Chapter Fifty-one
When Deronda presented himself at the door of his mother’s apartment he felt some revival of his boyhood agitations. The two servants looked a little surprised that the doctor their lady had come to consult was this striking young gentleman in evening dress. But Deronda could notice nothing until he found himself in the presence of a figure who stood awaiting his approach.
She was covered, except her face and fore-arms, with black lace. Her arms, adorned with rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine poise of her head made it look handsomer than it really was. Deronda held the hand she had put out and raised it to his lips. She looked at him examiningly; he was conscious that her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person.
Deronda felt himself changing colour, 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 conjecture in what language she would speak to him. Suddenly, she let fall his hand, and placed both hers on his shoulders, while a flash of admiration in her face seemed to restore its youth.
“You are a beautiful creature!” she said, in a low melodious voice, with a foreign but agreeable pronunciation. “I knew you would be.” Then she kissed him on each cheek, and he returned the kisses. But it was something like a greeting between royalties.
She paused a moment 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, and folding her arms again, looking at him as if she invited him to observe her. He saw her likeness to himself, but with striking differences. She was a remarkable looking being, but she gave him 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 of some other world.
“I used to think that you might be suffering,” he said, anxious not to wound her. “I used to wish that I could comfort you.”
“I am suffering. But with a suffering that you can’t comfort,” said the Princess, in a harder voice, moving to a sofa. “Sit down.” She pointed to a seat near her; and then added, more gently, “I am not suffering at this moment. I am at ease now, and 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 the longed-for mother. He was beginning to watch her with wonder, from the spiritual distance to which she had thrown him.
“I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not know 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 have never seen me. But I did not think I deprived you of anything worth having.”
“You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been worth having,” said Deronda.
“I don’t mean to speak ill of myself,” said the princess proudly, “But I had not much affection to give you. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. I was no princess then.” She rose with a sudden movement, and Deronda rose too; he felt breathless.
“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. I did not want a child.”
There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She seemed to fling out the last words against some possible reproach 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. She went on with the same intensity.
“I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying by my father’s 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 seek freedom from a bondage that I hated.”
She seated herself again, and after a moment looked up at him with a less defiant pleading as she said–
“I wanted to keep you from that bondage that I hated. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of being born a Jew.”
“Then I am a Jew?” Deronda burst out. “My father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?”
“Yes, your father was my cousin,” said the mother, watching him as if she saw something that she might have to be afraid of.
“I am glad of it,” he said impetuously. He could not have dreamed beforehand that he would say that in opposition to his mother. He was shaken by a mixed anger against this woman, who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had willingly made herself a stranger to him, and perhaps was now making herself known unwillingly.
But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and with her the shaking was visible. 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 into his chair again, while he looked away.
He was now trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept in upon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this unique moment. There was a pause before his mother spoke again, in firmly resistant 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 held such bitterness that any listener might have supposed some hatred had arisen between mother and son.
But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling what life was like for her whose best years were gone, and who with a suffering frame was now exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but also hers. His face regained some of its penetrative calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitating influence over her: her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of fascination.
“Forgive me, if I speak hastily,” he said. “Why have you resolved now on disclosing the facts to me? Why – since you seem angry that I should be glad?”
“Oh – reasons!” said the Princess, with sarcastic scorn. “When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel – or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me for sending you away, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about 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. As for reasons, a fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are rising round me. If I have wronged the dead – I have but little time to do what I left undone.”
The speech was in fact a piece of sincere acting; this woman’s nature was one in which all feeling and experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of this: she felt all the more, but with a difference; each pain or pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the spiritual intoxication which at once exalts and deadens.
But Deronda made no reflection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on his mother’s meaning. He longed for her to tell him of the strange mental conflict under which it seemed he had been brought into the world; but his compassionate nature forbade any further question. She paused, with her brow knit, her head turned away. He must wait for her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning her eyes upon him suddenly, and saying–
“Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful mind – you are wiser than he is with all his sixty years. You say you are glad 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?”
“I wish only 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 trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself.”
“Then you are unlike your grandfather,” she said, “though you look like him. He never comprehended me; he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’: 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 butter should touch a bit of meat;– to adore the wisdom of such silly laws. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, 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 did not care about Israel: I cared for the wide world. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness. ‘You must be this,’ ‘you must not be that’ pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted freedom. Ah!” – her tone changed to bitter incisiveness – “you are glad to have been born a Jew, because you were not brought up as a Jew. It seems sweet to you because I saved you from it.”
“Did you mean that I should never know my origin?” said Deronda. “You have changed your mind on that point.”
“I did mean that. 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 will, but events come upon us like evil enchantments. I obey something tyrannic: I am forced to feel pain, to be dying slowly. 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.”
“Please tell me what moved you to take the course you did,” said Deronda, trying to escape the heart-rending piteousness of this suffering and defiance. “I gather that my grandfather opposed your wish to be an artist. I can imagine the hardship of your struggle.”
“No,” said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms. “You are not a woman. You may try – but 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; 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 recipe.’ That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be singers and actresses for the Christian world. As if we were not the more enviable for that chance of escaping from bondage!”
“Was my grandfather a learned man?” said Deronda eagerly.
She answered impatiently, “Oh, yes, a clever physician – and good: I don’t deny that. A man to be admired in a play – grand, with an iron will. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but since they cannot, they throw all the weight of their will onto women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child, and I was like himself.
“Your father was different. Unlike me – all lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that he would not hinder my being an artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I was in awe of my father – I wished I could defy him openly; but I knew I could not succeed in that. And I never would risk failure.”
This last sentence was uttered with abrupt emphasis. Her son was listening to her with feelings more and more highly mixed; the first sense of being repelled by her frank coldness; the indignation at what shocked his most cherished principles – these feelings were subsiding, and making room for that effort at just allowance and admiration of a forcible nature which he would have felt if she had been a stranger. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lest her next words should be still more repugnant to him. He almost wished he could say, “Tell me only what is necessary,” and yet he felt a fascination which made him listen eagerly.
“Where was my grandfather’s home?”
“Here in Genoa; and his family 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. Through that marriage he thwarted his own plans. My mother’s sister was a singer who married a merchant of Genoa, and they lived here. My mother died when I was eight, and my father allowed me to be with my Aunt Leonora and be taught here, as if he had not minded her encouraging my wish to be a singer. But 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. My father 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. I wanted not to marry, but 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 bitingly, “It has not lasted, though. My father is getting his way now.”
She looked more contemplatively at her son, and said–
“You are like him – but milder – there is something of your own father in you; and he devoted himself to me. He wound up his money-changing and banking, and lived to wait upon me. As I loved my art, so he loved me. Let me look at your hand again, with the ring on. It was your father’s ring.”
He gave her his hand. As he felt the smaller hand holding his, as he saw nearer to him the face so like his own, his tender nature made him say fervently–
“Mother! take us all into your heart – the living and the dead. Forgive everything that hurts you. 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; and noticing this, she said–
“It is better so. We must part again soon, and you owe me no duties. I parted with you willingly. When your father died I resolved that I would have no more ties. I was the singer Alcharisi you have heard of: men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger was one who wished to marry 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 never let him know anything about his parents.’ You were little more than two years old, and were sitting on his foot. At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him. He agreed that it would be for your good. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son.
“I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. 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. “It would have been better if I had 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.”
“I have no reason to be ashamed,” said his mot
her, with a flash of new anger. “I rid myself of the Jewish gibberish that makes people nudge each other at sight of us. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for you.”
“Then why have you now undone it? Why have you now sent for me to tell me that I am a Jew?” said Deronda, feeling almost bitter.
“Why?” said the Princess, rising quickly and walking across the room. “I can’t explain. I don’t love my father’s religion now any more than I did then. I have not repented. But yet” – here she stood still, her voice subdued – “It is illness, I don’t doubt – my mind has gone back. It has come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain – I dare say I shall be to-night. Then it is as if my will forsakes me and leaves me alone in memories, and I can’t get away: my pain keeps me there. My childhood – my wedding day – the day of my father’s death – there seems to be nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me. I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying my father. I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it, but I have not burned it, I thank God!”
She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda, moved strongly by her suffering, entreated–
“Let us leave the rest till tomorrow.”
“No,” she said decisively. “I will confess it all. Often when I am at ease it fades away; my whole self comes back; but when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand. Even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. 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!”
“Who is Joseph Kalonymos?” said Deronda, recalling the Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue.
“He was my father’s friend. He knew of your birth: he knew of my husband’s death, and twenty years ago, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him that you were dead. If I had said that you were living, he would have interfered with my plans, and caused trouble. He believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest – things that had been dinned in my ears since I had any understanding. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn it. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. So I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, saying, ‘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.”
She ceased speaking, and looked vaguely before her: her thought was travelling through the years. When she spoke again, it was in a 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 meant anything.”
“Then it is not my real name?” said Deronda.
“Oh, as real as another,” said his mother, indifferently. “The Jews have always been changing their names. My husband was a Charisi; when I came out as a singer, we made it Alcharisi. But there had been an obscure branch of the family who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you, I thought of Deronda. Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion.
“He found out where I was. He journeyed into Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He raged against me, and said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood. His words were like lion’s teeth upon me. My father’s threats eat into me with my pain. If I tell 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?”
She had leaned forward in pleading, her arms and hands stretched out beseechingly. Deronda’s soul was absorbed in the anguish of compassion. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. He knelt by her and took her hand gently, saying,
“Mother, take comfort!”
She did not repulse him now, but let him fold her hands in his. Gradually tears gathered: she 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.
“No,” she answered, withdrawing her hand. “I have a husband 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. “I meant never to marry again. I meant to be free and to live for my art. I was a queen. But something befell me. I began to sing out of tune. They told me of it. I could not endure the prospect of failure and decline. It was horrible to me.” She shuddered. “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 acted that part because I felt my greatness sinking away, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, ‘She had better go.’”
Looking at the evening sky, she went on: “I repented. That singing out of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went, and I repented; but it was too late. I could not go back.”
A new haggardness had come in her face. The light was perceptibly fading as she turned to him and said–
“I can bear no more now. I cannot bear to be seen when I am in pain.” She drew forth a pocket-book, and took out a letter. “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.” Then she said, with effort but more gently than before, “Kneel again, and let me kiss you.”
He obeyed, and 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 kept it in reserve.”
“If you had needed anything I would have worked for you,” said Deronda, conscious of a shutting out forever from long vistas of affectionate imagination.
“I need nothing that man can give me,” said his mother, 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. Leave me now.”