Chapter Sixty-three
Imagine the difference in Deronda’s state of mind when he left England and when he returned. He had set out for Genoa in total uncertainty of how far his wishes would be encouraged. He came back with the inheritance that he had begun to yearn for: with what was better than freedom – with a bond which he accepted gladly, even if it offered no promise of satisfying a secret passionate longing never yet allowed to grow into a hope.
But now he dared avow to himself his hidden love. Since the hour when he left the house at Chelsea in silence after Mirah’s farewell look and words – stirring in him his habitual deep-laid care for womanhood – her hold on his feeling had helped him to be blameless in word and deed under the difficult circumstances we know of. There seemed no likelihood that he could ever woo Mirah; yet she had taken her place in his soul, reducing the power of other fascination and making a difference in it that became deficiency.
The influence had been continually strengthened. Poor Gwendolen’s dependence on Deronda tended to rouse in him self-martyring pity rather than love, and his tenderness dwelt on an image in all things unlike Gwendolen. His relation to Mordecai had brought a new nearness to Mirah which was agitating, not less because there was no apparent change in his position toward her; and she had been bound up in his thoughts about his parentage. Deronda had been conscious of this process, but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans’s pretensions, and when his mother accused him of being in love with a Jewess any evasion suddenly seemed an infidelity. His mother had compelled him to an acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had compelled him to a definite resolve.
This new state of decision acted on Deronda with a force which surprised even himself. There was a release of energy: it was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry, which drew him shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance. He wanted to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain dissent, and also to see Mirah without the embarrassment of seeking her, to interpret her looks and words from a new starting-point. He was not greatly alarmed about Hans’s attentions, but he had a presentiment that her feelings toward himself did not include love. To astonish a woman by turning into her lover when she has been thinking of you merely as a Lord Chancellor is what a man naturally shrinks from.
What wonder that Deronda went straight from the London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in Brompton? He wished to lose no time, but to deposit the precious chest with Mordecai: and that he should pay this visit without pause would gratify Mordecai’s heart. The strongest tendencies of Deronda’s nature were rushing in one current – the fervent affection which made him delight in meeting others’ wishes, and the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily acts. There was an added radiance in his eyes as he entered the house noiselessly, wondering what exactly he should find.
It was the evening of that same day on which Mirah had met her father. Mordecai, penetrated by her grief, and by sad memories, had not resumed his task of sifting papers. They had sat perfectly still together while the light faded. Mirah, unable to think of eating, had not moved, while he had laid his head back, with closed eyes and difficult breathing, looking, Mirah thought, as he would look after death. The thought that his death might be near continually visited her; and now, to her grief, was added the regret that she had been unable to control her violent outburst. She sat watching him – her cheeks pallid, her eyes brilliant with young tears, her curls in as much disorder as a just-awakened child’s – watching that emaciated face. Life at that moment stretched before Mirah with a double bereavement – of one living as well as one dead.
But now the door opened, and a well-known voice said: “Daniel Deronda – may he come in?”
“Come! come!” said Mordecai, immediately rising, apparently unsurprised; while Mirah started up blushing with confused, half-alarmed expectation.
Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment. As he held out his right hand to Mirah, he laid his other hand on Mordecai’s shoulder, and stood so a moment, uttering no word, but reading their faces, till he said anxiously to Mirah, “Has anything happened? – any trouble?”
“Talk not of trouble now,” said Mordecai, saving her from the need to answer. “There is joy in your face.”
Mirah thought, “It is for something he cannot tell us.” But when they sat down, Deronda said, emphatically–
“That is true. I did not tell you the reason of my journey abroad, Mordecai, but I went to learn my parentage. And you were right. I am a Jew.”
The two men clasped hands, while the words passed through Mirah like an electric shock. Deronda went on–
“We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall not be separated by life or by death.”
Mordecai’s whispered answer was uttered in Hebrew. It was the liturgical words which express the religious bond: “Our God and the God of our fathers.”
Mirah fell on her knees by her brother’s side, and looked at his now illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. For the moment she thought of the news only through the effect on her brother.
“And it is not only that I am a Jew,” Deronda went on, enjoying one of those rare moments when our yearnings and our acts can be one; “but I come of a strain that has ardently maintained the fellowship of our race – a line of Spanish Jews that has borne many students and men of practical power. My grandfather, Daniel Charisi, preserved manuscripts stretching far back, in the hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. Now his hope is fulfilled: I possess the chest containing them, and it is down below in this house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that you may help me to study the manuscripts. Some of them I can read easily enough – those in Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think, Arabic; but there seem to be Latin translations. We will study them together.”
Deronda ended with that bright smile which seemed a revelation. But when this happy glance rested on Mirah, it acted like a little too much sunshine, and made her change her position. She had knelt, but now she coloured under Deronda’s glance, and rose to take her seat again in her usual posture, trying to look as quiet as possible.
Deronda, equally sensitive, imagined that his feeling for her had entered too much into his eyes, and had been repugnant to her. He was afraid that his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred. If Mirah could not love him, advances of love on his part would make her wretched in their inevitable contact.
While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah, Mordecai, conscious of nothing but a blessed fulfilment, was speaking–
“Daniel, as I said to you, we know not all the pathways. Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations in one soul, where an idea draws the elements toward it, and is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in that Omnipresence which is the habitation of the world. And if it seems that the erring wills of men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better, that depends on another order than the law which must guide our footsteps. For a people can be blessed only by having counsellors whose will moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love. For see, now, it was your loving will that made a chief pathway; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood to my sister, and seeking out her brother, your soul has been prepared to receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, ‘behold the multitude of your brethren.’”
“It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers,” said Deronda. “If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you both, I think my mind would have rebelled against it. What I feel now is that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the accord between your mind and mine which has brought that about.”
As Deronda was speaking, he remembered that first evening in
the book-shop, and his struggling aloofness from Mordecai’s prophetic confidence. It was his nature to delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul; and he went on with fuller fervour–
“It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my life’s task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited yearning – the effect of passionate thoughts in many ancestors – thoughts that were intensely present in my grandfather. I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude – some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me – to bind our race together in spite of heresy. I mean to try what can be done with that union. Failure will not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for me not to try.”
“Even as my brother,” said Mordecai, falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose.
To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself a sacramental solemnity. On Mirah the effect was equally strong, though she felt more surprise than her brother at Deronda’s suddenly revealed nearness to them: there seemed to be a breaking of day around her which might show her other facts unlike her forebodings in the darkness.
Mordecai spoke again–
“It has begun already – the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing away of this body, and then we shall unite in a stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I have written, Daniel; for the willing marriage melts soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made fuller. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called yours.”
“You must not ask me to promise that,” said Deronda, smiling. “I must be convinced first of special reasons for it in the writings themselves. And I am too backward a pupil yet. I think our duty is faithful tradition where we can attain it. Don’t ask me to deny my spiritual parentage, when I am finding the clue of my life in the recognition of natural parentage.”
“I will ask for no promise till you see the reason,” said Mordecai. “But for years my hope has been, not that the imperfect image of my thought should live, but that my vision and passion should enter into yours; for he whom I longed for afar, was he not you whom I discerned when you came near? Nevertheless, you shall judge. For my soul is satisfied.”
“I will relate the whole story of my journey at some time,” said Deronda. “But now tell me how the time has passed since I went away. I am sure there has been some trouble. Mirah has been in distress about something.”
He looked at Mirah, but she immediately turned to her brother. She hoped he would not think it necessary to tell Deronda about her father this evening. Just when Deronda had brought himself so near, it hurt her that he should hear of this disgrace clinging about them. She rose to take up her cloak, meaning to go to her own room: perhaps they would speak more easily when she had left them. But meanwhile Mordecai said–
“To-day there has been a grief. A duty which seemed to have gone far into the distance, has come back and raised a dread that we must submit to. But let us defer speaking of it, as if this evening were the beginning of the festival in which we must offer the fruits of our joy, and mingle no mourning with them.”
Deronda guessed the hinted grief, and asked no more. Rising as he saw Mirah rise, he said, “Are you going? I must leave as soon as I have delivered the key to Mordecai – no, Ezra – may I call him Ezra now?”
“Please do,” said Mirah, faintly, feeling a new timidity under Deronda’s glance. Was there really something different about him, or was the difference only in her feeling? The various emotions of the last few hours had exhausted her; she was faint with fatigue and want of food. Deronda, observing her pallor and tremulousness, longed to show more feeling, but dared not. She put out her hand with an effort to smile, and then he opened the door for her. That was all.
A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover’s approaches to a woman whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous; but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which, superficially, was the reverse of that – though to a reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of rank which makes a man keenly susceptible about the appearance of his addresses.
Deronda was affected peculiarly because of his imaginative sympathy with her mind. Mirah, he knew, felt bound to him by deep obligations, which might seem to her to give every wish of his the aspect of a claim; and an inability to fulfil it would cause her a pain continually revived by their inevitable meetings in care of Ezra. Here were fears not of pride only, but of extreme tenderness. Altogether, his character as a benefactor seemed to Deronda an insurmountable obstacle to confessing himself a lover, unless in some inconceivable way it could be revealed to him that Mirah already loved him.
As for Mirah, her former suspicions were thrown out of shape but still present, like an ugly story which had been discredited but not therefore dissipated. All that she knew about Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such fetters upon him as she had begun to believe in. His whole manner as well as his words implied that he had no hidden bonds. But uneasiness still clung about her heart. Deronda was not to blame, but he had an importance for Mrs. Grandcourt which must give her some hold on him. And the thought of any close confidence between them stirred the little biting snake that had long lain curled and harmless in Mirah’s gentle bosom.
But did she this evening feel that any possibility of attachment was as remote as before? Hardly. Something indefinable had happened and made a difference. The soft warm rain of blossoms which had fallen just where she was – did it really come because she was there? What spirit was there among the boughs?