Chapter Thirty-six
Meanwhile Deronda had been led off by Mr. Vandernoodt, who wished for a cigar and a little gossip. That gentleman presently said–
“What a washed-out piece of cambric Grandcourt 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; though Lush, his old chum, hints that he married this girl out of obstinacy. By George! it was a very accountable obstinacy. But it must be 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.”
“No, no; not Diplow: Gadsmere. Sir Hugo knows, I’ll answer for it.”
Deronda said nothing, despite feeling some curiosity; but Mr. Vandernoodt required no prompting.
“Lush would not altogether own to it, of course. But I have it on the best authority. 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 – left her husband for him. He’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 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 didn’t marry her, for there’s a very fine boy, and I understand Grandcourt can do as he pleases with the estates.”
“What right had he to marry this girl?” said Deronda, with disgust.
Mr. Vandernoodt, adjusting his cigar, shrugged.
“She can know nothing of it,” said Deronda, emphatically. But that statement was immediately followed by an inward query – “Could she have known?”
“It’s rather a piquant picture,” said Mr. Vandernoodt, “Grandcourt between two fiery women. These fine women generally get hold of a stick.”
“Grandcourt is no stick,” said Deronda.
“I can’t quite make him out. But this girl 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.”
“He doesn’t listen much,” said Deronda. After a pause, he went on, “I think there must be some exaggeration in what you have heard about this lady at Gadsmere.”
“Not a bit. People have forgotten all about it. But there the nest is, and the birds are in it. And I have good evidence that Grandcourt goes there. However, that’s nobody’s business but his own. The affair has sunk below the surface.”
Deronda then chose to point to some giant oaks worth looking at: although this piece of gossip interested him, he felt that Mr. Vandernoodt had no more to tell.
Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his own birth, his mind had never been so active in weaving probabilities as it now began to be about Gwendolen’s marriage. Could she have gained some knowledge of this other household, which caused her to shrink from the match – a shrinking finally overcome by poverty? Her words seemed to show that she was conscious of having done some wrong. His own acute experience made him alive to the injury which might affect the unavowed children and their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under all her determined show of satisfaction, gnawed by self-reproach, disappointment or jealousy?
He dwelt especially on the signs of self-reproach: he was inclined to judge her tenderly. He thought he had found a key by which to interpret her more clearly, imagining the misery of a young creature who had wedded her fresh hopes to old secrets; and he saw why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this affair to him. Immediately the image of Mrs. Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden birth.
Gwendolen knowing of that woman and her children, marrying Grandcourt, and showing herself contented, would have repulsed him; but Gwendolen tasting bitter remorse for contributing to their injury was a sympathetic figure. She seemed to have reached a common plane of understanding with him on matters which a woman is rarely able to judge of with justice or generosity: for she might easily have taken the view that her husband’s marriage was his entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs. Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And Deronda had naturally some resentment on behalf of the abandoned Hagars and Ishmaels.
Undeniably his growing solicitude about Gwendolen depended chiefly on her peculiar manner toward him; but he dismissed any idea of her being a coquette trying to involve him in a vulgar flirtation, and he determined that he would not again evade any opportunity of talking to her.
That evening, he realised 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, began to feel that in shutting herself up she missed all chances of seeing and hearing, and that her visit would only last two days more. She adjusted herself, put on her self-possession, and going down, made herself resolutely agreeable. Lady Pentreath was amusing the assembled ladies with a description of a Regency drawing-room, when Deronda entered.
“Shall I be acceptable?” he said. “Perhaps I had better go back to the others in the billiard-room.”
“No, no; stay where you are,” said Lady Pentreath. “Let us hear what you have to say.”
“That is rather an embarrassing appeal,” said Deronda, drawing up a chair. “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 entered my head that anyone here wanted singing lessons.”
“All ladies know someone else who wants singing lessons,” said Deronda. “I have happened to find an exquisite singer,”– here he turned to Lady Pentreath. “She is living with some ladies who are friends of mine. 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, aren’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.”
“Why did she leave the stage, then?” said Lady Pentreath.
“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. “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; but I trust Daniel’s recommendation. I mean my girls to have lessons.”
“Is it a charitable affair?” said Lady Pentreath.
“It is a charity to those who want to have a good model of feminine singing,” said Deronda. “If you heard Miss Lapidoth” – here he looked at Gwendolen – “perhaps you would change 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 encourage me to try. I don’t mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing seem worthy of doing. Although my own music is not good for much, the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence shows us the spiritual wealth of the world.”
“But if we can’t imitate it, it only makes our own life seem tamer,” said Gwendolen.
“That depends on the point of view, I think,” said Deronda. “Most of us ought to practice art only as private study – preparation to understand 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 sarcasm.
“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 Lady Pentreath.
“On the contrary, she has not reached it,” said Deronda. “She is barely twenty.”
“And very pretty,” interposed Lady Mallinger, with an amiable wish to help Deronda. “And she has very good manners. I’m sorry she’s a Jewess; but it doesn’t matter in singing.”
“Well, I’ll tell Lady Clementina to set her on my nine granddaughters,” said Lady Pentreath; “and I hope she’ll convince eight of them that they have not voice enough to sing anywhere but at church. I think many of our girls nowadays want lessons not to sing.”
“I have had my lessons in that,” said Gwendolen, looking at Deronda.
While she was speaking, Sir Hugo entered with some of the other gentlemen, including Grandcourt, and said–
“What is Deronda imposing on you, ladies – slipping in among you by himself?”
“A pretty singing Jewess who is to astonish these young people,” said Lady Pentreath. “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, there have been singers since Catalani’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 and left you all in the lurch.”
“Yes, it’s too bad when these great singers marry themselves into silence,” said Sir Hugo, while Deronda moved away to make room for others, and sat down a little apart.
Presently he became aware that Gwendolen had walked to the piano, where she stood apparently examining the music which lay there. Will anyone be surprised at his concluding that she wished him to join her? He went to her side and said–
“Are you relenting about the music and looking for something to play or sing?”
“I am not looking for anything, but I am relenting,” said Gwendolen. “I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have lessons from her, since you admire her so much, 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.
“I shall be really glad for you to see and hear her,” said Deronda, returning the smile. “She has had an unhappy life, and 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 trouble hers were?”
“I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the brink of drowning herself in despair.”
“And what hindered her?” said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda.
“Some ray or other came – which made her feel that it was good to live,” he answered quietly. “She is full of piety, and seems capable of submitting to any duty.”
“Those people are not to be pitied,” said Gwendolen, impatiently, fingering the music. “I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don’t believe in their great sufferings.”
“It is true,” said Deronda, “that the consciousness of having done wrong is deeper and more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures feel the most for those who struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient story, that of the lost sheep.”
“That is a way of speaking – it is not real,” said Gwendolen, bitterly. “You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her blameless. You would despise a woman who had done something you thought very wrong.”
“That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done,” said Deronda.
“You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose,” said Gwendolen, impetuously.
“No, not satisfied – full of sorrow for her. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is not more adorable; I meant that people 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 consequences 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, sitting on the music-stool, looked up at him with pain in her eyes, like a wounded animal asking for help.
“Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to 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.
There was an end of any 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 picture-gallery above the cloister. When Gwendolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance of Leubronn, to put on the old turquoise necklace 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 necklace somehow, she wound it thrice round her wrist and made a bracelet of it just before 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. Red carpet was laid down for the occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in every recess of the gallery; and the old portraits made a piquant line of spectators. Some neighbouring gentry were invited; and Sir Hugo expected Grandcourt to feel flattered by being asked to the Abbey at a time which included this festival. All present knew that they were to see “young Grandcourt,” Sir Hugo’s nephew, the presumptive heir, now visiting the Abbey with his bride; and Gwendolen, opening the ball with Sir Hugo, was necessarily the focus of all eyes.
A year before, if some magic mirror could have shown Gwendolen her position, she would have imagined herself in a glow of triumphant pleasure, ready to make the best of her cleverness and spirit in her new life. And now she was wondering that she could get so little joy out of her exalted state, above the petty empire of her girlhood with its irksome lack of distinction and superfluity of sisters.
Wondering in this way at her own dullness, and longing for an excitement that would deaden her aches, she passed through files of admiring beholders in the country-dance with which the ball opened, and was generally regarded by her own sex as an enviable woman, who carried herself with a wonderful air, considering her origins. Poor Gwendolen! She would by-and-by become practised in the skill of bearing this last great gambling loss with an air of perfect self-possession.
The next couple that passed were also worth looking at. Lady Pentreath had insisted on standing up with Mr. Deronda. The contrast certainly set off the old lady well. She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had wisely embraced the beauty of age as early as possible. What might have seemed harshness in her face when she was young, had turned now into a satisfactory strength of feature which defied wrinkles, and was set off by a crown of white hair. She glided along gracefully, with a mischievous smile in her eyes as she observed the company. Her partner’s young richness of tint against her flattened hues had an effect something like that of a fine flower against a lichenous branch.
Grandcourt stood up with Lady Mallinger. It was agreed by onlookers that the heir to the estate could have had more hair, a fresher colour, and greater animation; but that Mr. Grandcourt could never be taken for anything but a born gentleman. Perhaps the person least well-disposed toward him at that moment was Lady Mallinger, to whom this country-dance with Grandcourt was a blazonment of herself as the unlucky wife who had p
roduced nothing but daughters.
One side of the quadrangle was used for dancing, and the opposite side for the supper-table; a third side was less brilliantly lit, and fitted with comfortable seats. Later in the evening Gwendolen was in one of these seats, and Grandcourt was standing near her. They were not talking to each other; and Deronda, observing this, went up to ask her if she had resolved not to dance any more. Having himself been doing hard duty at dancing with the guests, he thought he had earned the right to sink into the background, and he had spoken little to Gwendolen since their conversation at the piano the day before. Grandcourt’s presence would make it the easier to show his friendly pleasure in talking to her, even about trivialities.
Her face looked blank, but a smile beamed from it as she saw him coming, and she raised herself from her leaning posture. Grandcourt had been grumbling at the tedium of this stupid dance, and proposing that they should vanish: she had resisted on the ground of politeness, even though she was a little frightened that he was silently angry with her. She began to despair of the opportunity for which she had put the old necklace on her wrist. But now at last Deronda had come.
“Yes; I shall not dance any more. Are you not glad that you need not ask me?” she said gaily. “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 another way, and fetch me a glass of water?”
It was but a few steps that Deronda had to go for the water. Gwendolen was wrapped in the lightest of white woollen wraps, under which her hands were hidden. While he was gone she had drawn off her glove, and when she put up her hand to take the glass and drink, the necklace-bracelet, with its clumsy triple winding, was conspicuous. Grandcourt 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; “it is an old necklace I like to wear. I lost it once, and someone found it for me.”
With that she gave the glass again to Deronda, who carried it away, and on returning said, in order to banish any consciousness about the necklace–
“It is worth going to look out of the windows on that side. You can see the finest possible moonlight on the stone pillars and carving.”
“I should like to see it. Will you go?” said Gwendolen to her husband.
Saying, “No, Deronda will take you,” he slowly walked away.
Gwendolen’s face showed a fleeting vexation at this show of indifference toward her. Deronda felt annoyed for her sake; and with a sense that it would relieve her to behave as if nothing unusual had occurred, he said, “Will you take my arm and go, while only servants are there?” He thought that he understood her action in drawing his attention to the necklace: she wished him to infer that she had submitted herself to rebuke, and that she felt no lingering resentment. Her evident confidence in his interpretation appealed to him.
As they walked together, Gwendolen felt as if the previous annoyance had removed another veil of reserve from between them. She did not speak until they were at the window looking out on the moonlit court. She folded her hands in her wrap, and pressed her brow against the glass. He moved slightly away, abstaining from remarking on the scene, for fear that any indifferent words might jar on her: already the calm light and shadow, the ancient steadfast forms, had aloofness enough from her inward troubles. He judged aright: she would have been impatient of polite conversation. In a subdued voice, she said–
“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 make gain out of another’s loss in that way – and I have done a great deal worse.”
“I can imagine temptations,” said Deronda. “And at least I understand self-reproach.” He was almost alarmed at her sudden confidence toward him, in contrast with her habitual 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.
“That is not to be amended by doing one thing only – but many,” said Deronda, decisively.
“What?” said Gwendolen, moving away from the glass and looking at him.
He looked full at her in return, with some severity. He felt he must not let himself be tender.
“I mean there are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it.”
She turned 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 gambling? I might have won again, and I might not have to care for anything else. You would not let me do that. Why shouldn’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. “Idiots escape 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 without feeling remorse.”
“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 something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.”
For an instant or two Gwendolen was mute. Then she said–
“You mean that I am selfish and ignorant.”
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, but a subtle change came over her face: the subsidence of self-assertion.
“Shall I lead you back?” said Deronda, gently offering her his arm. She took it silently, and that way they came in sight of Grandcourt. Gwendolen went up to him and said, “I am ready to go now. Mr. Deronda will excuse us to Lady Mallinger.”
“Certainly,” said Deronda.
Grandcourt gave his arm in silent compliance, nodding over his shoulder to Deronda, and Gwendolen 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 expecting something unpleasant, had nervously thrown off her shawl, and immediately obeyed. 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 between 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 telegraphing 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 nightmare 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 distinct in its inward tones. “What I care to know I shall know without your telling me. Only you will 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 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 or you will go to the devil.”
“I never intended anything but to fill my place properly,” said Gwendolen, with bitterest mo
rtification 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 turned his back to the fire and looked down on her. She was mute. There was no reproach that she dared to fling back at him. She dreaded making a fool of herself and being compromised. It was futile to try and explain that Deronda had only been a monitor. Grandcourt was contemptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain of her subjection.
Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that closed around her. She sat in her splendid attire, a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even 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 assent, 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 a whispered answer: “Why did you put your fangs into me and not into him?” 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 to talk as much as she liked with Deronda; but no opportunities occurred, and she dared not devise any for the sake of her pride and dignity. Although she did not think that Deronda would misunderstand her openness, others might. But when the last morning came, still she had never been able to take up the dropped thread of their talk.
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 join in it. Grandcourt had gone out with Sir Hugo; other gentlemen were shooting; she was condemned to go and see the waterfowl, and everything else that she least wanted to see, with the ladies and Mr. Vandernoodt.
The irritation became too strong for her; without premeditation, she took advantage of the winding road to linger out of sight, and then set off back to the house, almost running when she was safe from observation. She entered by a side door, near the library. Deronda, she knew, was often there; why might she not enter? She had been taken there expressly to see the family tree – what more natural than that she should like to look in again?
The door was ajar. She pushed it gently, and looked round it. Deronda was there, writing at a distant table, with his back toward the door (Sir Hugo had asked him to answer some constituents’ letters). An enormous log fire warmed the great room. It seemed too daring to go in – too rude to 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. He sat back to consider whether he could walk out for the chance of meeting the party which included Gwendolen, when he heard her voice saying, “Mr. Deronda.”
He rose hastily, and turned with a strong expression of surprise.
“Am I wrong to come in?” said Gwendolen.
“I thought you were on your walk,” he said.
“I turned back.”
“Do you intend to go out again? I could join you now.”
“No; I want to say something, and I can’t stay long,” said Gwendolen, speaking quickly and quietly, while she walked forward and rested her arms on the back of a chair. “I want to tell you that it is so – I can’t help feeling remorse for having injured others. That was what I meant when I said that I had done worse than gamble again. 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 – made her appeal unspeakably touching.
Deronda said– “I should feel what you feel: deep sorrow.”
“But what would you try to do?” said Gwendolen urgently.
“Order my life so as to make any possible amends, and keep away from doing any injury again,” said Deronda.
“But I can’t – I can’t; I must go on,” said Gwendolen, in a passionate loud whisper. “I have made my gain out of others’ loss – tried to make it. And I must go on. I can’t alter it.”
It was impossible to answer this instantaneously. Her words had confirmed his guess, and the situation rose in swift images before him. He felt for those who had been thrust out, yet his heart was full of pity for her. He answered–
“It is bitter to bear our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to incurable disease? If you made the wrong a reason for more effort toward good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may make us long to save other lives from being spoiled.”
“But you have not wronged anyone, or spoiled their lives,” said Gwendolen, hastily. “It is only others who have wronged you. You were right – I am selfish. I have never thought much of anyone’s feelings, except my mother’s. I have not been fond of people. But what can I do? I must get up in the morning and do what everyone else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. 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?”
“Life would be worth more to you,” said Deronda with indignant severity, which he encouraged as his own safeguard, “if some real knowledge were to 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 narrow round, for want of ideas to make a larger home for it. Is there any occupation of mind that you care about with delight or interest?”
Deronda paused, but Gwendolen, looking startled and thrilled as by an electric shock, said nothing, and he went on–
“I take what you said of music for a small example: you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction? The refuge you need from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region which we reach by knowledge.”
The remonstrance in Deronda’s voice came from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. She was roused into self-judgment, like a child shaken out of its wailing 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 halted them – for Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure which comes 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 none about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible. Things have changed in such a short time. What I used not to like I long for now. I think I am almost fond of the old things now they are gone.” Her lip trembled.
“Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light,” said Deronda, more gently. “You are conscious of more beyond yourself. You are learning the way in which your life presses on others, and their life 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 ag
itation. “I am frightened at everything. When my blood is fired I can do daring things – take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself.”
Deronda said, with quick comprehension–
“Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. 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, like quickness of hearing, that can warn you of consequences. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as 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. “But if feelings rose – 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, agitated, and looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of seeing his urgings as mere pallid words before the outburst of her emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compassion in his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before. In a changed and imploring tone she said–
“I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You can help me. I will think of everything. I will try. You will not mind that I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when you rebuked me.” She said this with a melancholy smile, but added more entreatingly, “It will not be a pain to you?”
“Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come,” said Deronda strongly; “otherwise, it will be a lasting pain.”
“No – no – it shall not be. It shall be better with me because I have known you.” She turned immediately, and quitted the room.
When she was on the staircase, Sir Hugo crossed the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. When the baronet entered, Deronda was standing in his usual attitude, grasping his coat-collar, with that indefinable expression of a man still in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved, and began to arrange the letters.
“Has Mrs. Grandcourt been 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, Sir Hugo said, “I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan – you understand me?”
“I believe I do, sir,” said Deronda, with some repressed anger. “But there is no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching.”
Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then said, “So much the better. For, between ourselves, I fancy there may be some hidden gunpowder in that marriage.”