36 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 preparing himself for something quite different 
 from the fact. 
 
 " It is all revealed, — it is made clear to you," 
 said Mordecai, more eagerly, leaning forward 
 with clasped hands. " You are even as my 
 brother that sucked the breasts of my mother, — 
 the heritage is yours, — there is no doubt to 
 divide us." 
 
 " I have learned nothing new about myself," 
 said Deronda, The disappointment was inevi- 
 table; it was better not to let the feeling be 
 strained longer in a mistaken hope. 
 
 Mordecai sank back in his chair, unable for 
 the moment to care what was really coming. 
 The whole day his mind had been in a state 
 of tension towards one fulfilment. The reaction 
 was sickening, and he closed his eyes. 
 
 " Except," Deronda went on gently after a 
 pause, — " except that I had really some time 
 ago come into another sort of hidden connection 
 with you, besides what you have spoken of as 
 existing in your own feeling." 
 
 The eyes were not opened, but there was a 
 fluttering in the lids. 
 
 " I had made the acquaintance of one in 
 whom you are interested." 
 
 Mordecai opened his eyes and fixed them in 
 a quiet gaze on Deronda: the former painful 
 check repressed all activity of conjecture. 
 
 " One who is closely related to your departed 
 mother," Deronda went on, wishing to make the 
 disclosure gradual; but noticing a shrinking 
 movement in Mordecai, he added, — " whom she 
 and you held dear above all others." 
 
 Mordecai, with a sudden start, laid a spas- 
 
REVELATIONS 37 
 
 modic grasp on Deronda's wrist; there was a 
 great terror in him. And Deronda divined it. 
 A tremor was perceptible in his clear tones as 
 he said, — 
 
 "What was prayed for has come to pass: 
 Mir ah has been delivered from evil." 
 
 Mordecai's grasp relaxed a little, but he was 
 panting with a sort of tearless sob. 
 
 Deronda went on: " Your sister is worthy of 
 the mother you honoured." 
 
 He waited there; and Mordecai, throwing 
 himself backward in his chair, again closed his 
 eyes, uttering himself almost inaudibly for some 
 minutes in Hebrew, and then subsiding into a 
 happy-looking silence. Deronda, watching the 
 expression in his uplifted face, could have imag- 
 ined that he was speaking with some beloved 
 object: there was a new suffused sweetness, 
 something like that on the faces of the beautiful 
 dead. For the first time Deronda thought he 
 discerned a family resemblance to Mirah. 
 
 Presently, when Mordecai was ready to listen, 
 the rest was told. But in accounting for Mirah's 
 flight he made the statements about the father's 
 conduct as vague as he could, and threw the em- 
 phasis on her yearning to come to England as 
 the place where she might find her mother. Also 
 he kept back the fact of Mirah's intention to 
 drown herself, and his own part in rescuing her ; 
 merely describing the home she had found with 
 friends of his, whose interest in her and efforts 
 for her he had shared. What he dwelt on finally 
 was Mirah's feeling about her mother and 
 brother; and in relation to this he tried to give 
 every detail. 
 
38 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " It was in search of them," said Deronda, 
 smiHng, " that I turned into this house : the name 
 Ezra Cohen was just then the most interesting 
 name in the world to me. I confess I had a fear 
 for a long while. Perhaps you will forgive me 
 now for having asked you that question about the 
 elder Mrs. Cohen's daughter. I cared very much 
 what I should find Mirah's friends to be. But 
 I had found a brother worthy of her when I knew 
 that her Ezra was disguised under the name of 
 Mordecai." 
 
 " Mordecai is really my name, — Ezra Mor- 
 decai Cohen." 
 
 " Is there any kinship between this family and' 
 yours?" said Deronda. 
 
 " Only the kinship of Israel. My soul clings 
 to these people, who have sheltered me and given 
 me succour out of the affection that abides in 
 Jewish hearts, as a sweet odour in things long 
 crushed and hidden from the outer air. It is 
 good for me to bear with their ignorance and be 
 bound to them in gratitude that I may keep in 
 mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish million, 
 and not put impatient knowledge in the stead of 
 loving wisdom." 
 
 "But you don't feel bound to continue with 
 them now there is a closer tie to draw you? " said 
 Deronda, not without fear that he might find an 
 obstacle to overcome. " It seems to me right 
 now — is it not ? — that you should live with 
 your sister ; and I have prepared a home to take 
 you to in the neighbourhood of her friends, that 
 she may join you there. Pray grant me this 
 wish. It will enable me to be with you often in 
 the hours when Mirah is obliged to leave you. 
 
REVELATIONS 39 
 
 That is my selfish reason. But the chief reason 
 is, that Mirah \^dll desire to watch over you, and 
 that you ought to give to her the guardianship 
 of a brother's presence. You shall have books 
 about you. I shall want to learn of you, and to 
 take you out to see the river and trees. And you 
 will have the rest and comfort that you will be 
 more and more in need of, — nay, that I need for 
 you. This is the claim I make on you, now that 
 we have found each other." 
 
 Deronda spoke in a tone of earnest affection- 
 ate pleading, such as he might have used to a 
 venerated elder brother. Mordecai's eyes were 
 fixed on him with a listening contemplation, and 
 he was silent for a little while after Deronda had 
 ceased to speak. Then he said, with an almost 
 reproachful emphasis, — 
 
 " And you would have me hold it doubtful 
 whether you were born a Jew! Have we not 
 from the first touched each other with invisible 
 fibres, — have we not quivered together like the 
 leaves from a common stem with stirrings from 
 a common root? I know what I am outwardly, 
 — I am one among the crowd of poor, — I am 
 stricken, I am dying. But our souls know each 
 other. They gazed in silence as those who have 
 long been parted and meet again, but when they 
 found voice they were assured, and all their 
 speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in 
 your veins." 
 
 Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face 
 tingling. It was impossible either to deny or as- 
 sent. He waited, hoping that Mordecai would 
 presently give him a more direct answer. And 
 after a pause of meditation he did say firmly, — 
 
40 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " What you wish of me I will do. And our 
 mother — may the blessing of the Eternal be 
 with her in our souls! — would have wished it 
 too. I will accept what your loving-kindness has 
 prepared, and Mirah's home shall be mine." He 
 paused a moment, and then added in a more mel- 
 ancholy tone, " But I shall grieve to part from 
 these parents and the little ones. You must tell 
 them, for my heart would fail me." 
 
 "I felt that you would want me to tell them. 
 Shall we go now at once? " said Deronda, much 
 relieved by this unwavering compliance. 
 
 "Yes; let us not defer it. It must be done," 
 said Mordecai, rising with the air of a man who 
 has to perform a painful duty. Then came, as 
 an after-thought, " But do not dwell on my sister 
 more than is needful." 
 
 When they entered the parlour he said to the 
 alert Jacob, " Ask your father to come, and tell 
 Sarah to mind the shop. My friend has some- 
 thing to say," he continued, turning to the elder 
 Mrs. Cohen. It seemed part of Mordecai's ec- 
 centricity that he should call this gentleman his 
 friend; and the two women tried to show their 
 better manners by warm politeness in begging 
 Deronda to seat himself in the best place. 
 
 When Cohen entered with a pen behind his 
 ear, he rubbed his hands and said with loud satis- 
 faction: " Well, sir! I 'm glad you 're doing us 
 the honour to join our family party again. We 
 are pretty comfortable, I think." 
 
 He looked round with shiny gladness. And 
 when all were seated on the hearth, the scene was 
 worth peeping in upon ; on one side baby under 
 her scarlet quilt in the corner being rocked by the 
 
REVELATIONS 41 
 
 young mother, and Adelaide Rebekah seated on 
 the grandmother's knee ; on the other, Jacob be- 
 tween his father's legs; while the two markedly 
 different figures of Deronda and Mordecai were 
 in the middle, — Mordecai a little backward in 
 the shade, anxious to conceal his agitated suscep- 
 tibility to what was going on around him. The 
 chief light came from the fire, which brought out 
 the rich colour on a depth of shadow, and seemed 
 to turn into speech the dark gems of eyes that 
 looked at each other kindly. 
 
 " I have just been telling Mordecai of, an 
 event that makes a great change in his life," 
 Deronda began, " but I hope you will agree with 
 me that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you 
 as his best friends, he wishes me to tell you for 
 him at once." 
 
 " Relations with money, sir? " burst in Cohen, 
 feeling a power of divination which it was a pity 
 to nullify by waiting for the fact. 
 
 "No; not exactly," said Deronda, smiling. 
 " But a very precious relation wishes to be re- 
 united to him, — a very good and lovely young 
 sister, who will care for his comfort in every 
 way." 
 
 "Married, sir?" 
 
 " No, not married." 
 
 " But with a maintenance? " 
 
 " With talents which will secure her a main- 
 tenance. A home is already provided for 
 Mordecai." 
 
 There was silence for a moment or two before 
 the grandmother said in a wailing tone, — 
 
 " Well, well ! and so you 're going away from 
 us, Mordecai." 
 
42 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " And where there 's no children as there is 
 here," said the mother, catching the wail. 
 
 " No Jacob, and no Adelaide, and no Eu- 
 genie ! " wailed the grandmother again. 
 
 " Ay, ay, Jacob's learning 'ill all wear out of 
 him. He must go to school. It '11 be hard times 
 for Jacob," said Cohen, in a tone of decision. 
 
 In the wide-open ears of Jacob his father's 
 words sounded like a doom, giving an awful fin- 
 ish to the dirgelike effect of the whole announce- 
 ment. His face had been gathering a wondering 
 incredulous sorrow at the notion of Mordecai's 
 going away: he was unable to imagine the 
 change as anything lasting ; but at the mention 
 of " hard times for Jacob " there was no further 
 suspense of feeling, and he broke forth in loud 
 lamentation. Adelaide Rebekah always cried 
 when her brother cried, and now began to howl 
 with astonishing suddenness, whereupon baby 
 awaking contributed angry screams and required 
 to be taken out of the cradle. A great deal of 
 hushing was necessary; and Mordecai, feeling 
 the cries pierce him, put out his arms to Jacob, 
 who in the midst of his tears and sobs was turn- 
 ing his head right and left for general observa- 
 tion. His father, who had been saying, " Never 
 mind, old man; you shall go to the riders," now 
 released him; and he went to Mordecai, who 
 clasped him, and laid his cheek on the little black 
 head without speaking. But Cohen, sensible 
 that the master of the family must make some 
 apology for all this weakness, and that the occa- 
 sion called for a speech, addressed Deronda with 
 some elevation of pitch, squaring his elbows and 
 resting a hand on each knee, — 
 
REVELATIONS 43 
 
 " It 's not as we 're the people to grudge any- 
 body's good luck, sir, or the portion of their cup 
 being made fuller, as I may say. I 'm not an en- 
 vious man, and if anybody offered to set up 
 Mordecai in a shop of my sort two doors lower 
 down, / should n't make wry faces about it. 
 I 'm not one of them that had need have a poor 
 opinion of themselves, and be frightened at any- 
 body else getting a chance. If I 'm offal, let a 
 wise man come and tell me, for I Ve never heard 
 it yet. And in point of business, I 'm not a class 
 of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to 
 rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpil- 
 lar, and find my feet when I 'm let alone. And 
 though, as I may say, you 're taking some of our 
 good works from us, which is a property bearing 
 interest, I 'm not saying but we can afford that, 
 though my mother and my wife had the good will 
 to wish and do for Mordecai to the last; and a 
 Jew must not be like a servant who works for re- 
 ward, — though I see nothing against a reward 
 if I can get it. And as to the extra outlay in 
 schooling, I 'm neither poor nor greedy, — I 
 would n't hang myself for sixpence, nor half a 
 crown neither. But the truth of it is, the women 
 and children are fond of Mordecai. You may 
 partly see how it is, sir, by your own sense. A 
 Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, 
 that he was not made a woman ; but a woman has 
 to thank God that He has made her according 
 to His will. And we all know what He has made 
 her, — a child-bearing, tender-hearted thing is 
 the woman of our people. Her children are 
 mostly stout, as I think you '11 say Addy's are, 
 and she 's not mushy, but her heart is tender. 
 
44 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 So you must excuse present company, sir, for not 
 being glad all at once. And as to this young 
 lady, — for by what you say ' young lady ' is 
 the proper term," — Cohen here threw some ad- 
 ditional emphasis into his look and tone, — "we 
 shall all be glad for Mordecai's sake by and by, 
 when we cast up our accounts and see where we 
 are." 
 
 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 com- 
 mand 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 
 fulfil 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 
 farther than B romp ton." 
 
 Jacob, who had been gradually calmed by the 
 
REVELATIONS 45 
 
 need to hear what was going forward, began 
 now to see some daylight on the future, the word 
 " visit " having the Mvely charm of cakes and 
 general relaxation at his grandfather's, the 
 dealer in knives. He danced away from Mor- 
 decai, and took up a station of survey in the mid- 
 dle of the hearth with his hands in his knicker- 
 bockers. 
 
 " Well," said the grandmother, with a sigh of 
 resignation, " I hope there '11 be nothing in the 
 way of your getting kosher meat, Mordecai. 
 For you '11 have to trust to those you live with." 
 
 " That 's all right, that 's all right, you may be 
 ^ure, 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, turn- 
 ing with a look of amused enlightenment to De- 
 ronda, " 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, feel- 
 ing 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, — 
 
46 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " 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 in- 
 visible outstretched arms and pleadings made in 
 vain. In my ears I have the prayers of genera- 
 tions 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. 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 And you must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of yciur 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 a 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 Mey- 
 ricks to be propitiated towards 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 sunset-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 
 
48 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 you." 
 
 " As if I did n't know that, ma. I have seen it 
 in the corner of your eye ever so long, and in your 
 pretence of errands," said Kate, while the girls 
 came to put their feet on the fender, and Hans, 
 pushing his chair near them, sat astride it, rest- 
 ing 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 jewellery, — a 
 Crystal Palace Assyrian with a hat on," said 
 Hans, in the worst humour. 
 
 " 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. 
 
REVELATIONS 49 
 
 " 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. " Any- 
 where 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. De- 
 ronda 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, ris- 
 ing 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 
 
 VOL. XIV — 4 
 
50 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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, — star- 
 ing blankly at you, and requiring all your 
 remarks to be small footnotes to their text. If 
 you 're to be under a petrifying well, 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 behav- 
 ing," 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." 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 51 
 
 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 say- 
 ing that he wished to remain with Mordecai 
 while Mrs. Meyrick would bring Mir ah 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 pre- 
 occupation 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 per- 
 sistent activity of affection; but those 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 
 his new clothes obediently, but said afterwards to 
 Deronda, with a faint smile, " I must keep my 
 old garments by me for a remembrance." And 
 when they were seated, awaiting JSlirah, he 
 uttered no word, keeping his eyelids closed, but 
 yet showing restless feeling in his face and hands. 
 
52 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 a dominant bias dread an interview that im- 
 periously 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 knomng 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 downstairs equipped in this way, 
 and when JNIrs. ]VIe}T^ick said, in a tone of ques- 
 tion, " 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. De- 
 ronda 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, Mor- 
 decai had risen, and had his eyes turned towards 
 it with an eager gaze. JNIirah took only two or 
 three ste^s, 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 \\4th which 
 
REVELATIONS 58 
 
 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 hands 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 Mor- 
 decai, 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 pret- 
 tiest attitude, keeping one hand on her brother's 
 
54 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 arm while she looked at Mrs. Meyrick and De- 
 ronda. 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 De- 
 ronda'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 beseech- 
 ingly, 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 fulfil our 
 mother's prayer." 
 
 " I think we will go now, shall we? — and re- 
 turn later," said Deronda, laying a gentle pres- 
 sure 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 VIII 
 
 "'Tis a hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by 
 the rule of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelh concern- 
 ing 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 sub- 
 ject of this realm was of the grandly pas- 
 sive 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 com- 
 mercial 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 in- 
 terest showed some of the qualities which have 
 entered into triumphal diplomacy of the widest 
 (Continental sort. 
 
 No movement of Gwendolen in relation to 
 Deronda escaped him. He would have denied 
 
56 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 handcuff, that her inclination was help- 
 less to decide anything in contradiction with his 
 resolve. However much of vacillating whim 
 there might have been in his entrance on matri- 
 mony, there was no vacillating in his interpre- 
 tation 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 conmiand to love, one does not see 
 
REVELATIONS 57 
 
 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 
 behaviour in some respects was as like jealousy 
 as yellow is to yellow, which colour 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 trans- 
 action 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 ac- 
 companiment of his being in town was the pres- 
 entation 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 specta- 
 tors: for if you are fond of looking stonily at 
 smiling persons, the persons must be there 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 
 
58 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 Mallingers, tenaciously 
 avoiding the possible suggestion to anybody con- 
 cerned that Deronda's presence or absence could 
 be of the least importance to him; and he made 
 no direct observation to Gwendolen on her be- 
 haviour that evening, lest the expression of his 
 disgust should be a little too strong to satisfy 
 his own pride. But a few days afterwards 
 he remarked, without being careful of the a 
 propos, — 
 
 " Nothing makes a woman more of a gawky 
 than looking out after people and showing tem- 
 pers in public. A woman ought to have fine 
 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 over- 
 
REVELATIONS 59 
 
 hanging rebuke only intensified the strain of ex- 
 pectation towards 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 despon- 
 dency, 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 dif- 
 fusive effect in her consciousness, magnifying 
 their communication with each other, and there- 
 fore 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 indis- 
 creet, since it had not lowered his respect. More- 
 over, 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, how- 
 ever 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 crea- 
 ture, 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 lin- 
 
60 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 gered 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 breakfast- 
 ing, Gwendolen, in a recurrent fit of determina- 
 tion to exercise her 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 sau- 
 ciness; " 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, push- 
 ing away his plate, and leaning back in his chair 
 while he looked at her with his most Uzard-like 
 expression, and played with the ears of the tiny 
 spaniel on his lap (Gwendolen had taken a dis- 
 like 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 
 
REVELATIONS 61 
 
 themselves. A lady can't risk herself in that 
 way in company. And one does n't want to 
 hear squalling in private." 
 
 "I like frankness: that seems to me a hus- 
 band'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 4th? I thought of 
 engaging her. Lady Brackenshaw had her, you 
 know ; and the Raymonds, who are very partic- 
 ular about their music. And Mr. Deronda, who 
 is a musician himself, and a first-rate judge, 
 says that there is no singing in such good taste 
 as hers for a drawing-room. I think his opinion 
 is an authority." 
 
 She meant to sling a small stone at her hus- 
 band in that way. 
 
 " It 's very indecent of Deronda to go iabout 
 praising that girl," said Grandcourt, in a tone 
 of indifference. 
 
 "Indecent!" exclaimed Gwendolen, redden- 
 ing and looking at him again, overcome by 
 startled wonder, and unable to reflect on the 
 probable falsity of the phrase, — "to go about 
 praising! " 
 
 " Yes; and especially when she is patronized 
 by Lady Mallinger. He ought to hold his 
 tongue about her. Men can see what is his re- 
 lation to her." 
 
 " Men who judge of others by themselves," 
 said Gwendolen, turning white after her red- 
 
62 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ness, and immediately smitten with a dread of 
 her own words. 
 
 "Of course. And a woman should take their 
 judgment, — else she is likely to run her head 
 into the wrong place," said Grandcourt, con- 
 scious of using pincers on that white creature. 
 " I suppose you take Deronda for a saint." 
 
 " Oh dear, no! " said Gwendolen, summoning 
 desperately her almost miraculous power of self- 
 control, and speaking in a high hard tone. 
 " Only a little less of a monster." 
 
 She rose, pushed her chair away without 
 hurry, and walked out of the room with some- 
 thing like the care of a man who is afraid of 
 showing that he has taken more wine than usual. 
 She turned the keys inside her dressing-room 
 doors, and sat down for some time looking as 
 pale and quiet as when she was leaving the ^ 
 breakfast-room. Even in the moments after 
 reading the poisonous letter she had hardty had 
 more cruel sensations than now; for emotion 
 was at the acute point, where it is not distin- 
 guishable from sensation. Deronda unlike what 
 she had believed him to be, was an image which 
 affected her as a hideous apparition would have 
 done, quite apart from the way in which it was 
 produced. It had taken hold of her as pain 
 before she could consider whether it were fiction 
 or truth; and further to hinder her power of 
 resistance came the sudden perception, how very 
 slight were the grounds of her faith in Deronda, 
 — how little she knew of his life, — how childish 
 she had been in her confidence. His rebukes and 
 his severity to her began to seem odious, along 
 with all the poetry and lofty doctrine in the 
 
REVELATIONS 63 
 
 world, whatever it might be; and the grave 
 beauty of his face seemed the most unpleasant 
 mask that the common habits of men could 
 put on. 
 
 All this went on in her with the rapidity of a 
 sick dream; and her start into resistance was 
 very much like a waking. Suddenly from out 
 the gray sombre morning there came a stream 
 of sunshine, wrapping her in warmth and light 
 where she sat in stony stillness. She moved 
 gently and looked round her, — there was a 
 world outside this bad dream, and the dream 
 proved nothing; she rose, stretching her arms 
 upward and clasping her hands with her habitual 
 attitude when she was seeking relief from op- 
 pressive feeling, and walked about the room in 
 this flood of sunbeams. 
 
 " It is not true ! What does it matter whether 
 he believes it or not? " This was what she re- 
 peated to herself, — but this was not her faith 
 come back again; it was only the desperate 
 cry of faith, finding suffocation intolerable. 
 And how could she go on through the day in 
 this state? With one of her impetuous alter- 
 nations, her imagination flew to wild actions by 
 which she would convince herself of what she 
 wished: she would go to Lady Mallinger and 
 question her about Mirah ; she would write to 
 Deronda and upbraid him with making the 
 world all false and wicked and hopeless to her, 
 — to him she dared pour out all the bitter in- 
 dignation of her heart. No; she would go to 
 Mirah. This last form taken by her need was 
 more definitely practicable, and quickly became 
 imperious. No matter what came of it. She 
 
64 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 had the pretext of asking Mirah to sing at her 
 party on the 4th. What was she going to say- 
 besides? How satisfy herself? She did not 
 foresee, — she could not wait to foresee. If that 
 idea which was maddening her had been a liv- 
 ing thing, she would have wanted to throttle it 
 without waiting to foresee what would come 
 of the act. She rang her bell and asked if Mr. 
 Grandcourt were gone out : finding that he was, 
 she ordered the carriage, and began to dress 
 for the drive; then she went down, and walked 
 about the large drawing-room like an impris- 
 oned dumb creature, not recognizing herself in 
 the glass panels, not noting any object around 
 her in the painted gilded prison. Her husband 
 would probably find out where she had been, 
 and punish her in some way or other — no 
 matter — she could neither desire nor fear any- 
 thing just now but the assurance that she had 
 not been deluding herself in her trust. 
 
 She was provided with Mirah's address. Soon 
 she was on the way with all the fine equipage 
 necessary to carry about her poor uneasy heart, 
 depending in its palpitations on some answer 
 or other to questioning which she did not know 
 how she should put. She was as heedless of 
 what happened before she found that Miss Lapi- 
 doth was at home, as one is of lobbies and pas- 
 sages on the way to a court of justice, — heed- 
 less of everything till she was in a room where 
 there were folding-doors, and she heard De- 
 ronda's voice behind it. Doubtless the identifi- 
 cation was helped by forecast, but she was as 
 certain of it as if she had seen him. She was 
 frightened at her own agitation, and began to 
 
REVELATIONS 65 
 
 unbutton her gloves that she might button them 
 again, and bite her hps over the pretended diffi- 
 culty, while the d,oor opened, and Mirah pre- 
 sented herself with perfect quietude and a sweet 
 smile of recognition. There was relief in the 
 sight of her face, and Gwendolen was able to 
 smile in return, while she put out her hand in 
 silence; and as she seated herself, all the while 
 hearing the voice, she felt some reflux of energy 
 in the confused sense that the truth could not 
 be anything that she dreaded. Mirah drew her 
 chair very near, as if she felt that the sound 
 of the conversation should be subdued, and 
 looked at her visitor with placid expectation, 
 while Gwendolen began in a low tone, with 
 something that seemed like bashfulness, — 
 
 " Perhaps you wonder to see me, — perhaps 
 I ought to have written, — but I wished to make 
 a particular request." 
 
 " I am glad to see you instead of having a 
 letter," said Mirah, wondering at the changed 
 expression and manner of the " Vandyke duch- 
 ess," as Hans had taught her to call Gwendolen. 
 The rich colour and the calmness of her own 
 face were in strong contrast with the pale agi- 
 tated beauty under the plumed hat. 
 
 " I thought," Gwendolen went on — "at least, 
 I hoped you would not object to sing at our 
 house on the 4th, — in the evening, — at a party 
 like Lady Brackenshaw's. I should be so much 
 obliged." 
 
 " I shall be very happy to sing for you. At 
 ten? " said Mirah, while Gwendolen seemed to 
 get more instead of less embarrassed. 
 
 " At ten, please," she answered; then paused, 
 
 VOL. XIV — 5 
 
66 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 and felt that she had nothing more to say. She 
 could not go. It was impossible to rise and 
 say good-by. Deronda's voice was in her ears. 
 She must say it — she could contrive no other 
 sentence, — 
 
 " Mr. Deronda is in the next room." 
 
 " Yes," said Mirah, in her former tone. " He 
 is reading Hebrew with my brother." 
 
 " You have a brother? " said Gwendolen, who 
 had heard this from Lady Mallinger, but had 
 not minded it then. 
 
 " Yes, a dear brother who is ill — consump- 
 tive; and Mr. Deronda is the best of friends 
 to him, as he has been to me," said Mirah, with 
 the impulse that will not let us pass the mention 
 of a precious person indifferently. 
 
 " Tell me," said Gwendolen, putting her hand 
 on Mirah's, and speaking hardly above a whis- 
 per, — " tell me — tell me the truth. You are 
 sure he is quite good. You know no evil of 
 him. Any evil that people say of him is false." 
 
 Could the proud-spirited woman have behaved 
 more like a child? But the strange words pene- 
 trated Mirah with nothing but a sense of solem- 
 nity and indignation. With a sudden light in 
 her eyes and a tremor in her voice, she said, — 
 
 "Who are the people that say evil of him? 
 I would not believe any evil of him, if an angel 
 came to tell it me. He found me when I was 
 so miserable — I was going to drown myself — 
 I looked so poor and forsaken — you would have 
 thought I was a beggar by the wayside. And 
 he treated me as if I had been a king's daughter. 
 He took me to the best of women. He found 
 my brother for me. And he honours my brother 
 
REVELATIONS 67 
 
 — though he too was poor — oh, almost as poor 
 as he could be. And my brother honours him. 
 That is no light thing to say " — here Mirah's 
 tone changed to one of proud emphasis, and she 
 shook her head backward — " for my brother is 
 very learned and great-minded. And Mr. De- 
 ronda says there are few men equal to him." 
 Some Jewish defiance had flamed into her in- 
 dignant gratitude, and her anger could not help 
 including Gwendolen, since she seemed to have 
 doubted Deronda's goodness. 
 
 But Gwendolen was like one parched with 
 thirst, drinking the fresh water that spreads 
 through the frame as a sufficient bliss. She did 
 not notice that Mirah was angry with her; she 
 was not distinctly conscious of anything but of 
 the penetrating sense that Deronda and his life 
 were no more like her husband's conception than 
 the morning in the horizon was like the morn- 
 ing mixed with street gas: even Mirah's words 
 seemed to melt into the indefiniteness of her 
 relief. She could hardly have repeated them, 
 or said how her whole state of feeling was 
 changed. She pressed Mirah's hand, and said, 
 " Thank you, thank you," in a hurried whisper, 
 then rose, and added, with only a hazy con- 
 sciousness, " I must go, I shall see you — on 
 the 4th — I am so much obliged " — bowing 
 herself out automatically; while Mirah, open- 
 ing the door for her, wondered at what seemed 
 a sudden retreat into chill loftiness. 
 
 Gwendolen, indeed, had no feeling to spare 
 in any effusiveness towards the creature who 
 had brought her relief. The passionate need 
 of contradiction to Grandcourt's estimate of 
 
68 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Deronda, a need which had blunted her sensi- 
 bility to everything else, was no sooner satisfied 
 than she wanted to be gone: she began to be 
 aware that she was out of place, and to dread 
 Deronda's seeing her. And once in the car- 
 riage again, she had the vision of what awaited 
 her at home. When she drew up before the 
 door in Grosvenor Square, her husband was 
 arriving with a cigar between his fingers. He 
 threw it away and handed her out, accompany- 
 ing her upstairs. She turned into the drawing- 
 room, lest he should follow her farther and give 
 her no place to retreat to; then sat down with 
 a weary air, taking off her gloves, rubbing her 
 hand over her forehead, and making his pres- 
 ence as much of a cipher as possible. But he 
 sat too, and not far from her, — just in front, 
 where to avoid looking at him must have the 
 emphasis of effort. 
 
 " May I ask where you have been at this 
 extraordinary hour? " said Grandcourt. 
 
 " Oh, yes ; I have been to Miss Lapidoth's to 
 ask her to come and sing for us," said Gwen- 
 dolen, laying her gloves on the little table beside 
 her, and looking down at them. 
 
 " And to ask her about her relations with 
 Deronda?" said Grandcourt, with the coldest 
 possible sneer in his low voice, which in poor 
 Gwendolen's ear was diabolical. 
 
 For the first time since their marriage she 
 flashed out upon him without inward check. 
 Turning her eyes full on his, she said in a bit- 
 ing tone, — 
 
 " Yes; and what you said is false, — a low, 
 wicked falsehood." 
 
REVELATIONS 69 
 
 "She told you so, — did she?" returned 
 Grandcourt, with a more thoroughly distilled 
 sneer. 
 
 Gwendolen was mute. The daring anger 
 within her was turned into the rage of dumb- 
 ness. What reasons for her belief could she 
 give? All the reasons that seemed so strong 
 and living within her, — she saw them suffo- 
 cated and shrivelled up under her husband's 
 breath. There was no proof to give, but her 
 own impression, which would seem to him her 
 own folly. She turned her head quickly away 
 from him, and looked angrily towards the end 
 of the room; she would have risen, but he was 
 in her way. 
 
 Grandcourt saw his advantage. " It 's of 
 no consequence so far as her singing goes," he 
 said, in his superficial drawl. " You can have 
 her to sing, if you like." Then after a pause, 
 he added in his lowest imperious tone: "But 
 you will please to observe that you are not to 
 go near that house again. As my wife, you 
 must take my word about what is proper for 
 you. When you undertook to be Mrs. Grand- 
 court, you undertook not to make a fool of 
 yourself. You have been making a fool of your- 
 self this morning; and if you were to go on 
 as you have begun, you might soon get your- 
 self talked of at the clubs in a way you would 
 not like. What do you know about the world? 
 You have married me, and must be guided by 
 my opinion." 
 
 Every slow sentence of that speech had a ter- 
 rific mastery in it for Gwendolen's nature. If 
 the low tones had come from a physician telling 
 
70 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her that her symptoms were those of a fatal 
 disease, and prognosticating its course, she could 
 not have been more helpless against the argu- 
 ment that lay in it. But she was permitted to 
 move now, and her husband never again made 
 any reference to what had occurred this morn- 
 ing. He knew the force of his own words. If 
 this white-handed man with the perpendicular 
 profile had been sent to govern a difficult colony, 
 he might have won reputation among his con- 
 temporaries. He had certainly ability, would 
 have understood that it was safer to exterminate 
 than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would 
 not have flinched from making things safe in 
 that way. 
 
 Gwendolen did not, for all this, part with her 
 recovered faith; rather, she kept it with a more 
 anxious tenacity, as a Protestant of old kept his 
 Bible hidden or a Catholic his crucifix, accord- 
 ing to the side favoured by the civil arm; and 
 it was characteristic of her that apart from the 
 impression gained concerning Deronda in that 
 visit, her imagination was little occupied with 
 Mirah or the eulogized brother. The one result 
 established for her was, that Deronda had acted 
 simply as a generous benefactor, and the phrase 
 " reading Hebrew " had fleeted unimpressively 
 across her sense of hearing, as a stray stork 
 might have made its peculiar flight across her 
 landscape without rousing any surprised reflec- 
 tion on its natural history. 
 
 But the issue of that visit, as it regarded her 
 husband, took a strongly active part in the 
 process which made an habitual conflict within 
 her, and was the cause of some external change 
 
REVELATIONS 71 
 
 perhaps not observed by any one except De- 
 ronda. As the -weeks went on bringing occa- 
 sional transient interviews with her, he thought 
 that he perceived in her an intensifying of her 
 superficial hardness and resolute display, which 
 made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more 
 marked and disturbing to him. 
 
 In fact, she was undergoing a sort of disci- 
 pline for the refractory which, as little as pos- 
 sible like conversion, bends half the self with a 
 terrible strain, and exasperates the unwilling- 
 ness of the other half. Grandcourt had an active 
 divination rather than discernment of refrac- 
 toriness in her, and what had happened about 
 Mirah quickened his suspicion that there was an 
 increase of it dependent on the occasions when 
 she happened to see Deronda: there was some 
 confounded nonsense " between them: he did 
 not imagine it exactly as flirtation, and his 
 imagination in other branches was rather re- 
 stricted ; but it was nonsense that evidently kept 
 up a kind of simmering in her mind, — an in- 
 ward action which might become disagreeably 
 outward. Husbands in the old time are known 
 to have suffered from a threatening devoutness 
 in their wives, presenting itself first indistinctly 
 as oddity, and ending in that mild form of luna- 
 tic asylum, a nunnery : Grandcourt had a vague 
 perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen 
 which the unity between them in his views of 
 marriage required him peremptorily to check. 
 Among the means he chose, one was peculiar, 
 and was less ably calculated than the speeches 
 we have just heard. 
 
 He determined that she should know the main 
 
72 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 purport of the will he was making, but he could 
 not communicate this himself, because it involved 
 the fact of his relation to Mrs. Glasher and her 
 children; and that there should be any overt 
 recognition of this between Gwendolen and him- 
 self was supremely repugnant to him. Like all 
 proud, closely wrapped natures, he shrank from 
 explicitness and detail, even on trivialities, if 
 they were personal: a valet must maintain a 
 strict reserve with him on the subject of shoes 
 and stockings. And clashing was intolerable to 
 him: his habitual want was to put collision out 
 of the question by the quiet massive pressure of 
 his rule. But he wished Gwendolen to know 
 that before he made her an offer it was no secret 
 to him that she was aware of his relations with 
 Lydia, her previous knowledge being the apol- 
 ogy for bringing the subject before her now. 
 Some men in his place might have thought of 
 writing what he wanted her to know, in the form 
 of a letter. But Grandcourt hated writing: 
 even writing a note was a bore to him, and he 
 had long been accustomed to have all his writing 
 done by Lush. We know that there are persons 
 who will forego their own obvious interest rather 
 than do anything so disagreeable as to write let- 
 ters; and it is not probable that these imperfect 
 utilitarians would rush into manuscript and syn- 
 tax on a difficult subject in order to save an- 
 other's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even 
 occur that he should, would, or could write to 
 Gwendolen the information in question; and the 
 only medium of communication he could use was 
 Lush, who, to his mind, was as much of an im- 
 plement as pen and paper. But here too Grand- 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 73 
 
 court had his reserves, and would not have 
 uttered a word likely to encourage Lush in an 
 impudent sympathy with any supposed griev- 
 ance in a marriage which had been discom- 
 mended by him. Who that has a confidant es- 
 capes believing too little in his penetration, and 
 too much in his discretion? Grandcourt had 
 always allowed Lush to know his external affairs 
 indiscriminately, irregularities, debts, want of 
 ready money; he had only used discrimination 
 about what he would allow his confidant to say 
 to him; and he had been so accustomed to this 
 human tool, that the having him at call in Lon- 
 don was a recovery of lost ease. It followed that 
 Lush knew all the provisions of the will more 
 exactly than they were known to the testator 
 himself. 
 
 Grandcourt did not doubt that Gwendolen, 
 since she was a woman who could put two and 
 two together, knew or suspected Lush to be the 
 contriver of her interview with Lydia, and that 
 this was the reason why her first request was for 
 his banishment. But the bent of a woman's 
 inferences on mixed subjects which excite mixed 
 passions is not determined by her capacity for 
 simple addition; and here Grandcourt lacked 
 the only organ of thinking that could have saved 
 him from mistake, — namely, some experience 
 of the mixed passions concerned. He had cor- 
 rectly divined one half of Gwendolen's dread, — 
 all that related to her personal pride, and her 
 perception that his will must conquer hers; but 
 the remorseful half, even if he had known of her 
 broken promise, was as much out of his imagi- 
 nation as the other side of the moon. What he 
 
74 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 believed her to feel about Lydia was solely a 
 tongue-tied jealousy, and what he believed 
 Lydia to have written with the jewels was the 
 fact that she had once been used to wearing 
 them, with other amenities such as he imputed 
 to the intercourse of jealous women. He had 
 the triumphant certainty that he could aggra- 
 vate the jealousy and yet smite it with a more 
 absolute dumbness. His object was to engage 
 all his wife's egoism on the same side as his own, 
 and in his employment of Lush he did not in- 
 tend an insult to her: she ought to understand 
 that he was the only possible envoy. Grand- 
 court's view of things was considerably fenced 
 in by his general sense that what suited him 
 others must put up with. There is no escaping 
 the fact that want of sympathy condemns us 
 to a corresponding stupidity. Mephistopheles 
 thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his 
 own plots, would inevitably make blunders. 
 
 One morning he went to Gwendolen in the 
 boudoir beyond the back drawing-room, hat and 
 gloves in hand, and said with his best-tempered, 
 most persuasive drawl, standing before her and 
 looking down on her as she sat with a book on 
 her lap, — 
 
 "A — Gwendolen, there 's some business 
 about property to be explained. I have told 
 Lush to come and explain it to you. He knows 
 all about these things. I am going out. He 
 can come up now. He 's the only person who 
 can explain. I suppose you '11 not mind." 
 
 " You know that I do mind," said Gwendo- 
 len, angrily, starting up. " I shall not see him." 
 She showed the intention to dart away to the 
 
REVELATIONS 75 
 
 door. Grandcourt was before her, with his back 
 towards it. He was prepared for her anger, and 
 showed none in return, saying, with the same 
 sort of remonstrant tone that he might have 
 used about an objection to dining out, — 
 . " It 's no use making a fuss. There are plenty 
 of brutes in the world that one has to talk to. 
 People with any savoir vivre don't make a fuss 
 about such things. Some business must be done. 
 You don't expect agreeable people to do it. If 
 I employ Lush, the proper thing for you is to 
 take it as a matter of course. Not to make a 
 fuss about it. Not to toss your head and bite 
 your lips about people of that sort." 
 
 The drawling and the pauses with which this 
 speech was uttered gave time for croAvding re- 
 flections in Gwendolen, quelling her resistance. 
 What was there to be told her about property? 
 This word had certain dominant associations for 
 her, first with her mother, then with Mrs. Glasher 
 and her children. What would be the use if 
 she refused to see Lush? Could she ask Grand- 
 court to tell her himself? That might be intol- 
 erable, even if he consented, which it was certain 
 he would not, if he had made up his mind to 
 the contrary. The humiliation of standing an 
 obvious prisoner, with her husband barring the 
 door, was not to be borne any longer, and she 
 turned away to lean against a cabinet, while 
 Grandcourt again moved towards her. 
 
 " I have arranged with Lush to come up now, 
 while I am out," he said, after a long organ 
 stop, during which Gwendolen made no sign* 
 " Shall I tell him he may come? " 
 
 Yet another pause before she could say 
 
76 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Yes " — her face turned obliquely and her 
 eyes cast down. 
 
 " I shall come back in time to ride, if you like 
 to get ready," said Grandcourt. No answer. 
 " She is in a desperate rage," thought he. But 
 the rage was silent, and therefore not disagree- 
 able to him. It followed that he turned her 
 chin and kissed her, while she still kept her 
 eyelids down, and she did not move them until 
 he was on the other side of the door. 
 
 What was she to do? Search where she would 
 in her consciousness, she found no plea to justify 
 a plaint. Any romantic illusions she had had in 
 marrying this man had turned on her power of 
 using him as she liked. He was using her as 
 he hked. 
 
 She sat awaiting the announcement of Lush 
 as a sort of searing operation that she had to 
 go through. The facts that galled her gathered 
 a burning power when she thought of their 
 lying in his mind. It was all a part of that 
 new gambling in which the losing was not simply 
 a minus, but a terrible plus that had never en- 
 tered into her reckoning. 
 
 Lush was neither quite pleased nor quite dis- 
 pleased with his task. Grandcourt had said to 
 him by way of conclusion, " Don't make your- 
 self more disagreeable than nature obliges 
 
 you." 
 
 " That depends," thought Lush. But he said, 
 " I will write a brief abstract for Mrs. Grand- 
 court to read." He did not suggest that he 
 should make the whole communication in writ- 
 ing, which was a proof that the interview did 
 not wholly displease him. 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 77 
 
 Some provision was being made for himself 
 in the will, and he had no reason to be in a bad 
 humour, even if a bad humour had been com- 
 mon with him. He was perfectly convinced 
 that he had penetrated all the secrets of the 
 situation; but he had no diabolic delight in it. 
 He had only the small movements of gratified 
 self -loving resentment in discerning that this 
 marriage fulfilled his own foresight in not being 
 as satisfactory as the supercilious young lady 
 had expected it to be, and as Grandcourt wished 
 to feign that it was. He had no persistent spite 
 much stronger than what gives the seasoning 
 of ordinary scandal to those who repeat it and 
 exaggerate it by their conjectures. With no 
 active compassion or good- will, he had just as 
 little active malevolence, being chiefly occupied 
 in liking his particular pleasures, and not dis- 
 liking anything but what hindered those pleas- 
 ures, — everything else ranking with the last 
 murder and the last opera huff a, under the head 
 of things to talk about. Nevertheless, he was 
 not indifferent to the prospect of being treated 
 uncivilly by a beautiful woman, or to the counter- 
 balancing fact that his present commission put 
 into his hands an official power of humiliating 
 her. He did not mean to use it needlessly; but 
 there are some persons so gifted in relation to 
 us that their " How do you do? " seems charged 
 with offence. 
 
 By the time that Mr. Lush was announced, 
 Gwendolen had braced herself to a bitter resolve 
 that he should not witness the slightest betrayal 
 of her feeling, whatever he might have to tell. 
 She invited him to sit down with stately quietude. 
 
78 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 After all, what was this man to her? He was 
 not in the least like her husband. Her power of 
 hating a coarse, familiar-mannered man, with 
 clumsy hands, was now relaxed by the intensity 
 with which she hated his contrast. 
 
 He held a small paper folded in his hand while 
 he spoke. 
 
 " I need hardly say that I should not have 
 presented myself if Mr. Grandcourt had not 
 expressed a strong wish to that effect, — as no 
 doubt he has mentioned to you." 
 
 From some voices that speech might have 
 sounded entirely reverential, and even timidly 
 apologetic. Lush had no intention to the con- 
 trary, but to Gwendolen's ear his words had as 
 much insolence in them as his prominent eyes, 
 and the pronoun " you " was too familiar. He 
 ought to have addressed the folding-screen, and 
 spoken of her as Mrs. Grandcourt. She gave 
 the smallest sign of a bow, and Lush went on, 
 with a little awkwardness, getting entangled in 
 what is elegantly called tautology : — 
 
 " My having been in Mr. Grandcourt's con- 
 fidence for fifteen years or more — since he was 
 a youth, in fact — of course gives me a peculiar 
 position. He can speak to me of affairs that 
 he could not mention to any one else; and, in 
 fact, he could not have employed any one else 
 in this affair. I have accepted the task out of 
 friendship for him. Which is my apology for 
 accepting the task, — if you would have pre- 
 ferred, some one else." 
 
 He paused, but she made no sign, and Lush, 
 to give himself a countenance in an apology 
 which met no acceptance, opened the folded 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 79 
 
 paper, and looked at it vaguely before he began 
 to speak again. 
 
 " This paper contains some information about 
 Mr. Grandcourt's will, an abstract of a part he 
 wished you to know, — if you '11 be good enough 
 to cast your eyes over it. But there is something 
 I had to say by way of introduction, — which 
 I hope you '11 pardon me for, if it 's not quite 
 agreeable." Lush found that he was behaving 
 better than he had expected, and had no idea how 
 insulting he made himself with his " not quite 
 agreeable." 
 
 "Say what you have to say without apologiz- 
 ing, please," said Gwendolen, with the air she 
 might have bestowed on a dog-stealer come to 
 claim a reward for finding the dog he had stolen. 
 
 " I have only to remind you of something that 
 occurred before your engagement to Mr. Grand- 
 court," said Lush, not without the rise of some 
 willing insolence in exchange for her scorn. 
 " You met a lady in Cardell Chase, if you re- 
 member, who spoke to you of her position with 
 regard to Mr. Grandcourt. She had children 
 with her, — one a very fine boy." 
 
 Gwendolen's lips were almost as pale as her 
 cheeks : her passion had no weapons, — words 
 were no better than chips. This man's speech 
 was like a sharp knife-edge drawn across her 
 skin; but even her indignation at the employ- 
 ment of Lush was getting merged in a crowd of 
 other feelings, dim and alarming as a crowd of 
 ghosts. 
 
 " Mr. Grandcourt was aware that you were 
 acquainted with this unfortunate affair before- 
 hand, and he thinks it only right that his posi- 
 
80 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tion and intentions should be made quite clear to 
 you. It is an affair of property and prospects; 
 and if there were any objection you had to make, 
 if you would mention it to me, — it is a subject 
 which of course he would rather not speak about 
 himself, — if you will be good enough just to 
 read this." With the last words Lush rose and 
 presented the paper to her. 
 
 When Gwendolen resolved that she would 
 betray no feeling in the presence of this man, 
 she had not prepared herself to hear that her hus- 
 band knew the silent consciousness, the silently 
 accepted terms on which she had married him. 
 She dared not raise her hand to take the paper, 
 lest it should visibly tremble. For a moment 
 Lush stood holding it towards her, and she felt 
 his gaze on her as ignominy, before she could say 
 even with low-toned haughtiness, — 
 
 " Lay it on the table. And go into the next 
 room, please." 
 
 Lush obeyed, thinking, as he took an easy- 
 chair in the back drawing-room, " My lady 
 winces considerably. She didn't know what 
 would be the charge for that superfine article, 
 Henleigh Grandcourt." But it seemed to him 
 that a penniless girl had done better than she 
 had any right to expect and that she had been 
 uncommonly knowing for her years and oppor- 
 tunities: her words to Lydia meant nothing, 
 and her running away had probably been part 
 of her adroitness. It had turned out a master- 
 stroke. 
 
 Meanwhile Gwendolen was rallying her nerves 
 to the reading of the paper. She must read it. 
 Her whole being, — pride, longing for rebellion. 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 81 
 
 dreams of freedom, remorseful conscience, dread 
 of fresh visitation, — all made one need to know 
 what the paper contained. But at first it was not 
 easy to take in the meaning of the words. When 
 she had succeeded, she found that in the case of 
 there being no son as issue of her marriage, 
 Grandcourt had made the small Henleigh his 
 heir: that was all she cared to extract from the 
 paper with any distinctness. The other state- 
 ments as to what provision would be made for 
 her in the same case, she hurried over, getting 
 only a confused perception of thousands and 
 Gadsmere. It was enough. She could dismiss 
 the man in the next room with the defiant energy 
 which had revived in her at the idea that this 
 question of property and inheritance was meant 
 as a finish to her humiliations and her thraldom. 
 
 She thrust the paper between the leaves of 
 her book, which she took in her hand, and walked 
 with her stateliest air into the next room, where 
 Lush immediately rose, awaiting her approach. 
 When she was four yards from him, it was 
 hardly an instant that she paused to say in a high 
 tone, while she swept him with her eyelashes, — 
 
 " Tell Mr. Grandcourt that his arrangements 
 are just what I desired," — passing on without 
 haste, and leaving Lush time to mingle some 
 admiration of her graceful back with that half- 
 amused sense of her spirit and impertinence, 
 which he expressed by raising his eyebrows and 
 just thrusting his tongue between his teeth. He 
 really did not want her to be worse punished, and 
 he was glad to think that it was time to go and 
 lunch at the club, where he meant to have a lob- 
 ster salad. 
 
 VOL. XIV — 6 
 
82 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 What did Gwendolen look forward to ? When 
 her husband returned he found her equipped in 
 her riding-dress, ready to ride out with him. She 
 was not again going to be hysterical, or take to 
 her bed and say she was ill. That was the im- 
 plicit resolve adjusting her muscles before she 
 could have framed it in words, as she walked out 
 of the room, leaving Lush behind her. She was 
 going to act in the spirit of her message, and not 
 to give herself time to reflect. She rang the bell 
 for her maid, and went with the usual care 
 through her change of toilet. Doubtless her 
 husband had meant to produce a great effect on 
 her : by and by perhaps she would let him see an 
 effect the very opposite of what he intended; 
 but at present all that she could show was a de- 
 fiant satisfaction in what had been presumed to 
 be disagreeable. It came as an instinct rather 
 than a thought, that to show any sign which 
 could be interpreted as jealousy, when she had 
 just been insultingly reminded that the condi- 
 tions were what she had accepted with her eyes 
 open, would be the worst self-humiliation. She 
 said to herself that she had not time to-day to 
 be clear about her future actions; all she could 
 be clear about was that she would match her 
 husband in ignoring any ground for excitement. 
 She not only rode, but went out with him to dine, 
 contributing nothing to alter their mutual man- 
 ner, which was never that of rapid interchange 
 in discourse; and curiously enough she rejected 
 a handkerchief on which her maid had by mis- 
 take put the wrong scent, — a scent that Grand- 
 court had once objected to. Gwendolen would 
 not have liked to be an object of disgust to this 
 
REVELATIONS 83 
 
 husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust 
 to be on her side. 
 
 But to defer thought in tliis way was some- 
 thing like trying to talk down the singing in her 
 own ears. The thought that is bound up with our 
 passion is as penetrative as air, — everything is 
 porous to it; bows, smiles, conversation, rep- 
 artee, are mere honeycombs where such thought 
 rushes freely, not always with a taste of honey. 
 And without shutting herself up in any solitude, 
 Gwendolen seemed at the end of nine or ten 
 hours to have gone through a labyrinth of reflec- 
 tion, in which already the same succession of 
 prospects had been repeated, the same fallacious 
 outlets rejected, the same shrinking from the 
 necessities of every course. Already she was 
 undergoing some hardening effect from feeling 
 that she was under eyes which saw her past 
 actions solely in the light of her lowest motives. 
 She lived back in the scenes of her courtship, with 
 the new bitter consciousness of what had been in 
 Grandcourt's mind, — certain now, with her 
 present experience of him, that he had had a 
 peculiar triumph in conquering her dumb repug- 
 nance, and that ever since their marriage he had 
 had a cold exultation in knowing her fancied 
 secret. Her imagination exaggerated every 
 tyrannical impulse he was capable of. "I will 
 insist on being separated from him " — was her 
 first darting determination ; then, " I will leave 
 him, whether he consents or not. If this boy 
 becomes his heir, I have made an atonement." 
 But neither in darkness nor in daylight could 
 she imagine the scenes which must carry out 
 those determinations with the courage to feel 
 
84 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 them endurable. How could she run away to her 
 own family, — carry distress among them, and 
 render herself an object of scandal in the society 
 she had left behind her? What future lay before 
 her as Mrs. Grandcourt gone back to her mother, 
 who would be made destitute again by the rup- 
 ture of the marriage for which one chief excuse 
 had been that it had brought that mother a 
 maintenance? She had lately been seeing her 
 uncle and Anna in London, and though she had 
 been saved from any difficulty about inviting 
 them to stay in Grosvenor Square by their wish 
 to be with Rex, who would not risk a meeting 
 with her, the transient visit she had had from 
 them helped now in giving stronger colour to the 
 picture of what it would be for her to take refuge 
 in her own family. What could she say to jus- 
 tify her flight? Her uncle would tell her to go 
 back. Her mother would cry. Her aunt and 
 Anna would look at her with wondering alarm. 
 Her husband would have power to compel her. 
 She had absolutely nothing that she could allege 
 against him in judicious or judicial ears. And 
 to "insist on separation!" That was an easy 
 combination of words; but considered as an 
 action to be executed against Grandcourt, it 
 would be about as practicable as to give him a 
 pliant disposition and a dread of other people's 
 unwillingness. How was she to begin? What 
 was she to say that would not be a condemnation 
 of herself? " If I am to have misery anyhow," 
 was the bitter refrain of her rebellious dreams, 
 " I had better have the misery that I can keep to 
 myself." Moreover, her capability of rectitude 
 told her again and again that she had no right 
 
REVELATIONS 85 
 
 to complain of her contract or to withdraw 
 from it. 
 
 And always among the images that drove her 
 back to submission was Deronda. The idea of 
 herself separated from her husband gave De- 
 ronda a changed, perturbing, painful place in 
 her consciousness : instinctively she felt that the 
 separation would be from him too, and in the 
 prospective vision of herself as a solitary, dubi- 
 ously regarded woman, she felt some tingling 
 bashfulness at the remembrance of her behaviour 
 towards him. The association of Deronda with 
 a dubious position for herself was intolerable. 
 And what would he say if he knew everything? 
 Probably that she ought to bear what she had 
 brought on herself, unless she were sure that she 
 could make herself a better woman by taking 
 any other course. And what sort of woman was 
 she to be, — solitary, sickened of life, looked at 
 with a suspicious kind of pity? — even if she 
 could dream of success in getting that dreary 
 freedom. Mrs. Grandcourt " run away " would 
 be a more pitiable creature than Gwendolen 
 Harleth condemned to teach the bishop's 
 daughters, and to be inspected by Mrs. 
 Mompert. 
 
 One characteristic trait in her conduct is worth 
 mentioning. She would not look a second time 
 at the paper Lush had given her; and before 
 ringing for her maid she locked it up in a travel- 
 ling-desk which was at hand, proudly resolved 
 against curiosity about what was allotted to 
 herself in connection with Gadsmere, — feel- 
 ing herself branded in the minds of her husband 
 and his confidant with the meanness that would 
 
86 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 accept marriage and wealth on any conditions, 
 however dishonourable and humiliating. 
 
 Day after day the same pattern of thinking 
 was repeated. There came nothing to change 
 the situation, — no new elements in the sketch, 
 — only a recurrence which engraved it. The 
 May weeks went on into June, and still Mrs. 
 Grandcourt was outwardly in the same place, 
 presenting herself as she was expected to do in 
 the accustomed scenes, with the accustomed 
 grace, beauty, and costume ; from church at one 
 end of the week, through all the scale of desirable 
 receptions, to opera at the other. Church was 
 not markedly distinguished in her mind from 
 the other forms of self -presentation, for marriage 
 had included no instruction that enabled her to 
 connect liturgy and sermon with any larger or- 
 der of the world than that of unexplained and 
 perhaps inexplicable social fashions. While a 
 laudable zeal was labouring to carry the light 
 of spiritual law up the alleys where law is chiefly 
 known as the policeman, the brilliant Mrs. 
 Grandcourt, condescending a little to a fashion- 
 able Rector and conscious of a feminine advan- 
 tage over a learned Dean, was, so far as pastoral 
 care and religious fellowship were concerned, in 
 as complete a solitude as a man in a lighthouse. 
 
 Can we wonder at the practical submission 
 which hid her constructive rebellion? The com- 
 bination is common enough, as we know from 
 the number of persons who make us aware of 
 it in their own case by a clamorous unwearied 
 statement of the reasons against their submitting 
 to a situation which, on inquiry, we discover to 
 be the least disagreeable within their reach. 
 
REVELATIONS 87 
 
 Poor Gwendolen had both too much and too 
 httle mental power and dignity to make herself 
 exceptional. No wonder that Deronda now 
 marked some hardening in a look and manner 
 which were schooled daily to the suppression of 
 feeling. 
 
 For example. One morning, riding in Rotten 
 Row with Grandcourt by her side, she saw stand- 
 ing against the railing at the turn, just facing 
 them, a dark-eyed lady with a little girl and a 
 blond boy, whom she at once recognized as the 
 beings in all the world the most painful for her 
 to behold. She and Grandcourt had just slack- 
 ened their pace to a walk ; he being on the outer 
 side was the nearer to the unwelcome vision, and 
 Gwendolen had not presence of mind to do any- 
 thing but glance away from the dark eyes that 
 met hers piercingly towards Grandcourt, who 
 wheeled past the group with an unmoved face, 
 giving no sign of recognition. 
 
 Immediately she felt a rising rage against him 
 mingling with her shame for herself, and the 
 words, " You might at least have raised your hat 
 to her," flew impetuously to her lips, — but did 
 not pass them. If as her husband, in her com- 
 pany, he chose to ignore these creatures whom 
 she herself had excluded from the place she was 
 filling, how could she be the person to reproach 
 him? She was dumb. 
 
 It was not chance, but her own design, that 
 had brought Mrs. Glasher there with her boy. 
 She had come to town under the pretext of mak- 
 ing purchases, — really wanting educational 
 apparatus for the children, — and had had inter- 
 views with Lush in which he had not refused to 
 
88 DANIEL DEItONDA 
 
 soothe her uneasy mind by representing the 
 probabilities as all on the side of her ultimate 
 triumph. Let her keep quiet, and she might 
 live to see the marriage dissolve itself in one way 
 or other, — Lush hinted at several ways, — leav- 
 ing the succession assured to her boy. She had 
 had an interview with Grandcourt too, who had 
 as usual told her to behave like a reasonable 
 woman, and threatened punishment if she were 
 troublesome; but had also, as usual, vindicated 
 himself from any wish to be stingy, the money 
 he was receiving from Sir Hugo on account of 
 Diplow encouraging his disposition to be lavish. 
 Lydia, feeding on the probabilities in her fa- 
 vour, devoured her helpless wrath along with that 
 pleasanter nourishment; but she could not let 
 her discretion go entirely without the reward of 
 making a Medusa-apparition before Gwendolen, 
 vindictiveness and jealousy finding relief in an 
 outlet of venom, though it were as futile as that 
 of a viper already flung to the other side of the 
 hedge. Hence each day, after finding out from 
 Lush the likely time for Gwendolen to be riding, 
 she had watched at that post, daring Grandcourt 
 so far. Why should she not take little Hen- 
 leigh into the Park? 
 
 The Medusa-apparition was made effective 
 beyond Lydia 's conception by the shock it gave 
 Gwendolen actually to see Grandcourt ignor- 
 ing this woman who had once been the nearest 
 in the world to him, along with the children she 
 had borne him. And all the while the dark 
 shadow thus cast on the lot of a woman destitute 
 of acknowledged social dignity spread itself over 
 her visions of a future that might be her own, 
 
REVELATIONS 89 
 
 and made part of her dread on her own behalf. 
 She shrank all the more from any lonely action. 
 What possible release could there be for her 
 from this hated vantage-ground, which yet she 
 dared not quit, any more than if fire had been 
 raining outside it? What release, but death? 
 Not her own death. Gwendolen was not a, 
 woman who could easily think of her own death 
 as a near reality, or front for herself the dark 
 entrance on the untried and invisible. It seemed 
 more possible that Grandcourt should die, — and 
 yet not likely. The power of tyranny in him 
 seemed a power of living in the presence of any 
 wish that he should die. The thought that his 
 death was the only possible deliverance for her 
 was one with the thought that deliverance would 
 never come, — the double deliverance from the 
 injury with which other beings might reproach 
 her and from the yoke she had brought on her 
 own neck. No ! she foresaw him always living, 
 and her own life dominated by him; the 
 " always " of her young experience not stretch- 
 ing beyond the few immediate years that seemed 
 immeasurably long with her passionate weari- 
 ness. The thought of his dying would not sub- 
 sist: it turned as with a dream-change into the 
 terror that she should die with his throttling 
 fingers on her neck avenging that thought. 
 Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, making 
 no break in her more acknowledged conscious- 
 ness and finding no obstruction in it : dark rays 
 doing their work invisibly in the broad light. 
 
 Only an evening or two after that encounter 
 in the Park, there was a grand concert at Kles- 
 mer's, who was living rather magnificently now 
 
90 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 in one of the large houses in Grosvenor Place, 
 a patron and prince among musical professors. 
 Gwendolen had looked forward to this occasion 
 as one on which she was sure to meet Deronda, 
 and she had been meditating how to put a ques- 
 tion to him which, without containing a word 
 that she would feel a dislike to utter, would yet 
 be explicit enough for him to understand it. 
 The struggle of opposite feelings would not let 
 her abide by her instinct that the very idea of 
 Deronda's relation to her was a discouragement 
 to any desperate step towards freedom. The 
 next wave of emotion was a longing for some 
 word of his to enforce a resolve. The fact that 
 her opportunities of conversation with him had 
 always to be snatched in the doubtful privacy 
 of large parties, caused her to live through them 
 many times beforehand, imagining how they 
 would take place and what she would say. The 
 irritation was proportionate when no opportun- 
 ity came ; and this evening at Klesmer's she in- 
 cluded Deronda in her anger, because he looked 
 as calm as possible at a distance from her while 
 she was in danger of betraying her impatience 
 to every one who spoke to her. She found her 
 only safety in a chill haughtiness which made 
 Mr. Vandernoodt remark that Mrs. Grandcourt 
 was becoming a perfect match for her husband. 
 When at last the chances of the evening brought 
 Deronda near her. Sir Hugo and Mrs. Ray- 
 mond were close by and could hear every word 
 she said. No matter : her husband was not near, 
 and her irritation passed without check into a 
 fit of daring which restored the security of her 
 self-possession. Deronda was there at last, and 
 
REVELATIONS 91 
 
 she would compel him to do what she pleased. 
 Already and without effort rather queenly in 
 her air as she stood in her white lace and green 
 leaves, she threw a royal permissiveness into her 
 way of saying, " I wish you would come and 
 see me to-morrow between five and six, Mr. 
 Deronda." 
 
 There could be but one answer at that mo- 
 ment: " Certainly," with a tone of obedience. 
 
 Afterwards it occurred to Deronda that he 
 would write a note to excuse himself. He had 
 always avoided making a call at Grandcourt's. 
 But he could not persuade himself to any step 
 that might hurt her, and whether his excuse were 
 taken for indifference or for the affectation of 
 indifference, it would be equally wounding. He 
 kept his promise. Gwendolen had declined to 
 ride out on the plea of not feeling well enough, 
 having left her refusal to the last moment when 
 the horses were soon to be at the door, — not 
 without alarm lest her husband should say that 
 he too would stay at home. Become almost 
 superstitious about his power of suspicious 
 divination, she had a glancing forethought of 
 what she would do in that case, — namely, 
 have herself denied as not well. But Grand- 
 court accepted her excuse without remark, and 
 rode off. 
 
 Nevertheless, when Gwendolen found herself 
 alone, and had sent down the order that only Mr. 
 Deronda was to be admitted, she began to be 
 alarmed at what she had done, and to feel a 
 growing agitation in the thought that he would 
 soon appear, and she should soon be obliged to 
 speak: not of trivialities, as if she had had no 
 
92 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 serious moth^e in asking him to come; and yet 
 what she had been for hours determining to S9y 
 began to seem impossible. For the first time the 
 impulse of appeal to him was being checked by 
 timidity; and now that it was too late she was 
 shaken by the possibility that he might think her 
 invitation unbecoming. If so, she would have 
 sunk in his esteem. But immediately she re- 
 sisted this intolerable fear as an infection from 
 her husband's way of thinking. That he would 
 say she was making a fool of herself was rather 
 a reason why such a judgment would be remote 
 from Deronda's mind. But that she could not 
 rid herself from this sudden invasion of womanly 
 reticence was manifest in a kind of action which 
 had never occurred to her before. In her strug- 
 gle between agitation and the effort to suppress 
 it, she was walking up and doira the length of 
 two dra^\dng-rooms, where at one end a long mir- 
 ror reflected her in her black dress, chosen in the 
 early morning ^vith a half -admitted reference 
 to this hour. But above this black dress her head 
 on its white pillar of a neck showed to advan- 
 tage. Some consciousness of this made her turn 
 hastily and hurry to the boudoir, where again 
 there was glass, but also, tossed over a chair, 
 a large piece of black lace, which she snatched 
 and tied over her crown of hair so as completely 
 to conceal her neck, and leave only her face look- 
 ing out from the black frame. In this manifest 
 contempt of appearance, she thought it possible 
 to be freer from nervousness ; but the black lace 
 did not take away the uneasiness from her eyes 
 and lips. 
 
 She was standing in the middle of the room 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 93 
 
 when Deronda was announced, and as he ap- 
 proached her she perceived that he too for some 
 reason was not his usual self. She could not have 
 defined the change except by saying that he 
 looked less happy than usual, and appeared to 
 be under some effort in speaking to her. And 
 yet the speaking was the slightest possible. 
 They both said " How do you do? " quite curtly; 
 and Gwendolen, instead of sitting down, moved 
 to a little distance, resting her arms slightly on 
 the tall back of a chair, while Deronda stood 
 where he was, — both feeling it difficult to sa}^ 
 anything more, though the preoccupation in his 
 mind could hardly have been more remote than 
 it was from Gwendolen's conception. She nat- 
 urally saw in his embarrassment some reflec- 
 tion of her own. Forced to speak, she found 
 all her training in concealment and self-com- 
 mand of no use to her, and began with timid 
 awkwardness, — 
 
 " You will wonder why I begged you to come, 
 I wanted to ask you something. You said I was 
 ignorant. That is true. And what can I do but 
 ask you? " 
 
 And at this moment she was feeling it utterly 
 impossible to put the questions she had intended. 
 Something new in her nervous manner roused 
 Deronda's anxiety lest there might be a new 
 crisis. He said with the sadness of affection in 
 his voice, — 
 
 " My only regret is, that I can be of so little 
 use to you." The words and the tone touched a 
 new spring in her, and she went on with more 
 sense of freedom, yet still not saying anything 
 she had designed to say, and beginning to hurry, 
 
94 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 that she might somehow arrive at the right 
 words. 
 
 " I wanted to tell you that I have always been 
 thinking of your advice, but is it any use? — 
 I can't make myself different, because things 
 about me raise bad feelings — and I must go on 
 — I can alter nothing — it is no use." 
 
 She paused an instant, with a consciousness 
 that she was not finding the right words, but be- 
 gan again as hurriedly: " But if I go on, I shall 
 get worse. I want not to get worse. I should 
 like to be what you wish. There are people who 
 are good and enjoy great things, — I know there 
 are. I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if 
 I should get wicked with hating people. I have 
 tried to think that I would go away from every- 
 body. But I can't. There are so many things 
 to hinder me. You think, perhaps, that I don't 
 mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of every- 
 thing. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me 
 what I can do." 
 
 She had forgotten everything but that image 
 of her helpless misery which she was trying to 
 make present to Deronda in broken allusive 
 speech — wishing to convey but not express all 
 her need. Her eyes were tearless, and had a look 
 of smarting in their dilated brilliancy; there was 
 a subdued sob in her voice which was more and 
 more veiled, till it was hardly above a whisper. 
 She was hurting herself with the jewels that glit- 
 tered on her tightly-clasped fingers pressed 
 against her heart. 
 
 The feeling Deronda endured in these mo- 
 ments he afterward called horrible. Words 
 seemed to have no more rescue in them than if 
 
 \ 
 
REVELATIONS 95 
 
 he had been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck 
 — the poor ship with its many-lived anguish 
 beaten by the inescapable storm. How could 
 he grasp the long-growing process of this 
 young creature's wretchedness? — how arrest 
 and change it with a sentence? He was afraid 
 of his own voice. The words that rushed into 
 his mind seemed in their feebleness nothing 
 better than despair made audible, or than that 
 insensibility to another's hardship which applies 
 precept to soothe pain. He felt himself holding 
 a crowd of words imprisoned within his hps, as 
 if the letting them escape would be a violation of 
 awe before the mysteries of our human lot. The 
 thought that urged itself foremost was — " Con- 
 fess everything to your husband; leave nothing 
 concealed: " — the words carried in his mind a 
 vision of reasons which would have needed much 
 fuller expression for Gwendolen to apprehend 
 them, but before he had begun to utter those 
 brief sentences, the door opened and the husband 
 entered. 
 
 Grandcourt had deliberately gone out and 
 turned back to satisfy a suspicion. What he saw 
 was Gwendolen's face of anguish framed black 
 like a nun's and Deronda standing three yards 
 from her with a look of sorrow such as he might 
 have bent on the last struggle of life in a beloved 
 object. Without any show of surprise, Grand- 
 court nodded to Deronda, gave a second look 
 at Gwendolen, passed on, and seated himself 
 easily at a little distance, crossing his legs, 
 taking out his handkerchief and trifling with it 
 elegantly. 
 
 Gwendolen had shrunk and changed her atti- 
 
96 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tude on seeing him, but she did not turn or move 
 from her place. It was not a moment in which 
 she could feign anything, or manifest any strong- 
 re vulsion of feeling: the passionate movement of 
 her last speech was still too strong within her. 
 What she felt besides was a dull despairing sense 
 that her interview with Deronda was at an end: 
 a curtain had fallen. But he, naturally, was 
 urged into self-possession and effort by suscep- 
 tibility to what might follow for her from being 
 seen by her husband in this betrayal of agitation ; 
 and feeling that any pretence of ease in pro- 
 longing his visit would only exaggerate Grand- 
 court's possible conjectures of duplicity, he 
 merely said: 
 
 " I will not stay longer now. Good-by." 
 
 He put out his hand, and she let him press 
 her poor little chill fingers; but she said no 
 good-by. 
 
 When he had left the room, Gwendolen threw 
 herself into a seat, with an expectation as dull as 
 her despair — the expectation that she was go- 
 ing to be punished. But Grandcourt took no 
 notice ; he was satisfied to have let her know that 
 she had not deceived him, and to keep a silence 
 which was formidable with omniscience. He 
 went out that evening, and her plea of feeling 
 ill was accepted without even a sneer. 
 
 The next morning at breakfast he said, " I 
 am going yachting to the Mediterranean." 
 
 "When?" said Gwendolen, with a leap of 
 heart which had hope in it. 
 
 " The day after to-morrow. The yacht is at 
 Marseilles. Lush is gone to get everything 
 ready." 
 
REVELATIONS 97 
 
 " Shall I have mamma to stay with me, then? " 
 said Gwendolen, the new sudden possibility of 
 peace and affection filling her mind like a burst 
 of morning light. 
 
 " No; you will go with me." 
 
 VOL. xrv' — 7 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Ever in his soul 
 That larger justice which makes gratitude 
 Triumphed above resentment. 'T is the mark 
 Of regal natures, with the wider life, 
 And fuller capability of joy : — 
 Not wits exultant in the strongest lens 
 To show you goodness vanished into pulp 
 Never worth "thank you" — they're the devil's friars, 
 Vowed to be poor as he in love and trust. 
 Yet must go begging of a world that keeps 
 Some human property. 
 
 DERONDA, in parting from Gwendolen, 
 had abstained from saying, " I shall not 
 see you again for a long while; I am 
 going away," lest Grandcourt should understand 
 him to imply that the fact was of importance to 
 her. 
 
 He was actually going away under circum- 
 stances so momentous to himself that when he 
 set out to fulfil his promise of calling on her, 
 he was already under the shadow of a solemn 
 emotion which revived the deepest experience of 
 his life. 
 
 Sir Hugo had sent for him to his chambers 
 with the note — " Come immediately. Some- 
 thing has happened: " a preparation that 
 caused him some relief when, on entering the 
 baronet's study, he was received with grave af- 
 fection instead of the distress which he had 
 apprehended. 
 
 " It is nothing to grieve you, sir? " said De- 
 ronda, in a tone rather of restored confidence 
 than question, as he took the hand held out to 
 
REVELATIONS 99 
 
 him. There was an unusual meaning in Sir 
 Hugo's look, and a subdued emotion in his voice, 
 as he said: 
 
 " No, Dan, no. Sit down. I have something 
 to say." 
 
 Deronda obeyed, not without presentiment. 
 It was extremely rare for Sir Hugo to show so 
 much serious feeling. 
 
 " Not to grieve me, my boy, no. At least, if 
 there is nothing in it that will grieve you too 
 much. But I hardly expected that this — just 
 this — would ever happen. There have been 
 reasons why I have never prepared you for it. 
 There have been reasons why I have never told 
 you anything about your parentage. But I have 
 striven in every way not to make that an injury 
 to you." 
 
 Sir Hugo paused, but Deronda could not 
 speak. He could not say, " I have never felt it 
 an injury." Even if that had been true, he could 
 not have trusted his voice to say anything. Far 
 more than any one but himself could know of 
 was hanging on this moment when the secrecy 
 was to be broken. Sir Hugo had never seen the 
 grand face he delighted in so pale — the lips 
 pressed together with such a look of pain. He 
 went on with a more anxious tenderness, as if 
 he had a new fear of wounding. 
 
 " I have acted in obedience to your mother's 
 wishes. The secrecy was her wish. But now she 
 desires to remove it. She desires to see you. I 
 will put this letter into your hands, which you 
 can look at by and by. It will merely tell you 
 what she wishes you to do, and where you will 
 find her." 
 
100 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Sir Hugo held out a letter written on foreign 
 paper, which Deronda thrust into his breast- 
 pocket, with a sense of relief that he was not 
 called on to read anything immediately. The 
 emotion on Daniel's face had gained on the bar- 
 onet, and was visibly shaking his composure. 
 Sir Hugo found it difficult to say more. And 
 Deronda's whole soul was possessed by a ques- 
 tion which was the hardest in the world to utter. 
 Yet he could not bear to delay it. This was a 
 sacramental moment. If he let it pass, he could 
 not recover the influences under which it was pos- 
 sible to utter the words and meet the answer. 
 For some moments his eyes were cast down, and 
 it seemed to both as if thoughts were in the air 
 between them. But at last Deronda looked at 
 Sir Hugo, and said, with a tremulous reverence 
 in his voice — dreading to convey indirectly the 
 reproach that affection had for years been 
 stifling : 
 
 " Is my father also living? " 
 
 The answer came immediately in a low, em- 
 phatic tone : 
 
 "No." 
 
 In the mingled emotions which followed that - 
 answer it was impossible to distinguish joy from 
 pain. 
 
 Some new light had fallen on the past for Sir 
 Hugo too in this interview. After a silence in 
 which Deronda felt like one whose creed is gone 
 before he has religiously embraced another, the 
 baronet said, in a tone of confession : 
 
 " Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake 
 what I did. And perhaps I liked it a little too 
 well — having you all to myself. But if you 
 
REVELATIOl^S 101 
 
 have had any pain which I might have helped, 
 I ask you to forgive me." 
 
 " The forgiveness has long been there," said 
 Deronda. " The chief pain has always been on 
 account of some one else — whom I never knew 
 — whom I am now to know. It has not hin- 
 dered me from feeling an affection for you which 
 has made a large part of all the life I remember." 
 
 It seemed one impulse that made the two men 
 clasp each other's hand for a moment. 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 "If some mortal, born too soon, 
 Were laid away in some great trance — the ages 
 Coming and going all the while — till dawned 
 His true time's advent ; and could then record 
 The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed 
 Then I might tell more of the breath so light 
 Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm 
 Among my hair. Youth is confused ; yet never 
 So dull was I but, when that spirit passed, 
 I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns 
 A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep." 
 
 Browning: Paracelsus. 
 
 THIS was the letter which Sir Hugo put 
 into Deronda's hands: 
 
 To MY Son, Daniel Deronda, — My good friend 
 and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that 
 I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire 
 there should be no time lost before I deliver to you 
 what I have long withheld. Let nothing hinder you 
 from being at the Alhergo delV Italia in Genoa by the 
 fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am 
 uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey 
 from Spezia, where I shall be staying. That will de- 
 pend on several things. Wait for me — the Princess 
 Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring 
 that Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again. — 
 Your unknown mother, 
 
 Leonora Halm-Eberstein. 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 103 
 
 This letter with its colourless wording gave De- 
 ronda no clew to what was in reserve for him; 
 but he could not do otherwise than accept Sir 
 Hugo's reticence, which seemed to imply some 
 pledge not to anticipate the mother's disclosures ; 
 and the discovery that his life-long conjectures 
 had been mistaken checked further surmise. De- 
 ronda could not hinder his imagination from 
 taking a quick flight over what seemed possibili- 
 ties, but he refused to contemplate any one of 
 them as more likely than another, lest he should 
 be nursing it into a dominant desire or repug- 
 nance, instead of simply preparing himself with 
 resolve to meet the fact bravely, whatever it 
 might turn out to be. 
 
 In this state of mind he could not have com- 
 municated to any one the reason for the absence 
 which in some quarters he was obliged to mention 
 beforehand, least of all to Mordecai, whom it 
 would affect as powerfully as it did himself, only 
 in rather a different way. If he were to say, " I 
 am going to learn the truth about my birth," 
 Mordecai's hope would gather what might prove 
 a painful, dangerous excitement. To exclude 
 suppositions, he spoke of his journey as being 
 undertaken by Sir Hugo's wish, and threw as 
 much indifference as he could into his manner of 
 announcing it, saying he was uncertain of its 
 duration, but it would perhaps be very short. 
 
 " I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with 
 me," said Mordecai, comforting himself in this 
 way, after the first mournful glances. 
 
 " I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let 
 him come," said Mirah. 
 
 " The grandmother will deny you nothing," 
 
104 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 said Deronda. " I 'm glad you were a little 
 wrong as well as I," he added, smiling at 
 JNlordecai. " You thought that old Mrs. Cohen 
 would not bear to see Slirah." 
 
 " I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. 
 " She is capable of rejoicing that another's plant 
 blooms, though her own be withered." 
 
 " Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if 
 we all belonged to each other," said Mirah, with 
 a tinge of merriment in her smile. 
 
 " What should you have felt if that Ezra had 
 been your brother? " said Deronda, mischiev- 
 ously — a little provoked that she had taken 
 kindly at once to people who had caused him so 
 much prospective annoyance on her account. 
 
 JMirah looked at him with a slight surprise for 
 a moment, and then said: " He is not a bad man 
 — I think he would never forsake any one." 
 But when she had uttered the words she blushed 
 deeply, and glancing timidly at Mordecai, 
 turned away to some occupation. Her father 
 was in her mind, and this was a subject on which 
 she and her brother had a painful mutual con- 
 sciousness. " If he should come and find us! " 
 was a thought which to Mirah sometimes made 
 the street daylight as shadowy as a haunted for- 
 est where each turn screened for her an imagi- 
 nary apparition. 
 
 Deronda felt what was her involuntary allu- 
 sion, and understood the blush. How could he 
 be slow to understand feelings which now seemed 
 nearer than ever to his own? for the words of his 
 mother's letter implied that his filial relation was 
 not to be freed from painful conditions; indeed, 
 singularly enough that letter which had brought 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 105 
 
 his mother nearer as a living reality had thrown 
 her into more remoteness for his affections. The 
 tender yearning after a being whose life might 
 have been the worse for not having his care and 
 love, the image of a mother who had not had all 
 her dues whether of reverence or compassion, 
 had long been secretly present with him in his 
 observation of all the women he had come near. 
 But it seemed now that this picturing of his 
 mother might fit the facts no better than his for- 
 mer conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered 
 to find that when this mother's very handwriting 
 had come to him with words holding her actual 
 feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into 
 a state of comparative neutrality toward her, 
 A veiled figure with enigmatic speech had thrust 
 away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, 
 his clinging thought had gradually modelled and 
 made the possessor of his tenderness and duteous 
 longing. When he set off to Genoa, the inter- 
 est really uppermost in his mind had hardly so 
 much relation to his mother as to Mordecai and 
 Mirah. 
 
 " God bless you, Dan! " Sir Hugo had said, 
 when they shook hands. " Whatever else 
 changes for you, it can't change my being the 
 oldest friend you have known, and the one who 
 has all along felt the most for you. I could n't 
 have loved you better if you 'd been my own — 
 only I should have been better pleased with 
 thinking of you always as the future master of 
 the Abbey instead of my fine nephew ; and then 
 you would have seen it necessary for you to take 
 a political line. However — things must be as 
 they may." It was a defensive measure of the 
 
106 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 baronet's to mingle purposeless remarks with the 
 expression of serious feeling. 
 
 When Deronda arrived at the Italia in Genoa, 
 no Princess Halm-Eberstein was there; but on 
 the second day there was a letter for him, saying 
 that her arrival might happen within a week, or 
 might be deferred a fortnight and more : she was 
 under circumstances which made it impossible 
 for her to fix her journey more precisely, and 
 she entreated him to wait as patiently as he could. 
 
 With this indefinite prospect of suspense on 
 matters of supreme moment to him, Deronda set 
 about the difficult task of seeking amusement on 
 philosophic grounds, as a means of quieting ex- 
 cited feeling and giving patience a lift over a 
 weary road. His former visit to the superb city 
 had been only cursory, and left him much to 
 learn beyond the prescribed round of sight- 
 seeing, by spending the cooler hours in observant 
 wandering about the streets, the quay, and the 
 environs ; and he often took a boat that he might 
 enjoy the magnificent view of the city and har- 
 bour from the sea. All sights, all subjects, even 
 the expected meeting with his mother, found a 
 central union in Mordecai and Mirah, and the 
 ideas immediately associated with them; and 
 among the thoughts that most filled his mind 
 while his boat was pushing about within view of 
 the grand harbour was that of the multitudinous 
 Spanish Jews centuries ago driven destitute 
 from their Spanish homes, suffered to land from 
 the crowded ships only for brief rest on this 
 grand quay of Genoa, overspreading it with a 
 pall of famine and plague — dying mothers with 
 dying children at their breasts — fathers and 
 
THE MOTHER ANT) THE SON 107 
 
 sons agaze at each other's haggardness, Uke 
 groups from a hundred Hunger-towers turned 
 out beneath the mid-day sun. Inevitably, 
 dreamy constructions of a possible ancestry for 
 himself would weave themselves with historic 
 memories which had begun to have a new interest 
 for him on his discovery of Mirah, and now, un- 
 der the influence of Mordecai, had become irre- 
 sistibly dominant. He would have sealed his 
 mind against such constructions if it had been 
 possible, and he had never yet fully admitted to 
 himself that he wished the facts to verify Mor- 
 decai's conviction : he inwardly repeated that he 
 had no choice in the matter, and that wishing was 
 folly — nay, on the question of parentage, wish- 
 ing seemed part of that meajmess which disowns 
 kinship: it was a disowning by anticipation. 
 What he had to do was simply to accept the fact ; 
 and he had really no strong presumption to go 
 upon, now that he was assured of his mistake 
 about Sir Hugo. There had been a resolved con- 
 cealment which made all inference untrust- 
 worthy, and the very name he bore might be a 
 false one. If Mordecai were wrong — if he, the 
 so-called Daniel Deronda, were held by ties en- 
 tirely aloof from any such course as his friend's 
 pathetic hope had marked out? — he would not 
 say " I wish " ; but he could not help feeling on 
 which side the sacrifice lay. 
 
 Across these two importunate thoughts, which 
 he resisted as much as one can resist anything in 
 that unstrung condition which belongs to sus- 
 pense, there came continually an anxiety which 
 he made no effort to banish — dwelling on it 
 rather with a mournfulness, which often seems 
 
108^ DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to us the best atonement we can make to one 
 whose need we have been unable to meet. The 
 anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful 
 mixtures of our nature there is a feeling distinct 
 from that exclusive passionate love of which 
 some men and women (by no means all) are 
 capable, which yet is not the same with friend- 
 ship, nor with a merely benevolent regard, 
 whether admiring or compassionate : a man, say 
 
 — for it is a man who is here concerned — 
 hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling 
 toward a woman more nearly than in the words, 
 " I should have loved her, if — " : the " if " 
 covering some prior growth in the inclinations, 
 or else some circumstances which have made an 
 inward prohibitory law as a stay against the emo- 
 tions ready to quiver out of balance. The " if " 
 in Deronda's case carried reasons of both kinds ; 
 yet he had never throughout his relations with 
 Gwendolen been free from the nervous con- 
 sciousness that there was something to guard 
 against not only on her account, but on his own 
 
 — some precipitancy in the manifestation of im- 
 pulsive feeling — some ruinous inroad of what 
 is but momentary on the permanent chosen treas- 
 ure of the heart — some spoiling of her trust, 
 which wrought upon him now as if it had been 
 the retreating cry of a creature snatched and 
 carried out of his reach by swift horsemen or 
 swifter waves, while his own strength was only a 
 stronger sense of weakness. How could his feel- 
 ing for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his feel- 
 ing for other women, even when there was one by 
 whose side he desired to stand apart from them? 
 Strangely her figure entered into the pictures of 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 109 
 
 his present and future; strangely (and now it 
 seemed sadly) their two lots had come in con- 
 tact, hers narrowly personal, his charged with 
 far-reaching sensibilities, perhaps with durable 
 purposes, which were hardly more present to her 
 than the reasons why men migrate are present to 
 the birds that come as usual for the crumbs and 
 find them no more. Not that Deronda was too 
 ready to imagine himself of supreme importance 
 to a woman ; but her words of insistence that he 
 " must remain near her — must not forsake her " 
 — continually recurred to him with the clearness 
 and importunity of imagined sounds, such as 
 Dante has said pierce us like arrows whose 
 points carry the sharpness of pity: 
 
 "Lamenti saettaron me diversi 
 Che di pieta ferrati avean gli strali." 
 
 Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy 
 seemed to carry the consciousness that war had 
 been declared against Austria, and every day 
 was a hurrying march of crowded Time toward 
 the world-changing battle of Sadowa. Mean- 
 while, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, 
 the converging outer roads getting deeper with 
 white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the 
 wayside gardens looking more and more like 
 fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening 
 changing her office — scattering abroad those 
 whom the mid-day had sent under shelter, 
 and sowing all paths with happy social sounds, 
 little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of 
 thrummed strings, light footsteps and voices, if 
 not leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in 
 them ; while the encircling heights, crowned with 
 
110 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 forts, skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, 
 seemed also to come forth and gaze in fulness of 
 beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour 
 melted in the stream of moonlight which made 
 the streets a new spectacle with shadows, both 
 still and moving, on cathedral steps and against 
 the f a9ades of massive palaces ; and then slowly 
 with the descending moon all sank in deep night 
 and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights 
 of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and 
 the glimmering stars in the blackness above. 
 Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving 
 of the days as he might have watched a wonder- 
 ful clock where the striking of the hours was 
 made solemn with antique figures advancing and 
 retreating in monitory procession, while he still 
 kept his ear open for another kind of signal 
 which would have its solemnity too. He was be- 
 ginning to sicken of occupation, and found him- 
 self contemplating all activity with the aloofness 
 of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his letters to 
 Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing 
 about himself, but he was really getting into that 
 state of mind to which all subjects become per- 
 sonal ; and the few books he had brought to make 
 him a refuge in study were becoming unreadable, 
 because the point of view that life would make 
 for him was in that agitating moment of uncer- 
 tainty which is close upon decision. 
 
 Many nights were watched through by him in 
 gazing from the open window of his room on the 
 double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and 
 the heavens; often in struggling under the op- 
 pressive scepticism which represented his par- 
 ticular lot, with all the importance he was 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 111 
 
 allowing' Mordecai to give it, as of no more last- 
 ing effect than a dream — a set of changes which 
 made passion to him, but beyond his conscious- 
 ness were no more than an imperceptible dif- 
 ference of mass or shadow; sometimes with a 
 reaction of emotive force which gave even to 
 sustained disappointment, even to the fulfilled 
 demand of sacrifice, the nature of a satisfied 
 energy, and spread over his young future, 
 whatever it might be, the attraction of devoted 
 service ; sometimes with a sweet irresistible hope- 
 fulness that the very best of human possibilities 
 might befall him — the blending of a complete 
 personal love in one current with a larger duty ; 
 and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion 
 (what human creature escapes it?) against 
 things in general because they are thus and not 
 otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her 
 equivocal fate moved as busy images of what 
 was amiss in the world along with the conceal- 
 ments which he had felt as a hardship in his own 
 life, and which were acting in him now under the 
 form of an afflicting doubtfulness about the 
 mother who had announced herself coldly and 
 still kept away. 
 
 But at last she was come. One morning in his 
 third week of waiting there was a new kind of 
 knock at the door. A servant in chasseur's livery 
 entered and delivered in French the verbal mes- 
 sage that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had ar- 
 rived, that she was going to rest during the day, 
 but would be obliged if Monsieur would dine 
 early, so as to be at liberty at seven, when she 
 would be able to receive him. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 She held the spindle as she sat, 
 Erinna with the thick-coiled mat 
 Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes. 
 Gazing with a sad surprise 
 At surging visions of her destiny — 
 To spin the byssus drearily 
 In insect-labor, while the throng 
 Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song. 
 
 WHEN Deronda presented himself at the 
 door of his mother's apartment in the 
 Italia^ he felt some revival of his boy- 
 hood with its premature agitations. The two 
 servants in the antechamber looked at him mark- 
 edly, a little surprised that the doctor their lady 
 had come to consult was this striking young gen- 
 tleman whose appearance gave even the severe 
 lines of an evening dress the credit of adornment. 
 But Deronda could notice nothing until, the 
 second door being opened, he found himself in 
 the presence of a figure which at the other end of 
 the large room stood awaiting his approach. 
 
 She was covered, except as to her face and part 
 of her arms, with black lace hanging loosely 
 from the summit of her whitening hair to the 
 long train stretching from her tall figure. Her 
 arms, naked from the elbow, except for some 
 rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the 
 fine poise of her head made it look handsomer 
 than it really was. But Deronda felt no interval 
 of observation before he was close in front of her, 
 holding the hand she had put out and then rais- 
 ing it to his lips. She still kept her hand in his 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 113 
 
 and looked at him examiningly ; while his chief 
 consciousness was that her eyes were piercing 
 and her face so mobile that the next moment she 
 might look like a different person. For even 
 while she was examining him there was a play of 
 the brow and nostril which made a tacit lan- 
 guage. Deronda dared no movement, not able 
 to conceive what sort of manifestation her feeling 
 demanded; but he felt himself changing colour 
 like a girl, and yet wondering at his own lack of 
 emotion: he had lived through so many ideal 
 meetings with his mother, and they had seemed 
 more real than this! He could not even conjec- 
 ture in what language she would speak to him. 
 He imagined it would not be English. Sud- 
 denly, she let fall his hand, and placed both hers 
 on his shoulders, while her face gave out a flash 
 of admiration in which every worn line disap- 
 peared and seemed to leave a restored youth. 
 
 " You are a beautiful creature! " she said in a 
 low melodious voice, with syllables which had 
 what might be called a foreign but agreeable out- 
 line. " I knew you would be." Then she kissed 
 him on each cheek, and he returned her kisses. 
 But it was something like a greeting between 
 royalties. 
 
 She paused a moment, while the lines were 
 coming back into her face, and then said in a 
 colder tone : "I am your mother. But you can 
 have no love for me." 
 
 " I have thought of you more than of any other 
 being in the world," said Deronda, his voice 
 trembling nervously. 
 
 " I am not like what you thought I was," said 
 the mother, decisively, withdrawing her hands 
 
 VOL. XIV — 8 
 
114 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 from his shoulders and folding her arms before, 
 looking at him as if she invited him to observe 
 her. He had often pictured her face in his imagi- 
 nation as one which had a likeness to his own : he 
 saw some of the likeness now, but amidst more 
 striking differences. She was a remarkable- 
 looking being. What was it that gave her son a 
 painful sense of aloofness ? — Her worn beauty 
 had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a 
 human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with 
 some world which is independent of ours. 
 
 " I used to think that you might be suffering," 
 said Deronda, anxious above all not to wound 
 her. " I used to wish that I could be a comfort 
 to you." 
 
 " I am suffering. But with a suffering that 
 you can't comfort," said the Princess, in a harder 
 voice than before, moving to a sofa where cush- 
 ions had been carefully arranged for her. "Sit 
 down." She pointed to a seat near her; and 
 then discerning some distress in Deronda's face, 
 she added, more gently: " I am not suffering at 
 this moment. I am at ease now. I am able to 
 talk." 
 
 Deronda seated himself and waited for her to 
 speak again. It seemed as if he were in the 
 presence of a mysterious Fate rather than of the 
 longed-for mother. He was beginning to watch 
 her with wonder, from the spiritual distance to 
 which she had thrown him. 
 
 " No," she began; " I did not send for you to 
 comfort me. I could not know beforehand — I 
 don't know now — what you will feel toward me. 
 I have not the foolish notion that you can love 
 me merely because I am your mother, when you 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 115 
 
 have never seen or heard of me all your life. But 
 I thought I chose something better for you than 
 being with me. I did not think that I deprived 
 you of anything worth having." 
 
 " You cannot wish me to beHeve that your 
 affection would not have been worth having," 
 said Deronda, finding that she paused as if she 
 expected him to make some answer. 
 
 " I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the 
 Princess, with proud impetuosity, " but I had not 
 much affection to give you. I did not want af- 
 fection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to 
 live out the life that was in me, and not to be 
 hampered with other lives. You wonder what I 
 was. I was no princess then." She rose with a 
 sudden movement, and stood as she had done be- 
 fore. Deronda immediately rose too: he felt 
 breathless. 
 
 " No princess in this tame life that I live in 
 now. I was a great singer, and I acted as well as 
 I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men 
 followed me from one country to another. I was 
 living a myriad lives in one. I did not want a 
 child." 
 
 There was a passionate self-defence in her 
 tone. She had cast all precedent out of her mind. 
 Precedent had no excuse for her, and she could 
 only seek a justification in the intensest words 
 she could find for her experience. She seemed to 
 fling out the last words against some possible re- 
 proach in the mind of her son, who had to stand 
 and hear them — clutching his coat-collar as if 
 he were keeping himself above water by it, and 
 feeling his blood in the sort of commotion that 
 might have been excited if he had seen her going 
 
116 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 through some strange rite of a religion which 
 gave a sacredness to crime. What else had she 
 to tell him? She went on with the same intensity 
 and a sort of pale illumination in her face. 
 
 " I did not want to marry. I was forced into 
 marrying your father — forced, I mean, by my 
 father's wishes and commands; and besides, it 
 was my best way of getting some freedom. I 
 could rule my husband^ but not my father. I 
 had a right to be free. I had a right to seek my 
 freedom from a bondage that I hated." 
 
 She seated herself again, while there was that 
 subtle movement in her eyes and closed lips 
 which is like the suppressed continuation of 
 speech. Deronda continued standing, and after 
 a moment or two she looked up at him with a less 
 defiant pleading as she said : 
 
 "And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted 
 to keep you from. What better could the most 
 loving mother have done? I relieved you from 
 the bondage of having been born a Jew." 
 
 " Then I am a Jew? " Deronda burst out with 
 a deep -voiced energy that made his mother 
 shrink a little backward against her cushions. 
 " My father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess? " 
 
 " Yes, your father was my cousin," said the 
 mother, watching him with a change in her look, 
 as if she saw something that she might have to be 
 afraid of. 
 
 " I am glad of it," said Deronda, impetuously, 
 in the veiled voice of passion. He could not have 
 imagined beforehand how he would come to say 
 that which he had never hitherto admitted. He 
 could not have dreamed that it would be in im- 
 pulsive opposition to his mother. He was shaken 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 117 
 
 by a mixed anger which no reflection could come 
 soon enough to check, against this mother who it 
 seemed had borne him unwilKngly, had wiUingly 
 made herself a stranger to him, and — perhaps 
 - — was now making herself known unwillingly. 
 This last suspicion seemed to flash some expla- 
 nation over her speech. 
 
 But the mother was equally shaken by an 
 anger differently mixed, and her frame was less 
 equal to any repression. The shaking with her 
 was visibly physical, and her eyes looked the 
 larger for her pallid excitement as she said 
 violently : 
 
 " Why do you say you are glad? You are an 
 English gentleman. I secured you that." 
 
 " You did not know what you secured me. 
 How could you choose my birthright for me? " 
 said Deronda, throwing himself sideways into 
 his chair again, almost unconsciously, and lean- 
 ing his arm over the back while he looked away 
 from his mother. 
 
 He was fired with an intolerance that seemed 
 foreign to him. But he was now trying hard to 
 master himself and keep silence. A horror had 
 swept in upon his anger lest he should say some- 
 thing too hard in this moment which made an 
 epoch never to be recalled. There was a pause 
 before his mother spoke again, and when she 
 spoke her voice had become more firmly resistant 
 in its finely varied tones : 
 
 " I chose for you what I would have chosen for 
 myself. How could I know that you would have 
 the spirit of my father in you? How could I 
 know that you would love what I hated ? — if 
 you really love to be a Jew." The last words had 
 
118 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 such bitterness in them that any one overhearing 
 might have supposed some hatred had arisen be- 
 tween the mother and son. 
 
 But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. 
 He was recalling his sensibilities to what life had 
 been and actually was for her whose best years 
 were gone, and who with the signs of suffering 
 in her frame was now exerting herself to tell him 
 of a past which was not his alone, but also hers. 
 His habitual shame at the acceptance of events 
 as if they were his only, helped him even here. 
 As he looked at his mother silently after her last 
 words, his face regained some of its penetrative 
 calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitat- 
 ing influence over her: her eyes were fixed on 
 him with a sort of fascination, but not with any 
 repose of maternal delight. 
 
 " Forgive me if I speak hastily," he said, with 
 diffident gravity. " Why have you resolved now 
 on disclosing to me what you took care to have 
 me brought up in ignorance of? Why — since 
 you seem angry that I should be glad? " 
 
 " Oh — the reasons of our actions! " said the 
 Princess, with a ring of something like sarcas- 
 tic scorn. " When you are as old as I am, it will 
 not seem so simple a question — ' Why did you 
 do this ? ' People talk of their motives in a cut 
 and dried way. Every woman is supposed to 
 have the same set of motives, or else to be a mon- 
 ster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt ex- 
 actly what other women feel — or say they feel, 
 for fear of being thought unlike others. When 
 you reproach me in your heart for sending you 
 away from me, you mean that I ought to say I 
 felt about you as other women say they feel about 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 119 
 
 their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to 
 be freed from you. But I did well for you, and 
 I gave you your father's fortune. Do I seem 
 now to be revoking everything ? — Well, there 
 are reasons. I feel many things that I can't un- 
 derstand. A fatal illness has been growing in 
 me for a year. I shall very likely not live another 
 year. I will not deny anything I have done. I 
 will not pretend to love where I have no love. 
 But shadows are rising round me. Sickness 
 makes them. If I have wronged the dead — I 
 have but little time to do what I left undone." 
 
 The varied transitions of tone with which this 
 speech was delivered were as perfect as the most 
 accomplished actress could have made them. 
 The speech was in fact a piece of what may be 
 called sincere acting: this woman's nature was 
 one in which all feeling — and all the more when 
 it was tragic as well as real — immediately be- 
 came matter of conscious representation : experi- 
 ence immediately passed into drama, and she 
 acted her own emotions. In a minor degree this 
 is nothing uncommon, but in the Princess the 
 acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, 
 voice,' and gesture. It would not be true to say 
 that she felt less because of this double conscious- 
 ness : she felt — that is, her mind went through — 
 all the more, but with a difference : each nucleus 
 of pain or pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the 
 excitement or spiritual intoxication which at once 
 exalts and deadens. But Deronda made no re- 
 flection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on 
 the purport of what his mother was saying ; her 
 tones and her wonderful face entered into his 
 agitation without being noted. What he longed 
 
120 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 for with an awed desire was to know as much 
 as she would tell him of the strange mental con- 
 flict under which it seemed that he had been 
 brought into the world : what his compassionate 
 nature made the controlhng idea within him were 
 the suffering and the confession that breathed 
 through her later words, and these forbade any 
 further question, when she paused and remained 
 silent, with her brow knit, her head turned a little 
 away from him, and her large eyes fixed as if on 
 something incorporeal. He must wait for her to 
 speak again. She did so with strange abrupt- 
 ness, turning her eyes upon him suddenly, and 
 saying more quickly : 
 
 "Sir Hugo has written much about you. He 
 tells me you have a wonderful mind — you com- 
 prehend everything — you are wiser than he is 
 with all his sixty years. You say you are glad 
 to know that you were born a Jew. I am not 
 going to tell you that I have changed my mind 
 about that. Your feelings are against mine. 
 You don't thank me for what I did. Shall 
 you comprehend your mother — or only blame 
 her?" 
 
 " There is not a fibre within me but makes me 
 wish to comprehend her," said Deronda, meeting 
 her sharp gaze solemnly. " It is a bitter reversal 
 of my longing to think of blaming her. What 
 I have been most trying to do for fifteen years 
 is to have some understanding of those who differ 
 from myself." 
 
 " Then you have become unlike your grand- 
 father in that," said the mother, " though you 
 are a young copy of him in your face. He never 
 comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 121 
 
 of fettering me into obedience. I was to be 
 what he called ' the Jewish woman ' under pain 
 of his curse. I was to feel everything I did not 
 feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I 
 was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the 
 mezuza over the door ; to dread lest a bit of but- 
 ter should touch a bit of meat ; to think it beauti- 
 ful that men should bind the tephillin on them, 
 and women not, — to adore the wisdom of such 
 laws, however silly they might seem to me. I 
 was to love the long prayers in the ugly syna- 
 gogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and 
 the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and 
 my father's endless discoursing about Our* 
 People, which was a thunder without meaning in 
 my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel 
 had been ; and I did not care at all. I cared for 
 the wide world, and all that I could represent in 
 it. I hated living under the shadow of my 
 father's strictness. Teaching, teaching for ever- 
 lasting — ' this you must be,' ' that you must not 
 be' — pressed on me like a frame that got tighter 
 and tighter as I grew. I wanted to live a large 
 life, with freedom to do what every one else did, 
 and be carried along in a great current, not 
 obliged to care. Ah! " — here her tone changed 
 to one of more bitter incisiveness — " you are 
 glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. 
 That is because you have not been brought up as 
 a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you 
 because I saved you from it." 
 
 " When you resolvied on that, you meant that 
 I should never know my origin? " said Deronda, 
 impulsively. " You have at least changed in 
 your feeling on that point." 
 
122 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I 
 persevered in. And it is not true to say that I 
 have changed. Things have changed in spite of 
 me. I am still the same Leonora " — she 
 pointed with her forefinger to her breast — 
 " here within me is the same desire, the same will, 
 the same choice, but " — she spread out her 
 hands, palm upward, on each side of her, as she 
 paused with a bitter compression of her lip, then 
 let her voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance — 
 " events come upon us like evil enchantments : 
 and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the dark- 
 ness are events — are they not? I don't consent. 
 - We only consent to what we love. I obey some- 
 thing tyrannic " — she spread out her hands 
 again — "I am forced to be withered, to feel 
 pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, 
 I have been forced to obey my dead father. I 
 have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, 
 and deliver to you what he commanded me to 
 deliver." 
 
 " I beseech you to tell me what moved you — 
 when you were young, I mean — to take the 
 course you did," said Deronda, trying by this ref- 
 erence to the past to escape from what to him 
 was the heartrending piteousness of this mingled 
 suffering and defiance. " I gather that my 
 grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. 
 Though my own experience has been quite dif- 
 ferent, I enter into the painfulness of your strug- 
 gle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced 
 renunciation." 
 
 " No," said the Princess, shaking her head, 
 and folding her arms with an air of decision. 
 " You are not a woman. You may try — but 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 123 
 
 you can never imagine what it is to have a man's 
 force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the 
 slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut 
 out — ' this is the Jewish woman ; this is what 
 you must be ; this is what you are wanted for ; a 
 woman's heart must be of such a size and no 
 larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese 
 feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, 
 by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father 
 wanted. He wished I had been a son ; he cared 
 for me as a makeshift link. His heart was set on 
 his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women 
 should be thought of by the Christian world as 
 a sort of ware to make public singers and 
 actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable 
 for that! That is a chance of escaping from 
 bondage." 
 
 " Was my grandfather a learned man? " said 
 Deronda, eager to know particulars that he 
 feared his mother might not think of. 
 
 She answered impatiently, putting up her 
 hand: " Oh yes, — and a clever physician — and 
 good: I don't deny that he was good. A man 
 to be admired in a play — grand, with an iron 
 will. Like the old Foscari before he pardons. 
 But such men turn their wives and daughters 
 into slaves. They would rule the world if they 
 could; but not ruling the world, they throw all 
 the weight of their will on the necks and souls of 
 women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. 
 My father had no other child than his daughter, 
 and she was like himself." 
 
 She had folded her arms again, and looked as 
 if she were ready to face some impending at- 
 tempt at mastery. 
 
124 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Your father was different. Unlike me — all 
 lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule 
 him; and I made him secretly promise me, be- 
 fore I married him, that he would put no hin- 
 drance in the way of my being an artist. My 
 father was on his death-bed when we were mar- 
 ried : from the first he had fixed his mind on my 
 marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a 
 woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants 
 to govern her, half her strength must be conceal- 
 ment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I 
 could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an 
 awe of my father — always I had had an awe of 
 him : it was impossible to help it. I hated to feel 
 awed — 1 wished I could have defied him openly ; 
 but I never could. It was what I could not im- 
 agine : I could not act it to myself that I should 
 begin to defy my father openly and succeed. 
 And I never would risk failure." 
 
 That last sentence was uttered with an abrupt 
 emphasis, and she paused after it as if the 
 words had raised a crowd of remembrances which 
 obstructed speech. Her son was listening to 
 her with feelings more and more highly mixed: 
 the first sense of being repelled by the frank 
 coldness which had replaced all his preconcep- 
 tions of a mother's tender joy in the sight of 
 him; the first impulses of indignation at what 
 shocked his most cherished emotions and prin- 
 ciples — all these busy elements of collision be- 
 tween them were subsiding for a time, and 
 making more and more room for that effort at 
 just allowance and that admiration of a forcible 
 nature whose errors lay along high pathways, 
 which he would have felt if, instead of being his 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 125 
 
 mother, she had been a stranger who had appealed 
 to his sympathy. Still it was impossible to be dis- 
 passionate: he trembled lest the next thing she 
 had to say would be more repugnant to him than 
 what had gone before: he was afraid of the 
 strange coercion she seemed to be under to lay 
 her mind bare: he almost wished he could say, 
 " Tell me only what is necessary," and then 
 again he felt the fascination that made him 
 watch her and listen to her eagerly. He tried 
 to recall her to particulars by asking: 
 
 " Where was my grandfather's home? " 
 
 " Here in Genoa, when I was married ; and 
 his family had lived here generations ago. But 
 my father had been in various countries." 
 
 " You must surely have lived in England? " 
 
 " My mother was English — a Jewess of 
 Portuguese descent. My father married her in 
 England. Certain circumstances of that mar- 
 riage made all the difference in my life : through 
 that marriage my father thwarted his own plans. 
 My mother's sister was a singer, and afterward 
 she married the English partner of a merchant's 
 house here in Genoa, and they came and lived 
 here eleven years. My mother died when I was 
 eight years old, and then my father allowed me 
 to be continually with my aunt Leonora and 
 be taught under her eyes, as if he had not minded 
 the danger of her encouraging my wish to be a 
 singer, as she had been. But this was it — I 
 saw it again and again in my father : he did not 
 guard against consequences, because he felt sure 
 he could hinder them if he liked. Before my 
 aunt left Genoa, I had had enough teaching to 
 bring out the born singer and actress within 
 
126 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 me: my father did not know everything that 
 was done ; but he knew that I was taught music 
 and singing — he knew my inclination. That 
 was nothing to him: he meant that I should 
 obey his will. And he was resolved that I 
 should marry my cousin Ephraim, the only one 
 left of my father's family that he knew. I 
 wanted not to marry. I thought of all plans 
 to resist it, but at last I found that I could rule 
 my cousin, and I consented. My father died 
 three weeks after we were married, and then I 
 had my way! " She uttered these words almost 
 exultantly; but after a little pause her face 
 changed, and she said in a biting tone: " It has 
 not lasted, though. My father is getting his 
 way now." 
 
 She began to look more contemplatively again 
 at her son, and presently said: 
 
 " You are hke him — but milder — there is 
 something of your own father in you; and he 
 made it the labour of his life to devote himself 
 to me: wound up his money-changing and 
 banking, and lived to wait upon me — he went 
 against his conscience for me. As I loved the 
 life of my art, so he loved me. Let me look at 
 your hand again — the hand with the ring on. 
 It was your father's ring." 
 
 He drew his chair nearer to her and gave her 
 his hand. We know what kind of hand it was: 
 her own, very much smaller, was of the same 
 type. As he felt the smaller hand holding his, 
 as he saw nearer to him the face that held the 
 likeness of his own, aged not by time but by 
 intensity, the strong bent of his nature toward 
 a reverential tenderness asserted itself above 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 127 
 
 every other impression, and in his most fervent 
 tone he said: 
 
 "Mother! take us all into your heart — the 
 living and the dead. Forgive everything that 
 hurts you in the past. Take my affection." 
 
 She looked at him admiringly rather than 
 lovingly, then kissed him on the brow, and 
 saying sadly, " I reject nothing, but I have 
 nothing to give," she released his hand and sank 
 back on her cushions. Deronda turned pale 
 with what seems always more of a sensation 
 than an emotion — the pain of repulsed tender- 
 ness. She noticed the expression of pain, and 
 said, still with melodious melancholy in her 
 tones : 
 
 "It is better so. We must part again soon, 
 and you owe me no duties. I did not wish you 
 to be born. I parted with you willingly. When 
 your father died, I resolved that I would have 
 no more ties but such as I could free myself 
 from. I was the Alcharisi you have heard of : 
 the name had magic wherever it was carried. 
 Men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger was one 
 who wished to marry me. He was madly in love 
 with me. One day I asked him, ' Is there a man 
 capable of doing something for love of me, and 
 expecting nothing in return? ' He said, ' What 
 is it you want done ? ' I said, ' Take my boy and 
 bring him up as an Englishman, and let him 
 never know anything about his parents.' You 
 were little more than two years old, and were sit- 
 ting on his foot. He declared that he would pay 
 money to have such a boy. I had not meditated 
 much on the plan beforehand, but as soon as I 
 had spoken about it, it took possession of me as 
 
128 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 something I could not rest without doing. At 
 first he thought I was not serious, but I con- 
 vinced him, and he was never surprised at any- 
 thing. He agreed that it would be for your 
 good, and the finest thing for you. A great 
 singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no 
 royalty to her son. — All that happened at 
 Naples. And afterwards I made Sir Hugo the 
 trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; 
 and I had a joy in doing it. My father had 
 tyrannized over me, — he cared more about a 
 grandson to come than he did about me: I 
 counted as nothing. You were to be such a Jew^ 
 as he; you were to be what he wanted. But 
 you were my son, and it was my turn to say what 
 you should be. I said you should not know you 
 were a Jew." 
 
 " And for months events have been preparing 
 me to be glad that I am a Jew," said Deronda, 
 his opposition roused again. The point touched 
 the quick of his experience. " It would always 
 have been better that I should have known the 
 truth. I have always been rebelling against the 
 secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame 
 to have Jewish parents; the shame is to disown 
 it." 
 
 " You say it was a shame to me, then, that T 
 used that secrecy," said his mother, with a flash 
 of new anger. " There is no shame attaching to 
 me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid 
 myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that 
 make people nudge each other at sight of us, as 
 if we were tattooed under our clothes, though 
 our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you 
 from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 129 
 
 separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. 
 It was the better for you." 
 
 " 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 ap- 
 proached 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 re- 
 treated 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 
 
 VOL. XIV — 9 
 
130 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 burnt it. I thank God I 
 have not burnt it! " 
 
 She threw herself on her cushions again, visi- 
 bly 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, soli- 
 tary, 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 sud- 
 den return of impetuosity; "but I shall have 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 131 
 
 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 marvellous 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 child- 
 hood. If I had said you 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 a A 
 was done. If I had told him of it there would 
 have been trouble and scandal, — and all to con- 
 quer 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 de- 
 ceiving: 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 
 
132 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 up to him the chest that my father had charged 
 me and my husband to dehver 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 ^as go- 
 ing to burn the chest. But it was difficult to 
 burn ; and burning a chest and papers looks like 
 a shameful act. 1 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 travelling 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 De- 
 ronda, 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, in- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 133 
 
 differently. " 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 whis- 
 pered 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 rob- 
 bery, — falsehood to my father and robbery of 
 my own child. He accused me of having kept 
 the knowledge of your birth from you, and hav- 
 ing 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 main- 
 tained that I had a right to do it. But I can 
 maintain nothing now. No faith is strong with- 
 in 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?" 
 
134 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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. De- 
 ronda's soul was absorbed in the anguish of com- 
 passion. 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 exqui- 
 site 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 fehe 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 hus- 
 band 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 recur- 
 ring thought. " I meant never to marry again. 
 I meant to be free, and to live for my art. I 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 135 
 
 had parted with you. I had no bonds. For 
 nine years I was a queen. I enjoyed the Hfe 
 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 evi- 
 dently some mental relief for her in an outpour- 
 ing 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, sa^nng. 
 
136 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " 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 a 
 disappointed yearning, — a shutting out forever 
 from long early vistas of affectionate imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 " 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 III 
 
 La meme fermete qui sert a resister a I'amour sert aussi a le rendre 
 violent et durable; et les personnes foibles qui sont toujours agitees 
 des passions n'en sont presque jamais veritablement remplies. — La 
 Rochefoucauld. 
 
 A MONG Deronda's letters the next morn- 
 /-% ing was one from Hans Meyrick of four 
 quarto pages, in the small beautiful hand- 
 writing which ran in the Meyrick family. 
 
 My dear Deronda, — In return for your sketch of 
 Italian movements and your view of the world's alfairs 
 generally, I may say that here at home the most judi- 
 cious 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 tele- 
 grams account for the last year's cattle plague, — which 
 is a refutation of philosophy falsely so called, and jus- 
 tifies the compensation to the farmers. My own idea 
 that a murrain will shortly break out in the commer- 
 cial 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 Hes- 
 perus when Hyperion has departed, — sitting with our 
 Hebrew prophet, and making a study of his head, in 
 
138 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 agree- 
 ing 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 uncom- 
 monly interesting sitter, — a better model than Rem- 
 brandt 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 feel- 
 ing for his race and their traditions, he is no strait- 
 laced Jew, spitting after the word Christian, and 
 enj oying 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 take 
 an antediluvian point of view lest you should do in- 
 justice 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 argumenta- 
 tive rattler of peas in a bladder might soon be pricked 
 into 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 opin- 
 ions 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 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 139 
 
 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 towards Mordecai's notion that 
 a whole Christian is three fourths a Jew, and that from 
 the Alexandrian time downward, the most comprehen- 
 sive minds have been Jewish; for I think of pointing 
 out to Mirah that, Arabic and other accidents 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 decla- 
 ration. 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 fall- 
 ing on it through the sunshine, and is in doubt of 
 nothing; but, catching sight of Certainty in the dis- 
 tance, sees an ugly Janus-faced deit}^, 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 
 
140 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 as fascination, and that no virtuous aspiration will be 
 frustrated, — all which, if I mistake not, are doctrines 
 of the schools, and all imply that the Jewess I prefer 
 will prefer me. Any blockhead can cite generalities, 
 but the master-mind 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 muffling 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 were 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, per- 
 haps 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. 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 141 
 
 Judging from this modern Jacob at the age of six, mj 
 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 worship- 
 ping 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 excla- 
 mation to mark the surprise that the information at 
 first produced on my feeble understanding. On reflec- 
 tion 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 live- 
 liness 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, 
 'T will be in him." 
 
 I have accounted for it all, — he had a liveW spine. 
 
142 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 MalHngers. Apropos; 
 I am getting so important that I have rival invita- 
 tions. 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 rash- 
 ness ! — 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 fel- 
 low, your attempts at the historic and poetic are simply 
 pitiable. Your brush is just that of a successful por- 
 trait-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 take 
 the trouble to call, in order to tell me that I had irre- 
 trievably exposed my want of judgment in treating my 
 subject, and that if I had asked him he 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 ex- 
 ceedingly good-natured and comfortable that I begin 
 to feel it an advantage not to be among those poor fel- 
 lows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me tastes all 
 the better because it comes out of his love for you, o/d 
 boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 143 
 
 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.") 
 
 Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used 
 to more from me than a bare statement of facts, with- 
 out comment or digression. One fact I have omitted 
 — that the Klesmers on the eve of departure have 
 behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be ex- 
 pected from the planets of genius and fortune in con- 
 junction. Mirah is rich with their oriental gifts. 
 
 What luck it will be if you come back and present 
 yourself at the Abbey while I am there! I am going 
 to behave with consummate discretion and win golden 
 opinions. But I shall run up to town now and then, 
 just for a peep into Gan Eden. You see how far I 
 have got in Hebrew lore, — up with my Lord Boling- 
 broke, who knew no Hebrew, but " understood that sort 
 of learning and what is writ about it." If Mirah com- 
 manded, I would go to a depth below the tri-literal 
 roots. Already it makes no difference to me whether 
 the points are there or not. But while her brother's 
 life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a lover, even 
 one whose " hair is Hke a flock of goats on Mount 
 Gilead " — and I flatter myself that few heads would 
 bear that trying comparison better than mine. So I 
 stay with my hope among the orchard-blossoms. 
 
 Your devoted Hans Metric k. 
 
144 DANIEL DEHONDA 
 
 Some months before, this letter from Hans 
 would have divided Deronda's thoughts irritat- 
 ingly: its romancing about Mirah would have 
 had an unpleasant edge, scarcely anointed with 
 any commiseration for his friend's probable dis- 
 appointment. But things had altered since 
 March. Mirah was no longer so critically placed 
 with regard to the Meyricks, and Deronda's own 
 position had been undergoing a change which 
 had just been crowned by the revelation of his 
 birth. The new opening towards the future, 
 though he would not trust in any definite visions, 
 inevitably shed new lights, and influenced his 
 mood towards past and present; hence, what 
 Hans called his hope now seemed to Deronda, 
 not a mischievous unreasonableness which roused 
 his indignation, but an unusually persistent bird- 
 dance of an extravagant fancy, and he would 
 have felt quite able to pity any consequent suffer- 
 ing of his friend's, if he had believed in the suffer- 
 ing as probable. But some of the busy thought 
 filling that long day, which passed without his 
 receiving any new summons from his mother, 
 was given to the argument that Hans Meyrick's 
 nature was not one in which love could strike the 
 deep roots that turn disappointment into sorrow: 
 it was too restless, too readily excitable by nov- 
 elty, too ready to turn itself into imaginative 
 material, and wear its grief as a fantastic cos- 
 tume. " Already he is beginning to play at love : 
 he is taking the whole affair as a comedy," said 
 Deronda to himself; " he knows very well that 
 there is no chance for him. Just like him, — 
 never opening his eyes on any possible objec- 
 tion I could have to receive his outpourings about 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 145 
 
 Mirah. Poor old Hans! If we were under a 
 fiery hail together, he would howl like a Greek, 
 and if I did not howl too, it would never occur 
 to him that I was as badly off as he. And yet he 
 is tender-hearted and affectionate in intention, 
 and I can't say that he is not active in imagining 
 what goes on in other people, — but then he al- 
 ways imagines it to fit his own inclination." 
 
 With this touch of causticity Deronda got rid 
 of the slight heat at present raised by Hans's 
 naive expansiveness. The nonsense about Gwen- 
 dolen, conveying the fact that she was gone 
 yachting with her husband, only suggested a dis- 
 turbing sequel to his own strange parting with 
 her. But there was one sentence in the letter 
 which raised a more immediate, active anxiety. 
 Hans's suspicion of a hidden sadness in Mirah 
 was not in the direction of his wishes, and hence, 
 instead of distrusting his observation here, De- 
 ronda began to conceive a cause for the sadness. 
 Was it some event that had occurred during his 
 absence, or only the growing fear of some event ? 
 Was it something, perhaps alterable, in the new 
 position which had been made for her? Or had 
 Mordecai, against his habitual f-esolve, communi- 
 cated to her those peculiar cherished hopes about 
 him, Deronda, and had her quickly sensitive 
 nature been hurt by the discovery that her 
 brother's will or tenacity of visionary conviction 
 had acted coercively on their friendship, — been 
 hurt by the fear that there was more of pitying 
 self -suppression than of equal regard in De- 
 ronda's relation to him? For amidst all Mirah's 
 quiet renunciation, the evident thirst of soul 
 with which she received the tribute of equality 
 
 YOL. XIV — 10 
 
146 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 implied a corresponding pain if she found that 
 what she had taken for a purely reverential 
 regard towards her brother had its mixture of 
 condescension. 
 
 In this last conjecture of Deronda's he was 
 not wrong as to the quality in JVIirah's nature on 
 which he was founding, — the latent protest 
 against the treatment she had all her hfe been 
 subject to until she met him. For that gratitude 
 which would not let her pass by any notice of 
 their acquaintance without insisting on the depth 
 of her debt to him, took half its fervour from the 
 keen comparison with what others had thought 
 enough to render to her. Deronda's affinity in 
 feeling enabled him to penetrate such secrets. 
 But he was not near the truth in admitting the 
 idea that Mordecai had broken his characteristic 
 reticence. To no soul but Deronda himself had 
 he yet breathed the history of their relation to each 
 other, or his confidence about his friend's origin : 
 it was not only that these subjects were for him 
 too sacred to be spoken of without weighty 
 reasons, but that he had discerned Deronda's 
 shrinking at any mention of his birth; and the 
 severity of reserve which had hindered Mordecai 
 from answering a question on a private affair of 
 the Cohen family told yet more strongly here. 
 
 " Ezra, how is it? " Mirah one day said to him, 
 — "I am continually going to speak to JNIr. De- 
 ronda as if he were a Jew." 
 
 He smiled at her quietly, and said: " I sup- 
 pose it is because he treats us as if he were our 
 brother. But he loves not to have the difference 
 of birth dwelt upon." 
 
 " He has never lived with his parents, Mr. 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 147 
 
 Hans says," continued Mirah, to whom this was 
 necessarily a question of interest about every one 
 for whom she had a regard. 
 
 " Seek not to know such things from Mr. 
 Hans," said Mordecai, gravely, laying his hand 
 on her curls, as he was wont. " What Daniel 
 Deronda wishes us to know about himself is for 
 him to tell us." 
 
 And Mirah felt herself rebuked, as Deronda 
 had done. But to be rebuked in this way by 
 Mordecai made her rather proud. 
 
 " I see no one so great as my brother," she 
 said to Mrs. Meyrick one day that she called at 
 the Chelsea house on her way home, and, accord- 
 ing to her hope, found the little mother alone. 
 "It is difficult to think that he belongs to the 
 same world as those people I used to live 
 amongst. I told you once that they made life 
 seem like a madhouse ; but when I am with Ezra 
 he makes me feel that his life is a great good, 
 though he has suffered so much ; not like me, who 
 wanted to die because I had suffered a little, and 
 only for a little while. His soul is so full, it is im- 
 possible for him to wish for death as I did. I 
 get the same sort of feeling from him that I got 
 yesterday, when I was tired, and came home 
 through the park after the sweet rain had fallen 
 and the sunshine lay on the grass and flowers. 
 Everything in the sky and under the sky looked 
 so pure and beautiful that the weariness and 
 trouble and folly seemed only a small part of 
 what is, and I became more patient and hopeful." 
 
 A dovelike note of melancholy in this speech 
 caused Mrs. Meyrick to look at Mirah with new 
 examination. After laying down her hat and 
 
148 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 pushing her curls flat, with an air of fatigue, she 
 had placed herself on a chair opposite her friend 
 in her habitual attitude, her feet and hands just 
 crossed : and at a distance she might have seemed 
 a coloured statue of serenity. 
 
 But Mrs. Meyrick discerned a new look of 
 suppressed suffering in her face, which corre- 
 sponded to the hint that to be patient and hopeful 
 required some extra influence. 
 
 " Is there any fresh trouble on your mind, my 
 dear? " said Mrs. Meyrick, giving up her needle- 
 work as a sign of concentrated attention. 
 
 Mirah hesitated before she said: "I am too 
 ready to speak of troubles, I think. It seems 
 unkind to put anything painful into other 
 people's minds, unless one were sure it would 
 hinder something worse. And perhaps I am too 
 hasty and fearful." 
 
 " Oh, my dear, mothers are made to like pain - 
 and trouble for the sake of their children. Is it 
 because the singing-lessons are so few, and are 
 likely to fall off when the season comes to an end? 
 Success in these things can't come all at once." 
 Mrs. Meyrick did not believe that she was touch- 
 ing the real grief; but a guess that could be 
 corrected would make an easier channel for 
 confidence. 
 
 " No, not that," said Mirah, shaking her head 
 gently. " I have been a little disappointed be- 
 cause so many ladies said they wanted me to give 
 them or their daughters lessons, and then I never 
 heard of them again. But perhaps after the holi- 
 days I shall teach in some schools. Besides, you 
 know, I am as rich as a princess now. I have not 
 touched the hundred pounds that Mrs, Klesmer 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 149 
 
 gave me ; and I should never be afraid that Ezra 
 would be in want of anything, because there is 
 Mr. Deronda, and he said, ' It is the chief honour 
 of my life that your brother will share anything 
 with me.' Oh, no! Ezra and I can have no fears 
 for each other about such things as food and 
 clothing." 
 
 " But there is some other fear on your mind," 
 said Mrs. Meyrick, not without divination, — 
 " a fear of something that may disturb your 
 peace? Don't be forecasting evil, dear child, un- 
 less it is what you can guard against. Anxiety is 
 good for nothing if we can't turn it into a de- 
 fence. But there 's no defence against all the 
 things that might be. Have you any more rea- 
 son for being anxious now than you had a month 
 ago?" 
 
 " Yes, I have," said Mirah. " I have kept it 
 from Ezra. I have not dared to tell him. Pray 
 forgive me that I can't do without telling you, 
 I have more reason for being anxious. It is 
 five days ago now. I am quite sure I saw my 
 father." 
 
 Mrs. Meyrick shrank into smaller space, 
 packing her arms across her chest and leaning 
 forward, — to hinder herself from pelting that 
 father w^ith her worst epithets. 
 
 " The year has changed him," Mirah went on. 
 " He had already been much altered and worn 
 in the time before I left him. You remember 
 I said how he used sometimes to cry. He was 
 always excited one way or the other. I have told 
 Ezra everything that I told you, and he says that 
 my father had taken to gambling, which makes 
 people easily distressed and then again exalted. 
 
150 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 And now — it was only a moment that I saw 
 him — his face was more haggard, and his 
 clothes were shabby. He was with a much 
 worse-looking man, who carried something, and 
 they were hurrying along after an omnibus." 
 
 " Well, child, he did not see you, I hope? " 
 
 " No. I had just come from Mrs. Ray- 
 mond's, and I was waiting to cross near the 
 Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and 
 gone out of sight. It was a dreadful moment. 
 My old life seemed to have come back again, and 
 it was worse than it had ever been before. And 
 I could not help feeling it a new deliverance that 
 he was gone out of sight without knowing that 
 I was there. And yet it hurt me that I was 
 feeling so, — it seemed hateful in me, — almost 
 like words I once had to speak in a play, that 
 ' I had warmed my hands in the blood of my 
 kindred.' For where might my father be going? 
 What may become of him? And his having a 
 daughter who would own him in spite of all, 
 might have hindered the worst. Is there any 
 pain like seeing what ought to be the best things 
 in life turned into the worst? All those opposite 
 feelings were meeting and pressing against each 
 other, and took up all my strength. No one 
 could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what 
 we go through within. I don't know how I 
 called a cab. I only remember that I was in it 
 when I began to think, ' I cannot tell Ezra ; 
 he must not know.' " 
 
 " You are afraid of grieving him? " Mrs. 
 Meyrick asked, when Mirah had paused a little. 
 
 " Yes, — and there is something more," said 
 Mirah, hesitatingly, as if she were examining 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 151 
 
 her feeling before she would venture to speak of 
 it. "I want to tell you; I could not tell any 
 one else. I could not have told my own mother ; 
 I should have closed it up before her. I feel 
 shame for my father, and it is perhaps strange, 
 — but the shame is greater before Ezra than 
 before any one else in the world. He desired me 
 to tell him all about my life, and I obeyed him. 
 But it is always like a smart to me to know that 
 those things about my father are in Ezra's mind. 
 And, can you believe it ? — when the thought 
 haunts me how it would be if my father were to 
 come and show himself before us both, what 
 seems as if it would scorch me most is seeing 
 my father shrinking before Ezra. That is the 
 truth. I don't know whether it is a right feel- 
 ing. But I can't help thinking that I would 
 rather try to maintain my father in secret, and 
 bear a great deal in that way, if I could hinder 
 him from meeting my brother." 
 
 " You must not encourage that feeling, 
 Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick, hastily. " It would 
 be very dangerous; it would be wrong. You 
 must not have concealments of that sort." 
 
 " But ought I now to tell Ezra that I have 
 seen my father? " said Mirah, with deprecation 
 in her tone. 
 
 " No," Mrs. Meyrick answered dubitatively. 
 " I don't know that it is necessary to do that. 
 Your father may go away with the birds. It 
 is not clear that he came after you; you may 
 never see him again. And then your brother will 
 have been spared a useless anxiety. But promise 
 me that if your father sees you, — gets hold of 
 you in any way again, — you will let us all 
 
152 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 know. Promise me that solemnly, Mirah. I 
 have a right to ask it." 
 
 Mirah reflected a little, then leaned forward 
 to put her hands in Mrs. Meyrick's, and said, 
 " Since yoQ ask it, I do promise. I will bear 
 this feeling of shame. I have been so long used 
 to think that I must bear that sort of inward 
 pain. But the shame for my father burns me 
 more when I think of his meeting Ezra." She 
 was silent a moment or two, and then said, in 
 a new tone of yearning compassion, " And we 
 are his children, — and he was once young like 
 us, — and my mother loved him. Oh ! I cannot 
 help seeing it all close, and it hurts me like 
 a cruelty." 
 
 Mirah shed no tears: the discipline of her 
 whole life had been against indulgence in such 
 manifestation, which soon falls under the con- 
 trol of strong motives; but it seemed that the 
 more intense expression of sorrow had entered 
 into her voice. Mrs. Meyrick, with all her quick- 
 ness and loving insight, did not quite under- 
 stand that filial feeling in Mirah which had 
 active roots deep below her indignation for the 
 worst offences. She could conceive that a 
 mother would have a clinging pity and shame 
 for a reprobate son, but she was out of patience 
 with what she held an exaggerated suscepti- 
 bility on behalf of this father, whose reappear- 
 ance inclined her to wish him under the care of 
 a turnkey. Mirah's promise, however, was some 
 security against her weakness. 
 
 That incident was the only reason that Mirah 
 herself could have stated for the hidden sadness 
 which Hans had divined. Of one element in 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 153 
 
 her changed mood she could have given no defi- 
 nite account: it was something as dim as the 
 sense of approaching weather-change, and had 
 extremely slight external promptings, such as 
 we are often ashamed to find all we can allege 
 in support of the busy constructions that go on 
 within us, not only without effort but even 
 against it, under the influence of any blind 
 emotional stirring. Perhaps the first leaven of 
 uneasiness was laid by Gwendolen's behaviour 
 on that visit which was entirely superfluous as 
 a means of engaging Mirah to sing, and could 
 have no other motive than the excited and 
 strange questioning about Deronda. Mirah had 
 instinctively kept the visit a secret, but the active 
 remembrance of it had raised a new suscepti- 
 bility in her, and made her alive as she had never 
 been before to the relations Deronda must have 
 with that society which she herself was getting 
 frequent glimpses of without belonging to it. 
 Her peculiar life and education had produced in 
 her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness 
 with knowledge of the world's evil, and even this 
 knowledge was a strange blending of direct ob- 
 servation with the effects of reading and theatri- 
 cal study. Her memory was furnished with 
 abundant passionate situation and intrigue, 
 which she never made emotionally her own, but 
 felt a repelled aloofness from, as she had done 
 from the actual life around her. Some of that 
 imaginative knowledge began now to weave it- 
 self around Mrs. Grandcourt; and though 
 Mirah would admit no position likely to affect 
 her reverence for Deronda, she could not avoid 
 a new painfully vivid association of his general 
 
154 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 life with a world away from her own, where 
 there might be some involvement of his feeling 
 and action with a woman like Gwendolen, who 
 was increasingly repugnant to her, — increas- 
 ingly, even after she had ceased to see her; for 
 liking and disliking can grow in meditation as 
 fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. 
 Any disquietude consciously due to the idea 
 that Deronda's deepest care might be for some- 
 thing remote not only from herself but even 
 from his friendship for her brother, she would 
 have checked with rebuking questions, — What 
 was she but one who had shared his generous 
 kindness with many others? and his attachment 
 to her brother, was it not begun late to be soon 
 ended? Other ties had come before, and others 
 would remain after this had been cut by swift- 
 coming death. But her uneasiness had not 
 reached that point of self -recognition in which 
 she would have been ashamed of it as an indirect, 
 presumptuous claim on Deronda's feeling. 
 That she or any one else should think of him 
 as her possible lover was a conception which 
 had never entered her mind; indeed it was 
 equally out of the question with Mrs. Meyrick 
 and the girls, who with Mirah herself regarded 
 his intervention in her life as something excep- 
 tional, and were so impressed by his mission as 
 her deliverer and guardian that they would have 
 held it an offence to hint at his holding any other 
 relation towards her: a point of view which 
 Hans also had readily adopted. It is a little 
 hard upon some men that they appear to sink 
 for us in becoming lovers. But precisely to this 
 innocence of the Meyricks was owing the dis- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 155 
 
 turbance of Mirah's unconsciousness. The first 
 occasion could hardly have been more trivial, 
 but it prepared her emotive nature for a deeper 
 effect from what happened afterwards. 
 
 It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the 
 Meyricks, was led to speak of her cousinship 
 with Gwendolen. The visit had been arranged 
 that Anna might see Mirah ; the three girls were 
 at home with her mother, and there was natu- 
 rally a flux of talk among six feminine creatures, 
 free from the presence of a distorting male 
 standard. Anna Gascoigne felt herself much 
 at home with the Meyrick girls, w^ho knew what 
 it was to have a brother, and to be generally re- 
 garded as of minor importance in the world; 
 and she had told Rex that she thought the Uni- 
 versity very nice, because brothers made friends 
 there whose families were not rich and grand, 
 and yet (like the University) were very nice. 
 The Meyricks seemed to her almost alarmingly 
 clever, and she consulted them much on the best 
 mode of teaching Lotta, confiding to them that 
 she herself was the least clever of her family. 
 Mirah had lately come in, and there was a com- 
 plete bouquet of young faces round the tea- 
 table, — Hafiz, seated a little aloft with large 
 eyes on the alert, regarding the whole scene as 
 an apparatus for supplying his allowance of 
 milk. 
 
 " Think of our surprise, Mirah," said Kate. 
 " We were speaking of Mr. Deronda and the 
 MaUingers, and it turns out that Miss Gas- 
 coigne knows them." 
 
 " I only know about them," said Anna, a 
 little flushed with excitement, what she had 
 
156 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 heard and now saw of the lovely Jewess being 
 an almost startling noveltj^ to her. I have not 
 even seen them. But some months ago, my 
 cousin married Sir Hugo JNIallinger's nephew, 
 jNIr. Grandcourt, who lived in Sir Hugo's place 
 at Diplow, near us." 
 
 "There!" exclaimed Mab, clasping her 
 hands. " Something must come of that. Mrs. 
 Grandcourt, the Vandyke duchess, is your 
 cousin? " 
 
 " Oh, yes; I was her bridesmaid," said Anna. 
 " Her mamma and mine are sisters. My aunt 
 was much richer before last year, but then she 
 and mamma lost all their fortune. Papa is a 
 clergyman, you know, so it makes very little 
 difference to us, except that we keep no car- 
 riage, and have no dinner-parties, — and I like 
 it better. But it was very sad for poor Aunt 
 Davilow, for she could not live with us, because 
 she has four daughters besides Gwendolen; but 
 then, when she married Mr. Grandcourt, it did 
 not signify so much, because of his being so 
 rich." 
 
 " Oh, this finding out relationships is delight- 
 ful!" said Mab. "It is like a Chinese puzzle 
 that one has to fit together. I feel sure some- 
 thing wonderful may be made of it, but I can't 
 tell what." 
 
 "Dear me, Mab!" said Amy, "relationships 
 must branch out. The only difference is, that 
 we happen to know some of the people 
 concerned. Such things are going on every 
 day." 
 
 " And pray, Am}^ why do you insist on the 
 number nine being so wonderful? " said Mab. 
 
 \ 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 157 
 
 " I am sure that is happening every day. Never 
 mind, Miss Gascoigne ; please go on. And Mr. 
 Deronda — have you never seen Mr. Deronda? 
 You must bring him in." 
 
 " No, I have not seen him," said Anna; " but 
 he was at Diplow before my cousin was married, 
 and I have heard my aunt speaking of him to 
 papa. She said what you have been saying about 
 him, — only not so much : I mean, about Mr. 
 Deronda living with Sir Hugo Mallinger, and 
 being so nice, she thought. We talk a great deal 
 about every one who comes near Pennicote, be- 
 cause it is so seldom there is any one new. But 
 I remember, when I asked Gwendolen what she 
 thought of Mr. Deronda, she said, ' Don't men- 
 tion it, Anna; but I think his hair is dark.' 
 That wajs her droll way of answering; she was 
 always so lively. It is really rather wonderful 
 that I should come to hear so much about him, 
 all through Mr. Hans knowing Rex, and then 
 my having the pleasure of knowing you," Anna 
 ended, looking at Mrs. Meyrick with a shy 
 grace. 
 
 "The pleasure is on our side too; but the 
 wonder would have been if you had come to this 
 house without hearing of Mr. Deronda, — 
 would n't it, Mirah? " said Mrs. Meyrick. 
 
 Mirah smiled acquiescently, but had nothing 
 to say. A confused discontent took possession 
 of her at the mingling of names and images to 
 which she had been listening. 
 
 " My son calls Mrs. Grandcourt the Vandyke 
 duchess," continued Mrs. Meyrick, turning 
 again to Anna; " he thinks her so striking and 
 picturesque." 
 
158 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Yes," said Anna. " Gwendolen was always 
 so beautiful, — people fell dreadfully in love 
 with her. I thought it a pity, because it made 
 them unhappy." 
 
 " And how do you like Mr. Grandcourt, the 
 happy lover? " said Mrs. Meyrick, who in her 
 way was as much interested as Mab in the hints 
 she had been hearing of vicissitude in the life 
 of a widow with daughters. 
 
 " Papa approved of Gwendolen's accepting 
 him, and my aunt says he is very generous," 
 said Anna, beginning with a virtuous intention 
 of repressing her own sentiments; but then, 
 unable to resist a rare occasion for speaking 
 them freely, she went on, — " else I should have 
 thought he was not very nice, — rather proud, 
 and not at all lively, like Gwendolen. I should 
 have thought some one younger and more lively 
 would have suited her better. But, perhaps, 
 having a brother who seems to us better than 
 any one makes us think worse of others." 
 
 " Wait till you see Mr. Deronda," said Mab, 
 nodding significantly. " Nobody's brother will 
 do after him." 
 
 " Our brothers must do for people's hus- 
 bands," said Kate, curtly, " because they will 
 not get Mr. Deronda. No woman will do for 
 him to marry." 
 
 " No woman ought to want him to marry 
 her," said Mab, with indignation. " I never 
 should. Fancy finding out that he had a tailor's 
 bill, and used boot-hooks, like Hans. Who ever 
 thought of his marrying? " 
 
 " I have," said Kate. " When I drew a wed- 
 ding for a frontispiece to ' Hearts and Dia- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 159 
 
 monds,' I made a sort of likeness of him for the 
 bridegroom, and I went about looking for a 
 grand woman who would do for his countess, 
 but I saw none that would not be poor creatures 
 by the side of him." 
 
 " You should have seen this Mrs. Grandcourt 
 then," said Mrs. Meyrick. " Hans says that she 
 and Mr. Deronda set each other off when they 
 are side by side. She is tall and fair. But you 
 know her, Mirah, — you can always say some- 
 thing descriptive. What do you think of Mrs. 
 Grandcourt? " 
 
 " I think she is like the Princess of Eboli in 
 ' Don Carlos,' " said Mirah, with a quick inten- 
 sity. She was pursuing an association in her 
 own mind not intelligible to her hearers, — an 
 association with a certain actress as well as the 
 part she represented. 
 
 " Your comparison is a riddle for me, my 
 dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling. 
 
 " You said that Mrs. Grandcourt was tall and 
 fair," continued Mirah, slightly paler. " That 
 is quite true." 
 
 Mrs. Meyrick's quick eye and ear detected 
 something unusual, but immediately explained 
 it to herself. Fine ladies had often wounded 
 Mirah by caprices of manner and intention. 
 
 " Mrs. Grandcourt had thought of having 
 lessons from Mirah," she said, turning to Anna. 
 " But many have talked of having lessons, and 
 then have found no time. Fashionable ladies 
 have too much work to do." 
 
 And the chat went on without further insist- 
 ence on the Princess of Eboli. That comparison 
 escaped Mirah's lips under the urgency of a 
 
160 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 pang unlike anything she had felt before. The 
 conversation from the beginning had revived 
 unpleasant impressions, and Mrs. Meyrick's 
 suggestion of Gwendolen's figure by the side 
 of Deronda's had the stinging effect of a voice 
 outside her, confirming her secret conviction that 
 this tall and fair woman had some hold on his 
 lot. For a long while afterwards she felt as 
 if she had had a jarring shock through her 
 frame. 
 
 In the evening, putting her cheek against her 
 brother's shoulder as she was sitting by him, 
 while he sat propped up in bed under a new 
 difficulty of breathing, she said, — 
 
 " Ezra, does it ever hurt your love for Mr. 
 Deronda that so much of his life v^sls all hidden 
 away from you, — that he is amongst persons 
 and cares about persons who are all so unlike 
 us, — I mean, unlike you? " 
 
 " No, assuredly no," said Mordecai. " Rath- 
 er, it is a precious thought to me that he has 
 a preparation which I lacked, and is an accom- 
 plished Egyptian." Then, recollecting that his 
 words had a reference which his sister must not 
 yet understand, he added: " I have the more 
 to give him, since his treasure differs from mine. 
 That is a blessedness in friendship." 
 
 Mirah mused a little. 
 
 " Still," she said, " it would be a trial to your 
 love for him if that other part of his life were 
 like a crowd in which he had got entangled, so 
 that he was carried away from you, — I mean 
 in his thoughts, and not merely carried out of 
 sight as he is now, — and not merely for a little 
 while, but continually. How should you bear 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 161 
 
 that? Our religion commands us to bear. But 
 how should you bear it? " 
 
 " Not well, my sister, — not well; but it will 
 never happen," said Mordecai, looking at her 
 with a tender smile. He thought that her heart 
 needed comfort on his account. 
 
 Mirah said no more. She mused over the dif- 
 ference between her own state of mind and her 
 brother's, and felt her comparative pettiness. 
 Why could she not be completely satisfied with 
 what satisfied his larger judgment? She gave 
 herself no fuller reason than a painful sense of 
 unfitness, — in what ? Airy possibilities to 
 which she could give no outline, but to which 
 one name and one figure gave the wandering per- 
 sistency of a blot in her vision. Here lay the 
 vaguer source of the hidden sadness rendered 
 noticeable to Hans by some diminution of that 
 sweet ease, that ready joyousness of response in 
 her speech and smile, which had come with the 
 new sense of freedom and safety, and had made 
 her presence like the freshly opened daisies and 
 clear bird-notes after the rain. She herself re- 
 garded her uneasiness as a sort of ingratitude 
 and dulness of sensibility towards the great 
 things that had been given her in her new life; 
 and whenever she threw more energy than usual 
 into her singing, it was the energy of indigna- 
 tion against the shallowness of her own content. 
 In that mood she once said: " Shall I tell you 
 what is the difference between you and me, 
 Ezra? You are a spring in the drought, and 
 I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill 
 me, but the least little shake leaves me empty." 
 
 " Why, what has shaken thee? " said Mordecai. 
 
 VOL. XIV — 11 
 
162 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 He fell into this antique form of speech habitu- 
 ally in talking to his sister and to the Cohen 
 children. 
 
 "Thoughts," said Mirah; "thoughts that 
 come like the breeze and shake me, — bad peo- 
 ple, wrong things, misery, — and how they 
 might touch our life." 
 
 " We must take our portion, Mirah. It is 
 there. On whose shoulder would we lay it, that 
 we might be free? " 
 
 The one voluntary sign that she made of her 
 inward care was this distant allusion. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 My desolation does begin to make 
 A better life. 
 
 Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 BEFORE Deronda was summoned to a sec- 
 ond interview with his mother, a day had 
 passed in which she had only sent him a 
 message to say that she was not yet well enough 
 to receive him again; but on the third morning 
 he had a note saying, " I leave to-day. Come 
 and see me at once." 
 
 He was shown into the same room as before; 
 but it was much darkened with blinds and cur- 
 tains. The Princess was not there, but she pres- 
 ently entered, dressed in a loose wrap of some 
 soft silk, in colour a dusky orange, her head again 
 with black lace floating about it, her arms show- 
 ing themselves bare from under her wide sleeves. 
 Her face seemed even more impressive in the 
 sombre light, the eyes larger, the lines more 
 vigorous. You might have imagined her a sor- 
 ceress who would stretch forth her wonderful 
 hand and arm to mix youth-potions for others, 
 but scorned to mix them for herself, having had 
 enough of youth. 
 
 She put her arms on her son's shoulders at 
 once, and kissed him on both cheeks, then seated 
 herself among her cushions with an air of as- 
 sured firmness and dignity unlike her fitfulness 
 in their first interview, and told Deronda to sit 
 
164 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 down by her. He obeyed, saying, " You are 
 quite relieved now, I trust? " 
 
 " Yes, I am at ease again. Is there anything 
 more that you would like to ask me? " she said, 
 with the manner of a queen rather than of a 
 mother. 
 
 "Can I find the house in Genoa where you 
 used to live with my grandfather?" said 
 Deronda. 
 
 " No," she answered, with a deprecating move- 
 ment of her arms; " it is pulled down, — not to 
 be found. But about our family, and where my 
 father lived at various times, — you will find all 
 that among the papers in the chest, better than 
 I can tell you. My father, I told you, was a phy- 
 sician. My mother was a Morteira. I used to 
 hear all those things without listening. You 
 will find them all. I was born amongst them 
 without my will. I banished them as soon as I 
 could." 
 
 Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and 
 said, " Anything else that I should desire to 
 know from you could only be what it is some 
 satisfaction to your own feeling to tell me." 
 
 " I think I have told you everything that could 
 be demanded of me," said the Princess, looking 
 coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had ex- 
 hausted her emotion in their .former interview. 
 The fact was, she had said to herself : " I have 
 done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go 
 through it again. I will save myself from agita- 
 tion." And she was acting out that theme. 
 
 But to Deronda's nature the moment was 
 cruel: it made the filial yearning of his life a 
 disappointed pilgrimage to a shrine where there 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 165 
 
 were no longer the symbols of sacredness. It 
 seemed that all the woman lacking in her was 
 present in him as he said, with some tremor in his 
 voice, — 
 
 " Then are we to part, and I never be any- 
 thing to you? " 
 
 " It is better so," said the Princess, in a softer, 
 mellower voice. " There could be nothing but 
 hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you 
 to take the place of my son. You would not love 
 me. Don't deny it," she said abruptly, putting 
 up her hand. " I know what is the truth. You 
 don't like what I did. You are angry with me. 
 You think I robbed you of something. You are 
 on your grandfather's side, and you will always 
 have a condemnation of me in your heart." 
 
 Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. 
 He rose from his seat by her, preferring to stand, 
 if he had to obey that imperious prohibition of 
 any tenderness. But his mother now looked 
 up at him with a new admiration in her glance, 
 saying, — 
 
 " You are wrong to be angry with me. You 
 are the better for what I did." After pausing a 
 little, she added abruptly, " And now tell me 
 what you shall do." 
 
 " Do you mean now, immediately," said De- 
 ronda; " or as to the course of my future life? " 
 
 " I mean in the future. What difference will 
 it make to you that I have told you about your 
 birth?" 
 
 " A very great difference," said Deronda, em- 
 phatically. " I can hardly think of anything 
 that would make a greater difference." 
 
 " What shall you do, then? " said the Princess, 
 
166 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 with more sharpness. " Make yourself just like 
 your grandfather, — be what he wished you, — 
 turn yourself into a Jew like him? " 
 
 " That is impossible. The effect of my edu- 
 cation can never be done away with. The Chris- 
 tian sympathies in which my mind was reared 
 can never die out of me," said Deronda, with in- 
 creasing tenacity of tone. " But I consider it 
 my duty — it is the impulse of my feeling — to 
 identify myself, as far as possible, with my he- 
 reditary people, and if I can see any work to be 
 done for them that I can give my soul and hand 
 to, I shall choose to do it." 
 
 His mother had her eyes fixed on him with a 
 wondering speculation, examining his face as if 
 she thought that by close attention she could read 
 a difficult language there. He bore her gaze 
 very firmly, sustained by a resolute opposition, 
 which was the expression of his fullest self. She 
 bent towards him a little and said, with a decisive 
 emphasis, — 
 
 " You are in love with a Jewess." 
 
 Deronda coloured and said, " My reasons 
 would be independent of any such fact." 
 
 " I know better. I have seen what men are," 
 said the Princess, peremptorily. " Tell me the 
 truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept any 
 one but a Jew. There are a few such," she 
 added, with a touch of scorn. 
 
 Deronda had that objection to answer which 
 we all have knoTvn in speaking to those who are 
 too certain of their own fixed interpretations to 
 be enlightened by anything we may say. But be- 
 sides this, the point immediately in question was 
 one on which he felt a repugnance either to deny 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 167 
 
 or affirm. He remained silent, and she presently 
 said, — 
 
 " You love her as your father loved me, and 
 she draws you after her as I drew him." 
 
 Those words touched Deronda's filial imagina- 
 tion, and some tenderness in his glance was taken 
 by his mother as an assent. She went on with 
 rising passion. " But I was leading him the 
 other way. And now your grandfather is get- 
 ting his revenge." 
 
 " Mother," said Deronda, remonstrantly, 
 don't let us think of it in that way. I will admit 
 that there may come some benefit from the edu- 
 cation you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the 
 benefit with gratitude, to dwelling with resent- 
 ment on the injury. I think it would have been 
 right that I should have been brought up with the 
 consciousness that I was a Jew, but it must al- 
 ways have been a good to me to have as wide an 
 instruction and sympathy as possible. And now, 
 you have restored me my inheritance, — events 
 have brought a fuller restitution than you could 
 have made, — you have been saved from robbing 
 my people of my service and me of my duty: 
 can you not bring your whole soul to consent to 
 this?" 
 
 Deronda paused in his pleading: his mother 
 looked at him listeningly, as if the cadence of 
 his voice were taking her ear, yet she shook 
 her head slowly. He began again even more 
 urgently. 
 
 " You have told me that you sought what you 
 held the best for me : open your heart to relent- 
 ing and love towards my grandfather, who 
 sought what he held the best for you." 
 
168 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " Not for me, no," she said, shaking her head 
 with more absolute denial, and folding her arms 
 tightly. " I tell you, he never thought of his 
 daughter except as an instrument. Because I 
 had wants outside his purpose, I was to be put in 
 a frame and tortured. If that is the right law for 
 the world, I will not say that I love it. If my 
 acts were wrong, — if it is God who is exacting 
 from me that I should deliver up what I with- 
 held, — who is punishing me because I deceived 
 my father and did not warn him that I should 
 contradict his trust, — well, I have told every- 
 thing. I have done what I could. And your 
 soul consents. That is enough. I have after all 
 been the instrument my father wanted. — ' I 
 desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish 
 heart. Every Jew should rear his family as if 
 he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from 
 it.' " 
 
 In uttering these last sentences the Princess 
 narrowed her eyes, waved her head up and down, 
 and spoke slowly with a new kind of chest-voice, 
 as if she were quoting imwillingly. 
 
 " Were those my grandfather's words? " said 
 Deronda. 
 
 " Yes, yes ; and you will find them written. I 
 wanted to thwart him," said the Princess, with a 
 sudden outburst of the passion she had shown in 
 the former interview. Then she added more 
 slowly, " You would have me love what I have 
 hated from the time I was so high," — here she 
 held her left hand a yard from the floor. — 
 " That can never be. But what does it matter? 
 his yoke has been on me, whether I loved it or not. 
 You are the grandson he wanted. You speak as 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 169 
 
 men do, — as if you felt yourself wise. What 
 does it all mean? " 
 
 Her tone was abrupt and scornful. Deronda, 
 in his pained feeling, and under the solemn ur- 
 gency of the moment, had to keep a clutching re- 
 membrance of their relationship, lest his words 
 should become cruel. He began in a deep 
 entreating tone. 
 
 " Mother, don't say that I feel myself wise. 
 We are set in the midst of difficulties. I see no 
 other way to get any clearness than by being 
 truthful, — not by keeping back facts which may 
 
 — which should carry obligation with them, — 
 which should make the only guidance towards 
 duty. No wonder if such facts come to reveal 
 themselves in spite of concealments. The ef- 
 fects prepared by generations are likely to 
 triumph over a contrivance which would bend 
 them all to the satisfaction of self. Your will 
 was strong, but my grandfather's trust which 
 you accepted and did not fulfil — what you call 
 his yoke — is the expression of something 
 stronger, with deeper, farther-spreading roots, 
 knit into the foundations of sacredness for all 
 men. You renounced me — you still banish me 
 
 — as a son," — there was an involuntary move- 
 ment of indignation in Deronda's voice, — " but 
 that stronger Something has determined that I 
 shall be all the more the grandson whom also you 
 willed to annihilate." 
 
 His mother was watching him fixedly, and 
 again her face gathered admiration. After a 
 moment's silence she said, in a low persuasive 
 tone, — 
 
 "Sit down again;" and he obeyed, placing 
 
170 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 himself beside her. She laid her hand on his 
 shoulder and went on. 
 
 " You rebuke me. Well, I am the loser. And 
 you are angry because I banish you. What 
 could you do for me but weary your own pa- 
 tience? Your mother is a shattered woman. 
 My sense of life is little more than a sense of what 
 was, — except when the pain is present. You 
 reproach me that I parted with you. I had 
 joy enough without you then. Now you are 
 come back to me, and I cannot make you a joy. 
 Have you the cursing spirit of the Jew in you? 
 Are you not able to forgive me? Shall you be 
 glad to think that I am punished because I was 
 not a Jewish mother to you? " 
 
 " How can you ask me that? " said Deronda, 
 remonstrantly. " Have I not besought you that 
 I might now at least be a son to you? My grief 
 is that you have declared me helpless to comfort 
 you. I would give up much that is dear for the 
 sake of soothing your anguish." 
 
 " You shall give up nothing," said his mother, 
 with the hurry of agitation. " You shall be 
 happy. You shall let me think of you as happy. 
 I shall have done you no harm. You have no 
 reason to curse me. You shall feel for me as they 
 feel for the dead whom they say prayers for, — 
 you shall long that I may be freed from all suf- 
 fering, — from all punishment. And I shall see 
 you instead of always seeing your grandfather. 
 Will any harm come to me because I broke his 
 trust in the daylight after he was gone into dark- 
 ness? I cannot tell: if you think Kaddish will 
 help me, — say it, say it. You will come be- 
 tween me and the dead. When I am in your 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 171 
 
 mind, you will look as you do now, — always as 
 if you were a tender son, — always — as if I had 
 been a tender mother." 
 
 She seemed resolved that her agitation should 
 not conquer her, but he felt her hand trembling 
 on his shoulder. Deep, deep compassion hemmed 
 in all words. With a face of beseeching he put 
 his arm round her and pressed her head ten- 
 derly under his. They sat so for some moments. 
 Then she lifted her head again and rose from 
 her seat with a great sigh, as if in that breath she 
 were dismissing a weight of thoughts. Deronda, 
 standing in front of her, felt that the parting was 
 near. But one of her swift alternations had 
 come upon his mother. 
 
 " Is she beautiful? " she said abruptly. 
 
 " Who? " said Deronda, changing colour. 
 
 " The woman you love." 
 
 It was not a moment for deliberate explana- 
 tion. He was obliged to say, " Yes." 
 "Not ambitious?" 
 " No, I think not." 
 
 " Not one who must have a path of her 
 own? " 
 
 " I think her nature is not given to make great 
 claims." 
 
 " She is not like that? " said the Princess, tak- 
 ing from her wallet a miniature with jewels round 
 it, and holding it before her son. It was her own 
 in all the fire of youth; and as Deronda looked 
 at it with admiring sadness, she said: " Had I 
 not a rightful claim to be something more than a 
 mere daughter and mother? The voice and the 
 genius matched the face. Whatever else was 
 wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an 
 
172 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 artist, though my father's will was against it. 
 My nature gave me a charter." 
 
 " I do acknowledge that," said Deronda, look- 
 ing from the miniature to her face, which even 
 in its worn pallor had an expression of living 
 force beyond anything that the pencil could 
 show. 
 
 " Will you take the portrait? " said the Prin- 
 cess, more gently. " If she is a kind woman, 
 teach her to think of me kindly." 
 
 " I shall be grateful for the portrait," said 
 Deronda; " but — I ought to say, I have no as- 
 surance that she whom I love will have any love 
 for me. I have kept silence." 
 
 "Who and what is she?" said the mother. 
 The question seemed a command. 
 
 " She was brought up as a singer for the 
 stage," said Deronda, with inward reluctance. 
 " Her father took her away early from her 
 mother, and her life has been unhappy. She is 
 very young, — only twenty. Her father wished 
 to bring her up in disregard — even in dislike of 
 her Jewish origin, but she has clung with all her 
 affection to the memory of her mother and the 
 fellowship of her people." 
 
 " Ah! like you. She is attached to the Juda- 
 ism she knows nothing of," said the Princess, 
 peremptorily. " That is poetry, — fit to last 
 through an opera night. Is she fond of her art- 
 ist's life, — is her singing worth anything? " 
 
 " Her singing is exquisite. But her voice is 
 not suited to the stage. I think that the artist's 
 life has been made repugnant to her." 
 
 " Why, she is made for you, then. Sir Hugo 
 said you were bitterly against being a singer, and 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 173 
 
 I can see that you would never have let yourself 
 .be merged in a wife, as your father was." 
 
 " I repeat," said Deronda, emphatically, — 
 " I repeat that I have no assurance of her love 
 for me, of the possibility that we can ever be 
 united. Other things — painful issues may lie 
 before me. I have always felt that I should 
 prepare myself to renounce, not cherish that 
 prospect. But I suppose I might feel so of 
 happiness in general. Whether it may come 
 or not, one should try and prepare one's self 
 to do without it." 
 
 " Do you feel in that way? " said his mother, 
 laying her hands on his shoulders, and perusing 
 his face, while she spoke in a low meditative 
 tone, pausing between her sentences. " Poor 
 boy ! . . . I wonder how it would have been if I 
 had kept you with me . . . whether you would 
 have turned your heart to the old things . . . 
 against mine . . . and we should have quar- 
 relled . . . your grandfather would have been 
 in you . . . and you would have hampered my 
 life with your young growth from the old root." 
 
 " I think my affection might have lasted 
 through all our quarrelling," said Deronda, sad- 
 dened more and more, " and that would not have 
 hampered, — surely it would have enriched your 
 hfe." 
 
 " Not then, not then ... I did not want it 
 then ... I might have been glad of it now," 
 said the mother, with a bitter melancholy, " if I 
 could have been glad of anything." 
 
 "But you love your other children, and they 
 love you? " said Deronda, anxiously. 
 
 " Oh, yes," she answered, as to a question 
 
174 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 about a matter of course, while she folded her 
 arms again. " But "... she added in a deeper 
 tone, ..." I am not a loving woman. That is 
 the truth. It is a talent to love, — I lacked it. 
 Others have loved me, — and I have acted their 
 love. I know very well what love makes of men 
 and women, — it is subjection. It takes another 
 for a larger self, enclosing this one," — she 
 pointed to her own bosom. " I was never will- 
 ingly subject to any man. Men have been sub- 
 ject to me." 
 
 " Perhaps the man who was subject was the 
 happier of the two," said Deronda, — not with a 
 smile, but with a grave, sad sense of his mother's 
 privation. 
 
 "Perha'ps; but I was happy, — for a few 
 years I was happy. If I had not been afraid 
 of defeat and failure, I might have gone on. I 
 miscalculated. What then? It is all over. An- 
 other life! Men talk of ' another life,' as if it 
 only began on the other side of the grave. I have 
 long entered on another life." With the last 
 words she raised her arms till they were bare to 
 the elbow, her brow was contracted in one deep 
 fold, her eyes were closed, her voice was smoth- 
 ered: in her dusky flame-coloured garment, she 
 looked like a dreamed visitant from some region 
 of departed mortals. 
 
 Deronda' s feeling was wrought to a pitch of 
 acuteness in which he was no longer quite master 
 of himself. He gave an audible sob. His 
 mother, opening her eyes, and letting her hands 
 again rest on his shoulders, said, — 
 
 " Good-by, my son, good-by. We shall hear 
 no more of each other. Kiss me." 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 175 
 
 He clasped his arms round her neck, and they 
 kissed each other. 
 
 Deronda did not know how he got out of the 
 room. He felt an older man. All his boyish 
 yearnings and anxieties about his mother had 
 vanished. He had gone through a tragic experi- 
 ence which must forever solemnize his life and 
 deepen the significance of the acts by which he 
 bound himself to others. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The unwilling brain 
 Feigns often what it would not ; and we trust 
 Imagination with such phantasies 
 As the tongue dares not fashion into words; 
 Which have no words, their horror makes them dim 
 To the mind's eye. 
 
 Shellet. 
 
 MADONNA PIA, whose husband, feeling 
 himself injured by her, took her to his 
 castle amid the swampy flats of the 
 Maremma and got rid of her there, makes a pa- 
 thetic figure in Dante's Purgatory, among the 
 sinners who repented at the last and desire to be 
 remembered compassionately by their fellow-- 
 countrymen. We know little about the grounds 
 of mutual discontent between the Siennese couple, 
 but we may infer with some confidence that the 
 husband had never been a very delightful com- 
 panion, and that on the flats of the Maremma 
 his disagreeable manners had a background which 
 threw them out remarkably; whence in his de- 
 sire to punish his wife to the uttermost, the 
 nature of things was so far against him that in 
 relieving himself of her he could not avoid mak- 
 ing the relief mutual. And thus, without any 
 hardness to the poor Tuscan lady who had her 
 deliverance long ago, one may feel warranted in 
 thinking of her with a less sympathetic interest 
 than of the better known Gwendolen, who, in- 
 stead of being delivered from her errors on earth 
 and cleansed from their effect in purgatory, is 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 177 
 
 at the very height of her entanglement in those 
 fatal meshes which are woven within more closely 
 than without, and often make the inward tor- 
 ture disproportionate to what is discernible as 
 outward cause. 
 
 In taking his wife with him on a yachting ex- 
 pedition, Grandcourt had no intention to get rid 
 of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more 
 securely that she was his to do as he liked with, 
 land to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was 
 himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy, do- 
 nothing absolutism, unmolested by social de- 
 mands, suited his disposition, and he did not in 
 the least regard it as an equivalent for the dreari- 
 ness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for 
 carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but they were 
 not reasons that can seem black in the mere state- 
 ment. He suspected a growing spirit of opposi- 
 tion in her, and his feeling about the sentimental 
 inclination she betrayed for Deronda was what 
 in another man he would have called jealousy. 
 In himself it seemed merely a resolution to put 
 an end to such foolery as must have been going 
 on in that prearranged visit of Deronda's which 
 he had divined and interrupted. 
 
 And Grandcourt might have pleaded that he 
 was perfectly justified in taking care that his 
 wife should fulfil the obligations she had ac- 
 cepted. Her marriage was a contract where all 
 the ostensible advantages were on her side, and it 
 was only one of those advantages that her hus- 
 band should use his power to hinder her from 
 any injurious self -committal or unsuitable behav- 
 iour. He knew quite well that she had not mar- 
 ried him — had not overcome her repugnance to 
 
 VOL. XIV — 12 
 
178 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 certain facts — out of love to him personally; 
 he had won her by the rank and luxuries he had 
 to give her, and these she had got: he had ful- 
 filled his side of the contract. 
 
 And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly 
 aware of the situation. She could not excuse 
 herself by saying that there had been a tacit part 
 of the contract on her side, — namely, that she 
 meant to rule and have her own way. With all 
 her early indulgence in the disposition to domi- 
 nate, she was* not one of the narrow-brained 
 women who through life regard all their own 
 selfish demands as rights, and every claim upon 
 themselves as an injury. She had a root of con- 
 science in her, and the process of purgatory had 
 begun for her on the green earth: she knew that 
 she had been wrong. 
 
 But now enter into the soul of this young crea- 
 ture as she found herself, with the blue Mediter- 
 ranean dividing her from the world, on the tiny 
 plank-island of a yacht, the domain of the hus- 
 band to whom she felt that she had sold herself, 
 and had been paid the strict price, — nay, paid 
 more than she had dared to ask in the handsome 
 maintenance of her mother, — the husband to 
 whom she had sold her truthfulness and sense 
 of justice, so that he held them throttled into 
 silence, collared and dragged behind him to wit- 
 ness what he would without remonstrance. 
 
 What had she to complain of? The yacht was 
 of the prettiest ; the cabin fitted up to perfection, 
 smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with silk, 
 expanded with mirrors; the crew such as suited 
 an elegant toy, one of them having even ringlets, 
 as well as a bronze complexion and fine teeth : and 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 179 
 
 Mr. Lush was not there, for he had taken his way- 
 back to England as soon as he had seen all and 
 everything on board. Moreover, Gwendolen 
 herself liked the sea : it did not make her ill ; and 
 to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast 
 the necessary adjustments was a sort of amuse- 
 ment that might have gratified her activity and 
 enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was 
 fine', and they were coasting southward, where 
 even the rain- furrowed, heat-cracked clay be- 
 comes gem-like with purple shadows, and where 
 one may float between blue and blue in an open- 
 eyed dream that the world has done with sorrow. 
 
 But what can still that hunger of the heart 
 which sickens the eye for beauty and makes 
 sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of 
 Moslem paradise would quiet the terrible fury of 
 moral repulsion and cowed resistance which, like 
 an eating pain intensifying into torture, concen- 
 trates the mind in that poisonous misery? While 
 Gwendolen, throned on her cushions at evening, 
 and beholding the glory of sea and sky softening 
 as if with boundless love around her, was hoping 
 that Grandcourt in his march up and down was 
 not going to pause near her, not going to look at 
 her or speak to her, some woman under a smoky 
 sky, obliged to consider the price of eggs in ar- 
 ranging her dinner, was listening for the music 
 of a footstep that would remove all risk from her 
 foretaste of joy; some couple, bending cheek by 
 cheek over a bit of work done by the one and de- 
 lighted in by the other, were reckoning the earn- 
 ings that would make them rich enough for a 
 holiday among the furze and heather. 
 
 Had Grandcourt the least conception of what 
 
180 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 was going on in the breast of this wife? He con- 
 ceived that she did not love him: but was that 
 necessary? She was under his power, and he 
 was not accustomed to soothe himself, as some 
 cheerfully disposed persons are, with the convic- 
 tion that he was very generally and justly be- 
 loved. But what lay quite away from his con- 
 ception was that she could have any special re- 
 pulsion for him personally. How could she? 
 He himself knew what personal repulsion was, 
 — nobody better : his mind was much furnished 
 with a sense of what brutes his fellow-creatures 
 were, both masculine and feminine; what odious 
 familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes 
 of flourishing their handkerchiefs, what costume, 
 what lavender water, what bulging eyes, and 
 what foolish notions of making themselves agree- 
 able by remarks which were not wanted. In this 
 critical view of mankind there was an affinity be- 
 tween him and Gwendolen before their marriage, 
 and we know that she had been attractingly 
 wrought upon by the refined negations he pre- 
 sented to her. Hence he understood her repul- 
 sion for Lush. But how was he to understand 
 or conceive her present repulsion for Henleigh 
 Grandcourt? Some men bring themselves to be- 
 lieve, and not merely maintain, the non-existence 
 of an external world ; a few others believe them- 
 selves objects of repulsion to a woman without 
 being told so in plain language. But Grandcourt 
 did not belong to this eccentric body of thinkers. 
 He had all his life had reason to take a flattering 
 view of his own attractiveness, and to place him- 
 self in fine antithesis to the men who, he saw at 
 once, must be revolting to a woman of taste. He 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 181 
 
 had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not 
 have believed, if he had been told it, that there 
 may be a resentment and disgust which will 
 gradually make beauty more detestable than 
 ugliness, through exasperation at that outward 
 virtue in which hateful things can flaunt them- 
 selves or find a supercilious advantage. 
 
 How, then, could Grandcourt divine what was 
 going on in Gwendolen's breast? 
 
 For their behaviour to each other scandalized 
 no observer, — not even the foreign maid war- 
 ranted against sea-sickness; nor Grandcourt's 
 own experienced valet ; still less the picturesque 
 crew, who regarded them as a model couple in 
 high life. Their companionship consisted chiefly 
 in a well-bred silence. Grandcourt had no hu- 
 morous observations at which Gwendolen could 
 refuse to smile, no chit-chat to make small occa- 
 sions of dispute. He was perfectly polite in ar- 
 ranging an additional garment over her when 
 needful, and in handing her any object that he 
 perceived her to need, and she could not fall into 
 the vulgarity of accepting or rejecting such 
 politeness rudely. 
 
 Grandcourt put up his telescope and said, 
 " There 's a plantation of sugar-canes at the foot 
 of that rock: should you like to look? " 
 
 Gwendolen said, " Yes, please," remembering 
 that she must try and interest herself in sugar- 
 canes as something outside her personal affairs. 
 Then Grandcourt would walk up and down and 
 smoke for a long while, pausing occasionally to 
 point out a sail on the horizon, and at last wQuld 
 seat himself and look at Gwendolen with his 
 narrow, immovable gaze, as if she were part of 
 
182 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 the complete yacht ; while she, conscious of being 
 looked at, was exerting her ingenuity not to meet 
 his eyes. At dinner he would remark that the 
 fruit was getting stale,. and they must put in 
 somewhere for more; or, observing that she did 
 not drink the wine, he asked her if she would like 
 any other kind better. A lady was obliged to 
 respond to these things suitably ; and even if she 
 had not shrunk from quarrelling on other 
 grounds, quarrelling with Grandcourt was im- 
 possible: she might as well have made angry 
 remarks to a dangerous serpent ornamentally 
 coiled in her cabin without invitation. And what 
 sort of dispute could a woman of any pride and 
 dignity begin on a yacht? 
 
 Grandcourt had an intense satisfaction in 
 leading his wife captive after this fashion: it 
 gave their hfe on a small scale a royal represen- 
 tation and publicity in which everything familiar 
 was got rid of, and everybody must do what was 
 expected of them whatever might be their private 
 protest, — the protest (kept strictly private) 
 adding to the piquancy of despotism. 
 
 To Gwendolen, who even in the freedom of her 
 maiden time had had very faint glimpses of any 
 heroism or sublimity, the medium that now thrust 
 itself everywhere before her view was this hus- 
 band and her relation to him. The beings closest 
 to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually 
 our interpreters of the world, and some feather- 
 headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we 
 regret to take as legal tender for a human being 
 may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in 
 the minds of those who live with them, — like a 
 piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 183 
 
 and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial 
 sentences, their petty standards, their low sus- 
 picions, their loveless ennui, may be making 
 somebody else's life no better than a promenade 
 through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen 
 had that kind of window before her, affecting 
 the distant equally with the near. Some un- 
 happy wives are soothed by the possibility that 
 they may become mothers ; but Gwendolen felt 
 that to desire a child for herself would have been 
 a consenting to the completion of the injury she 
 had been guilty of. She was reduced to dread 
 lest she should become a mother. It was not the 
 image of a new sweetly budding life that came as 
 a vision of deliverance from the monotony of dis- 
 taste: it was an image of another sort. In the 
 irritable, fluctuating stages of despair, gleams 
 of hope came in the form of some possible acci- 
 dent. To dwell on the benignity of accident was 
 a refuge from worse temptation. 
 
 The embitterment of ibatred is often as unac- 
 countable to onlookers as the growth of devoted 
 love, and it not only seems but is really out of 
 direct relation with any outward causes to be 
 alleged. Passion is of the nature of seed, and 
 finds nourishment within, tending to a predomi- 
 nance which determines all currents towards 
 itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. 
 And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted 
 in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehe- 
 mence into a constructive vindictiveness, an im- 
 aginary annihilation -of the detested object, 
 something like the hidden rites of vengeance with 
 which the persecuted have made a dark vent for 
 their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumb- 
 
184 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy 
 of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing 
 effect, — rather with the effect of a struggHng 
 terror. Side by side with the dread of her hus- 
 band had grown the self-dread which urged her 
 to flee from the pursuing images wrought by 
 her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past 
 wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, 
 came with a pale ghastly illumination over every 
 imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, 
 such as she had made in her marriage. More- 
 over, she had learned to see all her acts through 
 the impression they would make on Deronda: 
 whatever relief might come to her, she could not 
 sever it from the judgment of her that would 
 be created in his mind. Not one word of flattery, 
 of indulgence, of dependence on her favour, 
 could be fastened on by her in all their inter- 
 course, to weaken his restraining power over her 
 (in this way Deronda's effort over himself was 
 repaid) ; and amid the dreary uncertainties of 
 her spoiled life the possible remedies that lay 
 in his mind, nay, the remedy that lay in her feel- 
 ing for him, made her only hope. He seemed 
 to her a terrible-browed angel from whom she 
 could not think of concealing any deed so as to 
 win an ignorant regard from him: it belonged 
 to the nature of their relation that she should 
 be truthful, for his power over her had begun in 
 the raising of a self -discontent which could be 
 satisfied only by genuine change. But in no con- 
 cealment had she now any confidence : her vision 
 of what she had to dread took more decidedly' 
 than ever the form of some fiercely impulsive 
 deed, committed as in a dream that she would 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 185 
 
 instantaneously wake from to find the effects 
 real though the images had been false: to find 
 death under her hands, but instead of darkness, 
 daylight ; instead of satisfied hatred, the dismay 
 of guilt; instead of freedom, the palsy of a new 
 terror, — a white dead face from which she was 
 forever trying to flee and forever held back. 
 She remembered Deronda's words: they were 
 continually recurring in her thought, — 
 
 " Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep 
 your*dread fixed on the idea of increasing your 
 remorse. . . . Take your fear as a, safeguard. 
 It is like quickness of hearing. It may make 
 consequences passionately present to you.'' 
 
 And so it was. In Gwendolen's consciousness 
 Temptation and Dread met and stared like two 
 pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the other, — 
 each obstructed by its own image; and all the 
 while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and 
 sobbed for deliverance from them. 
 
 Inarticulate prayers, no more definite than a 
 cry, often swept out from her into the vast si- 
 lence, unbroken except by her husband's breath- 
 ing or the plash of the wave or the creaking of 
 the masts; but if ever she thought of definite 
 help, it took the form of Deronda's presence and 
 words, of the sympathy he might have for her, of 
 the direction he might give her. It was some- 
 times after a white-lipped, fierce-eyed temptation 
 with murdering fingers had made its demon- 
 visit that these best moments of inward crying 
 and clinging for rescue would come to her, and 
 she would lie with wide-open eyes in which the 
 rising tears seemed a blessing, and the thought, 
 " I wiU not mind if I can keep from getting 
 
186 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 wicked," seemed an answer to the indefinite 
 prayer. 
 
 So the days passed, taking them with hght 
 breezes beyond and about the Balearic Isles, and 
 then to Sardinia, and then with gentle change 
 persuading them northward again towards 
 Corsica. But this floating, gently wafted ex- 
 istence, with its apparently peaceful influ- 
 ences, was becoming as bad as a nightmare to 
 Gwendolen. 
 
 " How long are we to be yachting? " she ven- 
 tured to ask one day after they had been touch- 
 ing at Ajaccio, and the mere fact of change in 
 going ashore had given her a relief from some 
 of the thoughts which seemed now to cling about 
 the very rigging of the vessel, mix with the air 
 in the red silk cabin below, and make the smell 
 of the sea odious. 
 
 " What else should we do? " said Grandcourt. 
 " I 'm not tired of it. I don't see why we 
 should n't stay out any length of time. There 's 
 less to bore one in this way. And where would 
 you go to? I 'm sick of foreign places. And we 
 shall have enough of Ryelands. Would you 
 rather be at Ryelands? " 
 
 " Oh, no," said Gwendolen, indifferently, find- 
 ing all places alike undesirable as soon as she 
 imagined herself and her husband in them. " I 
 only wondered how long you would like this." 
 
 " I like yachting longer than I like anything 
 else," said Grandcourt; "and I had none last 
 year. I suppose you are beginning to tire of it. 
 Women are so confoundedly whimsical. They 
 expect everything to give way to them." 
 
 " Oh dear, no! " said Gwendolen, letting out 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 187 
 
 her scorn in a flute-like tone. " I never expect 
 you to give way." 
 
 " Why should I? " said Grandcourt, with his 
 inward voice, looking at her, and then choosing 
 an orange, — for they were at table. 
 
 She made up her mind to a length of yacht- 
 ing that she could not see beyond ; but the next 
 day, after a squall which had made her rather 
 ill for the first time, he came down to her and 
 said, — 
 
 " There 's been the devil's own work in the 
 night. The skipper says we shall have to stay 
 at Genoa for a week while things are set right." 
 
 " Do you mind that? " said Gwendolen, who 
 lay looking very white amidst her white drapery. 
 
 " I should think so. Who wants to be broil- 
 ing at Genoa? " 
 
 " It will be a change," said Gwendolen, made 
 a little incautious by her languor. 
 
 " / don't want any change. Besides, the place 
 is intolerable; and one can't move along the 
 roads. I shall go out in a boat, as I used to 
 do, and manage it myself. One can get rid of 
 a few hours every day in that way instead of 
 stiving in a danmable hotel." 
 
 Here was a prospect which held hope in it. 
 Gwendolen thought of hours when she would 
 be alone, since Grandcourt would not want to 
 take her in the said boat; and in her exultation 
 at this unlooked-for relief, she had wild, con- 
 tradictory fancies of what she might do with 
 her freedom, — that " running away," which she 
 had already innumerable times seen to be a 
 worse evil than any actual endurance, now find- 
 ing new arguments as an escape from her worse 
 
188 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 self. Also, visionary relief on a par with the 
 fancy of a prisoner that the night wind may 
 blow down the wall of his prison and save him 
 from desperate devices, insinuated itself as a 
 better alternative, lawful to wish for. 
 
 The fresh current of expectation revived her 
 energies, and enabled her to take all things with 
 an air of cheerfulness and alacrity that made a 
 change marked enough to be noticed by her 
 husband. She watched through the evening 
 lights to the sinking of the moon with less of 
 awed loneliness than was habitual to her, — nay, 
 with a vague impression that in this mighty 
 frame of things there might be some prepara- 
 tion of rescue for her. Why not? — since the 
 weather had just been on her side. This pos- 
 sibility of hoping after her long fluctuation amid 
 fears, was like a first return of hunger to the 
 long languishing patient. 
 
 She was waked the next morning by the cast- 
 ing of the anchor in the port of Genoa, — waked 
 from a strangely mixed dream in which she felt 
 herself escaping over the Mont Cenis, and won- 
 dering to find it warmer even in the moonlight 
 on the snow, till suddenly she met Deronda, who 
 told her to go back. 
 
 In an hour or so from that dream she actually 
 met Deronda. But it was on the palatial stair- 
 case of the Italia, where she was feeling warm 
 in her light woollen dress and straw hat ; and her 
 husband was by her side. 
 
 There was a start of surprise in Deronda be- 
 fore he could raise his hat and pass on. The 
 moment did not seem to favour any closer greet- 
 ing, and the circumstances under which they had 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 189 
 
 last parted made him doubtful whether Grand- 
 court would be civilly inclined to him. 
 
 The doubt might certainly have been changed 
 into a disagreeable certainty, for Grandcourt on 
 this unaccountable appearance of Deronda at 
 Genoa, of all places, immediately tried to con- 
 ceive how there could have been an arrange- 
 ment between him ^nd Gwendolen. It is true 
 that before they were well in their rooms, he 
 had seen how difficult it was to shape such an 
 arrangement with any probability, being too 
 cool-headed to find it at once easily credible that 
 Gwendolen had not only while in London has- 
 tened to inform Deronda of the yachting project, 
 but had posted a letter to him from Marseilles 
 or Barcelona, advising him to travel to Genoa 
 in time for the chance of meeting her there, or of 
 receiving a letter from her telling of some other 
 destination, — all which must have implied 
 a miraculous foreknowledge in her, and in De- 
 ronda a birdlike facility in flying about and 
 perching idly. Still he was there, and though 
 Grandcourt would not make a fool of himself 
 by fabrications that others might call preposter- 
 ous, he was not, for all that, disposed to admit 
 fully that Deronda's presence was so far as 
 Gwendolen was concerned a mere accident. It 
 was a disgusting fact; that was enough; and 
 no doubt she was well pleased. A man out of 
 temper does not wait for proofs before feeling 
 towards all things animate and inanimate as 
 if they were in a conspiracy against him, but 
 at once thrashes his horse or kicks his dog in 
 consequence. Grandcourt felt towards Gwen- 
 dolen and Deronda as if he knew them to be in 
 
190 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 a conspiracy against him, and here was an event 
 in league with them. What he took for clearly 
 certain — and so far he divined the truth — was 
 that Gwendolen was now counting on an inter- 
 view with Deronda whenever her husband's back 
 was turned. 
 
 As he sat taking his coffee at a convenient 
 angle for observing her, he discerned something 
 which he felt sure was the effect of a secret de- 
 light, — some fresh ease in moving and speak- 
 ing, some peculiar meaning in her eyes, whatever 
 she looked on. Certainly her troubles had not 
 marred her beauty. Mrs.' Grandcourt was hand- 
 somer than Gwendolen Harleth: her grace and 
 expression were informed by a greater variety 
 of inward experience, giving new play to her 
 features, new attitudes in movement and repose; 
 her whole person and air had the nameless some- 
 thing which often makes a woman more inter- 
 esting after marriage than before, less confident 
 that all things are according to her opinion, and 
 yet with less of deerlike shyness, — more fully 
 a human being. 
 
 This morning the benefits of the voyage 
 seemed to be suddenly revealing themselves in 
 a new elasticity of mien. As she rose from the 
 table and put her two heavily jewelled hands 
 on each side of her neck, according to her wont, 
 she had no art to conceal that sort of joyous 
 expectation which makes the present more 
 bearable than usual, just as when a man means 
 to go out he finds it easier to be amiable to the 
 family for a quarter of an hour beforehand. It 
 is not impossible that a terrier whose pleasure 
 was concerned would perceive those amiable 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 191 
 
 signs and know their meaning*, — know why his 
 master stood in a pecuhar way, talked with 
 alacrity, and even had a peculiar gleam in his 
 eye, so that on the least movement towards the 
 door, the terrier would scuttle to be in time. 
 And, in dog fashion, Grandcourt discerned the 
 signs of Gwendolen's expectation, interpreting 
 them with the narrow correctness which leaves 
 a world of unknown feeling behind. 
 
 " A — just ring, please, and tell Gibbs to or- 
 der some dinner for us at three," said Grand- 
 court, as he too rose, took out a cigar, and then 
 stretched his hand towards the hat that lay near. 
 " I 'm going to send Angus to find me a little 
 sailing-boat for us to go out in; one that I can 
 manage, with you at the tiller. It 's uncom- 
 monly pleasant these fine evenings, — the least 
 boring of anything we can do." 
 
 Gwendolen turned cold: there was not only 
 the cruel disappointment, — there was the im- 
 mediate conviction that her husband had deter- 
 mined to take her because he would not leave 
 her out of his sight; and probably this dual 
 solitude in a boat was the more attractive to 
 him because it would be wearisome to her. 
 They were not on the plank-island; she felt 
 it the more possible to begin a contest. But 
 the gleaming content had died out of her. 
 There was a change in her like that of a 
 glacier after sunset. 
 
 " I would rather not go in the boat," she said. 
 " Take some one else with you." 
 
 " Very well ; if you don't go, I shall not go," 
 said Grandcourt. " We shall stay suffocating 
 here, that 's all." 
 
192 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " I can't bear going in a boat," said Gwen- 
 dolen, angrily. 
 
 " That is a sudden change," said Grandcourt, 
 with a slight sneer. " But since you decline, we 
 shall stay indoors." 
 
 He laid down his hat again, lit his cigar, and 
 walked up and down the room, pausing now 
 and then to look out of the windows. Gwen- 
 dolen's temper told her to persist. She knew 
 very well now that Grandcourt would not go 
 without her; but if he must tyrannize over her, 
 he should not do it precisely in the way he would 
 choose. She would oblige him to stay in the 
 hotel. Without speaking again she passed into 
 the adjoining bedroom, and threw herself into 
 a chair with her anger, seeing no purpose or 
 issue, — only feeling that the wave of evil had 
 rushed back upon her, and dragged her away 
 from her momentary breathing-place. 
 
 Presently Grandcourt came in with his hat on, 
 but threw it off and sat down sideways on a 
 chair nearly in front of her, saying in his super- 
 ficial drawl, — 
 
 " Have you come round yet? or do you find 
 it agreeable to be out of temper? You make 
 things uncommonly pleasant for me." 
 
 " Why do you want to make them unpleasant 
 for mef said Gwendolen, getting helpless 
 again, and feeling the hot tears rise. 
 
 " Now, will you be good enough to say what 
 it is you have to complain of ? " said Grand- 
 court, looking into her eyes, and using his most 
 inward voice. " Is it that I stay indoors when 
 you stay? " 
 
 She could give no answer. The sort of truth 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 193 
 
 that made any excuse for her anger could not 
 be uttered. In the conflict of despair and humil- 
 iation she began to sob, and the tears rolled 
 down her cheeks, — a form of agitation which 
 she had never shown before in her husband's 
 presence. 
 
 " I hope this is useful," said Grandcourt, after 
 a moment or two. " All I can say is, it 's most 
 confoundedly unpleasant. What the devil 
 women can see in this kind of thing, I don't 
 know. You see something to be got by it, of 
 course. All I can see is, that we shall be shut 
 up here when we might have been having a 
 pleasant sail." 
 
 " Let us go, then," said Gwendolen, impetu- 
 ously. " Perhaps we shall be drowned." She 
 began to sob again. 
 
 This extraordinary behaviour, which had evi- 
 dently some relation to Deronda, gave more 
 definiteness to Grandcourt's conclusions. He 
 drew his chair quite close in front of her, and 
 said in a low tone, " Just be quiet and listen, 
 will you? " 
 
 There seemed to be a magical effect in this 
 close vicinity. Gwendolen shrank, and ceased 
 to sob. She kept her eyelids down, and clasped 
 her hands tightly. 
 
 " Let us understand each other," said Grand- 
 court, in the same tone. I know very well what 
 this nonsense means. But if you suppose I am 
 going to let you make a fool of me, just dismiss 
 that notion from your mind. What are you 
 looking forward to, if you can't behave properly 
 as my wife? There is disgrace for you, if you 
 like to have it, but I don't know anything else; 
 
 VOL. XIV — 13 
 
194 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 and as to Deronda, it 's quite clear that he hangs 
 back from you." 
 
 "It is all false!" said Gwendolen, bitterly, . 
 " You don't in the least imagine what is in my 
 mind. I have seen enough of the disgrace that 
 comes in that way. And you had better leave me 
 at liberty to speak with any one I like. It would 
 be better for you." 
 
 " You will allow me to judge of that," said 
 Grandcourt, rising and moving to a little dis- 
 tance towards the window, but standing there 
 playing with his whiskers as if he were awaiting 
 something. 
 
 Gwendolen's words had so clear and tremen- 
 dous a meaning for herself that she thought they 
 must have expressed it to Grandcourt, and had 
 no sooner uttered them than she dreaded their 
 effect. But his soul was garrisoned against 
 presentiments and fears : he had the courage and 
 confidence that belong to domination, and he 
 was at that moment feeling perfectly satisfied 
 that he held his wife with bit and bridle. By the 
 time they had been married a year she would 
 cease to be restive. He continued standing with 
 his air of indifference, till she felt her habitual 
 stifling consciousness of having an immovable 
 obstruction in her life, like the nightmare of 
 beholding a single form that serves to arrest all 
 passage though the wide country lies open. 
 
 " What decision have you come to? " he said, 
 presently looking at her. " What orders shall 
 I give?" 
 
 " Oh, let us go," said Gwendolen. The walls 
 had begun to be an imprisonment, and while 
 there was breath in this man he would have the 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 195 
 
 mastery over her. His words had the power 
 of thumb-screws and the cold touch of the rack. 
 To resist was to act hke a stupid animal unable 
 to measure results. 
 
 So the boat was ordered. She even went down 
 to the quay again with him to see it before mid- 
 day. Grandcourt had recovered perfect qui- 
 etude of temper, and had a scornful satisfaction 
 in the attention given by the nautical groups 
 to the milord, owner of the handsome yacht 
 which had just put in for repairs, and who being 
 • an Englishman was naturally so at home on the 
 sea that he could manage a sail with the same 
 ease that he could manage a horse. The sort 
 of exultation he had discerned in Gwendolen 
 this morning she now^ thought that she discerned 
 in him ; and it w^as true that he had set his mind 
 on this boating, and carried out his purpose as 
 something that people might not expect him to 
 do, with the gratified impulse of a strong will 
 which had nothing better to exert itself upon. 
 He had remarkable physical courage, and Vvas 
 proud of it, — or rather he had a great contempt 
 for the coarser, bulkier men who generally had 
 less. JNIor cover, he was ruling that Gwendolen 
 should go with him. 
 
 And when they came down again at five 
 o'clock, equipped for their boating, the scene 
 was as good as a theatrical representation for all 
 beholders. This handsome, fair-skinned Eng- 
 hsh couple manifesting the usual eccentricity of 
 their nation, both of them proud, pale, and calm, 
 without a smile on their faces, moving like crea- 
 tures who were fulfilling a supernatural destiny, 
 — it was a thing to go out and see, a thing to 
 
196 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 paint. The husband's chest, back, and arms 
 showed very well in his close-fitting dress, and 
 the wife was declared to be like a statue. 
 
 Some suggestions were proffered concerning 
 a possible change in the breeze, and the neces- 
 sary care in putting about, but Grandcourt's 
 manner made the speakers understand that they 
 were too officious, and that he knew better than 
 they. 
 
 Gwendolen, keeping her impassible air, as 
 they moved away from the strand, felt her 
 imagination obstinately at work. She was not ' 
 afraid of any outward dangers, — she was afraid 
 of her own wishes, which were taking shapes 
 possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon- 
 faces. She was afraid of her own hatred, which 
 under the cold iron touch that had compelled 
 her to-day had gathered a fierce intensity. As 
 she sat guiding the tiller under her husband's 
 eyes, doing just what he told her, the strife with- 
 in her seemed like her own effort to escape from 
 herself. She clung to the thought of Deronda: 
 she persuaded herself that he would not go away 
 while she was there, — he knew she needed help. 
 The sense that he was there would save her from 
 acting out the evil within. And yet quick, quick, 
 came images, plans of evil that would come 
 again and seize her in the night, like furies pre- 
 paring the deed that they would straightway 
 avenge. 
 
 They were taken out of the port and carried 
 eastward by a gentle breeze. Some clouds tem- 
 pered the sunlight, and the hour was always 
 deepening towards the supreme beauty of even- 
 ing. Sails larger and smaller changed their 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 197 
 
 aspect like sensitive things, and made a cheerful 
 companionship, alternately near and far. The 
 grand city shone more vaguely, the mountains 
 looked out above it, and there was stillness as 
 in an island sanctuary. Yet suddenly Gwen- 
 dolen let her hands fall, and said in a scarcely 
 audible tone, " God help me! " 
 
 " What is the matter? " said Grandcourt, not 
 distinguishing the words. 
 
 " Oh, nothing," said Gwendolen, rousing her- 
 self from her momentary forgetfulness and re- 
 suming the ropes. 
 
 " Don't you find this pleasant? " said Grand- 
 court. 
 
 " Very." 
 
 " You admit now we could n't have done any- 
 thing better? " 
 
 " No, — I see nothing better. I think we 
 shall go on always, like the Flying Dutchman," 
 said Gwendolen, wildly. 
 
 Grandcourt gave her one of his narrow, ex- 
 amining glances, and then said, "If you like, 
 we can go to Spezia in the morning, and let 
 them take us up there." 
 
 " No;' I shall like nothing better than this." 
 Very well ; we '11 do the same to-morrow. 
 But we must be turning in soon. I shall put 
 about." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Ritorna a tua scienza 
 Che vuol, quanto la cosa e piu perfetta 
 Piu senta il bene, e cosi la doglienza. 
 
 Dante. 
 
 y 
 
 WHEN Deronda met Gwendolen and 
 Grandcourt on the staircase, his mind 
 was seriously preoccupied. He had 
 just been summoned to the second interview 
 with his mother. 
 
 In two hours after his parting from her he 
 knew that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had 
 left the hotel, and so far as the purpose of his 
 journey to Genoa was concerned he might him- 
 self have set off on his way to Mainz, to deliver 
 the letter from Joseph Kalonymos, and get pos- 
 session of the family chest. But mixed mental 
 conditions, which did not resolve themselves into 
 definite reasons, hindered him from departure. 
 Long after the farewell he was kept passive by 
 a weight of retrospective feeling. He lived 
 again, with the new keenness of emotive mem- 
 ory, through the exciting scenes which seemed 
 past only in the sense of preparation for their 
 actual presence in his soul. He allowed himself 
 in his solitude to sob, with perhaps more than 
 a woman's acuteness of compassion, over that 
 woman's 'life so near to his and yet so remote. 
 He beheld the world changed for him by the 
 certitude of ties that altered the poise of hopes 
 and fears, and gave him a new sense of fellow- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 199 
 
 ship, as if under cover of the night he had joined 
 the wrong band, of wanderers, and found with 
 the rise of morning that the tents of his kindred 
 were grouped far off. He had a quivering 
 imaginative sense of close relation to the grand- 
 father who had been animated by strong im- 
 pulses and beloved thoughts, which were now 
 perhaps being roused from their slumber within 
 himself. And through all this passionate medi- 
 tation Mordecai and Mirah were always present 
 as beings who clasped hands with him in sym- 
 pathetic silence. 
 
 Of such quick, responsive fibre was Deronda 
 made, under that mantle of self -controlled 
 reserve into which early experience had thrown 
 so much of his young strength. 
 
 When the persistent ringing of a bell as a 
 signal reminded him of the hour, he thought of 
 looking into " Bradshaw," and making the brief 
 necessary preparations for starting by the next 
 train, — thought of it, but made no movement 
 in consequence. Wishes went to Mainz and 
 what he was to get possession of there, — to 
 London and the beings there who made the 
 strongest attachments of his life; but there were 
 other wishes that clung in these moments to 
 Genoa, and they kept him where he was by that 
 force which urges us to linger over an interview 
 that carries a presentiment of final farewell or 
 of overshadowing sorrow. Deronda did not 
 formally say, " I will stay over to-night, because 
 it is Friday, and T should like to go to the even- 
 ing service at the synagogue where they must 
 all have gone ; and besides, I may see the Grand- 
 courts again." But simply, instead of packing 
 
200 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 and ringing for his bill, he sat doing nothing 
 at all, while his mind went to the synagogue and 
 saw faces there probably little different from 
 those of his grandfather's time, and heard the 
 Spanish-Hebrew liturgy which had lasted 
 through the seasons of wandering generations 
 like a plant with wandering seed, that gives the 
 far-off lands a kinship to the exile's home, — 
 while, also, his mind went towards Gwendolen, 
 with anxious remembrance of what had been, 
 and with a half-admitted impression that it would 
 be hardness in him willingly to go away at once 
 without making some effort, in spite of Grand- 
 court's probable dislike, to manifest the continu- 
 ance of his sympathy with her since their abrupt 
 parting. 
 
 In this state of mind he deferred departure, 
 ■ ate his dinner without sense of flavour, rose from 
 it quickly to find the synagogue, and in passing 
 the porter asked if Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt 
 were still in the hotel, and what was the number 
 of their apartment. The porter gave him the 
 number, but added that they were gone out 
 boating. That information had somehow power 
 enough over Deronda to divide his thoughts with 
 the memories wakened among the sparse talithim 
 and keen dark faces of worshippers whose way 
 of taking awful prayers and invocations with the 
 easy familiarity which might be called Hebrew 
 dyed Italian, made him reflect that his grand- 
 father, according to the Princess's hints of his 
 character, must have been almost as exceptional 
 a Jew as Mordecai. But were not men of ardent 
 zeal and far-reaching hope everywhere excep- 
 tional ? — the men who had the visions which, as 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 201 
 
 Mordecai said, were the creators and feeders of 
 the world, — moulding and feeding the more 
 passive life which without them would dwindle 
 and shrivel into the narrow tenacity of insects, 
 unshaken by thoughts beyond the reaches of 
 their antennae. Something of a mournful impa- 
 tience perhaps added itself to ihe solicitude about 
 Gwendolen (a solicitude that had room to grow 
 in his present release from immediate cares) as 
 an incitement to hasten from the synagogue and 
 choose to take his evening walk towards the 
 quay, always a favourite haunt with him, and 
 just now attractive with the possibility that he 
 might be in time to see the Grandcourts come in 
 from their boating. In this case he resolved that 
 he would advance to greet them deliberately, 
 and ignore any grounds that the husband might 
 have for wishing him elsewhere. 
 
 The sun had set behind a bank of cloud, and 
 only a faint yellow light was giving its farewell 
 kisses to the waves, which were agitated by 
 an active breeze. Deronda, sauntering slowly 
 within sight of what took place on the strand, 
 observed the groups there concentrating their 
 attention on a sailing-boat which was advancing 
 swiftly landward, being rowed by two men. 
 Amidst the clamorous talk in various languages, 
 Deronda held it the surer means of getting in- 
 formation not to ask questions, but to elbow his 
 way to the foreground and be an unobstructed 
 witness of what was occurring. Telescopes were 
 being used, and loud statements made that the 
 boat held somebody who had been drowned. 
 One said it was the milord who had gone out in 
 a sailing-boat ; another maintained that the pros- 
 
202 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 trate figure he discerned was milad'i; a French- 
 man who had no glass would rather say that it 
 was milord who had probably taken his wife out 
 to drown her, according to the national prac- 
 tice, — a remark which an English skipper im- 
 mediately commented on in our native idiom 
 ( as nonsense which — had undergone a mining 
 operation) , and further dismissed by the deci- 
 sion that the reclining figure was a woman. For 
 Deronda, terribly excited by fluctuating fears, 
 the strokes of the oars as he watched them were 
 divided by swift visions of events, possible and 
 impossible, which might have brought about this 
 issue, or this broken-off fragment of an issue, 
 with a worse half undisclosed, — if this woman 
 apparently snatched from the waters w^ere really 
 Mrs. Grandcourt. 
 
 But soon there was no longer any doubt : the 
 boat was being pulled to land, and he saw Gwen- 
 dolen half raising herself on her hands, by her own 
 effort, under her heavy covering of tarpaulin 
 and pea-jackets, — pale as one of the sheeted 
 dead, shivering, ^vdth wet hair streaming, a wild 
 amazed consciousness in her eyes, as if she had 
 waked up in a world where some judgment was 
 impending, and the beings she saw^ around were 
 coming to seize her. The first rower who jumped 
 to land was also wxt tln^ough, and ran off ; the 
 sailors, close about the boat, hindered Deronda 
 from advancing, and he could only look on while 
 Gwendolen gave scared glances, and seemed to 
 shrink wdth terror as she was carefully, tenderly 
 helped out, and led on by the strong arms of 
 those rough, bronzed men, her wet clothes cling- 
 ing about her limbs, and adding to the impedi- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 203 
 
 merit of her weakness. Suddenly her wandering 
 eyes fell on Deronda, standing before her; and 
 immediately, as if she had been expecting him 
 and looking for him, she tried to stretch out her 
 arms, which were held back by her supporters, 
 saying in a muffled voice, — 
 
 " It is come, it is come! He is dead! " 
 
 "Hush, hush!" said Deronda, in a tone of 
 authority; " quiet yourself." Then to the men 
 who were assisting her, " I am a connection of 
 this lady's husband. If you will get her on to 
 the Italia as quickly as possible, I will undertake 
 everything else." 
 
 He stayed behind to hear from the remaining 
 boatman that her husband had gone down irre- 
 coverably, and that his boat was left floating 
 empty. He and his comrade had heard a cry, 
 had come up in time to see the lady jump in after 
 her husband, and had got her out fast enough 
 to save her from much damage. 
 
 After this, Deronda hastened to the hotel, to 
 assure himself that the best medical help would 
 be provided; and being satisfied on this point, 
 he telegraphed the event to Sir Hugo, begging 
 him to come forthwith, and also to Mr. Gas- 
 coigne, whose address at the Rectory made his 
 nearest known way of getting the information 
 to Gwendolen's mother. Certain words of 
 Gwendolen's in the past had come back to him 
 with the effectiveness of an inspiration: in mo- 
 ments of agitated confession she had spoken of 
 her mother's presence as a possible help, if she 
 could have had it. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The pang, the curse, with which they died. 
 
 Had never passed away: 
 I could not draw my eyes from theirs. 
 
 Nor lift them up to pray, 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 DERONDA did not take off his clothes 
 that night. Gwendolen, after insisting 
 on seeing him again before she would 
 consent to be undrest, had been perfectly quiet, 
 and had only asked him, with a whispering, re- 
 pressed eagerness, to promise that he would come 
 to her when she sent for him in the morning. 
 Still, the possibility that a change might come 
 over her, the danger of a supervening feverish 
 condition, and the suspicion that something in 
 the late catastrophe was having an effect which 
 might betray itself in excited words, acted as a 
 foreboding within him. He mentioned to her 
 attendant that he should keep himself ready to 
 be called if there were any alarming change of 
 symptoms, making it understood by all con- 
 cerned that he was in communication with her 
 friends in England, and felt bound meanwhile 
 to take all care on her behalf, — a position which 
 it was the easier for him to assume, because he 
 was well known to Grandcourt's valet, the only 
 old servant who had come on the late voyage. 
 
 But when fatigue from the strangely various 
 emotions of the day at last sent Deronda to sleep, 
 he remained undisturbed except by the morning 
 dreams which came as a tangled web of yester- 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 205 
 
 day's events, and finally waked him with an 
 image drawn by his pressing anxiety. 
 
 Still it was morning, and there had been no 
 summons, — an augury which cheered him while 
 he made his toilet, and reflected that it was too 
 early to send inquiries. Later, he learned that 
 she had passed a too wakeful night, but had 
 shown no violent signs of agitation, and was at 
 last sleeping. He wondered at the force that 
 dwelt in this creature, so alive to dread; for he 
 had an irresistible impression that even under the 
 effects of a severe physical shock she was master- 
 ing herself with a determination of concealment. 
 For his own part, he thought that his sensibilities 
 had been blunted by what he had been going 
 through in the meeting with his mother: he 
 seemed to himself now to be only fulfilling 
 claims, and his more passionate sympathy was 
 in abeyance. He had lately been living so keenly 
 in an experience quite apart from Gwendolen's 
 lot, that his present cares for her were like a re- 
 visiting of scenes familiar in the past, and there 
 was not yet a complete revival of the inward 
 response to them. 
 
 Meanwhile he employed himself in getting a 
 formal, legally recognized statement from the 
 fishermen who had rescued Gwendolen. Few 
 details came to light. The boat in which Grand- 
 court had gone out had been found drifting with 
 its sail loose, and had been towed in. The fisher- 
 men thought it likely that he had been knocked 
 overboard by the flapping of the sail while put- 
 ting about, and that he had not known how to 
 swim; but though they were near, their atten- 
 tion had been first arrested by a cry which 
 
206 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 seemed like that of a man in distress, and 
 while they were hastening with their oars, they 
 heard a shriek from the lady and saw her 
 jump in. 
 
 On re-entering the hotel, Deronda was told 
 that Gwendolen had risen, and was desiring to 
 see him. He was shown into a room darkened 
 by blinds and curtains, where she was seated 
 with a white shawl wrapped round her, looking 
 towards the opening door like one waiting un- 
 easily. But her long hair was gathered up and 
 coiled carefully, and, through all, the blue stars 
 in her ears had kept their place: as she started 
 impulsively to her full height, sheathed in her 
 white shawl, her face and neck not less white, 
 except for a purple line under her eyes, her lips 
 a little apart with the peculiar expression of one 
 accused and helpless, she looked like the un- 
 happy ghost of that Gwendolen Harleth whom 
 Deronda had seen turning with firm lips and 
 proud self-possession from her losses at the 
 gaming-table. The sight pierced him with pity, 
 and the effects of all their past relation began to 
 revive within him. 
 
 " I beseech you to rest — not to stand," said 
 Deronda, as he approached her; and she obeyed, 
 falling back into her chair again. 
 
 " Will you sit down near me? " she said. " I 
 want to speak very low." 
 
 She was in a large arm-chair, and he drew a 
 small one near to her side. The action seemed 
 to touch her peculiarly; turning her pale face 
 full upon his, which was very near, she said, in 
 the lowest audible tone, " You know I am a 
 guilty woman? " 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 207 
 
 Deronda himself turned paler as he said, 
 " I know nothing." He did not dare to say 
 more. 
 
 " He is dead." She uttered this with the same 
 undertoned decision. 
 
 " Yes," said Deronda, in a mournful suspense 
 which made him reluctant to speak. 
 
 " His face will not be seen above the water 
 again," said Gwendolen, in a tone that was not 
 louder, but of a suppressed eagerness, while she 
 held both her hands clenched. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Not by any one else — only by me — a dead 
 face — I shall never get away from it." 
 
 It was with an inward voice of desperate self- 
 repression that she spoke these last words, while 
 she looked away from Deronda towards some- 
 thing at a distance from her on the floor. Was 
 she seeing the whole event — her own acts in- 
 cluded — through an exaggerating medium of 
 excitement and horror? Was she in a state 
 of delirium into which there entered a sense of 
 concealment and necessity for self -repression? 
 Such thoughts glanced through Deronda as a 
 sort of hope. But imagine the conflict of feel- 
 ing that kept him silent. She was bent on con- 
 fession, and he dreaded hearing her confession. 
 Against his better will, he shrank from the task 
 that was laid on him: he wished, and yet re- 
 buked the wish as cowardly, that she could bury 
 her secrets in her own bosom. He was not a 
 priest. He dreaded the weight of this woman's 
 soul flung upon his own with imploring depend- 
 ence. But she spoke again hurriedly, looking 
 at him, — • 
 
^08 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " You will not say that I ought to tell the 
 world? You will not say that I ought to be 
 disgraced? I could not do it. I could not bear 
 it. I cannot have my mother know. Not if I 
 were dead. I could not have her know. I must 
 tell you; but you will not say that any one else 
 should know." 
 
 " I can say nothing in my ignorance," said 
 Deronda, mournfully, " except that I desire to 
 help you." 
 
 " I told you from the beginning — as soon as 
 I could — I told you I was afraid of myself." 
 There was a piteous pleading in the low mur- 
 mur to which Deronda turned his ear only. Her 
 face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred 
 in me that was always working like an evil spirit 
 — contriving things. Everything I could do to 
 free myself came into my mind; and it got 
 worse — all things got worse. That was why 
 I asked you to come to me in town. I thought 
 then I would tell you the worst about myself. 
 I tried. But I could not tell everything. And 
 he came in." 
 
 She paused, while a shudder passed through 
 her; but soon went on. 
 
 " I will tell you everything now. Do you 
 think a woman who cried, and prayed, and 
 struggled to be saved from herself, could be 
 a murderess? " 
 
 " Great God! " said Deronda, in a deep shaken 
 voice, " don't torture me needlessly. You have 
 not murdered him. You threw yourself into the 
 water with the impulse to save him. Tell me the 
 rest afterwards. This death was an accident 
 that you could not have hindered." 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 209 
 
 " Don't be impatient with me." The tremor, 
 the childhke beseeching in these words com- 
 pelled Deronda to turn his head and look at 
 her face. The poor quivering lips went on. 
 " You said — you used to say — you felt more 
 for those who had done something wicked and 
 were miserable; you said they might get better 
 
 — they might be scourged into something better. 
 If you had not spoken in that way, everything 
 would have been worse. I did remember all 
 you said to me. It came to me always. It 
 came to me at the very last — that was the 
 reason why I — But now, if you cannot bear 
 with me when I tell you everything — if you 
 turn away from me and forsake me, what shall 
 I do? Am I worse than I was when you found 
 me and wanted to make me better? All the 
 wrong I have done was in me then — and more 
 
 — and more — if you had not come and been 
 patient with me. And now — will you forsake 
 me?" 
 
 Her hands, which had been so tightly clenched 
 some minutes before, were now helplessh^ re- 
 laxed and trembling on the arm of her chair. 
 Her quivering lips remained parted as she ceased 
 speaking. Deronda could not answer; he was 
 obliged to look away. He took one of her hands, 
 and clasped it as if they were going to walk 
 together like two children: it was the only way 
 in which he could answer, " I will not forsake 
 you." And all the while he felt as if he were 
 putting his name to a blank paper which might 
 be filled up terribly. Their attitude, his averted 
 face with its expression of a suffering which he 
 was solem^nly resolved to undergo, might have 
 
 VOL. XIV — 14 
 
210 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 told half the truth of the situation to a beholder 
 who had suddenly entered. 
 
 That grasp was an entirely new experience to 
 Gwendolen : she had never before had from any 
 man a sign of tenderness which her own being 
 had needed, and she interpreted its powerful 
 effect on her into a promise of inexhaustible 
 patience and constancy. The stream of renewed 
 strength made it possible for her to go on as 
 she had begun, — with that fitful, wandering 
 confession where the sameness of experience 
 seems to nullify the sense of time or of order 
 in events. She began again in a fragmentary 
 way: — 
 
 " All sort of contrivances in my mind — but 
 all so difficult. And I fought against them — 
 I was terrified at them — I saw his dead face " 
 — here her voice sank almost to a whisper close 
 to Deronda's ear — ever so long ago I saw 
 it; and I wished him to be dead. And yet it 
 terrified me. I was like two creatures. I could 
 not speak — I wanted to kill — it was as strong 
 as thirst — and then directly — I felt before- 
 hand I had done something dreadful, unalter- 
 able — that would make me like an evil spirit. 
 And it came — it came." 
 
 She was silent a moment or two, as if her 
 memory had lost itself in a web where each 
 mesh drew all the rest. 
 
 " It had all been in my mind when I first 
 spoke to you — when we were at the Abbey. 
 I had done something then. I could not tell 
 you that. It was the only thing I did towards 
 carrying out my thoughts. They went about 
 over everything; but they all remained like 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 211 
 
 dreadful dreams, — all but one. I did one act 
 
 — and I never undid it — it is there still — as 
 long ago as when we were at Ry elands. There 
 it was — something my fingers longed for among 
 the beautiful toys in the cabinet in my boudoir 
 
 — small and sharp, like a long willow leaf in a 
 silver sheath. I locked it in the drawer of my 
 dressing-case. I was continually haunted with 
 it, and how I should use it. I fancied myself 
 putting it under my pillow. But I never did. 
 I never looked at it again. I dared not unlock 
 the drawer : it had a key all to itself ; and not 
 long ago when we were in the yacht, I dropped 
 the key into the deep water. It was my wish 
 to drop it and dehver myself. After that I 
 began to think how I could open the drawer 
 without the key; and when I found we were 
 to stay at Genoa, it came into my mind that I 
 could get it opened privately at the hotel. But 
 then, when we were going up the stairs, I met 
 you; and I thought I should talk to you alone 
 and tell you this, — everything I could not tell 
 you in town; and then I was forced to go out 
 in the boat." 
 
 A sob had for the first time risen with the 
 last words, and she sank back in her chair. The 
 memory of that acute disappointment seemed 
 for the moment to efface what had come since. 
 Deronda did not look at her, but he said 
 insistently, — 
 
 " And it has all remained in your imagina- 
 tion. It has gone on only in your thought. To 
 the last the evil temptation has been resisted? " 
 
 There was silence. The tears had rolled 
 down her cheeks. She pressed her handkerchief 
 
212 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 against them and sat upright. She was sum- 
 moning her resolution; and again, leaning a 
 little towards Deronda's ear, she began in a 
 whisper, — 
 
 " No, no; I will tell you everything as God 
 knows it. I will tell you no falsehood; I will 
 tell you the exact truth. What should I do else ? 
 I used to think I could never be wicked. I 
 thought of wicked people as if they were a long 
 way off me. Since then I have been wicked. 
 I have felt wicked. And everything has been 
 a punishment to me, — all the things I used to 
 wish for, — it is as if they had been made red- 
 hot. The very daylight has often been a pun- 
 ishment to me. Because — you know — I ought 
 not to have married. That was the beginning 
 of it. I wronged some one else. I broke my 
 promise. I meant to get pleasure for myself, 
 and it all turned to misery. I wanted to make 
 my gain out of another's loss — you remember? 
 
 — it was like roulette — and the money burnt 
 into me. And I could not complain. It was 
 as if I had prayed that another should lose and 
 I should win. And I had won. I knew it all 
 
 — I knew I was guilty. When we were on the 
 sea, and I lay awake at night in the cabin, I 
 sometimes felt that everything I had done lay 
 open without excuse — nothing was hidden — 
 how could anything be known to me only? — it 
 was not my own knowledge, it was God's that 
 had entered into me, and even the stillness — 
 everything held a punishment for me — every- 
 thing but you. I always thought that you would 
 not want me to be punished — you would have 
 tried and helped me to be better. And only 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 213 
 
 thinking of that helped me. You will not change 
 — you will not want to punish me now^? " 
 Again a sob had risen. 
 
 "God forbid!" groaned Deronda. But he 
 sat motionless. 
 
 This long wandering with the poor conscience- 
 stricken one over her past was difficult to bear, 
 but he dared not again urge her with a question. 
 He must let her mind follow its own need. She 
 unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not 
 clearly distinguishing between what she said and 
 what she had only an inward vision of. Her 
 next words came after such an interval. 
 
 " That all made it so hard when I was forced 
 to go in the boat. Because when I saw you it 
 was an unexpected joy, and I thought I could 
 tell you everything — about the locked-up 
 drawer and what I had not told you before. 
 And if I had told you, and knew it was in your 
 mind, it would have less power over me. I 
 hoped and trusted in that. For after all my 
 struggles and my crying, the hatred and rage, 
 the temptation that frightened me, the longing, 
 the thirst for what I dreaded, always came back. 
 And that disappointment — when I was quite 
 shut out from speaking to you, and I was driven 
 to go in the boat — brought all the evil back, 
 as if I had been locked in a prison with it and 
 no escape. Oh, it seems so long ago now since 
 I stepped into that boat! I could have given 
 up everything in that moment, to have the 
 forked lightning for a weapon to strike him 
 dead." 
 
 Some of the compressed fierceness that she 
 was recalhng seemed to find its way into her 
 
214 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 undertoned utterance. After a little silence she 
 said, with agitated hurry, — 
 
 " If he were here again, what should I do? 
 I cannot wish him here — and yet I cannot bear 
 his dead face. I was a coward. I ought to 
 have borne contempt. I ought to have gone 
 away, — gone and wandered like a beggar rather 
 than stay to feel like a fiend. But turn where 
 I would there was something I could not bear. 
 Sometimes I thought he would kill me if I re- 
 sisted his will. But now — his dead face is there, 
 and I cannot bear it." 
 
 Suddenly loosing Deronda's hand, she started 
 up, stretching her arms to their full length up- 
 ward, and said with a sort of moan, — 
 
 "I have been a cruel* woman! What can I 
 do but cry for help? I am sinking. Die — 
 die — you are forsaken — go down, go down 
 into darkness. Forsaken — no pity — I shall 
 be forsaken." 
 
 She sank in her chair again and broke into 
 sobs. Even Deronda had no place in her con- 
 sciousness at that moment. He was completely 
 unmanned. Instead of finding, as he had im- 
 agined, that his late experience had dulled his 
 susceptibility to fresh emotion, it seemed that 
 the lot of this young creature, whose swift travel 
 from her bright rash girlhood into this agony 
 of remorse he had had to behold in helplessness, 
 pierced him the deeper because it came close 
 upon another sad revelation of spiritual conflict : 
 he was in one of those moments when the very 
 anguish of passionate pity makes us ready to 
 choose that we will know pleasure no more, and 
 live only for the stricken and afflicted. He had 
 
 1 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 215 
 
 risen from his seat while he watched that ter- 
 rible outburst, — which seemed the more awful 
 to him because, even in this supreme agita- 
 tion, she kept the suppressed voice of one who 
 confesses in secret. At last he felt impelled 
 to turn his back towards her and walk to a 
 distance. 
 
 But presently there was stillness. Her mind 
 had opened to the sense that he had gone away 
 from her. When Deronda turned round to 
 approach her again, he saw her face bent towards 
 him, her eyes dilated, her lips parted. She was 
 an image of timid forlorn beseeching, — too 
 timid to entreat in words while he kept himself 
 aloof from her. Was she forsaken by him — 
 now — already? But his eyes met hers sorrow- 
 fully, — met hers for the first time fully since 
 she had said, " You know I am a guilty 
 woman; " and that full glance in its intense 
 mournfulness seemed to say, " I know it, but 
 I shall all the less forsake you." He sat down 
 by her side again in the same attitude, — with- 
 out turning his face towards her and without 
 again taking her hand. 
 
 Once more Gwendolen was pierced, as she had 
 been by his face of sorrow at the Abbey, with 
 a compunction less egoistic than that which 
 urged her to confess, and she said, in a tone 
 of loving regret, — 
 
 " I make you very unhappy." 
 
 Deronda gave an indistinct " Oh," just shrink- 
 ing together and changing his attitude a little. 
 Then he had gathered resolution enough to say 
 clearly: " There is no question of being happy 
 or unhappy. What I most desire at this mo- 
 
216 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ment is what will most help you. Tell me all 
 you feel it a relief to tell." 
 
 Devoted as these words were, they widened 
 his spiritual distance from her, and she felt it 
 more difficult to speak: she had a vague need 
 of getting nearer to that compassion which 
 seemed to be regarding her from a halo of 
 superiority, and the need turned into an im- 
 pulse to humble herself more. She was ready 
 to throw herself on her knees before him; but 
 no — her wonderfully mixed consciousness held 
 checks on that impulse, and she was kept silent 
 and motionless by the pressure of opposing 
 needs. Her stillness made Deronda at last 
 say, — 
 
 " Perhaps you are too weary. Shall I go 
 away, and come again whenever you wish it? " 
 
 " No, no," said Gwendolen, — the dread of his 
 leaving her bringing back her power of speech. 
 She went on with her low-toned eagerness: " I 
 want to tell you what it was that came over me 
 in that boat. I was full of rage at being obliged 
 to go, — full of rage, — and I could do nothing 
 but sit there like a galley-slave. And then we 
 got away — out of the port — into the deep — 
 and everything was still — and we never looked 
 at each other, only he spoke to order me — and 
 the very light about me seemed to hold me a 
 prisoner and force me to sit as I did. It came 
 over me that when I was a child I used to fancy 
 sailing away into a world where people were not 
 forced to live with any one they did not like — 
 I did not like my father-in-law to come home. 
 And now, I thought, just the opposite had come 
 to me. I had stept into a boat, and my life was 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 21T 
 
 a sailing and sailing away — gliding on and no 
 help — always into solitude with him, away from 
 dehverance. And because I felt more helpless 
 than ever, my thoughts went out over worse 
 things — I longed for worse things — I had 
 cruel wishes — I fancied impossible ways of — 
 I did not want to die myself; I was afraid of 
 our being drowned together. If it had been 
 any use, I should have prayed — I should have 
 prayed that something might befall him. I 
 should have prayed that he might sink out of 
 my sight and leave me alone. I knew no way 
 of killing him there, but I did, I did kill him in 
 my thoughts." 
 
 She sank into silence for a minute, submerged 
 by the weight of memory which no words could 
 represent. 
 
 "But yet all the while I felt that I was get- 
 ting more wicked. And what had been with me 
 so much, came to me just then — what you once 
 said — about dreading to increase my wrong- 
 doing and my remorse — I should hope for 
 nothing then. It was all like a writing of fire 
 within me. Getting wicked was misery — being 
 shut out forever from knowing what you — 
 what better lives were. That had always been 
 coming back to me in the midst of bad thoughts 
 — it came back to me then — but yet with a 
 despair — a feeling that it was no use — evil 
 wishes were too strong. I remember then let- 
 ting go the tiller and saying ' God help me ! ' 
 But then I was forced to take it again and go 
 on ; and the evil longings, the evil prayers came 
 again and blotted everything else dim, till, in 
 the midst of them — I don't know how it was 
 
218 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 — he was turning the sail — there was a gust { 
 
 — he was struck — I know nothing — I only 
 know that I saw my wish outside me." 
 
 She began to speak more hurriedly, and in ^; 
 more of a whisper. 
 
 " I saw him sink, and my heart gave a leap "i 
 as if it were going out of me. I think I did not i 
 move. I kept my hands tight. It was long ' 
 enough for me to be glad, and yet to think it 
 was no use — he would come up again. And \ 
 he was come — farther off — the boat had moved. 
 It was all like lightning. ' The rope ! ' he called j 
 out in a voice — not his own — I hear it now — ' 
 and I stooped for the rope — I felt I must — ■ 
 I felt sure he could swim, and he would come \ 
 back whether or not, and I dreaded him. That 
 was in my mind — he would come back. But J 
 he was gone down again, and I had the rope ] 
 in my hand — no, there he was again — his face 
 above the water — and he cried again — and I j 
 held my hand, and my heart said, ' Die ! ' — and ] 
 he sank; and I felt ' It is done — I am wicked, ] 
 I am lost ! ' — and I had the rope in my hand ] 
 
 — I don't know what I thought — I was leap- i 
 ing away from myself — I would have saved ! 
 him then. I was leaping from my crime, and | 
 there it was — close to me as I fell — there was j 
 the dead face — dead, dead. It can never be j 
 altered. That was what happened. That was 
 what I did. You know it all. It can never be > 
 altered." ' 
 
 She sank back in her chair, exhausted with the I 
 agitation of memory and speech. Deronda felt i 
 the burthen on his spirit less heavy than the fore- j 
 going dread. The word " guilty " had held a i 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 219 
 
 possibility of interpretations worse than the fact ; 
 and Gwendolen's confession, for the very reason 
 that her conscience made her dwell on the de- 
 termining power of her evil thoughts, convinced 
 him the more that there had been throughout a 
 counterbalancing struggle of her better will. 
 It seemed almost certain that her murderous 
 thought had had no outward effect, — that, quite 
 apart from it, the death was inevitable. Still, 
 a question as to the outward effectiveness of a 
 criminal desire dominant enough to impel even 
 a momentary act, cannot alter our judgment of 
 the desire; and Deronda shrank from putting 
 that question forward in the first instance. He 
 held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggra- 
 vated her inward guilt, and that she gave the 
 character of decisive action to what had been 
 an inappreciably instantaneous glance of desire. 
 But her remorse was the precious sign of a re- 
 coverable nature ; it was the culmination of that 
 self-disapproval which had been the awakening 
 of a new life within her; it marked her off from 
 the criminals whose only regret is failure in 
 securing their evil wish. Deronda could not 
 utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion 
 to her worst self, — that thorn-pressure which 
 must come with the crowning of the sorrowful 
 Better, suffering because of the Worse. All this 
 mingled thought and feeling kept him silent; 
 speech was too momentous to be ventured on 
 rashly. There were no words of comfort that 
 did not carry some sacrilege. If he had opened 
 his lips to speak, he could only have echoed, " It 
 can never be altered, — it remains unaltered, to 
 alter other things." But he was silent and 
 
220 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 motionless — he did not know how long — be- 
 fore he turned to look at her, and saw her sunk 
 back with closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm- 
 beaten white doe, unable to rise and pursue its 
 unguided way. He rose and stood before her. 
 The movement touched her consciousness, and 
 she opened her eyes with a slight quivering that 
 seemed like fear. 
 
 "You must rest now. Try to rest: try to 
 sleep. And may I see you again this evening 
 — to-morrow — when you have had some rest? 
 Let us say no more now." 
 
 The tears came, and she could not answer 
 except by a slight movement of the head. De- 
 ronda rang for attendance, spoke urgently of 
 the necessity that she should be got to rest, and 
 then left her. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The unripe grape, the ripe, and the dried. All things are changes, 
 not into nothing, but into that which is not at present. — Marcus 
 
 AURELIUS. 
 
 "Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, 
 And righteous or unrighteous, being done. 
 Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself 
 Be laid in stillness, and the universe 
 Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more." 
 
 IN the evening she sent for him again. It was 
 already near the hour at which she had been 
 brought in from the sea the evening before, 
 and the hght was subdued enough with bhnds 
 drawn up and windows open. She was seated 
 gazing fixedly on the sea, resting her cheek on 
 her hand, looking less shattered than when he 
 had left her, but with a deep melancholy in her 
 expression which as Deronda approached her 
 passed into an anxious timidity. She did not 
 put out her hand, but said, " How long ago it 
 is! " Then, " Will you sit near me again a little 
 while?" 
 
 He placed himself by her side as he had done 
 before, and seeing that she turned to him with 
 that indefinable expression which implies a wish 
 to say something, he waited for her to speak. 
 But again she looked towards the window 
 silently, and again turned with the same expres- 
 sion, which yet did not issue in speech. There 
 was some fear hindering her, and Deronda, 
 wishing to relieve her timidity, averted his face. 
 Presently he heard her cry imploringly, — 
 
222 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " You will not say that any one else should 
 know? " 
 
 " Most decidedly not," said Deronda. " There 
 is no action that ought to be taken in conse- 
 quence. There is no injury that could be righted 
 in that way. There is no retribution that any 
 mortal could apportion justly." 
 
 She was so still during a pause, that she 
 seemed to be holding her breath, before she 
 said, — 
 
 " But if I had not had that murderous will — 
 that moment — if I had thrown the rope on 
 the instant — perhaps it would have hindered 
 death? " 
 
 " No — I think not," said Deronda, slowly. 
 "If it were true that he could swim, he must 
 have been seized with cramp. With your quick- 
 est, utmost effort, it seems impossible that you 
 could have done anything to save him. That 
 momentary murderous will cannot, I think, have 
 altered the course of events. Its effect is con- 
 fined to the motives in your own breast. Within 
 ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner 
 or later it works its way outside us — it may be 
 in the vitiation that breeds evil acts, but also it 
 may be in the self- abhorrence that stings us into 
 better striving." 
 
 " I am saved from robbing others — there are 
 others — they will have everything — they will 
 have what they ought to have. I knew that some 
 time before I left town. You do not suspect me 
 of wrong desires about those things?" She 
 spoke hesitatingly. 
 
 " I had not thought of them," said Deronda; 
 " I was thinking too much of the other things." 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 223 
 
 " Perhaps you don't quite know the begin- 
 ning of it all," said Gwendolen, slowly, as if she 
 were overcoming her reluctance. " There was 
 some one else he ought to have married. And I 
 knew it, and I told her I would not hinder it. 
 And I went away — that was when you first 
 saw me. But then we became poor all at once, 
 and I was very miserable, and I was tempted. 
 I thought, ' I shall do as I like and make every- 
 thing right.' I persuaded myself. And it was 
 all different. It was all dreadful. Then came 
 hatred and wicked thoughts. That was how it 
 all came. I told you I was afraid of myself. 
 And I did what you told me — I did try to 
 make my fear a safeguard. I thought of 
 what would be if I — I felt what would come 
 
 — how I should dread the morning — wishing 
 it would be always night — and yet in the dark- 
 ness always seeing something — seeing death. 
 If you did not know how miserable I was, you 
 might — but now it has all been no use. I 
 can care for nothing but saving the rest from 
 knowing — poor mamma, who has never been 
 happy." 
 
 There was silence again before she said with 
 a repressed sob: " You cannot bear to look at 
 me any more. You think I am too wicked. 
 You do not believe that I can become any better 
 
 — worth anything — worthy enough — I shall 
 always be too wicked to — " The voice broke 
 off helpless. 
 
 Deronda's heart was pierced. He turned his 
 eyes on her poor beseeching face, and said, " I 
 believe that you may become worthier than you 
 have ever yet been, — worthy to lead a hf e that 
 
224 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 may be a blessing. No evil dooms us hopelessly 
 except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, 
 and make no effort to escape from. You have 
 made efforts, — you will go on making them." 
 
 " But you were the beginning of them. You 
 must not forsake me," said Gwendolen, leaning 
 with her clasped, hands on the arm of her chair 
 and looking at him, while her face bore piteous 
 traces of the life-experience concentrated in the 
 twenty- four hours, — that new terrible life 
 lying on the other side of the deed which fulfils 
 a criminal desire. " I will bear any penance. I 
 will lead any life you tell me. But you must not 
 forsake me. You must be near. If you had 
 been near me — if I could have said everything 
 to you, I should have been different. You will 
 not forsake me? " 
 
 " It could never be my impulse to forsake 
 you," said Deronda, promptly, with that voice 
 which, like his eyes, had the unintentional effect 
 of making his ready sympathy seem more per- 
 sonal and special than it really was. And in 
 that moment he was not himself quite free from 
 a foreboding of some such self-committing 
 effect. His strong feeling for this stricken 
 creature could not hinder rushing images of 
 future difficulty. He continued to meet her 
 appealing eyes as he spoke, but it was with the 
 painful consciousness that to her ear his words 
 might carry a promise which one day would 
 seem unfulfilled: he was making an indefinite 
 promise to an indefinite hope. Anxieties, both 
 immediate and distant, crowded on his thought, 
 and it was under their influence that, after a 
 moment's silence, he said, — 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 225 
 
 " I expect Sir Hugo Mallinger to arrive by 
 to-morrow night at least; and I am not with- 
 out hope that Mrs. Davilow may shortly follow 
 him. Her presence will be the greatest comfort 
 to you, — it will give you a motive, to save her 
 from unnecessary pain? " 
 
 " Yes, yes — I will try. And you will not go 
 away? " 
 
 " Not till after Sir Hugo has come.' 
 
 " But we shall all go to England? " 
 
 " As soon as possible," said Deronda, not 
 wishing to enter into particulars. 
 
 Gwendolen looked towards the window again 
 with an expression which seemed like a gradual 
 awakening to new thoughts. The twilight was 
 perceptibly deepening, but Deronda could see a 
 movement in her eyes and hands such as accom- 
 panies a return of perception in one who has been 
 stunned. 
 
 " You will always be with Sir Hugo now? " 
 she said presently, looking at him. " You will 
 always live at the Abbey, — or else at Diplow? " 
 
 " I am quite uncertain where I shall live," said 
 Deronda, colouring. 
 
 She was warned by his changed colour that 
 she had spoken too rashly, and fell silent. 
 After a little while she began, again looking 
 away, — 
 
 " It is impossible to think how my life will go 
 on. I think now it would be better for me to be 
 poor and obliged to work." 
 
 " New promptings will come as the days pass. 
 When you are among your friends again, you 
 will discern new duties," said Deronda. " Make 
 it a task now to get as well and calm — as 
 
 VOL. XIV — 15 
 
226 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 much like yourself as you can, before — " He 
 hesitated. 
 
 " Before my mother comes," said Gwendolen. 
 "Ah! I must be changed. I have not looked at 
 myself. Should you have known me," she 
 added, turning towards him, " if you had met 
 me now? — should you have known me for the 
 one you saw at Leubronn? " 
 
 " Yes, I should have known you," said De- 
 ronda, mournfully. " The outside change is not 
 great. I should have seen at once that it was 
 you, and that you had gone through some great 
 sorrow." 
 
 " Don't \\dsh now that you had never seen me, 
 — don't wish that," said Gwendolen, implor- 
 ingly, while the tears gathered. 
 
 " I should despise myself for wishing it," said 
 Deronda. " How could I know what I was 
 wishing ? We must find our duties in what comes 
 to us, riot in what we imagine might have been. 
 If I took to foolish wishing of that sort, I should 
 wish — not that I had never seen you, but that I 
 had been able to save you from this." 
 
 " You have saved me from worse," said Gwen- 
 dolen, in a sobbing voice. " I should have been 
 worse if it had not been for you. If you had not 
 been good, I should have been more wicked than 
 I am." 
 
 " It will be better for me to go now," said De- 
 ronda, worn in spirit by the perpetual strain of 
 this scene. " Remember what we said of your 
 task, — to get well and calm before other friends 
 come." 
 
 He rose as he spoke, and she gave him her 
 hand submissively. But when he had left her she 
 
THE MOTHER AND THE SON 227 
 
 sank on her knees, in hysterical crying. The 
 distance between them was too great. She was 
 a banished soul, — beholding a possible life 
 which she had sinned herself away from. 
 
 She was found in this way, crushed on the 
 floor. Such grief seemed natural in a poor 
 lady whose husband had been drowned in her 
 presence. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Much adoe there was, God wot; 
 He wold love and she wold not. 
 
 Nicholas Breton. 
 
 EXTENSION, we know, is a very im- 
 perfect measure of thiags ; and the length 
 of the sun's journeying can no more tell us 
 how far life has advanced than the acreage of a 
 field can tell us what growths may be active 
 within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling 
 over a bone, may meditate upon it till he has 
 found a new starting-point for anatomy; or east- 
 ward, and discover a new key to language telling 
 a new story of races; or he may head an expe- 
 dition that opens new continental pathways, get 
 himself maimed in body, and go through a whole 
 heroic poem of resolve and endurance; and at 
 the end of a few months he may come back to 
 find his neighbours grumbling at the same parish 
 grievance as before, or to see the same elderly 
 gentleman treading the pavement in discourse 
 with himself, shaking his head after the same per- 
 cussive butcher's boy, and pausing at the same 
 shop-window to look at the same prints. If the 
 swiftest thinking has about the pace of a grey- 
 hound, the slowest must be supposed to move, 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 229 
 
 like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which 
 after a good while is discerned to be a slight pro- 
 gression. Such differences are manifest in the 
 variable intensity which we call human experi- 
 ence, from the revolutionary rush of change 
 which makes a new inner and outer life, to that 
 quiet recurrence of the familiar, which has no 
 other epochs than those of hunger and the 
 heavens. 
 
 Something of this contrast was seen in the 
 year's experience which had turned the brilliant, 
 self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Arch- 
 ery Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled 
 to confess her unworthiness where it would have 
 been her happiness to be held worthy; while it 
 had left her family in Pennicote without deeper 
 change than that of some outward habits, and 
 some adjustment of prospects and intentions to 
 reduced income, fewer visits, and fainter compli- 
 ments. The Rectory was as pleasant a home as 
 before : the red and pink peonies on the lawn, the 
 rows of hollyhocks by the hedges, had bloomed 
 as well this year as last: the Rector main- 
 tained his cheerful confidence in the good-will of 
 patrons and his resolution to deserve it by dili- 
 gence in the fulfilment of his duties, whether 
 patrons were likely to hear of it or not; doing 
 nothing solely with an eye to promotion except, 
 perhaps, the writing of two ecclesiastical articles, 
 which, having no signature, were attributed to 
 some one else, except by the patrons who had 
 a special copy sent them, and these certainly 
 knew the author but did not read the articles. 
 The Rector, however, chewed no poisonous cud 
 of suspicion on this point: he made marginal 
 
230 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 notes on his own copies to render them a more 
 interesting loan, and was gratified that the Arch- 
 deacon and other authorities had nothing to say 
 against the general tenor of his argument. 
 Peaceful authorship ! — living in the air of the 
 fields and downs, and not in the thrice-breathed 
 breath of criticism, — bringing no Dantesque 
 leanness; rather, assisting nutrition by compla- 
 cency, and perhaps giving a more suffusive sense 
 of achievement than the production of a whole 
 " Divina Commedia." Then there was the 
 father's recovered dehght in his favourite son, 
 which was a happiness outweighing the loss of 
 eighteen hundred a-year. Of whatever nature 
 might be the hidden change wrought in Rex by 
 the disappointment of his first love, it was ap- 
 parently quite secondary to that evidence of 
 more serious ambition which dated from the fam- 
 ily misfortune; indeed, Mr. Gascoigne was in- 
 clined to regard the little affair which had caused 
 him so much anxiety the year before as an evapo- 
 ration of superfluous moisture, a kind of finish 
 to the baking process which the human dough 
 demands. Rex had lately come down for a sum- 
 mer visit to the Rectory, bringing Anna home, 
 and while he showed nearly the old liveliness with 
 his brothers and sisters, he continued in his holi- 
 day the habits of the eager student, rising early 
 in the morning and shutting himself up early in 
 the evenings to carry on a fixed course of study. 
 
 " 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 231 
 
 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 litera- 
 ture that people choke their minds with. It 
 does n't make one so dull. Our wittiest men have 
 often been lawyers. Any orderly way of look- 
 ing 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 as- 
 pects 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 is so with most 
 work when a man goes into it with a will. Bre- 
 witt, 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. 
 
232 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 JNIrs. 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 ever- 
 greens, and known to the villagers as " Jod- 
 son's." JNIrs. Davilow's delicate face showed 
 only a slight deepening of its mild melancholy, 
 her hair only a few more silver lines, in conse- 
 quence 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 ser- 
 viceable neutrality towards 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 seem- 
 ing 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 favourite with her younger cousins, had much 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 233 
 
 to tell of her new experience, and the acquaint- 
 ances she had made in London ; and when on her 
 first visit she came alone, many questions were 
 asked her about Gwendolen's house in Gros- 
 venor 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 con- 
 nected with that interesting unknown vessel be- 
 yond the fact that Gwendolen had written just 
 before she set out to say that Mr. Grandcourt 
 and she were going yachting in the Mediter- 
 ranean, 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 strik- 
 ing 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, accord- 
 ing to instructions, never started this fascinating 
 topic ; and to-day there had only been animated 
 descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraor- 
 dinary Jewish friends, which caused some as- 
 tonished questioning from minds to which the 
 idea of live Jews, out of a book, suggested a dif- 
 ference 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 
 
234 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 now, and 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 " could n'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 uncon- 
 verted 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 Israel- 
 ites, having made a troublesome acquaintance 
 with the minutiae of their ancient history in the 
 form of " cram," was amusing himself by play- 
 fully exaggerating the notion of each speaker, 
 while Anna begged them all to understand that 
 he was only joking, when the laughter was in- 
 terrupted 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. Look- 
 ing 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 writ- 
 ten, and she said, with a sob which was half 
 relief, — 
 
 " My dears, Mr. Grandcourt — " she paused 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 235 
 
 an instant, and then began again, " Mr. Grand- 
 court is drowned." 
 
 Rex started up as if a missile had been sud- 
 denly 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 writ- 
 ten 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 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 sun- 
 shine which was suddenly solemn to them, with- 
 out 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 oppression being undimin- 
 ished 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 conse- 
 
236 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 quences on his own future in the presence of an- 
 other's misfortune, sorrow, or death? The ex- 
 pected 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 Ilex'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, — over- 
 spread them, perhaps, the more persistently be- 
 cause every phantasm of a hope was quickly nul- 
 lified 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 re- 
 pugnance, 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 op- 
 posing 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 un- 
 do 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 237 
 
 laid low by an archer who sometimes touches his 
 arrow with a subtle, lingering poison. The dis- 
 appointment 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 ma- 
 jority without obvious change. Everything de- 
 pends — 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 colour of his life. Now, 
 however, it seemed that his inward peace was 
 hardly more stable than that of republican Flor- 
 ence, and his heart no better than the alarm-bell 
 that made work slack and tumult busy. 
 
 Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrat- 
 ing, clinging sort which the ancients knew and 
 sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for 
 many moderns whose experience has been by no 
 means of a fiery, daemonic character. To have 
 the consciousness suddenly steeped with an- 
 other's personality, to have the strongest inclina- 
 tions possessed by an image which retains its 
 dominance in spite of change and apart from 
 worthiness, — nay, to feel a passion which clings 
 the faster for the tragic pangs inflicted by a cruel, 
 recognized unworthiness, — is a phase of love 
 which in the feeble and common-minded has a 
 repulsive likeness to a blind animalism insensible 
 
238 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to the higher sway of moral affinity or heaven-lit 
 admiration. But when this attaching force is 
 present in a nature not of brutish unmodifiable- 
 ness, 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 preposses- 
 sions, 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 help- 
 less, 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 count- 
 ing 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 irrevocable- 
 ness 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. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 239 
 
 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 gratui- 
 tous 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 mat- 
 ters he can't speak to me about, though I might 
 be useful in them? " 
 
 That 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 travelling 
 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 am 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 sub- 
 ject as a matter of course between them. " Per- 
 haps her mother may stay there with her, and I 
 may come back very soon. This telegram leaves 
 us in an ignorance which is rather anxious. But 
 
240 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 ex- 
 pect, 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 fam- 
 ily, and knew nothing of Gwendolen's flight 
 from her suitor to Leubronn. He only know 
 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 hand- 
 somely in providing for her mother and sisters. 
 That was all very natural, and what Rex him- 
 self 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 II 
 
 I count myself in nothing else so happy 
 As in a soul remembering my good friends. 
 
 Shakespeabe. 
 
 SIR HUGO MALLINGER was not so 
 prompt in starting for Genoa as Mr. Gas- 
 coigne had been, and Deronda on all ac- 
 counts would not take his departure till he had 
 seen the baronet. There was not only Grand- 
 court'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, ac- 
 cording 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 im- 
 pressed 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 
 
 VOL. XIV — 16 
 
242 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 them- 
 selves to our ideal. We must have some com- 
 radeship with imperfection; and it is, happily, 
 possible to feel gratitude even where we discern 
 a mistake that may have been injurious, the vehi- 
 cle of the mistake being an affectionate intention 
 prosecuted through a lifetime of kindly offices. 
 Deronda's feeling and judgment were strongly 
 against the action of Sir Hugo in making him- 
 self 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 bar- 
 onet had probably had no clear knowledge con- 
 cerning the mother's breach of trust, and with his 
 light easy way of taking life, had held it a reason- 
 able 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 towards 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 awiy, and yet to be patient 
 with the hanger who sees amiss. If Sir Hugo in 
 his bachelorhood had been beguiled into regard- 
 ing 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, 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 243 
 
 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 remem- 
 ber 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 i/^Tikindness, 
 the most remote from Deronda' s large imagina- 
 tive lenience towards 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 in- 
 dignation 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 
 fervour, 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 pro- 
 pose 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 did n't 
 hurry in setting off, because I wanted to inquire 
 into things a little, and so I got sight of your 
 
244 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 con- 
 clude 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 affec- 
 tions, 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 chil- 
 dren — girls. The boy is to take his father's 
 name; he is Henleigh already, and he is to be 
 Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallin- 
 ger 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 245 
 
 have had holes filled up with my fifty thousand 
 for Diplow that he had no right to; and mean- 
 while 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 dis- 
 gusted 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 con- 
 cerned, 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 mar- 
 ried this girl he ought to have given her a hand- 
 some 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 could n'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, m the other case, I suppose everything 
 
246 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 would have been reversed, — illegitimacy would 
 have had the extinguisher? " said Deronda, with 
 some scorn. 
 
 " Precisely, — Gadsmere and the two thou- 
 sand. It 's queer. One nuisance is that Grand- 
 court 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 ig- 
 norance 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 ques- 
 tion with his usual jocoseness, but rather with a 
 lowered tone of interested inquiry ; and Dieronda 
 felt that any evasion would be misinterpreted. 
 He answered gravely, — 
 
 " She was certainly not happy. They were un- 
 suited 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 entangle- 
 ment between your horoscope and hers — eh? 
 When that tremendous telegram carne, 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 247 
 
 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 your coming to Genoa 
 had to do with the Grandcourts." 
 
 There was silence for a little while. Sir Hugo 
 had begun to talk of the Grandcourts as the 
 less difficult subject between himself and De- 
 ronda; but they were both wishing to over- 
 come a reluctance to perfect frankness on the 
 events which touched their relation to each other. 
 Deronda felt that his letter, after the first in- 
 terview with his mother, had been rather a 
 thickening than a breaking of the ice, and that 
 he ought to wait for the first opening to come 
 from Sir Hugo. Just when they were about to 
 lose sight of the port, the baronet turned, and 
 pausing as if to get a last view, said in a tone 
 of more serious feeling, — 
 
 " And about the main business of your com- 
 ing to Genoa, Dan? You have not been deeply 
 pained by anything you have learned, I hope? 
 There is nothing that you feel need change your 
 position in any way ? You know, whatever hap- 
 pens to you must always be of importance to 
 me." 
 
 " I desire to meet your goodness by perfect 
 confidence, sir," said Deronda. " But I can't 
 answer those questions truly by a simple yes 
 or no. Much that I have heard about the past 
 has pained me. And it has been a pain to meet 
 and part with my mother in her suffering state, 
 as I have been compelled to do. But it is no 
 
248 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 pain — it is rather a clearing up of doubts for 
 which I am thankful — to know my parentage. 
 As to the effect on my position, there will be 
 no change in my gratitude to you, sir, for the 
 fatherly care and affection you have always 
 shown me. But to know that I was born a Jew, 
 may have a momentous influence on my life, 
 which I am hardly able to tell you of at present." 
 
 Deronda spoke the last sentence with a re- 
 solve that overcame some diffidence. He felt 
 that the differences between Sir Hugo's nature 
 and his own would have, by and by, to disclose 
 themselves more markedly than had ever yet 
 been needful. The baronet gave him a quick 
 glance, and turned to walk on. After a few 
 moments' silence, in which he had reviewed all 
 the material in his memory which would enable 
 him to interpret Deronda's words, he said, — 
 
 " I have long expected something remarkable 
 from you, Dan; but, for God's sake, don't 
 go into any eccentricities! I can tolerate any 
 man's difference of opinion, but let him tell it 
 me without getting himself up as a lunatic. 
 At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be 
 taken seriously he must keep clear of melo- 
 drama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not 
 suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your 
 own account. I only think you might ea^sily 
 be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if 
 he wanted defending. You have a passion for 
 people who are pelted, Dan. I 'm sorry for 
 them too; but so far as company goes, it's a 
 bad ground of selection. However, I don't 
 ask you to anticipate your inclination in any- 
 thing you have to tell me. When you make up 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 249 
 
 your mind to a course that requires money, I 
 have some sixteen thousand pounds that have 
 been accumulating for you over and above what 
 you have been having the interest of as income. 
 And now I am come, I suppose you want to get 
 back to England as soon as you can? " 
 
 " I must go first to Mainz to get away a chest 
 of my grandfather's, and perhaps to see a friend 
 of his," said Derond,a. " Although the chest 
 has been lying there these twenty years, I have 
 an unreasonable sort of nervous eagerness to 
 get it away under my care, as if it were more 
 likely now than before that something might 
 happen to it. And perhaps I am the more un- 
 easy, because I lingered after my mother left, 
 instead of setting out immediately. Yet I can't 
 regret that I was here, — else Mrs. Grandcourt 
 would have had none but servants to act for 
 her." 
 
 " Yes, yes," said Sir Hugo, with a flippancy 
 which was an escape of some vexation hidden 
 under his moie serious speech: I hope you are 
 not going to set a dead Jew above a living 
 Christian." 
 
 Deronda coloured, and repressed a retort. 
 They were just turning into the Italia, 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 But I shall say no more of this at this time; for this is to be felt 
 and not to be talked of; and they who never touched it with their 
 fingers may secretly perhaps laugh at it in their hearts and be never 
 the wiser. — Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 "The Roman Emperor in the legend put to death ten learned 
 IsraeUtes to avenge the sale of Joseph by his brethren. And there 
 have always been enough of his kidney, whose piety hes in punishing, 
 who can see the justice of grudges but not of gratitude. For you shall 
 never convince the stronger feeling that it hath not the stronger reason, 
 or incline him who hath no love to beheve that there is good ground 
 for loving. As we may learn from the order of word-making, wherein 
 love precedeth lovable" 
 
 WHEN Deronda presented his letter at 
 the banking-house in the Schuster 
 Strasse at Mainz, and asked for Joseph 
 Kalonymos, he was presently shown into an 
 inner room, where, seated at a table arranging 
 open letters, was the white-bearded man whom 
 he had seen the year before in the synagogue at 
 Frankfort. He wore his hat, — it seemed to 
 be the same old felt hat as before, — and near 
 him was a packed portmanteau with a wrap 
 and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda 
 enter he rose, but did not advance or put out 
 his hand. Looking at him with small pene- 
 trating eyes which glittered like black gems in 
 the midst of his yellowish face and white hair, 
 he said in German, — 
 
 " Good! It is now you who seek me, young 
 man." 
 
 " Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend 
 of my grandfather's," said Deronda, " and I am 
 under an obligation to you for giving yourself 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 251 
 
 much trouble on my account." He spoke with- 
 out difficulty in that liberal German tongue 
 which takes many strange accents to its mater- 
 nal bosom. 
 
 Kalonymos now put out his hand and said 
 cordially, "So — you are no longer angry at 
 being something more than an Englishman? " 
 
 " On the contrary. I thank you heartily for 
 helping to save me from remaining in ignorance 
 of my parentage, and for taking care of the chest 
 that my grandfather left in trust for me." 
 
 " Sit down, sit down," said Kalonymos, in a 
 quick undertone, seating himself again, and 
 pointing to a chair near him. Then deliberately 
 laying aside his hat and showing a head thickly 
 covered with white hair, he stroked and clutched 
 his beard while he looked examiningly at the 
 young face before him. The moment wrought 
 strongly on Deronda's imaginative suscepti- 
 bility: in the presence of one linked still in 
 zealous friendship with the grandfather whose 
 hope had yearned towards him when he was un- 
 born, and who though dead was yet to speak 
 with him in those written memorials which, 
 says Milton, " contain a potency of life in them 
 to be as active as that soul whose progeny they 
 are," he seemed to himself to be touching the 
 electric chain of his own ancestry; and he bore 
 the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a de- 
 lighted awe, something like what one feels in 
 the solemn commemoration of acts done long 
 ago but still telling markedly on the life of to- 
 day. Impossible for men of duller fibre — men 
 whose affection is not ready to diffuse itself 
 through the wide travel of imagination — to 
 
252 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 comprehend, perhaps even to credit, this sensi- 
 bihty of Deronda's; but it subsisted, Hke their 
 own dulness, notwithstanding their lack of be- 
 Hef in it, — and it gave his face an expression 
 which seemed very satisfactory to the observer. 
 
 He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the 
 fine hymns in the Hebrew hturgy, " As thy 
 goodness has been great to the former genera- 
 tions, even so may it be to the latter." Then 
 after pausing a little he began: " Young man, 
 I rejoice that I was not yet set off again on 
 my travels, and that you are come in time for 
 me to see the image of my friend as he was 
 in his youth, — no longer perverted from the 
 fellowship of your people, — no longer shrink- 
 ing in proud wrath from the touch of him who 
 seemed to be claiming you as a Jew. You come 
 with thankfulness yourself to claim the kindred 
 and heritage that wicked contrivance would have 
 robbed you of. You come with a willing soul 
 to declare ' I am the grandson of Daniel 
 Charisi.' Is it not so? " 
 
 "Assuredly it is," said Deronda. "But let 
 me say that I should at no time have been in- 
 clined to treat a Jew with incivility simply be- 
 cause he was a Jew. You can understand that 
 I shrank from saying to a stranger, ' I know 
 nothing of my mother.' " 
 
 " A sin, a sin! " said Kalonymos, putting up 
 his hand and closing his eyes in disgust. " A 
 robbery of our people, as when our youths and 
 maidens were reared for the Rorrian Edom. 
 But it is frustrated. I have frustrated it. 
 When Daniel Charisi — may his Rock and his 
 Redeemer guard him! — when Daniel Charisi 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 253 
 
 was a stripling and I was a lad little above his 
 shoulder, we made a solemn vow always to be 
 friends. He said, ' Let us bind ourselves with 
 duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.' 
 That was his bent from first to last, — as he 
 said, to fortify his soul with bonds. It was a 
 saying of his, ' Let us bind love with duty; for 
 duty is the love of law ; and law is the nature of 
 the Eternal.' So we bound ourselves. And 
 though we were much apart in our later life, 
 the bond has never been broken. When he was 
 dead, they sought to rob him; but they could 
 not rob him of me. I rescued that remainder 
 of him which he had prized and preserved for 
 his offspring. And I have restored to him the 
 offspring they had robbed him of. I will bring 
 you the chest forthwith." 
 
 Kalonymos left the room for a few minutes, 
 and returned with a clerk who carried the chest, 
 set it down on the floor, drew off a leather 
 cover, and went out again. It was not very 
 large, but was made heavy by ornamental 
 bracers and handles of gilt iron. The wood was 
 beautifully incised with Arabic lettering. 
 
 "So!" said Kalonymos, returning to his 
 seat. " And here is the curious key," he added, 
 taking it from a small leathern bag. " Bestow 
 ^it carefully. I trust you are methodic and 
 wary." He gave Deronda the monitory and 
 slightly suspicious look with which age is apt to 
 commit any object to the keeping of youth. 
 
 " I shall be more careful of this than of an}^ 
 other property," said Deronda, smiling and 
 putting the key in his breast-pocket. " I never 
 before possessed anything that was a sign to 
 
254 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 me of so much cherished hope and effort. And 
 I shall never forget that the effort was partly 
 yours. Have you time to tell me more of my 
 grandfather? Or shall I be trespassing in stay- 
 ing longer? " 
 
 " Stay yet a while. In an hour and eighteen 
 minutes I start for Trieste," said Kalonymos, 
 looking at his watch, " and presently my sons 
 will expect my attention. Will you let me make 
 you known to them, so that they may have the 
 pleasure of showing hospitality to my friend's 
 grandson? They dwell here in ease and luxury, 
 though I choose to be a wanderer." 
 
 " I shall be glad if you w^ll commend me to 
 their acquaintance for some future opportun- 
 ity," said Deronda. " There are pressing claims 
 calling me to England, — friends who may be 
 much in need of my presence. I have been kept 
 away from them too long by unexpected cir- 
 cumstances. But to know more of you and your 
 family would be motive enough to bring me 
 again to Mainz." 
 
 " Good! Me you will hardly find, for I am 
 beyond my threescore years and ten, and I am 
 a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me. But 
 my sons and their children dwell here in wealth 
 and unity. The days are changed for us in 
 Mainz since our people were slaughtered whole- 
 sale if they would n't be baptized wholesale : 
 they are changed for us since Karl the Great 
 fetched my ancestors from Italy to bring some 
 tincture of knowledge to our rough German 
 brethren. I and my contemporaries have had 
 to fight for it too. Our youth fell on evil days; 
 but this we have won: we increase our wealth 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 255 
 
 in safety, and the learning of all Germany is 
 fed and fattened by Jewish brains, — though 
 they keep not always their Jewish hearts. 
 Have you been left altogether ignorant of your 
 people's life, young man? " 
 
 " No," said Deronda, " I have lately, before 
 I had any true suspicion of my parentage, been 
 led to study everything belonging to their his- 
 tory with more interest than any other subject. 
 It turns out that I have been making myself 
 ready to understand my grandfather a little." 
 He was anxious lest the time should be con- 
 sumed before this circuitous course of talk could 
 lead them back to the topic he most cared about. 
 Age does not easily distinguish between what 
 it needs to express and what youth needs to 
 know, — distance seeming to level the objects 
 of memory ; and keenly active as Joseph Ka- 
 lonymos showed himself, an inkstand in the 
 wrong place would have hindered his imagina- 
 tion from getting to Beyrout: he had been used 
 to unite restless travel with punctilious obser- 
 vation. But Deronda's last sentence answered 
 its purpose. 
 
 " So, — you would perhaps have been such 
 a man as he, if your education had not hindered ; 
 for you are like him in features, — yet not alto- 
 gether, young man. He had an iron will in his 
 face: it braced up everybody about him. When 
 he was quite young he had already got one deep 
 upright line in his brow. I see none of that in 
 you. Daniel Charisi used to say, ' Better a 
 wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast 
 enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false 
 belief than no belief at all.' What he despised 
 
256 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 most was indifference. He had longer reasons 
 than I can give you." 
 
 " Yet his knowledge was not narrow? " said 
 Deronda, with a tacit reference to the usual 
 excuse for indecision, — that it comes from 
 knowing too much. 
 
 " Narrow? No," said Kalonymos, shaking 
 his head with a compassionate smile. " From 
 his childhood upward, he drank in learning as 
 easily as the plant sucks up water. But he 
 early took to medicine and theories about life 
 and health. He travelled to many countries, 
 and spent much of his substance in seeing and 
 knowing. What he used to insist on was that 
 the strength and wealth of mankind depended 
 on the balance of separateness and communi- 
 cation, and he was bitterly against our people 
 losing themselves among the Gentiles. 'It's 
 no better,' said he, ' than the many sorts of grain 
 going back from their variety into sameness.' 
 He mingled all sorts of learning; and in that 
 he was like our Arabic writers in the golden 
 time. We studied together, but he went beyond 
 me. Though we were bosom friends, and he 
 poured himself out to me, we were as different 
 as the inside and the outside of the bowl. I 
 stood up for no notions of my own: I took 
 Charisi's sayings as I took the shape of the 
 trees : they were there, not to be disputed about. 
 It came to the same thing in both of us : we were 
 both faithful Jews, thankful not to be Gentiles. 
 And since I was a ripe man, I have been what 
 I am now, for all but age, — loving to wander, 
 loving transactions, loving to behold all things, 
 and caring nothing about hardship. Charisi 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 257 
 
 thought continually of our people's future: he 
 went with all his soul into that part of our 
 religion; I, not. So we have freedom, I am con- 
 tent. Our people wandered before they were 
 driven. Young man, when I am in the East, 
 I lie much on deck and watch the greater stars. 
 The sight of them satisfies me. I know them 
 as they rise, and hunger not to know more. 
 Charisi was satisfied with no sight, but pieced 
 it out with what had been before and what would 
 come after. Yet we loved each other, and as 
 he said, we bound our love with duty; we 
 solemnly pledged ourselves to help and defend 
 each other to the last. I have fulfilled my 
 pledge." Here Kalonymos rose ; and Deronda, 
 rising also, said, — 
 
 " And in being faithful to him you have 
 caused justice to be done to me. It would have 
 been a robbery of me too that I should never 
 have known of the inheritance he had prepared 
 for me. I thank you with my whole soul." 
 
 " Be worthy of him, young man. What is 
 your vocation? " This question was put with 
 a quick abruptness which embarrassed Deronda, 
 who did not feel it quite honest to allege his law- 
 reading as a vocation. He answered, — 
 
 " I cannot say that I have any." 
 
 " Get one, get one. The Jew must be dili- 
 gent. You will call yourself a Jew and profess 
 the faith of your fathers?" said Kalonymos, 
 putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder and 
 looking sharply in his face. 
 
 " I shall call myself a Jew," said Deronda, 
 deliberately, becoming slightly paler under the 
 piercing eyes of his questioner. " But I will 
 
 VOL. XIV — 17 
 
258 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 not say that I shall profess to believe exactly 
 as my fathers have believed. Our fathers them- 
 selves changed the horizon of their belief and 
 learned of other races. But I think I can main- 
 tain my grandfather's notion of separateness 
 with communication. I hold that my first duty 
 is to my own people, and if there is anything 
 to be done towards restoring or perfecting their 
 common life, I shall make that my vocation." 
 
 It happened to Deronda at that moment, as 
 it has often happened to others, that the need 
 for speech made an epoch in resolve. His re- 
 spect for the questioner would not let him 
 decline to answer, and by the necessity to an- 
 swer he found out the truth for himself. 
 
 " Ah, you argue and you look forward, — 
 you are Daniel Charisi's grandson," said Ka- 
 lonymos, adding a benediction in Hebrew. 
 
 With that they parted; and almost as soon 
 as Deronda was in London, the aged man was 
 again on shipboard, greeting the friendly stars 
 without any eager curiosity. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, 
 As birds within the green shade of the grove. 
 
 Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme. 
 Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love. 
 
 Gtjido Guinicelli (Rossetti's Translation). 
 
 THERE was another house besides the 
 white house at Pennicote, another breast 
 besides Rex Gascoigne's, in which the 
 news of Grandcourt's death caused both strong 
 agitation and the effort to repress it. 
 
 It was Hans Meyrick's habit to send or bring 
 in the " Times "for his mother's reading. She 
 was a great reader of news, from the widest- 
 reaching pohtics to the Ust of marriages; the 
 latter, she said, giving her the pleasant sense 
 of finishing the fashionable novels without hav- 
 ing read them, and seeing the heroes and hero- 
 ines happy without knowing what poor creatures 
 they were. On a Wednesday there were reasons 
 why Hans always chose to bring the paper, 
 and to do so about the time that Mirah had 
 nearly ended giving Mab her weekly lesson, 
 avowing that he came then because he wanted 
 to hear Mirah sing. But on the particular 
 Wednesday now in question, after entering the 
 house as quietly as usual with his latch-key, he 
 appeared in the parlour, shaking the " Times " 
 aloft with a crackling noise, in remorseless in- 
 terruption of Mab's attempt to render Lascia 
 ch'io pian^a with a remote imitation of her 
 teacher. Piano and song ceased immediately: 
 
260 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 Mirah, who had been playing the accompani- ] 
 ment, involuntarily started up and turned 
 round, the crackling sound, after the occasional 
 
 trick of sounds, having seemed to her some- i 
 
 thing thunderous ; and Mab said, — ] 
 
 " O-o-o, Hans! why do you bring a more ; 
 
 horrible noise than my singing? " \ 
 
 "What on earth is the wonderful news?" ^ 
 
 said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the only other per- j 
 
 son in the room. " Anything about Italy, — i 
 
 anything about the Austrians giving up - 
 
 Venice?" \ 
 
 " Nothing about Italy, but something from | 
 
 Italy," said Hans, with a peculiarity in his tone ' 
 
 and manner which set his mother interpreting. ; 
 
 Imagine how some of us feel and behave when j 
 
 an event, not disagreeable, seems to be confirm- | 
 
 ing and carrying out our private constructions. 1 
 
 We say, " What do you think? " in a pregnant | 
 
 tone to some innocent person who has not em- ' 
 
 barked his wisdom in the same boat ^ith ours, [ 
 and finds our information flat. 
 
 "Nothing bad?" said Mrs. Meyrick, anx- 
 iously, thinking immediately of Deronda; and 
 
 Mirah's heart had been already clutched by the ^ 
 
 same thought. j 
 
 " Not bad for anybody we care much about," i 
 
 said Hans, quickly; " rather uncommonly lucky, ; 
 
 I think. I never knew anybody die conven- ; 
 
 iently before. Considering what a dear gazelle j 
 I am, I am constantly wondering to find myself 
 
 alive." . i 
 
 " Oh me, Hans! " said Mab, impatiently, "if 
 you must talk of yourself, let it be behind your 
 own back. What is it that has happened? " 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 
 
 261 
 
 " Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess 
 is ahve, that 's all," said Hans, putting the paper 
 before Mrs. Meyrick, with his finger against a 
 paragraph. " But more than all is — Deronda 
 was at Genoa in the same hotel with them, and 
 he saw her brought in by the fishermen, who had 
 got her out of the water time enough to save 
 her from any harm. It seems they saw her 
 jump in after her husband, — which was a less 
 judicious action than I should have expected 
 of the Duchess. However, Deronda is a lucky 
 fellow in being there to take care of her." 
 
 Mirah had sunk on the music-stool again, 
 with her eyelids down and her hands tightly 
 clasped; and Mrs. Meyrick, giving up the paper 
 to Mab, said, — 
 
 " Poor thing! she must have been fond of her 
 husband, to jump in after him." 
 
 " It was an inadvertence, — a little absence 
 of mind," said Hans, creasing his face roguishly, 
 and throwing himself into a chair not far from 
 Mirah. " Who can be fond of a jealous bary- 
 tone, with freezing glances, always singing 
 asides? — that was the husband's role, depend 
 upon it. Nothing can be neater than his get- 
 ting drov/ned. The Duchess is at liberty now 
 to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and 
 glances that will melt instead of freezing her. 
 And I shall be invited to the vv^dding." 
 
 Here Mirah started from her sitting posture, 
 and fixing her eyes on Hans with an angry 
 gleam in them, she said, in the deeply shaken 
 voice of indignation, — 
 
 " Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that 
 way. Mr. Deronda would not like you to speak 
 
262 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 so. Why will you say he is lucky, — why will 
 you use words of that sort about life and death, 
 — when what is life to one is death to another? 
 How do you know it would be lucky if he loved 
 Mrs. Grandcourt? It might be a great evil 
 to him. She would take him away from my 
 brother, — I know she would. Mr. Deronda 
 would not call that lucky, — to pierce my 
 brother's heart." 
 
 All three were struck with the sudden trans- 
 formation. Mirah's face, with a look of anger 
 that might have suited Ithuriel, pale even to the 
 lips that were usually so rich of tint, was not 
 far from poor Hans, who sat transfixed, blush- 
 ing under it as if he had been the girl, while 
 he said nervously, — 
 
 " I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw 
 every word. I '11 go and hang myself like 
 Judas, — if it 's allowable to mention him." 
 Even in Hans's sorrowful moments, his impro- 
 vised words had inevitably some drollery. 
 
 But Mirah's anger was not appeased; how 
 could it be ? She had burst into indignant speech 
 as creatures in intense pain bite and make their 
 teeth meet, even through their own flesh, by way 
 of making their agony bearable. She said no 
 more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed 
 the sheet of music before her, as if she thought 
 of beginning to play again. 
 
 It was Mab who spoke, while Mrs. Meyrick's 
 face seemed to reflect some of Hans's dis- 
 comfort. 
 
 " Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. 
 You are always taking Mr. Deronda's name in 
 vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 263 
 
 about his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men's 
 minds must be very black, I think," ended Mab, 
 with much scorn. 
 
 " Quite true, my dear," said Hans, in a low 
 tone, rising" and turning on his heel to walk 
 towards the back window. 
 
 "We had better go on, Mab; you have not 
 given your full time to the lesson," said Mirah, 
 in a higher tone than usual. " Will you sing 
 this again, or shall I sing it to you? " 
 
 " Oh, please sing it to me," said Mab, rejoiced 
 to take no more notice of what had happened. 
 
 And Mirah immediatel}^ sang Lascia cliio 
 pianga, giving forth its melodious sobs and cries 
 with new fulness and energy. Hans paused in 
 his walk and leaned against the mantelpiece, 
 keeping his * eyes carefully away from his 
 mother's. When Mirah had sung her last note 
 and touched the last chord, she rose and said,* 
 " I must go home now. Ezra expects me." 
 
 She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick 
 and hung back a little, not daring to look at 
 her, instead of kissing her as usual. But the 
 little mother drew Mirah's face down to hers, 
 and said soothingly, " God bless you, my dear." 
 Mirah felt that she had committed an offence 
 against Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking 
 Hans, and mixed with the rest of her suffering 
 was the sense that she had shown something like 
 a proud ingratitude, an unbecoming assertion 
 of superiority. And her friend had divined this 
 compunction. 
 
 Meanwhile Hans had seized his wide-awake, 
 and was ready to open the door. 
 
 " Now, Hans," said Mab, with what was 
 
264 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 really a sister's tenderness cunningly disguised, 
 " you are not going to walk home with Mir ah. 
 I am sure she would rather not. You are so 
 dreadfully disagreeable to-day." 
 
 " I shall go to take care of her, if she does not 
 forbid me," said Hans, opening the door. 
 
 Mirah said nothing, and when he had opened 
 the outer door for her and closed it behind him, 
 he walked by her side unforbidden. She had 
 not the courage to begin speaking to him again, 
 — conscious that she had perhaps been unbe- 
 comingly severe in her words to him, yet finding 
 only severer words behind them in her heart. 
 Besides, she was pressed upon by a crowd of 
 thoughts thrusting themselves forward as inter- 
 preters of that consciousness which still remained 
 unuttered to herself. 
 
 Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. 
 Mirah's anger had waked in him a new percep- 
 tion, and with it the unpleasant sense that he 
 was a dolt not to have had it before. Suppose 
 Mirah's heart were entirely preoccupied with 
 Deronda in another character than that of her 
 own and, her brother's benefactor: the supposi- 
 tion was attended in Hans's mind with anxieties 
 which, to do him justice, were not altogether 
 selfish. He had a strong persuasion, which only 
 direct evidence to the contrary could have dis- 
 sipated, that there was a serious attachment 
 between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he 
 had pieced together many fragments of obser- 
 vation and gradually gathered knowledge, com- 
 pleted by what his sisters had heard from Anna 
 Gascoigne, which convinced him not only that 
 Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 265 
 
 but also, notwithstanding his friend's austere 
 self -repression, that Deronda's susceptibility 
 about her was the sign of concealed love. Some 
 men, having such a conviction, would have 
 avoided allusions that could have roused that 
 susceptibility; but Hans's talk naturally flut- 
 tered towards mischief, and he was given to a 
 form of experiment on live animals which con- 
 sisted in irritating his friends playfully. His 
 experiments had ended in satisfying him that 
 what he thought likely was true. 
 
 On the other hand, any susceptibility De- 
 ronda had manifested about a lover's attentions 
 being shown to Mirah, Hans took to be suffi- 
 ciently accounted for by the alleged reason, 
 namely, her dependent position : for he credited 
 his friend with all possible unselfish anxiety for 
 those whom he could rescue or protect. And 
 Deronda's insistence that Mirah would never 
 marry one who was not a Jew necessarily 
 seemed to exclude himself, since Hans shared 
 the ordinary opinion, which he knew nothing to 
 disturb, that Deronda was the son of Sir Hugo 
 Mallinger. 
 
 Thus he felt himself in clearness about the 
 state of Deronda's affections; but now the 
 events which really struck him as concurring 
 towards the desirable union with Mrs. Grand- 
 court, had called forth a flash of revelation from 
 Mirah, — a betrayal of her passionate feeling 
 on this subject which made him melancholy on 
 her account as well as his own, — yet on the 
 whole less melancholy than if he had imagined 
 Deronda's hopes fixed on her. It is not sub- 
 lime, but it is common, for a man to see the 
 
266 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 beloved object unhappy because his rival loves 
 another, with more fortitude and a milder 
 jealousy than if he saw her entirely happy in his 
 rival. At least it was so with the mercurial 
 Hans, who fluctuated between the contradic- 
 tory states, of feeling wounded because Mirah 
 was wounded, and of being almost obliged to 
 Deronda for loving somebody else. It was im- 
 possible for him to give Mirah any direct sign 
 of the way in which he had understood her 
 anger, yet he longed that his speechless com- 
 panionship should be eloquent in a tender, peni- 
 tent sympathy which is an admissible form of 
 wooing a bruised heart. 
 
 Thus the two went side by side in a com- 
 panionship that yet seemed an agitated com- 
 munication, like that of two chords whose quick 
 vibrations lie outside our hearing. But when 
 they reached the door of Mirah's home, and 
 Hans said " Good-by," putting out his hand 
 with an appealingly look of penitence, she met 
 the look with melancholy gentleness, and said, 
 " Will you not come in and see my brother? " 
 
 Hans could not but interpret this invitation 
 as a sign of pardon. He had not enough under- 
 standing of what Mirah's nature had been 
 wrought into by her early experience, to divine 
 how the very strength of her late excitement 
 had made it pass the more quickly into a resolute 
 acceptance of pain. When he had said, " If 
 you will let me," and they went in together, 
 half his grief was gone, and he was spinning a 
 little romance of how his devotion might make 
 him indispensable to Mirah in proportion as 
 Deronda gave his devotion elsewhere. This 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 267 
 
 was quite fair, since his friend was provided for 
 according to his own heart ; and on the question 
 of Judaism Hans felt thoroughly fortified: 
 who ever heard in tale or history that a woman's 
 love went in the track of her race and religion? 
 Moslem and Jewish damsels were always at- 
 tracted towards Christians, and now if Mirah's 
 heart had gone forth too precipitately towards 
 Deronda, here was another case in point. Hans 
 was wont to make merry with his own argu- 
 ments, to call himself a Giaour, and antithesis 
 the sole clew to events; but he believed a little 
 in what he laughed at. And thus his birdlike 
 hope, constructed on the lightest principles, 
 soared again in spite of heavj circumstance. 
 
 They found Mordecai looking singularly 
 happy, holding a closed letter in his hand, his 
 eyes glowing with a quiet triumph which in his 
 emaciated face gave the idea of a conquest over 
 assailing death. After the greeting between 
 him and Hans, Mirah put her arm round her 
 brother's neck and looked down at the letter in 
 his hand, without the courage to ask about it, 
 though she felt sure that it was the cause of his 
 happiness. 
 
 " A letter from Daniel Deronda," said Mor- 
 decai, answering her look. " Brief — only say- 
 ing that he hopes soon to return. Unexpected 
 claims have detained him. The promise of see- 
 ing him again is like the bow in the cloud to 
 me," continued Mordecai, looking at Hans; 
 " and to you also it must be a gladness. For 
 who has two friends like him? " 
 
 While Hans was answering, Mirah slipped 
 away to her own room; but not to indulge in 
 
268 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 any outburst of the passion within her. If the 
 angels once supposed to watch the toilet of 
 women had entered the little chamber with her 
 and let her shut the door behind them, they 
 would only have seen her take off her hat, sit 
 down and press her hands against her temples 
 as if she had suddenly reflected that her head 
 ached,; then rise to dash cold water on her eyes 
 and brow and hair till her backward curls were 
 full of crystal beads, while she had dried her 
 brow and looked out like a freshly opened flower 
 from among the dewy tresses of the woodland; 
 then give deep sighs of relief, and putting on 
 her little slippers, sit still after that action for 
 a couple of minutes, which seemed to her so 
 long, so full of things to come, that she rose with 
 an air of recollection, and went down to make 
 tea. 
 
 Something of the old life had returned. She 
 had been used to remember that she must learn 
 her part, must go to rehearsal, must act and 
 sing in the evening, must hide her feelings from 
 her father; and the more painful her life grew, 
 the more she had been used to hide. The force 
 of her nature had long found its chief action 
 in resolute endurance, and to-day the violence 
 of feeling which had caused the first jet of anger 
 had quickly transformed itself into a steady 
 facing of trouble, the well-known companion 
 of her young years. But while she moved about 
 and spoke as usual, a close observer might have 
 discerned a difference between this apparent 
 calm, which was the effect of restraining energy, 
 and the sweet genuine calm of the months when 
 she first felt a return of her infantine happiness. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 269 
 
 Those who have been indulged by fortune and 
 have always thought of calamity as what hap- 
 pens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at 
 the reversal of their lot, and half believe that 
 their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. 
 Mirah felt no such surprise when familiar Sor- 
 row came back from brief absence, and sat down 
 with her according to the old use and wont. 
 And this habit of expecting trouble rather than 
 joy hindered her from having any persistent 
 belief in opposition to the probabilities which 
 were not merely suggested by Hans, but were 
 supported by her own private knowledge and 
 long-growing presentiment. An attaclmient 
 between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, to end 
 in their future marriage, had the aspect of a 
 certainty for her feeling. There had been no 
 fault in him : facts had ordered themselves so that 
 there was a tie between him and this woman who 
 belonged to another world than her own and 
 Ezra's, — nay, who seemed another sort of being 
 than Deronda, something foreign that would be 
 a disturbance in his life instead of blending with 
 it. Well, well — but if it could have been de- 
 ferred so as to make no difference while Ezra 
 was there! She did not know all the moment- 
 ousness of the relation between Deronda and her 
 brother, but she had seen and instinctively felt 
 enough to forebode its being incongruous with 
 any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt; at least this 
 was the clothing that IMirah first gave to her 
 mortal repugnance. But in the still, quick 
 action of her consciousness, thoughts went on 
 like changing states of sensation unbroken by 
 her habitual acts; and this inward language 
 
270 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 soon said distinctly that the mortal repugnance 
 would remain even if Ezra were secured from 
 loss. 
 
 " What I have read about and sung about 
 and seen acted, is happening to me, — this that 
 I am feeling is the love that makes jealousy: " 
 so impartially Mirah summed up the charge 
 against herself. But what difference could this 
 pain of hers make to any one else? It must 
 remain as exclusively her own, and hidden, as 
 her early yearning and devotion towards her 
 lost mother. But unlike that devotion, it was 
 something that she felt to be a misfortune of 
 her nature, — a discovery that what should have 
 been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk 
 into selfish pain, that the feeling she had hitherto 
 delighted to pour out in words was degraded 
 into something she was ashamed to betray, — 
 an absurd longing that she who had received 
 all and given nothing should be of importance 
 where she was of no importance, — an angry 
 feeling towards another woman who possessed 
 the good she. wanted. But what notion, what 
 vain reliance could it be that had lain darkly 
 within her and was now burning itself into 
 sight as disappointment and jealousy? It was 
 as if her soul had been steeped in poisonous 
 passion by forgotten dreams of deep sleep, and 
 now flamed out in this unaccountable misery. 
 For with her waking reason she had never 
 entertained what seemed the wildly unfitting 
 thought that Deronda could love her. The 
 uneasiness she had felt before had been compara- 
 tively vague and easily explained as part of 
 a general regret that he was only a visitant in 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 271 
 
 her and her brother's world, from which the 
 world where his home lay was as different as 
 a portico with lights and lackeys was different 
 from the door of a tent, where the only splen- 
 dour came from the mysterious inaccessible 
 stars. But her feehng was no longer vague; 
 the cause of her pain — the image of Mrs. 
 Grandcourt by Deronda's side drawing him far- 
 ther and farther into the distance was as defi- 
 nite as pincers on her flesh. In the Psyche- 
 mould of Mirah's frame there rested a fervid 
 quality of emotion sometimes rashly supposed 
 to require the bulk of a Cleopatra; her impres- 
 sions had the thoroughness and tenacity that 
 give to the first selection of passionate feeling 
 the character of a life-long faithfulness. And 
 now a selection had declared itself, which gave 
 love a cruel heart of jealousy: she had been used 
 to a strong repugnance towards certain objects 
 that surrounded her, and to walk inwardly aloof 
 from them while they touched her sense. And 
 now her repugnance concentrated itself on Mrs. 
 Grandcourt, of whom she involuntarily con- 
 ceived more evil than she knew. " I could bear 
 everything that used to be, — but this is worse, 
 — this is worse, — I used not to have horrible 
 feelings! " said the poor child in a loud whisper 
 to her pillow. Strange that she should have 
 to pray against any feeling which concerned 
 Deronda ! 
 
 But this conclusion had been reached through 
 an evening spent in attending to Mordecai, 
 whose exaltation of spirit in the prospect of 
 seeing his friend again, disposed him to utter 
 many thoughts aloud to Mirah, though such 
 
272 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 communication was often interrupted by inter- 
 vals apparently filled with an inward utterance 
 that animated his eyes and gave an occasional 
 silent action to his lips. One thought especially 
 occupied him. 
 
 " Seest thou, Mirah," he said once, after a 
 long silence, " the Shemah, wherein we briefly 
 confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional 
 exercise of the Hebrew; and this made our re- 
 ligion the fundamental religion for the whole 
 world; for the divine Unity embraced as its 
 consequence the ultimate unity of mankind. 
 See, then, — the nation which has been scoifed 
 at for its separateness, has given a binding 
 theory to the human race. Now, in complete 
 unity a part possesses the whole as the whole 
 possesses every part; and in this way human 
 life is tending toward the image of the Supreme 
 Unity: for as our life becomes more spiritual 
 by capacity of thought, and joy therein, pos- 
 session tends to become more universal, being 
 independent of gross material contact; so that 
 in a brief day the soul of a man may know in 
 fuller volume the good which has been and is, 
 nay, is to come, than all he could possess in a 
 whole life where he had to follow the creeping 
 paths of the senses. In this moment, my sister, 
 I hold the joy of another's future within me: 
 a future which these eyes will not see and which 
 my spirit may not then recognize as mine. I 
 recognize it now, and love it so that I can lay 
 down this poor life upon its altar and say: 
 ' Burn, burn indiscernibly into that which shall 
 be, which is my love and not me.' Dost thou 
 understand, Mirah?" 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 273 
 
 "A little," said Mirah, faintly; "but my 
 mind is too poor to have felt it." 
 
 " And yet," said Mordecai, rather insistently, 
 " women are specially framed for the love which 
 feels possession in renouncing, and is thus a fit 
 image of what I mean. Somewhere in the later 
 Midrash, I think, is the story of a Jewish maiden 
 who loved a Gentile king so well that this was 
 what she did: she entered into prison and 
 changed clothes with the woman who was be- 
 loved by the king, that she might deliver that 
 woman from death by dying in her stead, and 
 leave the king to be happy in his love which was 
 not for her. This is the surpassing love, that 
 loses self in the object of love." 
 
 " No, Ezra, no," said Mirah, with low-toned 
 intensity, " that was not it. She wanted the 
 king when she was dead to know what she had 
 done, and feel that she was better than the other. 
 It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that 
 made her die." 
 
 Mordecai was silent a little, and then 
 argued, — 
 
 " That might be, Mirah. But if she acted so, 
 believing the king would never know? " 
 
 " You can make the story so in your mind, 
 Ezra, because you are great, and like to 
 fancy the greatest that could be. But I think 
 it was not really like that. The Jewish girl 
 must have had jealousy in her heart, and she 
 wanted somehow to have the first place in 
 the king's mind. That is what she would die 
 for." 
 
 " My sister, thou hast read too many plays, 
 where the writers delight in showing the hum.an 
 
 VOL. xrv — 18 
 
274 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 passions as indwelling demons, unmixed with the 
 relenting and devout elements of the soul. Thou 
 judgest by the plays, and not by thy own heart, 
 which is like our mother's." 
 Mirah made no answer. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Das Gliick ist eine leichte Dime, 
 Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort; 
 Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne 
 Und kiisst dich rasch und flattert fort. 
 
 Frau Ungliick hat im Gegentheile 
 Dich liebefest an's Herz gedriickt; 
 Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile, 
 Setzt sich zu dir ans Bett und strickt. 
 
 Heine. 
 
 SOMETHING which Mirah had lately been 
 watching for as the fulfilment of a threat, 
 seemed now the continued visit of that 
 familiar sorrow which had lately come back, 
 bringing abundant luggage. 
 
 Turning out of Knightsbridge, after singing 
 at a charitable morning concert in a wealthy 
 house, where she had been recommended by Kles- 
 mer, and where there had been the usual groups 
 outside to see the departing company, she began 
 to feel herself dogged by footsteps that kept an 
 even pace with her own. Her concert dress be- 
 ing simple black, over which she had thrown a 
 dust cloak, could not make her an object of un- 
 pleasant attention, and render walking an im- 
 prudence; but this reflection did not occur to 
 Mirah: another kind of alarm lay uppermost in 
 her mind. She immediately thought of her 
 father, and could no more look round than if she 
 had felt herself tracked by a ghost. To turn and 
 face him would be voluntarily to meet the rush 
 of emotions which beforehand seemed intolerable. 
 
276 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 If it were her father, he must mean to claim rec- 
 ognition, and he would oblige her to face him. 
 She must wait for that compulsion. She walked 
 on, not quickening her pace, — of what use was 
 that? — but picturing what was about to happen 
 as if she had the full certainty that the man be- 
 hind her was her father; and along with her 
 picturing went a regret that she had given her 
 word to Mrs. Meyrick not to use any conceal- 
 ment about him. The regret at last urged her, 
 at least, to try and hinder any sudden betrayal 
 that would cause her brother an unnecessary 
 shock. Under the pressure of this motive, she 
 resolved to turn before she reached her own door, 
 and firmly will the encounter instead of merely 
 submitting to it. She had already reached the 
 entrance of the small square where her home lay, 
 and had made up her mind to turn, when she felt 
 her embodied presentiment getting closer to her, 
 then slipping to her side, grasping her wrist, 
 and saying, with a persuasive curl of accent, 
 " Mirah!" 
 
 She paused at once without any start; it was 
 the voice she expected, and she was meeting the 
 expected eyes. Her face was as grave as if she 
 had been looking at her executioner, while his 
 was adjusted to the intention of soothing and 
 propitiating her. Once a handsome face, with 
 bright colour, it was now sallow and deep-lined, 
 and had that peculiar impress of impudent 
 suavity which comes from courting favour while 
 accepting disrespect. He was lightly made and 
 active, with something of youth about him which 
 made the signs of age seem a disguise; and in 
 reality he was hardly fifty-seven. His dress was 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 277 
 
 shabby, as when she had seen him before. The 
 presence of this unreverend father now, more 
 than ever, affected Mirah wdth the mingled an- 
 guish of shame and grief, repulsion and pity, — 
 more than ever, now that her own world was 
 changed into one where there was no comrade- 
 ship to fence him from scorn and contempt. 
 
 Slowly, with a sad, tremulous voice, she said, 
 " It is you, father." 
 
 " Why did you run away from me, child? " 
 he began, with rapid speech which was meant to 
 have a tone of tender remonstrance, accompanied 
 with various quick gestures like an abbreviated 
 finger-language. " What were you afraid of? 
 You knew I never made you do anything against 
 your will. It was for your sake I broke up your 
 engagement in the Vorstadt, because I saw it 
 did n't suit you, and you repaid me by leaving 
 me to the bad times that came in consequence. 
 I had made an easier engagement for you at the 
 Vorstadt Theatre in Dresden: I did n't tell you, 
 because I wanted to take you by surprise. And 
 you left me planted there, — obliged to make 
 myself scarce because I had broken contract. 
 That was hard lines for me, after I had given up 
 everything for the sake of getting you an educa- 
 tion v/hich was to be a fortune to you. What 
 father devoted himself to his daughter more than 
 I did to you? You know how I bore that disap- 
 pointment in your voice, and made the best of it ; 
 and when I had nobody besides you, and was 
 getting broken, as a man must who has had to 
 fight his way with his brains, — you chose that 
 time to leave me. Who else was it you owed 
 everything to, if not to me ? and where was your 
 
278 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 feeling in return? For what my daughter cared, 
 I might have died in a ditch." 
 
 Lapidoth stopped short here, not from lack of 
 invention, but because he had reached a pathetic 
 climax, and gave a sudden sob, like a woman's, 
 taking out hastily an old yellow silk handkerchief. 
 He really felt that his daughter had treated him 
 ill, — a sort of sensibility which is naturally 
 strong in unscrupulous persons, who put down 
 what is owing to them, without any per contra. 
 Mirah, in spite of that sob, had energy enough 
 not to let him suppose that he deceived her. 
 She answered more firmly, though it was the 
 first time she had ever used accusing words to 
 him. 
 
 " You know why I left you, father; and I had 
 reason to distrust you, because I felt sure that 
 you had deceived my mother. If I could have 
 trusted you, I would have stayed with you and 
 worked for you." 
 
 " I never meant to deceive your mother, 
 Mirah," said Lapidoth, putting back his hand- 
 kerchief, but beginning with a voice that seemed 
 to struggle against further sobbing. " I meant 
 to take you back to her, but chances hindered me 
 just at the time, and then there came information 
 of her death. It was better for you that I should 
 stay where I was, and your brother could take 
 care of himself. Nobody had any claim on me but 
 you. I had word of your mother's death from 
 a particular friend, who had undertaken to man- 
 age things for me, and I sent him over money to 
 pay expenses. There 's one chance, to be sure," 
 — Lapidoth had quickly conceived that he must 
 guard against something unlikely, yet possible. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 
 
 279 
 
 — "he may have written me Hes for the sake of 
 getting the money out of me." 
 
 Mirah made no answer ; she could not bear to 
 utter the only true one, — "I don't believe one 
 word of what you say," — and she simply 
 showed a wish that they should walk on, feeling 
 that their standing still might draw down un- 
 pleasant notice. Even as they walked along, 
 their companionship might well have made a 
 passer-by turn back to look at them. The figure 
 of Mirah, with her beauty set off by the quiet, 
 careful dress of an English lady, made a strange 
 pendant to this shabby, foreign-looking, eager, 
 and gesticulating man, who withal had an in- 
 effaceable jauntiness of air, perhaps due to the 
 bushy curls of his grizzled hair, the smallness of 
 his hands and feet, and his light walk. 
 
 " You seem to have done well for yourself, 
 Mirah? You are in no want, I see," said 
 the father, looking at her with emphatic 
 examination. 
 
 " Good friends who found me in distress have 
 helped me to get work," said Mirah, hardly 
 knowing what she actually said, from being occu- 
 pied with what she would presently have to say. 
 " I give lessons. I have sung in private houses. 
 I have just been singing at a private concert." 
 She paused, and then added, with significance, 
 " I have very good friends, who know all about 
 me." 
 
 " And you would be ashamed they should see 
 your father in this plight? No wonder. I came 
 to England with no prospect but the chance of 
 finding you. It was a mad quest ; but a father's 
 heart is superstitious, — feels a loadstone draw- 
 
280 DANIEL DEROND A 
 
 ing it somewhere or other. I might have done 
 very well, staying abroad : when I had n't you 
 to take care of, I could have rolled or settled as 
 easily as a ball ; but it 's hard being lonely in the 
 world, when your spirit 's beginning to break. 
 And I thought my little Mirah would repent 
 leaving her father, when she came to look back. 
 I Ve had a sharp pinch to work my way ; I don't 
 know what I shall come down to next. Talents 
 like mine are no use in this country. When a 
 man 's getting out at elbows, nobody will believe 
 in him. I could n't get any decent employ w ith 
 my appearance. I 've been obliged to go pretty 
 low for a shilling already." 
 
 Mirah's anxiety was quick enough to imagine 
 her father's sinking into a further degradation, 
 which she was bound to hinder if she could. But 
 before she could answer his string of inventive 
 sentences, delivered with as much glibness as 
 if they had been learned by rote, he added 
 promptly, — 
 
 " Where do you live, Mirah? " 
 
 " Here in this square. We are not far from 
 the house." 
 
 " In lodgings? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Any one to take care of you? " 
 
 " Yes," said Mirah again, looking full at the 
 keen face which was turned towards hers, — " my 
 brother." 
 
 The father's eyelids fluttered as if the light- 
 ning had come across them, and there was a slight 
 movement of the shoulders. But he said, after a 
 just perceptible pause: " Ezra? How did you 
 know — how did you find him? " 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 281 
 
 " That would take long to tell. Here we are 
 at the door. My brother would not wish me to 
 close it on you." 
 
 Mirah was already on the doorstep, but had 
 her face turned towards her father, who stood 
 below her on the pavement. Her heart had be- 
 gun to beat faster with the prospect of what was 
 coming in the presence of Ezra ; and already in 
 this attitude of giving leave to the father whom 
 she had been used to obey, — in this sight of him 
 standing below her, with a perceptible shrinking 
 from the admission which he had been indi- 
 rectly asking for, — she had a pang of the pecul- 
 iar, sympathetic humiliation and shame — the 
 stabbed heart of reverence — which belongs to a 
 nature intensely filial. 
 
 " Stay a minute, LiehchenJ' said Lapidoth, 
 speaking in a lowered tone; " what sort of man 
 has Ezra turned out? " 
 
 " A good man, — a wonderful man," said 
 Mirah, with slow emphasis, trying to master the 
 agitation which made her voice more tremulous 
 as she v/ent on. She felt urged to prepare her 
 father for the complete penetration of himself 
 which awaited him. " But he was very poor 
 when my friends found him for me, — a poor 
 workman. Once — twelve years ago — he was 
 strong and happy, going to the East, which he 
 loved to think of; and my mother called him 
 back because — because she had lost me. And 
 he went to her, and took care of her through 
 great trouble, and worked for her till she died, — 
 died in grief. And Ezra, too, had lost his health 
 and strength. The cold had seized him coming 
 back to my mother, because she was forsaken. 
 
282 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 For years he has been getting weaker, — always 
 poor, always working, — but full of knowledge, 
 and great-minded. All who come near him hon- 
 our him. To stand before him is like standing 
 before a prophet of God," — Mirah ended with 
 difficulty, her heart throbbing, — " falsehoods 
 are no use." 
 
 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 caress- 
 ing way, " should n'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 did n'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, oblig- 
 ing 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 283 
 
 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-humour gave way a little. 
 He said with a sneer: " You are a hard and fast 
 young lady, — you Ve been learning useful vir- 
 tues, — 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, tremb- 
 ling 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 re- 
 turn 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 Httle money in your 
 pocket, I suppose it is n'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 portemon- 
 
284 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 naie and hold it out. Lapidoth grasped it at 
 once, pressed her fingers the while, said, 
 " Good-by, 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 in 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 ex- 
 pected him to cry, and reflecting every phase of 
 her feeling with mimetic susceptibility. Lapi- 
 doth had travelled a long way from that young 
 self, and thought of all that this inscription sig- 
 nified 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 
 flavour. 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 285 
 
 giving away, — and Lapidoth jpresently 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 be- 
 ing 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 read- 
 ing 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 was 
 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 
 
286 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 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 Morde- 
 cai. 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 be- 
 cause 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 transmit- 
 ting 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 VI 
 
 Moses, trotz seiner Befeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein grosser 
 Kiinstler war und den wahren Kiinstlergeist besass. Nur war dieser 
 Kiinstlergeist bei ihm, wie bei seinen agyptischen Landsleuten, nur 
 auf das Colossale und Unverwiistliche gerichtet. Aber nicht wie 
 die Aegypter formirte er seine Kunstwerke aus Baekstein und Granit, 
 sondern er baute Menschenpyramiden, er meisselte Menschen Obe- 
 lisken, er nahm einen armen Hirtenstamm und Schuf daraus ein Volk, 
 das ebenfalls den Jahrhunderten 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 pre- 
 paring 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 appealiiigness stir- 
 ring in him that deeply laid care for woman- 
 
288 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hood which had begun when his own Hp was like 
 a girl's, — her hold on his feeling had helped him 
 to be blameless in word and deed under the diffi- 
 cult 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 differ- 
 ence in it that became deficiency. The influence 
 had been continually strengthened. It had lain in 
 the course of poor Gwendolen's lot that her de- 
 pendence 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 towards an indwell- 
 ing 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 towards her; and she had inevi- 
 tably been bound up in all the thoughts that 
 made him shrink from an issue disappointing to 
 her brother. This process had not gone on un- 
 consciously 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 ac- 
 cused him of being in love with a Jewess, any 
 evasion suddenly seemed an infidelity. His 
 mother had compelled him to a decisive acknowl- 
 edgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had 
 compelled him to a definite expression of his re- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 289 
 
 solve. This new state of decision wrought on 
 Deronda with a force which surprised even him- 
 self. There was a release of all the energy which 
 had long been spent in self -checking and sup- 
 pression 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 judg- 
 ment no longer wandering in the mazes of im- 
 partial sympathy, but choosing, with that noble 
 partiality which is man's best strength, the closer 
 fellowship that makes sympathy practical, — ex- 
 changing 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 eflPect of 
 Hans's attentions, but he had a presentiment 
 that her feeling towards 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 anx- 
 ious to create an easier transition. 
 
 What wonder that Deronda saw no other 
 
 VOL. XIV - 19 
 
290 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 course than to go straight from the London rail- 
 way station to the lodgings in that small square 
 in B romp ton? Every argument was in favour 
 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 rela- 
 tion 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 
 armour, he wore — but so, one must suppose, 
 did the most ancient heroes, whether Semitic or 
 Japhetic — the summer costume of his contem- 
 poraries. 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 colouring, 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 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 291 
 
 also by 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, look- 
 ing, Mirah thought, as he would look when the 
 soul within him could no longer live in its strait- 
 ened home. The thought that his death might 
 be near was continually visiting her when she 
 saw his face in this way, without its vivid ani- 
 mation; 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 brillianc}' 
 left by young tears, her curls in as much dis- 
 order as a just-wakened child's, — watching that 
 emaciated face, where it might have been im- 
 agined 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. 
 
292 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 But now the door was opened, and while none 
 entered, a well-known voice said: " Daniel De- 
 ronda, — 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 shoul- 
 der, 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 can- 
 not 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. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 293 
 
 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 re- 
 ligious 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 
 fervour. 
 
 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 reli- 
 gious 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," De- 
 ronda went on, enjoying one of those rare mo- 
 ments 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 stretch- 
 ing far back, in the hope that they would pass 
 
294 DANIEL DEROISTDA 
 
 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 transla- 
 tions. 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 Mor- 
 decai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little too 
 much sunshine, and made her change her atti- 
 tude. She had knelt under an impulse with 
 which any personal embarrassment was incon- 
 gruous, and especially any thoughts about how 
 Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to this new aspect 
 of things, — thoughts which made her colour 
 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 towards him, — and then his precious 
 relation to brother and sister would be marred. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 295 
 
 If Mirah could have no love for him, any ad- 
 vances 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 noth- 
 ing in his friend's presence and words but a 
 blessed fulfilment, 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 breath- 
 ing draws the elements towards it, and is fed 
 and grows? For all things are bound together 
 in that Omnipresence which is the place and 
 habitation of the world, and events are as a glass 
 wherethrough our eyes see some of the path- 
 ways. And if it seems that the erring and un- 
 loving 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 
 
296 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 with gladness this message of the Eternal: ' Be- 
 hold 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 con- 
 fidence. It was his nature to delight in satisfy- 
 ing 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 mounting signal-flame; and he 
 went on with fuller fervour, — 
 
 "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 brood- 
 ing, passionate thoughts in many ancestors, — 
 thoughts that seem to have been intensely pres- 
 ent in my grandfather. Suppose the stolen off- 
 spring 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 
 
 / 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 297 
 
 like a cunningly wrought musical instrument, 
 never played on, but quivering throughout in 
 uneasy mysterious moanings 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 Rabban- 
 ites 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 labour. 
 
 To estimate the effect of this ardent outpour- 
 ing from Deronda we must remember his former 
 reserve, his careful avoidance of premature as- 
 sent or delusive encouragement, which gave to 
 this decided pledge of himself a sacramental 
 solemnity, both for his own mind and Morde- 
 cai'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 
 
298 DANIEL DEKONDA 
 
 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 writ- 
 ten, 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 mar- 
 riage which melts soul into soul, and makes 
 thought fuller as the clear waters are made 
 fuller, where the fulness 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." 
 
 " You must not ask me to promise that," said 
 Deronda, smiling. " I must be convinced first 
 of special reasons for it in the writings them- 
 selves. And I am too backward a pupil yet. 
 That blent transmission must go on without any 
 choice of ours; but what we can't hinder must 
 not make our rule for what we ought to choose. 
 I think our duty is faithful tradition where we 
 can attain it. And so you would insist for any 
 one but yourself. Don't ask me to deny my spir- 
 itual parentage, when I am finding the clew 
 of my life in the recognition of my natural 
 parentage." 
 
 " I will ask for no promise till you see the rea- 
 son," said Mordecai. " You have said the truth: 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 299 
 
 I would obey the Masters' rule for another. 
 But for years my hope, nay, my confidence, has 
 been, not that the imperfect image of my 
 thought, which is as the ill-shapen work of the 
 youthful carver who has seen a heavenly pat- 
 tern, and trembles in imitating the vision, — not 
 that this should live, but that my vision and pas- 
 sion should enter into yours, — yea, into yours ; 
 for he whom I longed for afar, was he not you 
 whom I discerned as mine when you came near? 
 Nevertheless, you shall judge. For my soul is 
 satisfied." Mordecai paused, and then began in 
 a changed tone, reverting to previous sugges- 
 tions from Deronda's disclosure: " What moved 
 your parents — " But he immediately checked 
 himself, and added, " Nay, I ask not that you 
 should tell me aught concerning others, unless 
 it is your pleasure." 
 
 " Sometime — gradually — you will know all," 
 said Deronda. " But now tell me more about 
 yourselves, and how the time has passed since 
 I went away. I am sure there has been some 
 trouble. Mirah has been in distress about 
 something." 
 
 He looked at Mirah, but she immediately 
 turned to her brother, appealing to him to give 
 the difficult answer. She hoped he would not 
 think it necessary to tell Deronda the facts about 
 her father on such an evening as this. Just when 
 Deronda had brought himself so near, and iden- 
 tified himself with her brother, it was cutting 
 to her that he should hear of this disgrace cling- 
 ing about them, which seemed to have become 
 partly his. To relieve herself she rose to take 
 up her hat and cloak, thinking she would go to 
 
300 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 her own room: perhaps they would speak more 
 easily when she had left them. But meanwhile 
 Mordecai said, — 
 
 " To-day there has been a grief. A duty 
 which seemed to have gone far into the distance 
 has come back and turned its face upon us, and 
 raised no gladness, — has raised a dread that 
 we must submit to. But for the moment we are 
 delivered from any visible yoke. Let us defer 
 speaking of it, as if this evening which is deep- 
 ening about us were the beginning of the fes- 
 tival in which we must offer the first-fruits of 
 our joy, and mingle no mourning with them." 
 
 Deronda divined the hinted grief, and left it 
 in silence, rising as he saw Mirah rise, and say- 
 ing to her, " Are you going? I must leave 
 almost immediately, — when I and Mrs. Adam 
 have mounted the precious chest, and I have 
 delivered the key to Mordecai, — no, Ezra, — 
 may I call him Ezra now? I have learned to 
 think of him as Ezra since I have heard you call 
 him so." 
 
 " Please call him Ezra," said Mirah, faintly, 
 feeling a new timidity under Deronda's glance 
 and near presence. Was there really something 
 different about him, or was the difference only 
 in her feeling? The strangely various emotions 
 of the last few hours had exhausted her : she was 
 faint with fatigue and want of food. Deronda, 
 observing her pallor and tremulousness, longed 
 to show more feeling, but dared not. She put 
 out her hand with an effort to smile, and then 
 he opened the door for her. That was all. 
 
 A man of refined pride shrinks from making 
 a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 301 
 
 or rank might make them appear presumptu- 
 ous or low-motived; but Deronda was finding 
 a more dehcate difficulty in a position which, 
 superficially taken, was the reverse of that, 
 though to an ardent reverential love the loved 
 woman has always a kind of wealth and rank 
 which makes a man keenly susceptible about 
 the aspect of his addresses. Deronda's difficulty 
 was what any generous man might have felt 
 in some degree; but it affected him peculiarly 
 through his imaginative sympathy with a mind 
 in which gratitude was strong. Mirah, he knew, 
 felt herself bound to him by deep obligations, 
 which to her sensibilities might give every wish 
 of his the aspect of a claim; and an inability to 
 fulfil it would cause her a pain continually re- 
 vived by their inevitable communion in care for 
 Ezra. Here were fears not of pride only, but 
 of extreme tenderness. Altogether, to have the 
 character of a benefactor seemed to Deronda's 
 anxiety an insurmountable obstacle to confess- 
 ing himself a lover, unless in some inconceiv- 
 able way it could be revealed to him that Mirah's 
 heart had accepted him beforehand. And the 
 agitation on his own account, too, was not small. 
 
 Even a man who has practised himself in love- 
 making till his own glibness has rendered him 
 sceptical, may at last be overtaken by the lover's 
 awe, — may tremble, stammer, and show other 
 signs of recovered sensibility no more in the 
 range of his acquired talents than pins and 
 needles after numbness: how much more may 
 that energetic timidity possess a man whose in- 
 ward history has cherished his susceptibilities 
 instead of dulKng them, and has kept all the 
 
302 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 language of passion fresh and rooted as the 
 lovely leafage about the hillside spring! 
 
 As for Mirah her dear head lay on its pillow 
 that night with its former suspicions thrown out 
 of shape but still present, like an ugly story 
 which has been discredited but not therefore 
 dissipated. All that she was certain of about 
 Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such 
 fetters upon him as she had been allowing herself 
 to believe in. His whole manner as well as his 
 words implied that there were no hidden bonds 
 remaining to have any effect in determining his 
 future. But notwithstanding this plainly rea- 
 sonable inference, uneasiness still clung about 
 Mirah's heart. Deronda was not to blame, but 
 he had an importance for Mrs. Grandcourt which 
 must give her some hold on him. And the 
 thought of any close confidence between them 
 stirred the little biting snake that had long lain 
 curled and harmless in Mirah's gentle bosom. 
 
 But did she this evening feel as completely as 
 before that her jealousy was no less remote from 
 any possibility for herself personally than if her 
 human soul had been lodged in the body of a 
 fawn that Deronda had saved from the archers? 
 Hardly. Something indefinable had happened 
 and made a difference. The soft warm rain of 
 blossoms which had fallen just where she was, 
 — did it really come because she was there ? 
 What spirit was there among the boughs? 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Questa montagna e tale, 
 Che sempre al comineiar di sotto e grave, 
 E quanto uom piu va su e men fa male. 
 
 Dante: II Purgatorio. 
 
 IT was not many days after her mother's 
 arrival that Gwendolen would consent to 
 remain at Genoa. Her desire to get away 
 from that gem of the sea helped to rally her 
 strength and courage. For what place, though 
 it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the 
 inward sense turn into a circle of punishment 
 where the flowers are no better than a crop of 
 flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet? 
 
 " I shall never like to see the Mediterranean 
 again," said Gwendolen to her mother, who 
 thought that she quite understood her child's 
 feeling, — even in her tacit prohibition of any 
 express reference to her late husband. 
 
 Mrs. Davilow, indeed, though compelled for- 
 mally to regard this time as one of severe calam- 
 ity, was virtually enjoying her life more than 
 she had ever done since her daughter's marriage. 
 It seemed that her darling was brought back 
 to her not merely with all the old affection, but 
 with a conscious cherishing of her mother's near- 
 ness, such as we give to a possession that we 
 have been on the brink of losing. 
 
 " Are you there, mamma? " cried Gwendolen, 
 in the middle of the night (a bed had been made 
 for her mother in the same room with hers), 
 
304 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 very much as she would have done in her early 
 girlhood, if she had felt frightened in lying 
 awake. 
 
 " Yes, dear; can I do anything for you? " 
 
 " No, thank you; only I like so to know you 
 are there. Do you mind my waking you? " 
 (This question would hardly have been Gwen- 
 dolen's in her early girlhood.) 
 
 " I was not asleep, darling." 
 
 " It seemed not real that you were with me. 
 I wanted to make it real. I can bear things if 
 you are with me. But you must not lie awake 
 being anxious about me. You must be happy 
 now. You mtist let me make you happy now 
 at last, — else what shall I do? " 
 
 " God bless you, dear; I have the best hap- 
 piness I can have, when you make much of 
 me." 
 
 But the next night, hearing that she was sigh- 
 ing and restless, Mrs. Davilow said, " Let me 
 give you your sleeping draught, Gwendolen." 
 
 "No, mamma, thank you; I don't want to 
 sleep." 
 
 " It would be so good for you to sleep more, 
 my darling." 
 
 " Don't say what would be good for me, 
 mamma," Gwendolen answered impetuously. 
 " You don't know what would be good for me. 
 You and my uncle must not contradict me and 
 tell me anything is good for me when I feel it 
 is not good." 
 
 Mrs. Davilow was silent, not wondering that 
 the poor child was irritable. Presently Gwen- 
 dolen said, — 
 
 " I was always naughty to you, mamma." 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 305 
 
 " No, dear, no." 
 
 " Yes, I was," said Gwendolen, insistently. 
 " It is because I was always wicked that I am 
 miserable now." 
 
 She burst into sobs and cries. The determi- 
 nation to be silent about all the facts of her 
 married life and its close, reacted in these es- 
 capes of enigmatic excitement. 
 
 But dim lights of interpretation were break- 
 ing on the mother's mind through the informa- 
 tion that came from Sir Hugo to Mr. Gascoigne, 
 and, with some omissions, from Mr. Gascoigne 
 to herself. The good-natured baronet, while he 
 was attending to all decent measures in rela- 
 tion to his nephew's death and the possible wash- 
 ing ashore of the body, thought it the kindest 
 thing he could do to use his present friendly 
 intercourse with the Rector as an opportunity 
 for communicating to him, in the mildest way, 
 the purport of Grandcourt's will, so as to save 
 him the additional shock that would be in store 
 for him if he carried his illusions all the way 
 home. Perhaps Sir Hugo would have been 
 communicable enough without that kind motive, 
 but he really felt the motive. He broke the 
 unpleasant news to the Rector by degrees: at 
 . first he only implied his fear that the widow was 
 not so splendidly provided for as Mr. Gascoigne, 
 nay, as the baronet himself, had expected; and 
 only at last, after some previous vague refer- 
 ence to large claims on Grandcourt, he disclosed 
 the prior relations which, in the unfortunate ab- 
 sence of a legitimate heir, had determined all 
 the splendour in another direction. 
 
 The R ector was deeply hurt, and remembered, 
 
 VOL. XIV — 2") 
 
306 DAmEL DERONDA 
 
 more vividly than he had ever done before, how 
 offensively proud and repelling the manners of 
 the deceased had been towards him, — remem- 
 bered also that he himself, in that interesting 
 period just before the arrival of the new occu- 
 pant at Diplow, had received hints of former 
 entangling dissipations, and an undue addiction 
 to pleasure, though he had not foreseen that the 
 pleasure which had probably, so to speak, been 
 swept into private rubbish-heaps, would ever 
 present itself as an array of live caterpillars, 
 disastrous to the green meat of respectable 
 people. But he did not make these retrospec- 
 tive thoughts audible to Sir Hugo, or lower 
 himself by expressing any indignation on merely 
 personal grounds, but behaved like a man of 
 the world who had become a conscientious 
 clergyman. His first remark was, — 
 
 " When a young man makes his will in health, 
 he usually counts on living a long while. Prob- 
 ably Mr. Grandcourt did not believe that this 
 will would ever have its present effect." After 
 a moment he added: " The effect is painful in 
 more ways than one. Female morality is likely 
 to suffer from this marked advantage and promi- 
 nence being given to illegitimate offspring." 
 
 " Well, in point of fact," said Sir Hugo, in 
 his comfortable way, " since the boy is there, this 
 was really the best alternative for the disposal 
 of the estates. Grandcourt had nobody nearer 
 than his cousin. And it 's a chilling thought 
 that you go out of this life only for the benefit 
 of a cousin. A man gets a little pleasure in 
 making his will, if it 's for the good of his own 
 curly heads ; but it 's a nuisance when you 're 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 307 
 
 giving and bequeathing to a used-up fellow like 
 yourself, and one you don't care two straws for. 
 It 's the next worse thing to having only a life 
 interest in your estates. No; I forgive Grand- 
 court for that part of his will. But, between 
 ourselves, what I don't forgive him for is the 
 shabby way he has provided for your niece, — 
 our niece, I will say, — no better a position than 
 if she had been a doctor's widow. Nothing 
 grates on me more than that posthumous grudg- 
 ingness towards a wife. A man ought to 
 have some pride and fondness for his widow. 
 / should, I know. I take it as a test of a man, 
 that he feels the easier about his death when he 
 can think of his wife and daughters being com- 
 fortable after it. I like that story of the fel- 
 lows in the Crimean war, who were ready to 
 go to the bottom of the sea, if their widows were 
 provided for." 
 
 " It has certainly taken me by surprise," said 
 Mr. Gascoigne, " all the more because, as the 
 one who stood in the place of father to my niece, 
 I had shown my reliance on Mr. Grandcourt's 
 apparent liberality in money matters by mak- 
 ing no claims for her beforehand. That seemed 
 to me due to him under the circumstances. 
 Probably you think me blamable." 
 
 " Not blamable exactly. I respect a man for 
 trusting another. But take my advice. If you 
 marry another niece, though it may be to the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, bind him down. 
 Your niece can't be married for the first time 
 twice over. And if he 's a good fellow, he 'II 
 wish to be bound. But as to Mrs. Grandcourt, 
 I can only say that I feel my relation to her 
 
308 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 all the nearer because I think that she has not 
 been well treated. And I hope you will urge 
 her to rely on me as a friend." 
 
 Thus spake the chivalrous Sir Hugo, in his 
 disgust at the young and beautiful widow of a 
 Mallinger Grandcourt being left with only two 
 thousand a year and a house in a coal-mining 
 district. To the Rector that income naturally 
 appeared less shabby and less accompanied with 
 mortifying privations; but in this conversation 
 he had devoured a much keener sense than the 
 baronet's of the humiliation cast over his niece, 
 and also over her nearest friends, by the con- 
 spicuous publishing of her husband's relation to 
 Mrs. Glasher. And like all men who are good 
 husbands and fathers, he felt the humiliation 
 through the minds of the women who would be 
 chiefly affected by it ; so that the annoyance of 
 first hearing the facts was far slighter than what 
 he felt in communicating them to Mrs. Davilow, 
 and in anticipating Gwendolen's feeling when- 
 ever her mother saw fit to tell her of them. For 
 the good Rector had an innocent conviction that 
 his niece was unaware of Mrs. Glasher's exist- 
 ence, arguing with masculine soundness from 
 what maidens and wives were likely to know, 
 do, and suffer, and having had a most imperfect 
 observation of the particular maiden and wife 
 in question. Not so Gwendolen's mother, who 
 now thought that she saw an explanation of 
 much that had been enigmatic in her child's con- 
 duct and words before and after her engage- 
 ment, concluding that in some inconceivable 
 way Gwendolen had been informed of this left- 
 handed marriage and the existence of the chil- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 309 
 
 dren. She trusted to opportunities that would 
 arise in moments of affectionate confidence be- 
 , fore and during their journey to England, when 
 she might gradually learn how far the actual 
 state of things was clear to Gwendolen, and 
 prepare her for anything that might be a dis- 
 appointment. But she was spared from devices 
 on the subject. 
 
 " I hope you don't expect that I am going to 
 be rich and grand, mamma," said Gwendolen, 
 not long after the Rector's communication; 
 " perhaps I shall have nothing at all." 
 
 She was dressed, and had been sitting long in 
 quiet meditation. Mrs. Davilow was startled, 
 but said, after a moment's reflection, — 
 
 " Oh, yes, dear, you will have something. 
 Sir Hugo knows all about the will." 
 
 " That will not decide," said Gwendolen, 
 abruptly. 
 
 " Surely, dear: Sir Hugo says you are to 
 have two thousand a year and the house at 
 Gadsmere." 
 
 " What I have will depend on what I accept," 
 said Gwendolen. " You and my uncle must not 
 attempt to cross me and persuade me about this. 
 I will do everything I can do to make you 
 happy, but in anything about my husband I 
 must not be interfered with. Is eight hundred 
 a year enough for you, mamma? " 
 
 " More than enough, dear. You must not 
 think of giving me so much." Mrs. Davilow 
 paused a little, and then said, " Do you know 
 who is to have the estates and the rest of the 
 money? " 
 
 " Yes," said Gwendolen, waving her hand in 
 
310 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 dismissal of the subject. " I know everything. 
 It is all perfectly right, and I wish never to 
 have it mentioned." 
 
 The mother was silent, looked away, and rose 
 to fetch a fan-screen, with a slight flush on her 
 delicate cheeks. Wondering, imagining, she did 
 not like to meet her daughter's eyes, and sat 
 down again under a sad constraint. What 
 wretchedness her child had perhaps gone 
 through, which yet must remain, as it always 
 had been, locked away from their mutual 
 speech! But Gwendolen was watching her 
 mother with that new divination which experi- 
 ence had given her; and in tender relenting 
 at her own peremptoriness, she said, " Come 
 and sit nearer to me, mamma, and don't be 
 unhappy." 
 
 Mrs. Davilow did as she was told, but bit 
 her lips in the vain attempt to hinder smarting 
 tears. Gwendolen leaned towards her caress- 
 ingly and said: " I mean to be very wise; I do 
 really. And good, — oh, so good to you, dear, 
 old, sweet mamma, you won't know me. Only 
 you must not cry." 
 
 The resolve that Gwendolen had in her mind 
 was that she would ask Deronda whether she 
 ought to accept any of her husband's money, — 
 whether she might accept what would enable 
 her to provide for her mother. The poor 
 thing felt strong enough to do anything that 
 would give her a higher place in Deronda's 
 mind. 
 
 An invitation that Sir Hugo pressed on her 
 with kind urgency was that she and Mrs. Davi- 
 low should go straight with him to Park Lane, 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 311 
 
 and make his house their abode as long as 
 mourning and other details needed attending 
 to in London. Town, he insisted, was just then 
 the most retired of places; and he proposed to 
 exert himself at once in getting all articles be- 
 longing to Gwendolen away from the house in 
 Grosvenor Square. No proposal could have 
 suited her better than this of staying a little 
 while in Park Lane. It would be easy for her 
 there to have an interview with Deronda, if she 
 only knew how to get a letter into his hands, 
 asking ^im to come to her. During the jour- 
 ney Sir Hugo, having understood that she was 
 acquainted with the purport of her husband's 
 will, ventured to talk before her and to her 
 about her future arrangements, referring here 
 and there to mildly agreeable prospects as mat- 
 ters of course, and otherwise shedding a deco- 
 rous cheerfulness over her widowed position. It 
 seemed to him really the more graceful course 
 for a widow to recover her spirits on finding 
 that her husband had not dealt as handsomely 
 by her as he might have done; it was the tes- 
 tator's fault if he compromised all her grief at 
 his departure by giving a testamentary reason 
 for it, so that she might be supposed to look 
 sad not because he had left her, but because he 
 had left her poor. The baronet, having his 
 kindliness doubly fanned by the favourable wind 
 on his own fortunes and by compassion for 
 Gwendolen, had become quite fatherly in his 
 behaviour to her, called her my dear," and in 
 mentioning Gadsmere to Mr. Gascoigne with 
 its various advantages and disadvantages, spoke 
 of what " we " might do to make the best of 
 
312 
 
 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 that property. Gwendolen sat by in pale silence 
 while Sir Hugo, with his face turned towards 
 Mrs. Davilow or Mr. Gascoigne, conjectured 
 that Mrs. Grandcourt might perhaps prefer let- 
 ting Gadsmere to residing there during any part 
 of the year, in which case he thought that it 
 might be leased on capital terms to one of the 
 fellows engaged with the coal: Sir Hugo had 
 seen enough of the place to know that it was as 
 comfortable and picturesque a box as any man 
 need desire, providing his desires were circum- 
 scribed within a coal area. 
 
 " I should n't mind about the soot myself," 
 said the baronet, with that dispassionateness 
 which belongs to the potential mood. " Noth- 
 ing is more healthy. And if one's business lay 
 there, Gadsmere would be a Paradise. It makes 
 quite a feature in Scrogg's history of the county, 
 with the little tower and the fine piece of water, 
 — the prettiest print in the book." 
 
 " A more important place than Offendene, I 
 suppose?" said Mr. Gascoigne. 
 
 " Much," said the baronet, decisively. " I 
 was there with my poor brother, — it is more 
 than a quarter of a century ago, but I remember 
 it very well. The rooms may not be larger, but 
 the grounds are on a different scale." 
 
 " Our poor dear Offendene is empty after all," 
 said Mrs. Davilow. " When it came to the 
 point, Mr. Haynes declared off, and there has 
 been no one to take it since. I might as well 
 have accepted Lord Brackenshaw's kind offer 
 that I should remain in it another year rent-free : 
 for I should have kept the place aired and 
 warmed." 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 313 
 
 " I hope you have got something snug in- 
 stead," said Sir Hugo. 
 
 "A httle too snug," said Mr. Gascoigne, smil- 
 ing at his sister-in-law. " You are rather thick 
 upon the ground." 
 
 Gwendolen had turned with a changed glance 
 when her mother spoke of Offendene being 
 empty. This conversation passed during one of 
 the long unaccountable pauses often experienced 
 in foreign trains at some country station. There 
 was a dreamy, sunny stillness over the hedgeless 
 fields stretching to the boundary of poplars; 
 and to Gwendolen the talk within the carriage 
 seemed only to make the dreamland larger with 
 an indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purga- 
 torial Gadsmere which she would never visit; 
 till, at her mother's words, this mingled, dozing 
 view seemed to dissolve and give way to a more 
 wakeful vision of Offendene and Pennicote 
 under their cooler lights. She saw the gray 
 shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked fields, 
 the shadowy plantations with rutted lanes where 
 the barked timber lay for a wayside seat, the 
 neatly clipped hedges on the road from the par- 
 sonage to Offendene, the avenue where she was 
 gradually discerned from the windows, the hall- 
 door opening, and her mother or one of the 
 troublesome sisters coming out to meet her. All 
 that brief experience of a quiet home which had 
 once seemed a dulness to be fled from, now came 
 back to her as a restful escape, a station where 
 she found the breath of morning and the unre- 
 proaching voice of birds, after following a lure 
 through a long Satanic masquerade, which she 
 had entered on with an intoxicated belief in its 
 
314 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 disguises, and had seen the end of in shrieking 
 fear lest she herself had become one of the evil 
 spirits who were dropping their human mum- 
 mery and hissing around her with serpent 
 tongues. 
 
 In this way Gwendolen's mind paused over 
 Offendene and made it the scene of many 
 thoughts; but she gave no further outward sign 
 of interest in this conversation, any more than 
 in Sir Hugo's opinion on the telegraphic cable 
 or her uncle's views of the Church Rate Abolition 
 Bill. What subjects will not our talk embrace 
 in leisurely day- j ourneying from Genoa to Lon- 
 don? Even strangers, after glancing from 
 China to Peru and opening their mental stores 
 with a liberality threatening a mutual impres- 
 sion of poverty on any future meeting, are liable 
 to become excessively confidential. But the bar- 
 onet and the Rector were under a still stronger 
 pressure towards cheerful communication; they 
 were like acquaintances compelled to a long 
 drive in a mourning- coach, who having first re- 
 marked that the occasion is a melancholy one, 
 naturally proceed to enliven it by the most mis- 
 cellaneous discourse. " I don't mind telling 
 you J' said Sir Hugo to the Rector, in mention- 
 ing some private detail ; while the Rector, with- 
 out saying so, did not mind telling the baronet 
 about his sons, and the difficulty of placing them 
 in the world. By dint of discussing all persons 
 and things within driving-reach of Diplow, Sir 
 Hugo got himself wrought to a pitch of interest 
 in that former home, and of conviction that it 
 was his pleasant duty to regain and strengthen 
 his personal influence in the neighbourhood, that 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 315 
 
 made him declare his intention of taking his 
 family to the place for a month or two before the 
 autumn was over; and Mr. Gascoigne cordially 
 rejoiced in that prospect. Altogether, the jour- 
 ney was continued and ended with mutual lik- 
 ing between the male fellow-travellers. 
 
 Meanwhile Gwendolen sat by like one who 
 had visited the spirit- world and was full to the 
 lips of an unutterable experience that threw a 
 strange unreality over all the talk she was hear- 
 ing of her own and the world's business; and 
 Mrs. Davilow was chiefly occupied in imagining 
 what her daughter was feeling, and in wonder- 
 ing what was signified by her hinted doubt 
 whether she would accept her husband's bequest. 
 Gwendolen in fact had before her the unsealed 
 wall of an immediate purpose shutting off every 
 other resolution. How to scale the wall? She 
 wanted again to see and consult Deronda, that 
 she might secure herself against any act he 
 would disapprove. Would her remorse have 
 maintained its power within her, or would she 
 have felt absolved by secrecy, if it had not been 
 for that outer conscience which was made for her 
 by Deronda? It is hard to say how much we 
 could forgive ourselves if we were secure from 
 judgment by another whose opinion is the 
 breathing-medium of all our joy, — who brings 
 to us with close pressure and immediate sequence 
 that judgment of the Invisible and Universal 
 which self -flattery and the world's tolerance 
 would easily melt and disperse. In this way our 
 brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his 
 opinion, which has pierced even to the joints and 
 marrow, may be our virtue in the making. That 
 
316 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 mission of Deronda to Gwendolen had begun 
 with what she had felt to be his judgment of her 
 at the gaming-table. He might easily have 
 spoiled it : much of our lives is spent in marring 
 our own influence and turning others' belief in 
 us into a widely concluding unbelief which they 
 call knowledge of the world, while it is really 
 disappointment in you or me. Deronda had not 
 spoiled his mission. 
 
 But Gwendolen had forgotten to ask him for 
 his address in case she wanted to write, and her 
 only way of reaching him was through Sir 
 Hugo. She was not in the least blind to the 
 construction that all witnesses might put on her 
 giving signs of dependence on Deronda, and her 
 seeking him more than he sought her: Grand- 
 court's rebukes had sufficiently enlightened her 
 pride. But the force, the tenacity of her nature 
 had thrown itself into that dependence, and she 
 would no more let go her hold on Deronda's 
 help, or deny herself the interview her soul 
 needed, because of witnesses, than if she had been 
 in prison in danger of being condemned to death. 
 When she was in Park Lane and knew that 
 the baronet would be going down to the Abbey 
 immediately (just to see his family for a couple 
 of days and then return to transact needful busi- 
 ness for Gwendolen) , she said to him without 
 any air of hesitation, while her mother was 
 present, — 
 
 " Sir Hugo, I wish to see Mr. Deronda again 
 as soon as possible. I don't know his address. 
 Will yiDu tell it me, or let him know that I want 
 to see him? " 
 
 A quick thought passed across Sir Hugo's 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 317 
 
 face, but made no difference to the ease with 
 which he said: " Upon my word, I don't know 
 whether he 's at his chambers or the Abbey at 
 this moment. But I '11 make sure of him. I '11 
 send a note now to his chambers telling him to 
 come, and if he 's at the Abbey I can give him 
 your message and send him up at once. I am 
 sure he will want to obey your wish," the baronet 
 ended, with grave kindness, as if nothing could 
 seem to him more in the appropriate course of 
 things than that she should send such a message. 
 
 But he was convinced that Gwendolen had a 
 passionate attachment to Deronda, the seeds of 
 which had been laid long ago, and his former 
 suspicion now recurred to him with more strength 
 than ever, that her feeling was likely to lead her 
 into imprudences, — in which kind-hearted Sir 
 Hugo was determined to screen and defend her 
 as far as lay in his power. To him it was as pretty 
 a story as need be that this fine creature and his 
 favourite Dan should have turned out to be 
 formed for each other, and that the unsuitable 
 husband should have made his exit in such excel- 
 lent time. Sir Hugo liked that a charming 
 woman should be made as happy as possible. 
 In truth, what most vexed his mind in this matter 
 at present was a doubt whether the too lofty and 
 inscrutable Dan had not got some scheme or 
 other in his head, which would prove to be dearer 
 to him than the lovely Mrs. Grandcourt, and put 
 that neatly prepared marriage with her out of 
 the question. It was among the usual paradoxes 
 of feeling that Sir Hugo, who had given his 
 fatherly cautions to Deronda against too much 
 tenderness in his relations with the bride, should 
 
318 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 now feel rather irritated against him by the sus- 
 picion that he had not fallen in love as he ought 
 to have done. Of course all this thinking on Sir 
 Hugo's part was eminently premature, only a 
 fortnight or so after Grandcourt's death. But 
 it is the trick of thinking to be either premature 
 or behindhand. 
 
 However, he sent the note to Deronda's 
 chambers, and it found him there. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Oh, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, 
 Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings ! 
 
 Milton. 
 
 DERONDA did not obey Gwendolen's 
 new summons without some agitation. 
 Not his vanity, but his keen sympathy 
 made him susceptible to the danger that an- 
 other's heart might feel larger demands on him 
 than he would be able to fulfil; and it was no 
 longer a matter of argument with him, but of 
 penetrating consciousness, that Gwendolen's 
 soul clung to his with a passionate need. We do 
 not argue the existence of the anger or the scorn 
 that thrills through us in a voice; we simply feel 
 it, and it admits of no disproof. Deronda felt 
 this woman's destiny hanging on his over a preci- 
 pice of despair. Any one who knows him cannot 
 wonder at his inward confession, that if all this 
 had happened little more than a year ago, he 
 would hardly have asked himself whether he 
 loved her: the impetuous determining impulse 
 which would have moved him would have been 
 to save her from sorrow, to shelter her life for- 
 evermore from the dangers of loneliness, and 
 carry out to the last the rescue he had begun in 
 that monitory redemption of the necklace. But 
 now love and duty had thrown other bonds 
 around him, and that impulse could no longer 
 determine his life; still, it was present in him 
 as a compassionate yearning, a painful quiver- 
 
320 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ing at the very imagination of having again and 
 again to meet the appeal of her eyes and words. 
 The very strength of the bond, the certainty of 
 the resolve, that kept him asunder from her, 
 made him gaze at her lot apart with the more 
 aching pity. 
 
 He awaited her coming in the back drawing- 
 room, — part of that white and crimson space 
 where they had sat together at the musical party, 
 where Gwendolen had said for the first time that 
 her lot depended on his not forsaking her, and 
 her appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic 
 cry, — Per pietd non dirmi addio. But the mel- 
 ody had come from Mirah's dear voice. 
 
 Deronda walked about this room, which he 
 had for years known by heart, with a strange 
 sense of metamorphosis in his own life. The 
 familiar objects around him, from Lady Mal- 
 linger's gently smiling portrait to the also 
 human and urbane faces of the lions on the pi- 
 lasters of the chimney-piece, seemed almost to 
 belong to a previous state of existence which he 
 was revisiting in memory only, not in reality; 
 so deep and transforming had been the impres- 
 sions he had lately experienced, so new were the 
 conditions under which he found himself in the 
 house he had been accustomed to think of as a 
 home, — standing with his hat in his hand await- 
 ing the entrance of a young creature whose life 
 had also been undergoing a transformation, — 
 a tragic transformation towards a wavering re- 
 sult, in which he felt with apprehensiveness that 
 his own action was still bound up. 
 
 But Gwendolen was come in, looking 
 changed,, not only by her mourning dress, but 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 321 
 
 by a more satisfied quietude of expression than 
 he had seen in her face at Genoa. Her satisfac- 
 tion was that Deronda was there ; but there was 
 no smile between them as they met and clasped 
 hands : each was full of remembrances, — full 
 of anxious prevision. She said, " It was good 
 of you to come. Let us sit down," immediately 
 seating herself in the nearest chair. He placed 
 himself opposite to her. 
 
 " I asked you to come because I want you to 
 tell me what I ought to do," she began at once. 
 " Don't be afraid of telling me what you think 
 is right, because it seems hard. I have made up 
 my mind to do it. I was afraid once of being 
 poor; I could not bear to think of being under 
 other people ; and that was w hy I did something 
 
 — why I married. I have borne worse things 
 now. I think I could bear to be poor, if you 
 think I ought. Do you know about my hus- 
 band's will?" 
 
 " Yes, Sir Hugo told me," said Deronda, al- 
 ready guessing the question she had to ask. 
 
 " Ought I to take anything he has left me? 
 I will tell you what I have been thinking," said 
 Gwendolen, with a more nervous eagerness. 
 " Perhaps you may not quite know that I really 
 did think a good deal about my mother when I 
 married. I was selfish, but I did love her, and 
 feel about her poverty ; and what comforted me 
 most at first, when I was miserable, was her being 
 better off because I had married. The thing that 
 would be hardest to me now would be to see her 
 in poverty again ; and I have been thinking that 
 if I took enough to provide for her and no more 
 
 — nothing for myself — it would not be wrong; 
 
 VOL. XIV — 21 
 
322 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 for I was very precious to my mother — and he 
 took me from her — and he meant — and if she 
 had known — " 
 
 Gwendolen broke off. She had been preparing 
 herself for this interview by thinking of hardly 
 anything else than this question of right towards 
 her mother ; but the question had carried with it 
 thoughts and reasons which it was impossible for 
 her to utter, and these perilous remembrances 
 swarmed between her words, making her speech 
 more and more agitated and tremulous. She 
 looked down helplessly at her hands, now un- 
 laden of all rings except her wedding-ring. 
 
 "Do not hurt yourself by speaking of that," 
 said Deronda, tenderly. " There is no need; the 
 case is very simple. I think I can hardly judge 
 wrongly about it. You consult me because I am 
 the only person to whom you have confided the 
 most painful part of your experience ; and I can 
 understand your scruples." He did not go on 
 immediately, waiting for her to recover herself. 
 The silence seemed to Gwendolen full of the 
 tenderness that she heard in his voice, and she 
 had courage to lift up her eyes and look at him 
 as he said, " You are conscious of something 
 which you feel to be a crime towards one who is 
 dead. You think that you have forfeited all 
 claim as a wife. You shrink from taking what 
 was his. You want to keep yourself pure from 
 profiting by his death. Your feeling even urges 
 you to some self -punishment, — some scourg- 
 ing of the self that disobeyed your better will, 
 the will that struggled against temptation. I 
 have known something of that myself. Do I 
 understand you ? " 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 323 
 
 " Yes, — at least, I want to be good — not 
 like what I have been," said Gwendolen. " I will 
 try to bear what you think I ought to bear. I 
 have tried to tell you the worst about myself. 
 What ought I to do?" 
 
 " If no one but yourself were concerned in this 
 question of income," said Deronda, " I should 
 hardly dare to urge you against any remorseful 
 prompting ; but I take as a guide now your feel- 
 ing about Mrs. Davilow, which seems to me 
 quite just. I cannot think that your husband's 
 dues even to yourself are nullified by any act you 
 have committed. He voluntarily entered into 
 your life, and affected its course in what is 
 always the most momentous way. But setting 
 that aside, it was due from him in his position 
 that he should provide for your mother, and he 
 of course understood that if this will took effect 
 she would share the provision he had made for 
 you." 
 
 " She has had eight hundred a-year. What 
 I thought of was to take that and leave the rest," 
 said Gwendolen. She had been so long inwardly 
 arguing for this as a permission, that her mind 
 could not at once take another attitude. 
 
 " I think it is not your duty to fix a limit in 
 that way," said Deronda. " You would be mak- 
 ing a painful enigma for Mrs. Davilow; an in- 
 come from which you shut yourself out must be 
 embittered to her. And your own course would 
 become too difficult. We agreed at Genoa that 
 the burthen on your conscience is what no one 
 oiight to be admitted to the knowledge of. The 
 future beneficence of your life will be best fur- 
 thered by your saving all others from the pain 
 
 \ 
 
324 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 of that knowledge. In my opinion you ought 
 simply to abide by the provisions of your hus- 
 band's will, and let your remorse tell only on 
 the use that you will make of your monetary 
 independence." 
 
 In uttering the last sentence Deronda auto- 
 matically took up his hat, which he had laid on 
 the floor beside him. Gwendolen, sensitive to his 
 slightest movement, felt her heart giving a great 
 leap, as if it too had a consciousness of its own, 
 and would hinder him from going : in the same 
 moment she rose from her chair, unable to re- 
 flect that the movement was an acceptance of his 
 apparent intention to leave her; and Deronda 
 of course also rose, advancing a little. 
 
 " I will do what you tell me," said Gwendo- 
 len, hurriedly; " but what else shall I do ? " No 
 other than these simple w^ords were possible to 
 her; and even these were too much for her in 
 a state of emotion where her proud secrecy was 
 disenthroned : as the childlike sentences fell 
 from her lips they reacted on her like a picture 
 of her own helplessness, and she could not check 
 the sob which sent the large tears to her eyes. 
 Deronda, too, felt a crushing pain; but immi- 
 nent consequences were visible to him, and urged 
 him to the utmost exertion of conscience. When 
 she had pressed her tears away, he said, in a 
 gently questioning tone, — 
 
 " You will probably be soon going with Mrs. 
 Davilow into the country? " 
 
 " Yes, in a week or ten days." Gwendolen 
 waited an instant, turning her eyes vaguely 
 towards the window, as if looking at some im- 
 agined prospect. " I want to be kind to them 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 325 
 
 all — they can be happier than I can. Is that the 
 best I can do? " 
 
 " I think so. It is a duty that cannot be doubt- 
 ful," said I)eronda. He paused a little between 
 his sentences, feeling a weight of anxiety on all 
 his words. " Other duties will spring from it. 
 Looking at your life as a debt may seem the 
 dreariest view of things at a distance; but it 
 cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is 
 the want of motive; but once beginning to act 
 with that penitential loving purpose you have in 
 your mind, there will be unexpected satisfac- 
 tions, — there will be newly opening needs, — 
 continually coming to carry you on from day to 
 day. You will find your life growing like a 
 plant." 
 
 Gwendolen turned her eyes on him with the 
 look of one athirst towards the sound of unseen 
 waters. Deronda felt the look as if she had been 
 stretching her arms towards him from a for- 
 saken shore. His voice took an affectionate 
 imploringness when he said, — 
 
 " This sorrow, which has cut down to the 
 root, has come to you while you are so young, — 
 try to think of it, not as a spoiling of your life, 
 but as a preparation for it. Let it be a prepara- 
 tion — " Any one overhearing his tones would 
 have thought he was entreating for his own hap- 
 piness. " See; you have been saved from the 
 worst evils that might have come from your mar- 
 riage, which you feel was wrong. You have had 
 a vision of injurious, selfish action, — a vision of 
 possible degradation; think that a severe angel, 
 seeing you along the road of error, grasped you 
 by the wrist, and showed you the horror of the 
 
326 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 life you must avoid. And it has come to you in 
 your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. 
 You can, you will, be among the best of women, 
 such as make others glad that they were born." 
 
 The words were like a touch of a miracu- 
 lous hand to Gwendolen. Mingled emotions 
 streamed through her frame with a strength that 
 seemed the beginning of a new existence, having 
 some new powers or other which stirred in her 
 vaguely. So pregnant is the divine hope of 
 moral recovery with the energy that fulfils it. 
 So potent in us is the infused action of another 
 soul, before which we bow in complete love. But 
 the new existence seemed inseparable from De- 
 ronda: the hope seemed to make his presence 
 permanent. It was not her thought, that he 
 loved her and would cling to her, — a thought 
 would have tottered with improbability; it was 
 her spiritual breath. For the first time since that 
 terrible moment on the sea a flush rose and 
 spread over her cheek, brow, and neck, deepened 
 an instant or two, and then gradually disap- 
 peared. She did not speak. 
 
 Deronda advanced and put out his hand, say- 
 ing, " I must not weary you." 
 
 She was startled by the sense that he was 
 going, and put her hand in his, still without 
 speaking. 
 
 " You look ill yet, — unlike yourself," he 
 added, while he held her hand. 
 
 " I can't sleep much," she answered, with 
 some return of her dispirited manner. " Things 
 repeat themselves in me so. They come back 
 — they will all come back," she ended shudder- 
 ingly, a chill fear threatening her. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 327 
 
 " By degrees they will be less insistent," said 
 Deronda. He could not drop her hand or move 
 away from her abruptly. 
 
 " Sir Hugo says he shall come to stay at Dip- 
 low," said Gwendolen, snatching at previously 
 intended words which had slipped away from 
 her. " You will come too." 
 
 " Probably," said Deronda; and then feeling 
 that the word was cold, he added correctively, 
 " Yes, I shall come," and then released her hand, 
 with the final friendly pressure of one who has 
 virtually said good-by. 
 
 " And not again here, before I leave town? " 
 said Gwendolen, with timid sadness, looking as 
 pallid as ever. 
 
 What could Deronda say? " If I can be of 
 any use, — if you wish me, — certainly I will." 
 
 I must wish it," said Gwendolen, impetu- 
 ously; "you know I must wish it. What 
 strength have I? Who else is there?" Again 
 a sob was rising. 
 
 Deronda felt a pang, which showed itself in 
 his face. He looked miserable as he said, " I will 
 certainly come." 
 
 Gwendolen perceived the change in his face; 
 but the intense relief of expecting him to come 
 again could not give way to any other feeling, 
 and there was a recovery of the inspired hope 
 and courage in her. 
 
 " Don't be unhappy about Ine," she said, in a 
 tone of affectionate assurance. " I shall remem- 
 ber your words, — every one of them. I shall 
 remember what you believe about me; I shall 
 try." 
 
 She looked at him firmly, and put out her 
 
328 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hand again as if she had forgotten what had 
 passed since those words of his which she prom- 
 ised to remember. But there was no approach 
 to a smile on her hps. She had never smiled 
 since her husband's death. When she stood still 
 and in silence, she looked like a melancholy 
 statue of the Gwendolen whose laughter had 
 once been so ready when others were grave. 
 
 It is only by remembering the searching an- 
 guish which had changed the aspect of the world 
 for her that we can understand her behaviour 
 to Deronda, — the unreflecting openness, nay, 
 the importunate pleading, with which she ex- 
 pi;essed her dependence on him. Considerations 
 such as would have filled the minds of indifferent 
 spectators could not occur to her, any more than 
 if flames had been mounting around her, and she 
 had flung herself into his opened arms and clung 
 about his neck that he might carry her into 
 safety. She identified him with the struggling 
 regenerative process in her which had begun with 
 his action. Is it any wonder that she saw her own 
 necessity reflected in his feeling? She was in 
 that state of unconscious reliance and expecta- 
 tion which is a common experience with us when 
 we are preoccupied with our own trouble or our 
 own purposes. We diffuse our feeling over 
 others, and count on their acting from our mo- 
 tives. Her imagination had not been turned to 
 a future union with Deronda by any other than 
 the spiritual tie which had been continually 
 strengthening; but also it had not been turned 
 towards a future separation from him. Love- 
 making and marriage, — how could they now 
 be the imagery in which poor Gwendolen's deep- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 329 
 
 est attachment could spontaneously clothe itself ? 
 Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her; but 
 what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of 
 rebuke, — the hard task of self -change, — con- 
 fession, — endurance. If she cried towards him, 
 what then? She cried as the child cries whose 
 little feet have fallen backward, — cried to be 
 taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself. 
 
 The cry pierced Deronda. What position 
 could have been more difficult for a man full of 
 tenderness, yet with clear foresight ? He was the 
 only creature who knew the real nature of Gwen- 
 dolen's trouble: to withdraw himself from any 
 appeal of hers would be to consign her to a dan- 
 gerous loneliness. He could not reconcile him- 
 self to the cruelty of apparently rejecting her 
 dependence on him; and yet in the nearer or 
 farther distance he saw a coming w-rench which 
 ail present strengthening of their bond would 
 make the harder. 
 
 He was obliged to risk that. He went once 
 and again to Park Lane before Gwendolen left; 
 but their interviews were in the presence of 
 Mrs. Davilow, and were therefore less agitat- 
 ing. Gwendolen, since she had determined to 
 accept her income, had conceived a project which 
 she liked to speak of : it was to place her mother 
 and sisters with herself in Offendene again, and, 
 as she said, piece back her life on to that time 
 ♦ when they first went there, and when everything 
 was happiness about her, only she did not know 
 it. The idea had been mentioned to Sir Hugo, 
 who was going to exert himself about the let- 
 ting of Gadsmere for a rent which would more 
 than pay the rent of Offendene. All this was 
 
330 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 told to Deronda, who willingly dwelt on a sub- 
 ject that seemed to give some soothing occupa- 
 tion to Gwendolen. He said nothing, and she 
 asked nothing, of what chiefly occupied himself. 
 Her mind was fixed on his coming to Diplow 
 before the autumn was over; and she no more 
 thought of the Lapidoths — the .little Jewess 
 and her brother — as likely to make a difference 
 in her destiny, than of the fermenting political 
 and social leaven which was making a differ- 
 ence in the history of the world. In fact, poor 
 Gwendolen's memory had been stunned, and aU 
 outside the lava-lit track of her .troubled con- 
 science, and her effort to get deliverance from 
 it, lay for her in dim forgetfulness. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm. 
 
 Browning: The Ring and the Book. 
 
 MEANWHILE Ezra and Mirah, whom 
 Gwendolen did not include in her think- 
 ing about Deronda, were having their 
 relation to him drawn closer and brought into 
 fuller light. 
 
 The father Lapidoth had quitted his daughter 
 at the doorstep, ruled by that possibility of stak- 
 ing something in play or betting which pre- 
 sented itself with the handhng of any sum be- 
 yond the price of staying actual hunger, and 
 left no care for alternative prospects or resolu- 
 tions. Until he had lost everything he never 
 considered whether he would apply to Mirah 
 again or whether he would brave his son's pres- 
 ence. In the first moment he had shrunk from 
 encountering Ezra as he would have shrunk 
 from any other situation of disagreeable con- 
 straint; and the possession of Mirah's purse 
 was enough to banish the thought of future 
 necessities. The gambling appetite is more ab- 
 solutely dominant than bodily hunger, which 
 can be neutralized by an emotional or intellec- 
 tual excitation; but the passion for watching 
 chances — the habitual suspensive poise of the 
 mind in actual or imaginary play — nullifies the 
 susceptibihty to other excitation. In its final, 
 imperious stage, it seems the un joyous dissipa- 
 
332 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 tion of demons, seeking diversion on the burn- 
 ing marl of perdition. 
 
 But every form of selfishness, however ab- 
 stract and unhuman, requires the support of 
 at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's 
 appetite for food and drink was extremely mod- 
 erate, he had slipped into a shabby, unfriended 
 form of life in which the appetite could not be 
 satisfied without some ready money. When, in 
 a brief visit at a house which announced " Pyra- 
 mids " on the window-blind, he had first doubled 
 and trebled and finally lost Mirah's thirty shil- 
 lings, he went out with her empty purse in his 
 pocket, already balancing in his mind whether 
 he should get another immediate stake by pawn- 
 ing the purse, or whether he should go back to 
 her giving himself a good countenance by re- 
 storing the purse, and declaring that he had used 
 the money in paying a score that was standing 
 against him. Besides, among the sensibilities 
 still left strong in Lapidoth was the sensibility 
 to his own claims, and he appeared to himself 
 to have a claim on any property his children 
 might possess, which was stronger than the jus- 
 tice of his son's resentment. After all, to take 
 up his lodging with his children was the best 
 thing he could do; and the more he thought of 
 meeting Ezra the less he winced from it, his 
 imagination being more wrought on by the 
 chances of his getting something into his pocket 
 with safety and without exertion, than by the 
 threat of a private humiliation. Luck had been 
 against him lately ; he expected it to turn, — 
 and might not the turn begin with some open- 
 ing of supplies which would present itself 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 333 
 
 through his daughter's affairs and the good 
 friends she had spoken of? Lapidoth counted 
 on the fascination of his cleverness, — an old 
 habit of mind which early experience had sanc- 
 tioned; and it is not only women who are un- 
 aware of their diminished charm, or imagine that 
 they can feign not to be worn out. 
 
 The result of Lapidoth's rapid balancing was 
 that he went towards the little square in Bromp- 
 ton with the hope that, by walking about and 
 watching, he might catch sight of Mirah going 
 out or returning, in which case his entrance into 
 the house would be made easier. But it was 
 already evening, — the evening of the day next 
 to that on which he had first seen her ; and after 
 a little waiting, weariness made him reflect that 
 he might ring, and if she were not at home, he 
 might ask the time at which she was expected. 
 But on coming near the house he knew that she 
 was at home; he heard her singing. 
 
 Mirah, seated at the piano, was pouring forth 
 Herz, mein Herz, while Ezra was listening with 
 his eyes shut, when Mrs. Adam opened the 
 door, and said in some embarrassment, — 
 
 " A gentleman below says he is your father, 
 miss." 
 
 " I will go down to him," said Mirah, starting 
 up immediately and looking towards her brother. 
 
 " No, Mirah, not so," said Ezra, with decision. 
 " Let him come up, Mrs. Adam." 
 
 Mirah stood with her hands pinching each 
 other, and feeling sick with anxiety, while she 
 continued looking at Ezra, who had also risen, 
 and was evidently much shaken.' But there was 
 an expression in his face which she had never 
 
384 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 seen before; his brow was knit, his Hps seemed 
 hardened with the same severity that gleamed 
 from his eyes. 
 
 When Mrs. Adam opened the door to let in 
 the father, she could not help easting a look at 
 the group, and after glancing from the younger 
 man to the elder, said to herself as she closed 
 the door, " Father, sure enough." The likeness 
 was that of outline, which is always most strik- 
 ing at the first moment ; the expression had been 
 wrought into the strongest contrast by such hid- 
 den or inconspicuous differences as can make the 
 genius of a Cromwell within the outward type 
 of a father who was no more than a respectable 
 parishioner. 
 
 Lapidoth had put on a melancholy expression 
 beforehand, but there was some real wincing in 
 his frame as he said, — 
 
 " Well, Ezra, my boy, you hardly know me 
 after so many years." 
 
 " I know you — too well — father," said 
 Ezra, with a slow biting solemnity which made 
 the word " father " a reproach. 
 
 " Ah, you are not pleased with me. I don't 
 wonder at it. Appearances have been against 
 me. When a man gets into straits he can't do 
 just as he would by himself or anybody else. 
 I 've suffered enough, I know," said Lapi- 
 doth, quickly. In speaking he always recov- 
 ered some glibness and hardihood; and now 
 turning towards Mirah, he held out her purse, 
 saying, " Here 's your little purse, my dear. I 
 thought you 'd be anxious about it, because of 
 that bit of writing. I 've emptied it, you '11 see, 
 for I had a score to pay for food and lodging. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 335 
 
 I knew you would like me to clear myself, and 
 here I stand — without a single farthing in my 
 pocket — at the mercy of my children. You 
 can turn me out if you like, without getting a 
 policeman. Say the word, Mirah; say, ' Father, 
 I Ve had enough of you ; you made a pet of 
 me, and spent your all on me, when I could n't 
 have done without you; but I can do better 
 without you now,' — say that, and I 'm gone 
 out like a spark. I sha'n't spoil your pleasure 
 again." The tears were in his voice as usual, 
 before he had finished. 
 
 " You know I could never say it, father," 
 answered Mirah, with not the less anguish be- 
 cause she felt the falsity of everything in his 
 speech except the implied wish to remain in the 
 house. 
 
 "Mirah, my sister, leave us!" said Ezra, 
 in a tone of authority. 
 
 She looked at her brother falteringly, beseech- 
 ingly, — in awe of his decision, yet unable to 
 go without making a plea for this father who 
 was like something that had grown in her flesh 
 with pain, but that she could never have cut 
 away without worse pain. She went close to 
 her brother, and putting her hand in his, said, 
 in a low voice, but not so low as to be unheard 
 by Lapidoth, " Remember, Ezra, — you said my 
 mother would not have shut him out." 
 
 " Trust me, and go," said Ezra. 
 
 She left the room, but after going a few steps 
 up the stairs, sat down with a palpitating heart. 
 If, because of anything her brother said to him, 
 he went away — 
 
 Lapidoth had some sense of what was being 
 
3^ DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 prepared for him in his son's mind, but he was 
 beginning to adjust himself to the situation and 
 find a point of view that would give him a cool 
 superiority to any attempt at humiliating him. 
 This haggard son, speaking as from a sepulchre, 
 had the incongruity which selfish levity learns 
 to see in suffering and death, until the unre- 
 lenting pincers of disease clutch its own flesh. 
 Whatever preaching he might deliver must be 
 taken for a matter of course, as a man finding 
 shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take 
 a little religious howling that happened to be 
 going on there. 
 
 Lapidoth was not born with this sort of cal- 
 lousness: he had achieved it. 
 
 " This home that we have here," Ezra began, 
 " is maintained partly by the generosity of a 
 beloved friend who supports me, and partly by 
 the labours of my sister, who supports herself. 
 While we have a home we will not shut you out 
 from it. We will not cast you out to the mercy 
 of your vices. For you are our father, and 
 though you have broken your bond, we acknowl- 
 edge ours. But I will never trust you. You 
 absconded with money, leaving your debts un- 
 paid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her 
 of her little child and broke her heart ; you have 
 become a gambler, and where shame and con- 
 science were, there sits an insatiable desire; you 
 were ready to sell my sister, — you had sold her, 
 but the price was denied you. The man who 
 has done these things must never expect to be 
 trusted any more. We will share our food with 
 you, — you shall have a bed and clothing. We 
 will do this duty to j^ou, because you are our 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 337 
 
 father. But you will never be trusted. You 
 are an evil man: you made the misery of our 
 mother. That such a man is our father is a 
 brand on our flesh which will not cease smart- 
 ing. But the Eternal has laid it upon us; and 
 though human justice were to flog you for 
 crimes, and your body fell helpless before the 
 public scorn, w^e would still say, ' This is our 
 father; make way, that we may carry him out 
 of your sight. ' " 
 
 Lapidoth, in adjusting himself to what was 
 coming, had not been able to foresee the exact 
 intensity of the lightning or the exact course 
 it would take, — that it would not fall outside 
 his frame but through it. He could not foresee 
 what was so new to him as this voice from 
 the soul of his son. It touched that spring of 
 hysterical excitability which Mirah used to wit- 
 ness in him when he sat at home and sobbed. 
 As Ezra ended, Lapidoth threw himself into 
 a chair and cried like a woman, burying his face 
 against the table ; and yet, strangely, while this 
 hysterical crying was an inevitable reaction in 
 him under the stress of his son's words, it was 
 also a conscious resource in a difficulty, — just 
 as in early life, when he was a bright- faced curly 
 young man, he had been used to avail himself 
 of this subtly poised physical susceptibility to 
 turn the edge of resentment or disapprobation. 
 
 Ezra sat down again and said nothing, — ex- 
 hausted by the shock of his own irrepressible 
 utterance, the outburst of feelings which for 
 years he had borne in solitude and silence. His 
 thin hands trembled on the arms of the chair; 
 he would hardly have found voice to answer a 
 
 VOL. XIV — 22 
 
338 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 question; he felt as if he had taken a step 
 towards beckoning Death. Meanwhile Mirah's 
 quick expectant ear detected a sound which her 
 heart recognized: she could not stay out of the 
 room any longer. But on opening the door her 
 immediate alarm was for Ezra, and it was to his 
 side that she went, taking his trembling hand 
 in hers, which he pressed and found support in; 
 but he did not speak, or even look at her. The 
 father with his face buried was conscious that 
 Mirah had entered, and presently lifted up his 
 head, pressed his handkerchief against his eyes, 
 put out his hand towards her, and said with 
 plaintive hoarseness: Good-by, Mirah; your 
 father will not trouble you again. He deserves 
 to die like a dog by the roadside, and he will. 
 If your mother had lived, she would have for- 
 given* me, — thirty-four years ago I put the 
 ring on her finger under the Chuppa, and we 
 were made one. She would have forgiven me, 
 and we should have spent our old age together. 
 But I have n't deserved it. Good-by." 
 
 He rose from the chair as he said the last 
 " good-by." Mirah had put her hand in his and 
 held him. She was not tearful and grieving, 
 but frightened and awestruck, as she cried 
 out, — 
 
 "No, father, no!" Then turning to her 
 brother, " E'zra, you have not forbidden him? 
 — Stay, father, and leave off wi'ong things. 
 Ezra, I cannot bear it. How can I say to my 
 father, ^ Go and die!"' 
 
 " I have not said it," Ezra answered, 
 with great effort. " I have said, ' Stay and 
 be sheltered.' " 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 339 
 
 " Then you will stay, father, — and be taken 
 care of, — and come with me," said Mirah, draw- 
 ing him towards the door. 
 
 This was really what Lapidoth wanted. And 
 for the moment he felt a sort of comfort in re- 
 covering his daughter's dutiful tendance, that 
 made a change of habits seem possible to him. 
 She led him down to the parlour below, and 
 said, — 
 
 " This is my sitting-room when I am not with 
 Ezra, and there is a bedroom behind which shall 
 be yours. You will stay and be good, father. 
 Think that you are come back to my mother, 
 and that she has forgiven you, — she speaks to 
 you through me." Mirah's tones were implor- 
 ing, but she could not give one of her former 
 caresses. 
 
 Lapidoth quickly recovered his composure, 
 began to speak to Mirah of the improvement 
 in her voice, and other easy subjects, and when 
 Mrs. Adam came to lay out his supper, entered 
 into converse with her in order to show her that 
 he was not a common person, though his clothes 
 were just now against him. 
 
 But in his usual wakefulness, at night, he fell 
 to wondering what money Mirah had by her, 
 and went back over old Continental hours at 
 roulette, reproducing the method of his play, 
 and the chances that had frustrated it. He had 
 had his reasons for coming to England, but for 
 most things it was a cursed country. 
 
 These were the stronger visions of the night 
 with Lapidoth, and not the worn frame of his 
 ireful son uttering a terrible judgment. Ezra 
 did pass across the gaming-table, and his words 
 
340 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 were audible; but he passed like an insubstan- 
 tial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten 
 out of them by numbers and movements that 
 seemed to make the very tissue of Lapidoth's 
 consciousness. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 "The godhead in us wrings our nobler deeds 
 From our reluctant selves." 
 
 IT was an unpleasant surprise to Deronda 
 when he returned from the Abbey to find 
 the undesirable father installed in the lodg- 
 ings at Brompton. Mirah had felt it necessary 
 to speak of Deronda to her father, and even to 
 make him as fully aware as she could of the 
 way in which the friendship with Ezra had 
 begun, and of the sympathy which had cemented 
 it. She passed more lightly over what Deronda 
 had done for her, omitting altogether the rescue 
 from drowning, and speaking of the shelter she 
 had found in Mrs. Meyrick's family so as to 
 leave her father to suppose that it was through 
 these friends Deronda had become acquainted 
 with her. She could not persuade herself to 
 more completeness in her narrative: she could 
 not let the breath of her father's soul pass over 
 her relation to Deronda. And Lapidoth, for 
 reasons, was not eager in his questioning about 
 the circumstances of her flight and arrival in 
 England. But he was much interested in the 
 fact of his children having a beneficent friend 
 apparently high in the world. 
 
 It was the brother who told Deronda of this 
 new condition added to their life. " I am be- 
 come calm in beholding him now," Ezra ended, 
 " and I try to think it possible that my sis- 
 ter's tenderness, and the daily tasting a life 
 
342 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 of peace, may win him to remain aloof from 
 temptation. I have enjoined her, and she has 
 promised, to trust him with no money. I have 
 convinced her that he will buy with it his own 
 destruction." 
 
 Deronda first came on the third day from 
 Lapidoth's arrival. The new clothes for which 
 he had been measured were not yet ready, and 
 wishing to make a favourable impression, he did 
 not choose to present himself in the old ones. 
 He watched for Deronda's departure, and get- 
 ting a view of him from the window was rather 
 surprised at his youthfulness, which Mirah had 
 not mentioned, and which he had somehow 
 thought out of the question in a personage who 
 had taken up a grave friendship and hoary 
 studies with the sepulchral Ezra. Lapidoth 
 began to imagine that Deronda's real or chief 
 motive must be that he was in love with Mirah. 
 And so much the better; for a tie to Mirah had 
 more promise of indulgence for her father than 
 the tie to Ezra; and Lapidoth was not without 
 the hope of recommending himself to Deronda, 
 and of softening any hard prepossessions. He 
 was behaving with much amiability, and trying 
 in all ways at his command to get himself into 
 easy domestication with his children, — entering 
 into Mirah's music, showing himself docile about 
 smoking, which Mrs. Adam could not tolerate 
 in her parlour, and walking out in the square 
 with his German pipe and the tobacco with 
 which Mirah supplied him. He was too acute 
 to venture any present remonstrance against the 
 refusal of money, which Mirah told him that 
 she must persist in as a solemn duty promised 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 343 
 
 to her brother. He was comfortable enough to 
 wait. 
 
 The next time Deronda came, Lapidoth, 
 equipped in his new clothes and satisfied with 
 his own appearance, was in the room with Ezra, 
 who was teaching himself, as part of his severe 
 duty, to tolerate his father's presence whenever 
 it was imposed. Deronda was cold and distant, 
 the first sight of this man, who had blighted the 
 lives of his wife and children, creating in him 
 a repulsion that was even a physical discomfort. 
 But Lapidoth did not let himself be discour- 
 aged, asked leave to stay and hear the reading 
 of papers from the old chest, and actually made 
 himself useful in helping to decipher some diffi- 
 cult German manuscript. This led him to 
 suggest that it might be desirable to make a tran- 
 scription of the manuscript, and he offered his 
 services for this purpose and also to make copies 
 of any papers in Roman characters. Though 
 Ezra's young eyes, he observed, were getting 
 weak, his own were still strong. Deronda ac- 
 cepted the offer, thinking that Lapidoth showed 
 a sign of grace in the willingness to be employed 
 usefully; and he saw a gratified expression in 
 Ezra's face, who, however, presently said, " Let 
 all the writing be done here; for I cannot trust 
 the papers out of my sdght, lest there be an 
 accident by burning or otherwise." Poor Ezra 
 felt very much as if he had a convict on leave 
 under his charge. Unless he saw his father 
 working, it was not possible to believe that he 
 would work in good faith. But by this arrange- 
 ment he fastened on himself the burthen of his 
 father's presence, which was made painful not 
 
344 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 only through his deepest, longest associations, 
 but also through Lapidoth's restlessness of tem- 
 perament, which showed itself the more as he 
 became familiarized with his situation, and lost 
 any awe he had felt of his son. The fact was, 
 he was putting a strong constraint on himself 
 in confining his attention for the sake of win- 
 ning Deronda's favour; and like a man in an 
 uncomfortable garment he gave himself relief 
 at every opportunity, going out to smoke, or 
 moving about and talking, or throwing himself 
 back in his chair and remaining silent, but in- 
 cessantly carrying on a dumb language of facial 
 movement or gesticulation; and if Mirah were 
 in the room, he would fall into his old habit of 
 talk with her, gossiping about their former 
 doings and companions, or repeating quirks, 
 and stories, and plots of the plays he used to 
 adapt, in the belief that he could at will com- 
 mand the vivacity of his earlier time. All this 
 was a mortal infliction to Ezra ; and when Mirah 
 was at home she tried to relieve him, by getting 
 her father down into the parlour and keeping 
 watch over him there. What duty is made of 
 a single difficult resolve? The difficulty lies in 
 the daily unflinching support of consequences 
 that mar the blessed return of morning with the 
 prospect of irritation to be suppressed or shame 
 to be endured. And such consequences were 
 being borne by these, as by many other, heroic 
 children of an unworthy father, — with the pros- 
 pect, at least to Mirah, of their stretching on- 
 ward through the solid part of life. 
 
 Meanwhile Lapidoth's presence had raised a 
 new im-palpable partition between Deronda and 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 345 
 
 Mirah, — each of them dreading the soiling in- 
 ferences of his mind, each of them interpreting 
 mistakenly the increased reserve and diffidence 
 of the other. But it was not very long before 
 some light came to Deronda. 
 
 As soon as he could, after returning from his 
 brief visit to the Abbey, he had called at Hans 
 Meyrick's rooms, feeling it, on more grounds 
 than one, a due of friendship that Hans should 
 be at once acquainted with the reasons of his 
 late journey, and the changes of intention it 
 had brought about. Hans was not there; he 
 was said to be in the country for a few days; 
 and Deronda, after leaving a note, waited a 
 week, rather expecting a note in return. But 
 receiving no word, and fearing some freak of 
 feeling in the incalculably susceptible Hans, 
 whose proposed sojourn at the Abbey he knew 
 had been deferred, he at length made a second 
 call, and was admitted into the painting-rooin, 
 where he found his friend in a light coat, with- 
 out a waistcoat, his long hair still wet from a 
 bath, but with a face looking worn and wizened, 
 — anything but country-like. He had taken up 
 his palette and brushes, and stood before his 
 easel when Deronda entered, but the equipment 
 and attitude seemed to have been got up on 
 short notice. 
 
 As they shook hands, Deronda said, " You 
 don't look much as if you had been in the 
 country, old fellow. Is it Cambridge you have 
 been to? " 
 
 " No," said Hans, curtly, throwing down his 
 palette with the air of one who has begun to 
 feign by mistake; then, pushing forward a chair 
 
346 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 for Deronda, he threw himself into another, and 
 leaned backward with his hands behind his head, 
 while he went on, "I 've been to I-don't-know- 
 where — No man's land — and a mortally un- 
 pleasant country it is." 
 
 " You don't mean to say you have been 
 drinking, Hans," said Deronda, who had seated 
 himself opposite, in anxious survey. 
 
 " Nothing so good. I 've been smoking 
 opium. I always meant to do it some time or 
 other, to try how much bliss could be got by 
 it; and having found myself just now rather 
 out of other bliss, I thought it judicious to seize 
 the opportunity. But I pledge you my word 
 I shall never tap a cask of that bliss again. It 
 disagrees with my constitution." 
 
 "What has been the matter? You were in 
 good spirits enough w^hen you wrote to me." 
 
 " Oh, nothing in particular. The world began 
 to look seedy, — a sort of cabbage-garden with 
 all the cabbages cut. A malady of genius, you 
 may be sure," said Hans, creasing his face into 
 a smile; "and, in fact, I was tired of being 
 virtuous without reward, especially in this hot 
 London weather." 
 
 "Nothing else? No real vexation?" said 
 Deronda. 
 
 Hans shook his head. 
 
 " I came to tell you of my own affairs, but 
 I can't do it with a good grace if you are to 
 hide yours." 
 
 " Have n't an affair in the world," said Hans, 
 in a flighty way, " except a quarrel with a bric- 
 a-brac man. Besides, as it is the first time in 
 our lives that you ever spoke to me about your 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 347 
 
 own affairs, you are only beginning to pay a 
 pretty long debt." 
 
 Deronda felt convinced that Hans was be- 
 having artificially, but he trusted to a return 
 of the old frankness by and by if he gave his 
 own confidence. 
 
 " You laughed at the mystery of my journey 
 to Italy, Hans," he began. " It was for an 
 object that touched my happiness at the very 
 roots. I had never known anything about my 
 parents, and I really went to Genoa to meet my 
 mother. My father has been long dead, — died 
 when I was an infant. My mother was the 
 daughter of an eminent Jew; my father was 
 her cousin. Many things had caused me to 
 think of this origin as almost a probability be- 
 fore I set out. I was so far prepared for the 
 result that I was glad of it, — glad to find 
 myself a Jew." 
 
 " You must not expect me to look surprised, 
 Deronda," said Hans, who had changed his atti- 
 tude, laying one leg across the other and exam- 
 ining the heel of his slipper. 
 
 " You knew it?" 
 
 " My mother told me. She went to the house 
 the morning after you had been there, — brother 
 and sister both told her. You may imagine we 
 can't rejoice as they do. But whatever you are 
 glad of, I shall come to be glad of in the end, — 
 when exactly the end may be I can't predict," said 
 Hans, speaking in a low tone, which was as un- 
 usual with him as it was to be out of humour with 
 his lot, and yet bent on making no fuss about it. 
 
 " I quite understand that you can't share my 
 feeling," said Deronda; "but I could not let 
 
348 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 silence lie between us on what casts quite a new 
 light over my future. I have taken up some of 
 Mordecai's ideas, and I mean to try and carry 
 them out, so far as one man's efforts can go. I 
 dare say I shall by and by travel to the East and 
 be away for some years." 
 
 Hans said nothing, but rose, seized his palette, 
 and began to work his brush on it, standing be- 
 fore his picture with his back to Deronda, who 
 also felt himself at a break in his path, embar- 
 rassed by Hans's embarrassment. 
 
 Presently Hans said, again speaking low, and 
 without turning, " Excuse the question, but does 
 Mrs. Grandcourt know of all this? " 
 
 "No; and I must beg of you, Hans," said 
 Deronda, rather angrily, " to cease joking on 
 that subject. Any notions you have are wide of 
 the truth, — are the very reverse of the truth." 
 
 " I am no more inclined to joke than I shall 
 be at my own funeral," said Hans. " But I am 
 not at all sure that you are aware what are my 
 notions on that subject." 
 
 " Perhaps not," said Deronda. " But let me 
 say, once for all, that in relation to Mrs. Grand- 
 court, I never have had, and never shall have, the 
 position of a lover. If you have ever seriously 
 put that interpretation on anything you have ob- 
 served, you are supremely mistaken." 
 
 There was silence a little while, and to each the 
 silence was like an irritating air, exaggerating 
 discomfort. 
 
 " Perhaps I have been mistaken in another 
 interpretation also," said Hans, presently. 
 "What is that?" 
 
 " That you had no wish to hold the position of 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 349 
 
 a lover towards another woman, who is neither 
 wife nor widow." 
 
 " I can't pretend not to understand you, Mey- 
 rick. It is painful that our wishes should clash. 
 But I hope you will tell me if you have any 
 ground for supposing that you would succeed." 
 
 " That seems rather a superfluous inquiry on 
 your part, Deronda," said Hans, with some 
 irritation. 
 
 " Why superfluous? " 
 
 " Because you are perfectly convinced on the 
 subject, — and probably you have had the very 
 best evidence to convince you." 
 
 " I will be more frank with you than you are 
 with me," said Deronda, still heated by Hans's 
 show of temper, and yet sorry for him. " I have 
 never had the slightest evidence that I should 
 succeed myself. In fact, I have very little 
 hope." 
 
 Hans looked round hastily at his friend, but 
 immediately turned to his picture again. 
 
 " And in our present situation," said Deronda, 
 hurt by the idea that Hans suspected him of 
 insincerity, and giving an offended emphasis to 
 his words, " I don't see how I can deliberately 
 make known my feeling to her. If she could not 
 return it, I should have embittered her best com- 
 fort, for neither she nor I can be parted from her 
 brother, and we should have to meet continually. 
 If I were to cause her that sort of pain by an un- 
 willing betrayal of my feeling, I should be no 
 better than a mischievous animal." 
 
 " I don't know that I have ever betrayed my 
 feeling to her," said Hans, as if he were vindi- 
 cating himself. 
 
350 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 " You mean that we are on a level; then, you 
 have no reason to envy me." 
 
 " Oh, not the slightest," said Hans, with bitter 
 irony. " You have measured my conceit and 
 know that it out-tops all your advantages." 
 
 " I am a nuisance to you, Meyrick. I am 
 sorry, but I can't help it," said Deronda, rising. 
 " After what passed between us before, I wished 
 to have this explanation; and I don't see that 
 any pretensions of mine have made a real differ- 
 ence to you. They are not likely to make any 
 pleasant difference to myself under present cir- 
 cumstances. Now the father is there — did you 
 know that the father is there? " 
 
 " Yes. If he were not a Jew I would permit 
 myself to damn him, — with faint praise, I 
 mean," said Hans, but with no smile. 
 
 " She and I meet under greater constraint than 
 ever. Things might go on in this way for two 
 years without my getting any insight into her 
 feeling towards me. That is the whole state of 
 affairs, Hans. Neither you nor I have injured 
 the other, that I can see. We must put up with 
 this sort of rivalry in a hope that is likely enough 
 to come to nothing. Our friendship can bear 
 that strain, surely." 
 
 " No, it can't," said Hans, impetuously, 
 throwing down his tools, thrusting his hands 
 into his coat-pockets, and turning round to face 
 Deronda, who drew back a little and looked at 
 him with amazement. Hans went on in the same 
 tone, — 
 
 " Our friendship — my friendship — can't 
 bear the strain of behaving to you like an un- 
 grateful dastard and grudging you your hap- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 351 
 
 piness. For you are the happiest dog in the 
 world. If Mirah loves anybody better than her 
 brother, you are the man.'' 
 
 Hans turned on his heel and threw himself 
 into his chair, looking up at Deronda with an ex- 
 pression the reverse of tender. Something like 
 a shock passed through Deronda, and after an 
 instant he said, — 
 
 " It is a good-natured fiction of yours, Hans." 
 
 " I am not in a good-natured mood. I assure 
 you I found the fact disagreeable when it was 
 thrust on me, — all the more, or perhaps all the 
 less, because I believed then that your heart was 
 pledged to the Duchess. But now, confound 
 you ! you turn out to be in love in the right place, 
 — a Jew — and everything eligible." 
 
 " Tell me what convinced you, — there 's a 
 good fellow," said Deronda, distrusting a de- 
 light that he was unused to. 
 
 " Don't ask. Little mother was witness. The 
 upshot is that Mirah is jealous of the Duchess, 
 and the sooner you relieve her mind, the better. 
 There ! I 've cleared off a score or two, and may 
 be allowed to swear at you for getting what you 
 deserve, — which is just the very best luck I 
 know of." 
 
 " God bless you, Hans! " said Deronda, put- 
 ting out his hand, which the other took and 
 wrung in silence. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights. 
 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame. 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 
 And feed his sacred flame. 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 DERONDA'S eagerness to confess his 
 love could hardly have had a stronger 
 stimulus than Hans had given it in his 
 assurance that Mirah needed relief from jeal- 
 ousy. He went on his next visit to Ezra with 
 the determination to be resolute in using — nay, 
 in requesting — an opportunity of private con- 
 versation with her. If she accepted his love, he 
 felt courageous about all other consequences, 
 and as her betrothed husband he would gain a 
 protective authority which might be a desirable 
 defence for her in future difficulties with her 
 father. Deronda had not observed any signs of 
 growing restlessness in Lapidoth, or of dimin- 
 ished desire to recommend himself; but he had 
 forebodings of some future struggle, some mor- 
 tification, or some intolerable increase of do- 
 mestic disquietude in which he might save Ezra 
 and Mirah from being helpless victims. 
 
 His forebodings would have been strength- 
 ened if he had known what was going on in the 
 father's mind. That amount of restlessness, that 
 desultoriness of attention, which made a small 
 torture to Ezra, was to Lapidoth an irksome sub- 
 mission to restraint, only made bearable by his 
 thinking of it as a means of by and by securing 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 353 
 
 a well-conditioned freedom. He began with the 
 intention of awaiting some really good chance, 
 such as an opening for getting a considerable sum 
 from Deronda ; but all the while he was looking 
 about curiously, and trying to discover where 
 Mirah deposited her money and her keys. The 
 imperious gambling desire within him, which 
 carried on its activity through every other occu- 
 pation, and made a continuous web of imagina- 
 tion that held all else in its meshes, would hardly 
 have been under the control of a protracted pur- 
 pose, if he had been able to lay his hand on any 
 sum worth capturing. But Mirah, with her 
 practical clear-sightedness, guarded against any 
 frustration of the promise she had given Ezra, by 
 confiding all money except what she was imme- 
 diately in want of, to Mrs. Meyrick's care, and 
 Lapidoth felt himself under an irritating com- 
 pleteness of supply in kind as in a lunatic asylum 
 where everything was made safe against him. 
 To have opened a desk or drawer of Mirah's, 
 and pocketed any bank-notes found there, would 
 have been to his mind a sort of domestic appro- 
 priation which had no disgrace in it; the degrees 
 of liberty a man allows himself with other 
 people's property being often delicately drawn, 
 even beyond the boundary where the law begins 
 to lay its hold, — which is the reason why spoons 
 are a safer investment than mining shares. Lap- 
 idoth really felt himself injuriously treated by 
 his daughter, and thought that he ought to have 
 had what he wanted of her other earnings as 
 he had of her apple-tart. But he remained 
 submissive; indeed, the indiscretion that most 
 tempted him was not any insistence ivith Mirah, 
 
 VOL. xrv — 23 
 
354 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 but some kind of appeal to Deronda. Clever 
 persons who have nothing else to sell can often 
 put a good price t)n their absence, and Lapi- 
 doth's difficult search for devices forced upon 
 him the idea that his family would find them- 
 selves happier without him, and that Deronda 
 would be willing to advance a considerable sum 
 for the sake of getting rid of him. But, in spite 
 of well-practised hardihood, Lapidoth was still 
 in some awe of Ezra's imposing friend, and de- 
 ferred his purpose indefinitely. 
 
 On this day, when Deronda had come full 
 of a gladdened consciousness, which inevitably 
 showed itself in his air and speech, Lapidoth was 
 at a crisis of discontent and longing that made 
 his mind busy with schemes of freedom, and 
 Deronda's new amenity encouraged them. This 
 preoccupation was at last so strong as to inter- 
 fere with his usual show of interest in what went 
 forward, and his persistence in sitting by even 
 when there was reading which he could not fol- 
 low. After sitting a little while, he went out to 
 smoke and walk in the square, and the two 
 friends were all the easier. Mirah was not at 
 home, but she was sure to be in again before 
 Deronda left, and his eyes glowed with a secret 
 anticipation: he thought that when he saw her 
 again he should see some sweetness of recogni- 
 tion for himself to which his eyes had been sealed 
 before. There was an additional playful affec- 
 tionateness in his manner towards Ezra. 
 
 " This little room is too close for you, Ezra," 
 he said, breaking off his reading. " The week's 
 heat we sometimes get here is worse than the 
 heat in Genoa, where one sits in the shaded cool- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 355 
 
 ness of large rooms. You must have a better 
 home now. I shall do as I like with you, being 
 the stronger half." He smiled toward Ezra, 
 who said, — 
 
 " I am straitened for nothing except breath. 
 But you, who might be in a spacious palace, with 
 the wide green country around you, find this a 
 narrow prison. Nevertheless, I cannot say, 
 
 ' Go: " 
 
 " Oh, the country would be a banishment while 
 you are here," said Deronda, rising and walking 
 round the double room, which yet offered no long 
 promenade, while he made a great fan of his 
 handkerchief. " This is the happiest room in the 
 world to me. Besides, I will imagine myself 
 in the East, since I am getting ready to go there 
 some day. Only I will not wear a cravat and a 
 heavy ring there," he ended emphatically, paus- 
 ing to take off those superfluities and deposit 
 them on a small table behind Ezra, w^ho had the 
 table in front of him covered with books and 
 papers. 
 
 " I have been wearing my memorable ring 
 ever since I came home," he went on, as he re- 
 seated himself. " But I am such a Sybarite that 
 I constantly put it off as a burthen when I am 
 doing anything. I understand why the Romans 
 had summer rings, — if they had them. Now 
 then, I shall get on better." 
 
 They were soon absorbed in their work again. 
 Deronda was reading a piece of rabbinical He- 
 brew under Ezra's correction and comment, and 
 they took little notice when Lapidoth re-entered 
 and seated himself somewhat in the background. 
 
 His rambling eyes quickly alighted on the 
 
356 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 ring that sparkled on the bit of dark mahogany. 
 During his walk his mind had been occupied 
 with the fiction of an advantageous opening for 
 him abroad, only requiring a sum of ready 
 money, which on being communicated to De- 
 ronda in private, might immediately draw from 
 him a question as to the amount of the required 
 sum; and it was this part of his forecast that 
 Lapidoth found the most debatable, there being 
 a danger in asking too much, and a prospective 
 regret in asking too little. His own desire gave 
 him no limit, and he was quite without guidance 
 as to the limit of Deronda's willingness. But 
 now, in the midst of these airy conditions pre- 
 paratory to a receipt which remained indefinite, 
 this ring, which on Deronda's finger had become 
 familiar to Lapidoth's envy, suddenly shone de- 
 tached and within easy grasp. Its value was 
 certainly below the smallest of the imaginary 
 sums that his purpose fluctuated between; but 
 then it was before him as a solid fact, and his de- 
 sire at once leaped into the thought (not yet an 
 intention) that if he were quietly to pocket that 
 ring and walk away he would have the means of 
 comfortable escape from present restraint, with- 
 out trouble, and also without danger; for any 
 property of Deronda's (available without his 
 formal consent) was all one with his children's 
 property, since their father would never be pros- 
 ecuted for taking it. The details of this think- 
 ing followed each other so quickly that they 
 seemed to rise before him as one picture. Lapi- 
 doth had never committed larceny; but larceny 
 is a form of appropriation for which people are 
 punished by law; and to take this ring from a 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 357 
 
 virtual relation, who would have been willing to 
 make a much heavier gift, would not come under 
 the head of larceny. Still, the heavier gift was 
 to be preferred, if Lapidoth could only make 
 haste enough in asking for it, and the imaginary 
 action of taking the ring, which kept repeating 
 itself like an inward tune, sank into a rejected 
 idea. He satisfied his urgent longing by resolv- 
 ing to go below, and watch for the moment of 
 Deronda's departure, when he would ask leave 
 to join him in his walk, and boldly carry out 
 his meditated plan. He rose and stood looking 
 out of the window, but all the while he saw what 
 lay behind him, — the brief passage he would 
 have to make to the door close by the table where 
 the ring was. However, he was resolved to go 
 down; but — by no distinct change of resolu- 
 tion, rather by a dominance of desire, like the 
 thirst of the drunkard — it so happened that in 
 passing the table his fingers fell noiselessly on 
 the ring, and he found himself in the passage 
 with the ring in his hand. It followed that he 
 put on his hat and quitted the house. The pos- 
 sibility of again throwing himself on his chil- 
 dren receded into the indefinite distance, and 
 before he was out of the square his sense of 
 haste had concentrated itself on selling the ring 
 and getting on shipboard. 
 
 Deronda and Ezra were just aware of his exit; 
 that was all. But by and by Mirah came in and 
 made a real interruption. She had not taken off 
 her hat ; and when Deronda rose and advanced to 
 shake hands with her, she said, in a confusion at 
 once unaccountable and troublesome to herself, — 
 
 " I only came in to see that Ezra had his new 
 
358 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 draught. I must go directly to Mrs. Meyrick's 
 to fetch something." 
 
 " Pray allow me to walk with you," said De- 
 ronda, urgently. " I must not tire Ezra any 
 further ; besides, my brains are melting. I want 
 to go to Mrs. Meyrick's: may I go with you? " 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Mirah, blushing still more, 
 with the vague sense of something new in De- 
 ronda, and turning away to pour out Ezra's 
 draught; Ezra meanwhile throwing back his 
 head with his eyes shut, unable to get his mind 
 away from the ideas that had been filling it 
 while the reading was going on. Deronda for a 
 moment stood thinking of nothing but the walk, 
 till Mirah turned round again and brought the 
 draught, when he suddenly remembered that he 
 had laid aside his cravat, and saying, " Pray 
 excuse my dishabille, — I did not mean you to 
 see it," he went to the little table, took up his 
 cravat, and exclaimed with a violent impulse of 
 surprise, " Good heavens! where is my ring 
 gone? " beginning to search about on the floor. 
 
 Ezra looked round the corner of his chair. 
 Mirah, quick as thought, went to the spot where 
 Deronda was seeking, and said, " Did you lay 
 it down? " 
 
 " Yes," said Deronda, still unvisited by any 
 other explanation than that the ring had fallen 
 and was lurking in shadow, indiscernible on the 
 variegated carpet. He was moving the bits of 
 furniture near, and searching in all possible and 
 impossible places with hand and eyes. 
 
 But another explanation had visited Mirah, 
 and taken the colour from her cheek. She went 
 to Ezra's ear and whispered, " Was my father 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 359 
 
 here? " He bent his head in reply, meeting her 
 eyes with terrible understanding. She darted 
 back to the spot where Deronda was still casting 
 down his eyes in that hopeless exploration which 
 we are apt to carry on over a space we have ex- 
 amined in vain. " You have not found it? " she 
 said hurriedly. 
 
 He, meeting her frightened gaze, immedi- 
 ately caught alarm from it, and answered, " I 
 perhaps put it in my pocket," professing to feel 
 for it there. 
 
 She watched him and said, " It is not there? 
 — you put it on the table," with a penetrating 
 voice that would not let him feign to have found 
 it in his pocket ; and immediately she rushed out 
 of the room. Deronda followed her, — she was 
 gone into the sitting-room below to look for her 
 father, — she opened the door of the bedroom 
 to see if he were there, — she looked where his 
 hat usually hung, — she turned with her hands 
 clasped tight and her lips pale, gazing despair- 
 ingly out of the window. Then she looked up 
 at Deronda, who had not dared to speak to her 
 in her white agitation. She looked up at him, 
 unable to utter a word, — the look seemed a 
 tacit acceptance of the humiliation she felt in 
 bis presence. But he, taking her clasped hands 
 between both his, said, in a tone of reverent 
 adoration, — 
 
 " Mirah, let me think that he is my father as 
 well as yours, — that we can have no sorrow, no 
 disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather take your 
 grief to be mine than I would take the brightest 
 joy of another woman. Say you will not reject 
 xne^ — say you will take me to share all things 
 
360 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 with you. Say you will promise to be my wife 
 — say it now. I have been in doubt so long, — 
 I have had to hide my love so long. Say that 
 now and always I may prove to you that I love 
 you with complete love." 
 
 The change in Mirah had been gradual. She 
 had not passed at once from anguish to the full, 
 blessed consciousness that, in this moment of 
 grief and shame, Deronda was giving her the 
 highest tribute man can give to woman. With 
 the first tones and the first words, she had only 
 a sense of solemn comfort, referring this good- 
 ness of Deronda's to his feeling for Ezra. But 
 by degrees the rapturous assurance of unhoped- 
 for good took possession of her frame; her face 
 glowed under Deronda's as he bent over her; 
 yet she looked up still with intense gravity, as 
 when she had first acknowledged with religious 
 gratitude that he had thought her worthy of 
 the best; " and when he had finished, she could 
 say nothing, — she could only lift up her lips 
 to his and just kiss them, as if that were the sim- 
 plest yes." They stood then, only looking at 
 each other, he holding her hands between his, — 
 too happy to move, meeting so fully in their new 
 consciousness that all signs would have seemed 
 to throw them farther apart, till Mirah said in a 
 whisper, " Let us go and comfort Ezra." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The human nature unto which I felt 
 That I belonged, and reverenced with love, 
 Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit 
 Diffused through time and space, with aid derived 
 Of evidence from monuments, erect, 
 Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest 
 In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime 
 Of vanished nations. 
 
 Wordsworth: The Prelude. 
 
 SIR Hugo carried out his plan of spending 
 part of the autumn at Diplow, and by the 
 beginning of October his presence was 
 spreading some cheerfulness in the neighbour- 
 hood, among all ranks and persons concerned, 
 from the stately homes of Brackenshaw and 
 Quetcham to the respectable shop-parlours in 
 Wanchester. For Sir Hugo was a man who^ 
 liked to show himself and be affable, a Liberal of 
 good lineage, who confided entirely in Reform as 
 not likely to make any serious difference in Eng- 
 lish habits of feeling, one of which undoubtedly 
 is the liking to behold society well fenced and 
 adorned with hereditary rank. Hence he made 
 Diplow a most agreeable house, extending his 
 invitations to old Wanchester solicitors and 
 young village curates, but also taking some care 
 in the combination of his guests, and not feed- 
 ing all the common poultry together, so that 
 they should think their meal no particular com- 
 pliment. Easy-going Lord Brackenshaw, for 
 example, would not mind meeting Robinson the 
 Attorney, but Robinson would have been natu- 
 
362 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 rally piqued if he had been asked to meet a set 
 of people who passed for his equals. On all 
 these points Sir Hugo was well informed enough 
 at once to gain popularity for himself and give 
 pleasure to others, — two results which emi- 
 nently suited his disposition. The Rector of 
 Pennicote now found a reception at Diplow 
 very different from the haughty tolerance he had 
 undergone during the reign of Grandcourt. It 
 was not only that the baronet liked Mr. Gas- 
 coigne, it was that he desired to keep up a 
 marked relation of friendliness with him on ac- 
 count of Mrs. Grandcourt, for whom Sir Hugo's 
 chivalry had become more and more engaged. 
 Why? The chief reason was one that he could 
 not fully communicate, even to Lady Mallinger, 
 — for he would not tell what he thought one 
 woman's secret to another, even though the other 
 was his wife, — which shows that his chivalry 
 included a rare reticence. 
 
 Deronda, after he had become engaged to 
 Mirah, felt it right to make a full statement of 
 his position and purposes to Sir Hugo, and he 
 chose to make it by letter. He had more than a 
 presentiment that his fatherly friend would feel 
 some dissatisfaction, if not pain, at this turn of 
 his destiny. In reading unwelcome news, in- 
 stead of hearing it, there is the advantage that 
 one avoids a hasty expression of impatience 
 which may afterwards be repented of. Deronda 
 dreaded that verbal collision which makes other- 
 wise pardonable feeling lastingly offensive. 
 
 And Sir Hugo, though not altogether sur- 
 prised, was thoroughly vexed. His immediate 
 resource was to take the letter to Lady Mai- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 363 
 
 linger, who would be sure to express an aston- 
 ishment which her husband could argue against 
 as unreasonable, and in this way divide the stress 
 of his discontent. And, in fact, when she showed 
 herself astonished and distressed that all Daniel's 
 wonderful talents, and the comfort of having 
 him in the house, should have ended in his going 
 mad in this way about the Jews, the baronet 
 could say, — 
 
 "Oh, nonsense, my dear! depend upon it, 
 Dan will not make a fool of himself. He has 
 large notions about Judaism, — political views 
 which you can't understand. No fear but Dan 
 will keep himself head uppermost." 
 
 But with regard to the prospective marriage, 
 she afforded him no counter-irritant. The gentle 
 lady observed, without rancour, that she had 
 little dreamed of what was coming when she 
 had Mirah to sing at her musical party and give 
 lessons to Amabel. After some hesitation, in- 
 deed, she confessed it had passed through her 
 mind that after a proper time Daniel might 
 marry Mrs. Grandcourt, — because it seemed so 
 remarkable that he should be at Genoa just at 
 that time, — and although she herself was not 
 fond of widows she could not help thinking that 
 such a marriage would have been better than his 
 going altogether with the Jews. But Sir Hugo 
 was so strongly of the same opinion that he could 
 not correct it as a feminine mistake; and his 
 ill-humour at the disproof of his agreeable con- 
 clusions on behalf of Gwendolen was left with- 
 out vent. He desired Lady Mallinger not to 
 breathe a word about the affair till further no- 
 tice, saying to himself, "If it is an unkind cut 
 
364 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 to the poor thing " (meaning Gwendolen) , " the 
 longer she is without knowing it the better, in 
 her present nervous state. And she will best 
 learn it from Dan himself." Sir Hugo's con- 
 jectures had worked so industriously with his 
 knowledge, that he fancied himself well in- 
 formed concerning the whole situation. 
 
 Meanwhile his residence with his family at 
 Diplow enabled him to continue his fatherly 
 attentions to Gwendolen; and in these Lady 
 Mallinger, notwithstanding her small liking for 
 widows, was quite willing to second him. 
 
 The plan of removal to Offendene had been 
 carried out; and Gwendolen, in settling there, 
 maintained a calm beyond her mother's hopes. 
 She was experiencing some of that peaceful 
 melancholy which comes from the renunciation 
 of demands for self, and from taking the ordi- 
 nary good of existence, and especially kindness, 
 even from a dog, as a gift above expectation. 
 Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of 
 darkness complain of the sweet air and the day- 
 light? There is a way of looking at our life 
 daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return 
 of morn and evening — still more the starlike 
 outglowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some 
 generous impulse breaking our inward darkness 
 — as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. 
 Those who have a self-knowledge prompting 
 such self -accusation as Hamlet's, can understand 
 this habitual feeling of rescue. And it was felt 
 by Gwendolen as she lived through and through 
 again the terrible history of her temptations, 
 from their first form of illusory self -pleasing 
 when she struggled away from the hold of con- 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 365 
 
 science, to their latest form of an urgent hatred 
 dragging her towards its satisfaction, while she 
 prayed and cried for the help of that conscience 
 which she had once forsaken. She was now 
 dwelling on every word of Deronda's that pointed 
 to her past deliverance from the worst evil in 
 herself and the worst infliction of it on others, 
 and on every word that carried a force to resist 
 self-despair. 
 
 But she was also upborne by the prospect of 
 soon seeing him again : she did not imagine him 
 otherwise than always within her reach, her 
 supreme need of him blinding her to the sepa- 
 rateness of his life, the whole scene of which she 
 filled with his relation to her, — no unique pre- 
 occupation of Gwendolen's, for we are all apt 
 to fall into this passionate egoism of imagina- 
 tion, not only towards our fellow-men, but 
 towards God. And the future which she turned 
 her face to with a willing step was one where 
 she would be* continually assimilating herself to 
 some type that he would hold before her. Had 
 he not first risen on her vision as a corrective 
 presence which she had recognized in the begin- 
 ning with resentment, and at last with entire 
 love and trust? She could not spontaneously 
 think of an end to that reliance, which had 
 become to her imagination like the firmness of 
 the earth, the only condition of her walking. 
 
 And Deronda was not long before he came 
 to Diplow, which was at a more convenient dis- 
 tance from town than the Abbey. He had 
 wished to carry out a plan for taking Ezra and 
 Mirah to a mild spot on the coast, while he 
 prepared another home that Mirah might enter 
 
366 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 as his bride, and where they might unitedly 
 watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not 
 to be removed, unless it were to go with them 
 to the East. All outward solicitations were 
 becoming more and more of a burthen to him; 
 but his mind dwelt on the possibility of this 
 voyage with a visionary joy. Deronda in his 
 preparations for the marriage, which he hoped 
 might not be deferred beyond a couple of 
 months, wished to have fuller consultation as to 
 his resources and affairs generally with Sir 
 Hugo, and here was a reason for not delaying 
 his visit to Diplow. But he thought quite as 
 much of another reason, — his promise to Gwen- 
 dolen. The sense of blessedness in his ow^n lot 
 had yet an aching anxiety at its heart : this may 
 be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is 
 always called happy, and happiness is consid- 
 ered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow- 
 outside it. But human experience is usually 
 paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the 
 phrases of current talk or even current philos- 
 ophy. It was no treason to Mirah, but a part 
 of that full nature which made his love for her 
 the more worthy, that his joy in her could hold 
 by its side the care for another. For what is 
 love itself, for the one we love best ? — an en- 
 folding of immeasurable cares which yet are 
 better than any joys outside our love. 
 
 Deronda came twice to Diplow, and saw 
 Gwendolen twice, — and yet he went back to 
 town without having told her anything about 
 the change in his lot and prospects. He blamed 
 himself; but in all momentous communication 
 likely to give pain we feel dependent on some 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 367 
 
 preparatory turn of words or associations, some 
 agreement of the other's mood with the prob- 
 able effect of what we have to impart. In the 
 first interview Gwendolen was so absorbed in 
 what she had to say to him, so full of questions 
 which he must answer, about the arrangement 
 of her life, what she could do to make herself 
 less ignorant, how she could be kindest to every- 
 body, and make amends for her selfishness and 
 try to be rid of it, that Deronda utterly shrank 
 from waiving her immediate wants in order to 
 speak of himself, nay, from inflicting a wound 
 on her in these moments when she was leaning 
 on him for help in her path. In the second 
 interview, when he went with new resolve to 
 command the conversation into some prepara- 
 tory track, he found her in a state of deep 
 depression, overmastered by those distasteful 
 miserable memories which forced themselves on 
 her as something more real and ample than any 
 new material out of which she could mould her 
 future. She cried hysterically, and said that he 
 would always despise her. He could only seek 
 words of soothing and encouragement; and 
 when she gradually revived under them, with 
 that pathetic look of renewed childlike interest 
 which we see in eyes where the lashes are still 
 beaded with tears, it was impossible to lay 
 another burthen on her. 
 
 But time went on, and he felt it a pressing 
 duty to make the difficult disclosure. Gwen- 
 dolen, it is true, never recognized his having 
 any affairs; and it had never even occurred to 
 her to ask him why he happened to be at Genoa. 
 But this unconsciousness of hers would make a 
 
368 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 sudden revelation of affairs that were determin- 
 ing his course in Ufe all the heavier blow to her; 
 and if he left the revelation to be made by in- 
 different persons, she would feel that he had 
 treated her with cruel inconsiderateness. He 
 could not make the communication in writing: 
 his tenderness could not bear to think of her 
 reading his virtual farewell in solitude, and 
 perhaps feeling his words full of a hard glad- 
 ness for himself and indifference for her. He 
 went down to Diplow again, feeling that every 
 other peril was to be incurred rather than that 
 of returning and leaving her still in ignorance. 
 
 On this third visit Deronda found Hans Mey- 
 rick installed with his easel at Diplow, begin- 
 ning his picture of the three daughters sitting 
 on a bank " in the Gainsborough style," and 
 varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to 
 sketch the village children and improve his 
 acquaintance with the Gascoignes. Hans ap- 
 peared to have recovered his vivacity, but De- 
 ronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect 
 the artificiality of a lady's bloom from its being 
 a little too high-toned and steadily persistent 
 (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet ap- 
 peared among the advertisements ) . Also, with 
 all his grateful friendship and admiration for 
 Deronda, Hans could not help a certain irri- 
 tation against him such as extremely incautious, 
 open natures are apt to feel when the breaking 
 of a friend's reserve discloses a state of things 
 not merely unsuspected but the reverse of what 
 had been hoped and ingeniously conjectured. 
 It is true that poor Hans had always cared 
 chiefly to confide in Deronda, and had been 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 369 
 
 quite incurious as to any confidence that might 
 have been given in return; but what outpourer 
 of his own affairs is not tempted to think any 
 hint of his friend's affairs as an egoistic irrele- 
 vance? That was no reason why it was not 
 rather a sore reflection to Hans that while he 
 had been all along naively opening his heart 
 about Mirah, Deronda had kept secret a feel- 
 ing of rivalry which now revealed itself as the 
 important determining fact. Moreover, it is 
 always at their peril that our friends turn out 
 to be something more than we were aware of. 
 Hans must be excused for these promptings of 
 bruised sensibility, since he had not allowed them 
 to govern his substantial conduct: he had the 
 consciousness of having done right by his for- 
 tunate friend; or, as he told himself, " his metal 
 had given a better ring than he would have 
 sworn to beforehand." For Hans had always 
 said that in point of virtue he was a dilettante; 
 which meant that he was very fond of it in other 
 people, but if he meddled with it himself he 
 cut a poor figure. Perhaps in reward of his 
 good behaviour he gave his tongue the more 
 freedom; and he was too fully possessed by the 
 notion of Deronda's happiness to have a con- 
 ception of what he was feeling about Gwendo- 
 len, so that he spoke of her without hesitation. 
 
 "When did you come down, Hans?" said 
 Deronda, joining him in the grounds where he 
 was making a study of the requisite bank and 
 trees. 
 
 " Oh, ten days ago, — before the time Sir 
 Hugo fixed. I ran down with Rex Gascoigne, 
 and stayed at the Rectory a day or two. I 'm 
 
 VOL. XIV — 24 
 
370 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 up in all the gossip of these parts, — I know 
 the state of the wheelwright's interior, and have 
 assisted at an infant school examination. Sister 
 Anna with the good upper lip escorted me, else 
 I should have been mobbed by three urchins 
 and an idiot, because of my long hair and a 
 general appearance which departs from the Pen- 
 nicote type of the beautiful. Altogether, the 
 village is idyllic. Its only fault is a dark curate 
 with broad shoulders and broad trousers, who 
 ought to have gone into the heavy drapery line. 
 The Gascoignes are perfect, — besides being 
 related to the Vandyke Duchess. I caught a 
 glimpse of her in her black robes at a distance, 
 though she does n't show to visitors." 
 
 " She was not staying at the Rectory? " said 
 Deronda. 
 
 "No; but I was taken to Offendene to se6 
 the old house, and as a consequence I saw the 
 Duchess's family. I suppose you have been 
 there and know all about them? " 
 
 " Yes, I have been there," said Deronda, 
 quietly. 
 
 " A fine old place. An excellent setting for 
 a widow with romantic fortunes. And she seems 
 to have had several romances. I think I have 
 found out that there was one between her and 
 my friend Rex." 
 
 " Not long before her marriage, then? " said 
 Deronda, really interested; " for they had only 
 been a year at Offendene. How came you to 
 know anything of it? " 
 
 " Oh, — not ignorant of what it is to be a 
 miserable devil, I learn to gloat on the signs 
 of misery in others. I found out that Rex 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 371 
 
 never goes to Offendene, and has never seen 
 the Duchess since she came back; and Miss 
 Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about 
 charade-acting, — for I went through some of 
 my nonsense to please the young ones, — some- 
 thing which proved to me that Rex was once 
 hovering about his fair cousin close enough to 
 get singed. I don't know what was her part in 
 the affair. Perhaps the Duke came in and car- 
 ried her off. That is always the way when an 
 exceptionally worthy young man forms an at- 
 tachment. I understand now why Gascoigne 
 talks of making the law his mistress and remain- 
 ing a bachelor. But these are green resolves. 
 Since the Duke did not get himself drowned 
 for your sake, it may turn out to be for my 
 friend Rex's sake. Who knows? " 
 
 " Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grand- 
 court should marry again? " said Deronda, ready 
 to add that Hans's success in constructing her 
 fortunes hitherto had not been enough to war- 
 rant a new attempt. 
 
 "You monster!" retorted Hans, "do you 
 want her to wear weeds for you all her life, — 
 burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are 
 alive and merry? " 
 
 Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so 
 much annoyed that Hans turned the current of 
 his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his 
 shoulders a little over the thought that there 
 really had been some stronger feeling between 
 Deronda and the Duchess than Mirah would 
 like to know of. " Why did n't she fall in 
 love with me? " thought Hans, laughing at 
 himself. " She would have had no rivals. No 
 
372 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 woman ever wanted to discuss theology with 
 me." 
 
 No wonder that Deronda winced under that 
 sort of joking with a whip-lash. It touched 
 sensibilities that were already quivering with the 
 anticipation of witnessing some of that pain to 
 which even Hans's light words seemed to give 
 more reality, — any sort of recognition by an- 
 other giving emphasis to the subject of our 
 anxiety. And now he had come down with the 
 firm resolve that he would not again evade the 
 trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He 
 had sent word that he intended to call and to - 
 ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he 
 found her awaiting him in the old drawing- 
 room where some chief crises of her life had 
 happened. She seemed less sad than he had 
 seen her since her husband's death; there was 
 no smile on her face, but a placid self-possession, 
 in contrast with the mood in which he had last 
 found her. She was all the more alive to the 
 sadness perceptible in Deronda; and they were 
 no sooner seated — he at a little distance oppo- 
 site to her — than she said, — 
 
 " You were afraid of coming to see me, be- 
 cause I was so full of grief and despair the last 
 time. But I am not so to-day. I have been 
 sorry ever since. I have been making it a 
 reason why I should keep up my hope and be 
 as cheerful as I can, because I would not give 
 you any pain about me." 
 
 There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwen- 
 dolen's tone and look as she uttered these words 
 that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost 
 cruelty into the task now laid upon him. But 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 373 
 
 he felt obliged to make his answer a beginning 
 of the task. 
 
 " I am in some trouble to-day," he said, look- 
 ing at her rather mournfully; " but it is because 
 I have things to tell you which you will almost 
 think it a want of confidence on my part not 
 to have spoken of before. They are things 
 affecting my own life, — my own future. I 
 shall seem to have made an ill return to you 
 for the trust you have placed in me — never to 
 have given you an idea of events that make 
 great changes for me. But when we have been 
 together we have hardly had time to enter into 
 subjects which at the moment were really less 
 pressing to me than the trials you have been 
 going through." There was a sort of timid 
 tenderness in Deronda's deep tones, and he 
 paused with a pleading look, as if it had been 
 Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in 
 her scenes of beseeching and confession. 
 
 A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such 
 meaning as she found in his words had shaken 
 her, but without causing fear. Her mind had 
 flown at once to some change in his position 
 with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir Hugo's prop- 
 erty. She said, with a sense of comfort from 
 Deronda's way of asking her pardon, — 
 
 " You never thought of anything but what 
 you could do to help me ; and I was so trouble- 
 some. How could you tell me things? " 
 
 " It will perhaps astonish you," said Deronda, 
 " that I have only quite lately known who were 
 my parents." 
 
 Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the 
 more assured that her expectations of what was 
 
374 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 coming were right. Deronda went on without 
 check. 
 
 " The reason why you found me in Italy was 
 that I had gone there to learn that — in fact, to 
 meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was 
 brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She 
 parted with me after my father's death, when 
 I was a little creature. But she is now very 
 ill, and she felt that the secrecy ought not to 
 be any longer maintained. Her chief reason 
 had been that she did not wish me to know I 
 was a Jew." 
 
 " A Jew! " Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low 
 tone of amazement, wdth an utterly frustrated 
 look, as if some confusing potion were creeping 
 through her system. 
 
 Deronda coloured and did not speak, while 
 Gwendolen, with her eyes fixed on the floor, 
 was struggling to find her way in the dark by 
 the aid of various reminiscences. She seemed 
 at last to have arrived at some judgment, for 
 she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if 
 remonstrating against the mother's conduct, — 
 
 "What difference need that have made?" 
 
 " It has made a great difference to me that 
 I have known it," said Deronda, emphatically; 
 but he could not go on easily, — the distance 
 between her ideas and his acted like a differ- 
 ence of native language, making him uncertain 
 what force his words would carry. 
 
 Gwendolen meditated again, and then said 
 feelingly: " I hope there is nothing to make you 
 mind. You are just the same as if you were 
 not a Jew." 
 
 She meant to assure him that nothing of that 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 375 
 
 external sort could affect the way in which she 
 regarded him, or the way in which he could 
 influence her. Deronda was a little helped by 
 this misunderstanding. 
 
 " The discovery was far from being painful 
 to me," he said. " I had been gradually pre- 
 pared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been 
 prepared for it by becoming intimate with a 
 very remarkable Jew, whose ideas have attracted 
 me so much that I think of devoting the best 
 part of my life to some effort at giving them 
 effect." 
 
 Again Gwendolen seemed shaken, — again 
 there was a look of frustration, but this time 
 it was mingled with alarm. She looked at 
 Deronda with lips childishly parted. It was 
 not that she had yet connected his words with 
 Mirah and her brother, but that they had in- 
 spired her with a dreadful presentiment of 
 mountainous travel for her mind before it could 
 reach Deronda' s. Great ideas in general which 
 she had attributed to him seemed to make no 
 great practical difference, and were not formi- 
 dable in the same way as these mysteriously 
 shadowed particular ideas. He could not quite 
 divine what was going on within her; he could 
 only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure. 
 
 " That is an object," he said, after a mo- 
 ment, " which will by and by force me to 
 leave England for some time — for some years. 
 I have purposes which will take me to the 
 East." 
 
 Here was something clearer, but all the more 
 immediately agitating. Gwendolen's lip began 
 to tremble. " But you will come back? " she 
 
376 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 said, tasting her own tears as they fell, before 
 she thought of drying them. 
 
 Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and 
 went to prop himself against the corner of the 
 mantelpiece, at a different angle from her face. 
 But when she had pressed her handkerchief 
 against her cheeks she turned and looked up at 
 him, awaiting an answer. 
 
 " If I live," said Deronda, — " some time,'' 
 
 They were both silent. He could not per- 
 suade himself to say more unless she led up to it 
 by a question ; and she was apparently meditat- 
 ing something that she had to say. 
 
 " What are you going to do? " she asked, at 
 last, very timidly. " Can I understand the ideas, 
 or am I too ignorant? " 
 
 " I am going to the East to become better ac- 
 quainted with the condition of my race in vari- 
 ous countries there," said Deronda, gently, — 
 anxious to be as explanatory as he could on what 
 was the impersonal part of their separateness 
 from each other. " The idea that I am possessed 
 with is that of restoring a political existence to 
 my people, making them a nation again, giving 
 them a national centre, such as the English have, 
 though they too are scattered over the face of 
 the globe. That is a task which presents itself 
 to me as a duty : I am resolved to begin it, how- 
 ever feebly. I am resolved to devote my life 
 to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in 
 other minds, such as has been awakened in my 
 own." 
 
 There was a long silence between them. The 
 world seemed getting larger round poor Gwen- 
 dolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 377 
 
 midst. The thought that he might come back 
 after going to the East, sank before the bewil- 
 dering vision of these wide-stretching purposes 
 in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. 
 There comes a terrible moment to many souls 
 when the great movements of the world, the 
 larger destinies of mankind, which have lain 
 aloof in newspapers and other neglected read- 
 ing, enter like an earthquake into their own lives, 
 — when the slow urgency of growing genera- 
 tions turns into the tread of an invading army 
 or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers 
 know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their 
 blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to 
 make lint and bandages which may serve for 
 the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. 
 Then it is as if the Invisible Power that has been 
 the object of lip-worship and lip -resignation be- 
 came visible, according to the imagery of the 
 Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and 
 riding on the wings of the wind, till the moun- 
 tains smoke and the plains shudder under the 
 rolling fiery visitation. Often the good cause 
 seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of unre- 
 lenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, 
 and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and 
 the palm branch. Then it is that the submission 
 of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even 
 in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the 
 scene of human struggle with the awful face of 
 duty, and a religion shows itself which is some- 
 thing else than a private consolation. 
 
 That was the sort of crisis which was at this 
 moment beginning in Gwendolen's small life: 
 she was for the first time feeling the pressure 
 
378 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time 
 being dislodged from her supremacy in her own 
 world, and getting a sense that her horizon was 
 but a dipping onward of an existence with which 
 her own was revolving. All the troubles of her 
 wifehood and widowhood had still left her with 
 the implicit impression which had accompanied 
 her from childhood, that whatever surrounded 
 her was somehow specially for her, and it was 
 because of this that no personal jealousy had 
 been roused in her in relation to Deronda: she 
 could not spontaneously think of him as right- 
 fully belonging to others more than to her. But 
 here had come a shock which went deeper than 
 personal jealousy, — something spiritual and 
 vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and 
 yet quelled all anger into self-humiliation. 
 
 There had been a long silence. Deronda had 
 stood still, even thankful for an interval before 
 he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat 
 like a statue with her wrists lying over each other 
 and her eyes fixed, — the intensity of her mental 
 action arresting all other excitation. At length 
 something occurred to her that made her turn 
 her face to Deronda and say in a trembling 
 voice, — 
 
 " Is that all you can tell me? " 
 
 The question was like a dart to him. " The 
 Jew whom I mentioned just now," he answered, 
 not without a certain tremor in his tones too, 
 " the remarkable man who has greatly influ- 
 enced my mind, has not perhaps been totally 
 unheard of by you. He is the brother of Miss 
 Lapidoth, whom you have often heard sing." 
 
 A great wave of remembrance passed through 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 379 
 
 Gwendolen, and spread as a deep painful flush 
 over face and neck. It had come first as the 
 scene of that morning when she had called on 
 Mirah, and heard Deronda's voice reading, and 
 been told, without then heeding it, that he was 
 reading Hebrew with Mirah's brother. 
 
 " He is very ill, — very near death now," De- 
 ronda went on nervously, and then stopped 
 short. He felt that he must wait. Would she 
 divine the rest? 
 
 " Did she tell you that I went to her? " said 
 Gwendolen, abruptly, looking up at him. 
 
 " No," said Deronda. " I don't understand 
 you." 
 
 She turned away her eyes again, and sat think- 
 ing. Slowly the colour died out of face and neck, 
 and she was as pale as before, — with that almost 
 withered paleness which is seen after a painful 
 flush. At last she said, without turning towards 
 him, — in a low, measured voice, as if she were 
 only thinking aloud in preparation for future 
 speech, — 
 
 " But can you marry? " 
 
 " Yes," said Deronda, also in a low voice. " I 
 am going to marry." 
 
 At first there was no change in Gwendolen's 
 attitude ; she only began to tremble visibly ; then 
 she looked before her with dilated eyes, as at 
 something Ijning in front of her, till she stretched 
 her arms out straight, and cried with a smoth- 
 ered voice, — 
 
 " I said I should be forsaken. I have been a 
 cruel woman. And I am forsaken." 
 
 Deronda's anguish was intolerable. He could 
 not help himself. He seized her outstretched 
 
380 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 hands and held them together, and kneeled at 
 her feet. She was the victim of his happiness. 
 
 " I am cruel too, I am cruel," he repeated, with 
 a sort of groan, looking up at her imploringly. 
 
 His presence and touch seemed to dispel a 
 horrible vision, and she met his upward look of 
 sorrow with something like the return of con- 
 sciousness after fainting. Then she dwelt on it 
 with that growing pathetic movement of the 
 brow which accompanies the revival of some 
 tender recollection. The look of sorrow brought 
 back what seemed a very far-off moment, — the 
 first time she had ever seen it, in the library at 
 the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. 
 Deronda would not let her hands go, — held 
 them still with one of his, and himself pressed 
 her handkerchief against her eyes. She sub- 
 mitted like a half -soothed child, making an 
 effort to speak, which was hindered by strug- 
 gling sobs. At last she succeeded in saying 
 brokenly, — 
 
 " I said ... I said ... it should be better 
 . . . better with me ... for having known 
 you." 
 
 His eyes too were larger with tears. She 
 wrested one of her hands from his, and returned 
 his action, pressing his tears away. 
 
 " We shall not be quite parted," he said. I 
 will write to you always, when I can, and you 
 will answer? " 
 
 He waited till she said in a whisper, " I will 
 try." 
 
 " I shall be more with you than I used to be," :si. 
 Deronda said with gentle urgency, releasing her ^ 
 hands and rising from his kneeling posture. 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 381 
 
 "If we had been much together before, we 
 should have felt our differences more, and seemed 
 to get farther apart. Now we can perhaps never 
 see each other again. But our minds may get 
 nearer." 
 
 Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, auto- 
 matically. Her withered look of grief, such as 
 the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn 
 up after the burial of life's joy, made him hate 
 his own words: they seemed to have the hard- 
 ness of easy consolation in them. She felt that 
 he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. 
 The sense of it was like a dreadful whisper in 
 her ear, which dulled all other consciousness; 
 and she had not known that she was rising. 
 
 Deronda could not speak again. He thought 
 that they must part in silence, but it was difficult 
 to move towards the parting, till she looked at 
 him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which 
 helped him. He advanced to put out his hand 
 silently; and when she had placed hers within 
 it, she said what her mind had been labouring 
 with, — 
 
 " You have been very good to me. I have de- 
 served nothing. I will try — try to live. I shall 
 think of you. What good have I been? Only 
 harm. Don't let me be harm to you. It shall be 
 the better for me — " 
 
 She could not finish. It was not that she was 
 sobbing, but that the intense effort with which 
 she spoke made her too tremulous. The bur- 
 then of that difficult rectitude towards him was 
 a weight her frame tottered under. 
 
 She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he 
 kissed hers. Then they looked at each other for 
 
382 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 an instant with clasped hands, and he turned 
 away. 
 
 When he was quite gone, her mother came in 
 and found-her sitting motionless. 
 
 " Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill," she 
 said, bending over her and touching her cold 
 hands. 
 
 " Yes, mamma. But don't be afraid. I am 
 going to live," said Gwendolen, bursting out 
 hysterically. 
 
 Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and 
 watched by her. Through the day and half the 
 night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, 
 but cried in the midst of them to her mother, 
 " Don't be afraid. I shall live. I mean to live." 
 
 After all, she slept; and when she waked in 
 the morning light, she looked up fixedly at her 
 mother and said tenderly: " Ah, poor mamma! 
 You have been sitting up with me. Don't be 
 unhappy. I shall live. I shall be better." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 "In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all 
 mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in 
 the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled ; one 
 tends the green cluster, and another treads the wine-press. Nay, 
 in each of our hves harvest and spring-time are continually one, until 
 Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields." 
 
 MONG the blessings of love there is 
 
 hardly one more exquisite than the sense 
 
 that in uniting the beloved life to ours 
 we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort 
 where hardship was, and over memories of 
 privation and suffering open the sweetest foun- 
 tains of joy. Deronda's love for Mirah was 
 strongly imbued with that blessed protective- 
 ness. Even with infantine feet she had begun 
 to tread among thorns; and the first time he 
 had beheld her face it had seemed to him the 
 girlish image of despair. 
 
 But now she was glowing like a dark-tipped 
 yet delicate ivory-tinted flower in the warm sun- 
 light of content, thinking of any possible grief 
 as part of that life with Deronda which she 
 could call by no other name than good. And 
 he watched the sober gladness which gave new 
 beauty to her movements and her habitual atti- 
 tudes of repose, with a delight which made him 
 say to himself that it was enough of personal 
 joy for him to save her from pain. She knew 
 nothing of Hans's struggle or of Gwendolen's 
 pang; for after the assurance that Deronda's 
 hidden love had been for her, she easily ex- 
 plained Gwendolen's eager solicitude about him 
 
384 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 as part of a grateful dependence on his good- 
 ness, such as she herself had known. And all 
 Deronda's words about Mrs. Grandcourt con- 
 firmed that view of their relation, though he 
 never touched on it except in the most distant 
 manner. Mirah was ready to believe that he 
 had been a rescuing angel to many besides her- 
 self. The only wonder was, that she among 
 them all was to have the bliss of being con- 
 tinually by his side. 
 
 So, when the bridal veil was around Mirah, it 
 hid no doubtful tremors, — only a thrill of awe 
 at the acceptance of a great gift which required 
 great uses. And the velvet canopy never cov- 
 ered a more goodly bride and bridegroom, to 
 whom their people might more wisely wish 
 offspring; more truthful lips never touched 
 the sacramental marriage-wine; the marriage- 
 blessing never gathered stronger promise of 
 fulfilment than in the integrity of their mutual 
 pledge. Naturally, they were married accord- 
 ing to the Jewish rite. And since no religion 
 seems yet to have demanded that when we make 
 a feast we should invite only the highest rank 
 of our acquaintances, few, it is to be hoped, 
 will be offended to learn that among the guests 
 at Deronda's little wedding-feast was the entire 
 Cohen family, with the one exception of the 
 baby, who carried on her teething intelligently 
 at home. How could Mordecai have borne that 
 those friends of his adversity should have been 
 shut out from rejoicing in common with him? 
 
 JNIrs. INIeyrick so fully understood this that 
 she had quite reconciled herself to meeting the 
 Jewish pawnbroker, and was there with her three 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 385 
 
 daughters, — all of them enjoying the conscious- 
 ness that Mirah's marriage to Deronda crowned 
 a romance which would always make a sweet 
 memory to them. For which of them, mother 
 or girls, had not had a generous part in it, — 
 giving their best in feeling and in act to her 
 who needed? If Hans could have been there, 
 it would have been better ; but Mab had already 
 observed that men must suffer for being so in- 
 convenient: suppose she, Kate, and Amy had 
 all fallen in love with Mr. Deronda? — but 
 being women, they were not so ridiculous. 
 
 The Meyricks were awarded for conquer- 
 ing their prejudices by hearing a speech from 
 Mr. Cohen, which had the rare quality among 
 speeches of not being quite after the usual pat- 
 tern. Jacob ate beyond his years; and con- 
 tributed several small whinnying laughs as a 
 free accompaniment of his father's speech, not 
 irreverently, but from a lively sense that his 
 family was distinguishing itself ; while Adelaide 
 Rebekah, in a new Sabbath frock, maintained 
 throughout a grave air of responsibility. 
 
 Mordecai's brilliant eyes, sunken in their large 
 sockets, dwelt on the scene with the cherishing 
 benignancy of a spirit already lifted into an 
 aloofness which nullified only selfish require- 
 ments and left sympathy alive. But continu- 
 ally, after his gaze had been travelling round 
 on the others, it returned to dwell on Deronda 
 with a fresh gleam of trusting affection. 
 
 The wedding-feast was humble, but Mirah 
 was not without splendid wedding-gifts. As 
 soon as the betrothal had been known, there 
 were friends who had entertained graceful de- 
 
 VOL. xrvr — 25 
 
886 DANIEL DERONDA 
 
 vices. Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger had taken 
 trouble to provide a complete equipment for 
 Eastern travel, as well as a precious locket 
 containing an inscription, — "To the bride of 
 our dear Daniel Deronda all blessings. — H. 4 
 L. M." The Klesmers sent a perfect watch, 
 also with a pretty inscription. 
 
 But something more precious than gold and 
 gems came to Deronda from the neighbourhood 
 of Diplow on the morning of his marriage. It 
 was a letter containing these words : — 
 
 Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. 
 I have remembered your words, — that I may live to 
 be one of the best of women, who make others glad 
 that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, 
 but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it 
 will be because you helped me. I only thought of my- 
 self, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think 
 of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. 
 It is better — it shall be better with me because I 
 have known you. Gwendolen Ghandcourt. 
 
 The preparations for the departure of all 
 three to the East began at once; for Deronda 
 could not deny Ezra's wish that they should set 
 out on the voyage forthwith, so that he might 
 go with them, instead of detaining them to watch 
 over him. He had no belief that Ezra's life 
 would last through the voyage, for there were 
 symptoms which seemed to show that the last 
 stage of his malady had set in. But Ezra him- r 
 self had said, " Never mhid where I die, so that 
 I am with you." 
 
 He did not set out with them. One morning 
 early he said to Deronda, " Do not quit me to- 
 day. I shall die before it is ended." 
 
FRUIT AND SEED 387 
 
 He chose to be dressed and sit up in his easy- 
 chair as usual, Deronda and Mirah on each side 
 of him, and for some hours he was unusually 
 silent, not even making the effort to speak, but 
 looking at them occasionally with eyes full of 
 some restful meaning, as if to assure them that 
 while this remnant of breathing-time was diffi- 
 cult, he felt an ocean of peace beneath him. 
 
 It was not till late in the afternoon, when the 
 light was failing, that he took a hand of each in 
 his and said, looking at Deronda, " Death is com- 
 ing to me as the divine kiss which is both parting 
 and reunion, — which takes me from your bodily 
 eyes and gives me full presence in your soul. 
 Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not 
 begun? Have I not breathed my soul into yoii? 
 We shall Hve together." 
 
 He paused, and Deronda waited, thinking 
 that there might be another word for him. But 
 slowly and with effort Ezra, pressing on their 
 hands, raised himself and uttered in Hebrew the 
 confession of the divine Unity, which for long 
 generations has been on the lips of the dying 
 Israelite. 
 
 He sank back gently into his chair, and did 
 not speak again. But it was some hours before 
 he had ceased to breathe, with Mirah's and 
 Deronda's arms around him. 
 
 "Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
 Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, 
 Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair. 
 And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 
 
 THE END 
 
 The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.