<h2><SPAN name="2HCH0032"></SPAN> CHAPTER XXXII.</h2>
<p class="poem">
In all ages it hath been a favorite 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 Heraclitus 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 Juliet, wherein any objections he might have held against
Ptolemy had made little difference 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
acknowledge 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.</p>
<p>Deronda, on his return to town, could assure Sir Hugo of his having lodged in
Grandcourt’s mind a distinct understanding that he could get fifty
thousand pounds by giving up a prospect which was probably distant, 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.</p>
<p>“And what did you think of the future bride on a nearer survey?”
said Sir Hugo.</p>
<p>“I thought better of her than I did in Leubronn. Roulette was not a good
setting for her; it brought out something of the demon. At Diplow she seemed
much more womanly and attractive—less hard and self-possessed. I thought
her mouth and eyes had quite a different expression.”</p>
<p>“Don’t flirt with her too much, Dan,” said Sir Hugo, meaning
to be agreeably playful. “If you make Grandcourt savage when they come to
the Abbey at Christmas, it will interfere with my affairs.”</p>
<p>“I can stay in town, sir.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think you ever saw me flirt,” said Deronda, not
amused.</p>
<p>“Oh, haven’t I, though?” said Sir Hugo, provokingly.
“You are always looking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a
Jesuitical way. You are a dangerous young fellow—a kind of Lovelace who
will make the Clarissas run after you instead of you running after them.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He would be on his guard in future; for example, in his behavior 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 difficult not
to show a tender kind of interest both by looks and speech.</p>
<p>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 toward 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 beautiful
voice.”</p>
<p>But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particulars which would have required her
to say that Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue, found the
Jewish faith less reconcilable 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.</p>
<p>“Excuse me, Mirah, but <i>does</i> it seem quite right to you that the
women should sit behind rails in a gallery apart?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I never thought of anything else,” said Mirah, with mild
surprise.</p>
<p>“And you like better to see the men with their hats on?” said Mab,
cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back to
me the same feelings—the feelings I would not part with for anything else
in the world.”</p>
<p>After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine or practice, would have seemed
to these generous 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.</p>
<p>“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.
“Perhaps 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.”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think it, my dear,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I
believe Mirah is cut out after the pattern 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 reckoning, I suppose” (she shot a
mischievous glance at her own daughters), “and a dead mother is worth
more than a living one?”</p>
<p>“Well, and so she may be, little mother,” said Kate; “but we
would rather hold you cheaper, and have you alive.”</p>
<p>Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the
irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, but Deronda
himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been roused by this apparition
of Mirah to the consciousness 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 something
(no matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise; and
Deronda, like his neighbors, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric
fossilized form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and
leave to specialists. But Mirah, with her terrified 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 immediately afterward set out with Sir Hugo he began to look for the
outsides of synagogues, and the title of books about the Jews. This awakening
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 ignorance—is an effectual remedy for
<i>ennui</i>, 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 entered a Jewish
synagogue—at Frankfort—where his party rested on a Friday. In
exploring the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long before, 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 interested
in his future. True, when a young man has a fine person, no eccentricity of
manners, the education of a gentleman, and a present income, it is not
customary to feel a prying curiosity 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 objectionable. But any one
wishing to understand 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.</p>
<p>It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him the
more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent
indefiniteness in his sentiments. His 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 imagination 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 reflective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy.
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 fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his
affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations
on government and religion, yet loth 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 repugnance to taking up that clue
of success which the order of the world often forces upon us and makes it
treason against the common weal to reject. And yet his fear of falling into an
unreasoning 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 innovator. A too reflective and diffusive
sympathy was in danger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong and
that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral 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 compress 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 everything 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 justify
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 not contented to live without; but how to 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 had 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 proclaim anything) to be the best of all life, and for himself
the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotion and its
progeny of sentiments—which make the savors of life—substantial and
strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all
differences. To pound the objects of sentiment into small 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?</p>
<p>Something like this was the common under-current in Deronda’s mind while
he was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite conversation. 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 patriarch have had to pass
through, with more or less of bruising if not laming.</p>
<p>I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made him easily
feel the presence of poetry in everyday 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 sublimely 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 sorrowing memory.</p>
<p>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 affectionately 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 certain cards,
apparently combining advantages of business with religion, and shoutingly
proposed 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 background 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 distinguishable from queer-looking
Christians of the same mixed <i>morale</i>. 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 ridiculous exaggeration,
began to use that corrective comparison: he paid his thaler too much, without
prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew destiny, or his wish to find the
<i>Rabbinische Schule</i>, which he arrived at by sunset, and entered with a
good congregation of men.</p>
<p>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 white 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 with unknown persons,
and a reason to Deronda for not looking again; but he immediately found an open
prayer-book pushed toward him and had to bow his thanks. However, the
congregation had mustered, the reader had mounted to the <i>almemor</i> 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 detailed verbal
meaning—like the effect of an Allegri’s <i>Miserere</i> or a
Palestrina’s <i>Magnificat</i>. 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 invocation of all
Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of
Gladness, a <i>Gloria in excelsis</i> that such Good exists; both the yearning
and the exaltation 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 Deronda: the chant of the <i>Chazaris</i> 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 backward and forward, the very commonness of the building
and shabbiness of the scene where a national faith, 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 burden a passionate regret, which, if he had known the liturgy for
the Day of Reconciliation, he might have clad in its antithetic burden;
“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.”</p>
<p>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 person 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 neighbor 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 neighbor, who said to him in German, “Excuse me, young
gentleman—allow me—what is your parentage—your mother’s
family—her maiden name?”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 reflecting that he could not
have acted differently. 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
unwarrantable liberty in the abruptness of his question, 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 romantic; 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 strongest difference between him and
Deronda, who rarely ate at breakfast without some silent discursive flight
after grounds for filling up his day according to the practice of his
contemporaries.</p>
<p>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, would have seemed a threat rather than
a promise of revelation, and reinforced his anxiety as to the effect of finding
Mirah’s relatives and his resolve to proceed with caution. If he made any
unpleasant 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. Meyrick
and Mab, the open piano, and all the glorious company of engravings. The dainty
neatness of her hair and dress, the glow of tranquil happiness 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,</p>
<p>“See how different I am from the miserable creature by the river! all
because you found me and brought me to the very best.”</p>
<p>“It was my good chance to find you,” said Deronda. “Any other
man would have been glad to do what I did.”</p>
<p>“That is not the right way to be 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.”</p>
<p>“I agree with Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “Saint Anybody is a
bad saint to pray to.”</p>
<p>“Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you,” said Mirah,
smiling at Mrs. Meyrick. “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 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 <i>little</i> afraid.”</p>
<p>“What is it you are afraid of?” said Deronda with anxiety.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“It is surely not very probable,” said Deronda, 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?”</p>
<p>She did not answer immediately, but meditated 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 alive 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,
to say Kaddish in memory of her. 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.”</p>
<p>“In what way are you not a good Jewess?” said Deronda.</p>
<p>“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 remember a play I read in
German—since I have been here it has come into my mind—where the
heroine says something like that.”</p>
<p>“<i>Antigone</i>,” said Deronda.</p>
<p>“Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not
to love my best 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!”</p>
<p>“God bless you, child!” said Mrs. Meyrick, the words escaping
involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of feeling she
looked at Deronda and said, “It is curious 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.”</p>
<p>“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 a 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.”</p>
<p>It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs. Meyrick
and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt as painfully
dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her memories,</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Like your singing—yes,” said Mab, who had hitherto kept a
modest silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of
Prince Camaralzaman—“Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not
heard her.”</p>
<p>“Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?” said Deronda, with a
more deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.</p>
<p>“Oh, I shall like it,” said Mirah. “My voice has come back a
little with rest.”</p>
<p>Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity of her
nature. The circumstances of her life 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-consciousness was born.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 transparent orbs of life that we find in the
sea—imagine 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 fortune 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.</p>
<p>She sang Beethoven’s “Per pietà 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 darkness; then he refrained from what might seem oddity,
and was ready to meet the look of mute appeal which she turned toward him at
the end.</p>
<p>“I think I never enjoyed a song more than that,” he said,
gratefully.</p>
<p>“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 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 Meyrick found for me.
They pay me nearly two crowns for their two lessons.”</p>
<p>“I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after
Christmas,” said Deronda. “You would not mind singing before any
one who wished to hear you?”</p>
<p>“Oh no, I want to do something to get money. I could teach reading and
speaking, Mrs. Meyrick thinks. But if no one would learn of me, that is
difficult.” Mirah 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 can not 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.”</p>
<p>“I should think you can get rich,” said Deronda, smiling.
“Great ladies will perhaps like you to teach their daughters. We shall
see. But now do sing again to us.”</p>
<p>She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani
and Schubert; then, when she had left the piano, Mab said, entreatingly,
“Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn.”</p>
<p>“It is too childish,” said Mirah. “It is like lisping.”</p>
<p>“What is the hymn?” said Deronda.</p>
<p>“It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother singing over her when she
lay in her cot,” said Mrs. Meyrick.</p>
<p>“I should like very much to hear it,” said Deronda, “if you
think I am worthy to hear what is so sacred.”</p>
<p>“I will sing it if you like,” said Mirah, “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.”</p>
<p>Deronda shook his head. “It will be quite good Hebrew to me.”</p>
<p>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;
the voice in which she gave it forth had gathered even a sweeter, more cooing
tenderness than was heard in her other songs.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“Why not?” said Deronda. “The lisped syllables are very full
of meaning.”</p>
<p>“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “A mother hears something
of a lisp in her children’s talk to the very last. Their words are not
just what everybody else says, though they may be spelled 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 all the wood in
it, from the very first it made.”</p>
<p>“Is not that the way with friendship, too?” said Deronda, smiling.
“We must not let the mothers be too arrogant.”</p>
<p>The little woman shook her head over her darning.</p>
<p>“It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend. Friendships begin
with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up. Mother’s love
begins deeper down.”</p>
<p>“Like what you were saying about the influence 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—perhaps more.”</p>
<p>“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 hesitated, feeling that she could not disentangle her
thought from its imagery.</p>
<p>“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 hesitated in his turn—“that is
perhaps not always so.”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in, and
like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them,” said
Deronda apologetically.</p>
<p>“But you are not like that,” said Mirah, looking at him with
unconscious fixedness.</p>
<p>“No, I think not,” said Deronda; “but you know I was not
brought up as a Jew.”</p>
<p>“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a look of
disappointed recollection, and slightly blushing.</p>
<p>Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause, which he
put an end to by saying playfully,</p>
<p>“Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we all
went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just the
same.”</p>
<p>“To be sure. We should go on forever in zig-zags,” said Mrs.
Meyrick. “I think it is very weak-minded to make your creed up by the
rule of the contrary. Still one may honor 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 honor my parents’ memory.”</p>
<p>“But I could not make myself not a Jewess,” said Mirah,
insistently, “even if I changed my belief.”</p>
<p>“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. Meyrick, taking
that consummation very cheerfully.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become 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
personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of
professed Catholicism 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.”</p>
<p>“Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!” said Mrs. Meyrick,
alarmed. “God forbid 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. Forgive me,
come! we will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to
you.”</p>
<p>“I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life,” said Mirah,
not yet quite calm.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear
to think of that,” said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She
had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become severe
if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this inconvenient susceptibility to
innocent remarks.</p>
<p>Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange contrast by
the side of Mirah’s—smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically as he
said, “That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far
in practice. Mirah’s feelings, she tells us, are concerned with what
is.”</p>
<p>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,</p>
<p>“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,
inclining to the opinion of Socrates: “What motive has a man to live, if
not for the pleasure of discourse?”</p>
<p>Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him
to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, “Hans is to share my
chambers when he comes at Christmas.”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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 fervor 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.</p>
<p>“I have my hands on the reins now,” he thought, “and I will
not drop them. I shall go there as little as possible.”</p>
<p>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 himself as a lover—whom she did not
love—whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged 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 conscience as remorse.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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 fortune 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 but happiness. There could be no
refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my taking
the vows and settling everything as it should be, if that marplot Hans comes
and upsets it all?”</p>
<p>Few things were more likely. Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs seemed
more breakable 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 impracticable. 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 discovery of Hans’s inclination he gave him a very energetic
warning—suddenly checked, however, 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 provision against
dangers until they came nearer. To save an unhappy Jewess from drowning
herself, 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 consequences. Deronda would not let himself for a
moment dwell on any supposition that the consequences might enter deeply into
his own life. The image of Mirah had never yet had that penetrating 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.</p>
<p>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 measures. 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 repugnance to the possible truth, which
threw a turning weight into the scale of argument.</p>
<p>“At least, I will look about,” was his final determination.
“I may find some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after
Christmas.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />