Chapter Chapter 32 · Chapter XXXII

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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.

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.

“And what did you think of the future bride on a nearer survey?” said

Sir Hugo.

“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.”

“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.”

“I can stay in town, sir.”

“No, no. Lady Mallinger and the children can’t do without you at

Christmas. Only don’t make mischief—unless you can get up a duel, and

manage to shoot Grandcourt, which might be worth a little

inconvenience.”

“I don’t think you ever saw me flirt,” said Deronda, not amused.

“Oh, haven’t I, though?” said Sir Hugo, provokingly. “You are always

looking 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.”

What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke?—only the

exasperation comes before the reflection on utility. Few friendly

remarks are more annoying than the information that we are always

seeming to do what we never mean to do. Sir Hugo’s notion of flirting,

it was to be hoped, was rather peculiar; for his own part, Deronda was

sure that he had never flirted. But he was glad that the baronet had no

knowledge about the repurchase of Gwendolen’s necklace to feed his

taste for this kind of rallying.

He would be on his guard in future; for 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.

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.”

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.

“Excuse me, Mirah, but _does_ it seem quite right to you that the women

should sit behind rails in a gallery apart?”

“Yes, I never thought of anything else,” said Mirah, with mild surprise.

“And you like better to see the men with their hats on?” said Mab,

cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.

“Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back

to me the same feelings—the feelings I would not part with for

anything else in the world.”

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.

“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.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” cried Mab. “I wish I were not such a hideous Christian.

How can an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert a

beautiful Jewess, who has not a fault?”

“It may be wicked of me,” said shrewd Kate, “but I cannot help wishing

that her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant.”

“I don’t think it, my dear,” said Mrs. 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?”

“Well, and so she may be, little mother,” said Kate; “but we would

rather hold you cheaper, and have you alive.”

Not only the Meyricks, whose various 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 _ennui_, 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

_morale_. In his anxiety about Mirah’s relatives, he had lately been

thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But a little

comparison will often diminish our surprise and disgust at the

aberrations of Jews and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a

consistent or lovely pattern of their creed; and this evening Deronda,

becoming more conscious that he was falling into unfairness and

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 _Rabbinische Schule_, which he

arrived at by sunset, and entered with a good congregation of men.

He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom he

was distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a

noticeable figure—his ample 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 _almemor_ or platform, and the service began.

Deronda, having looked enough at the German translation of the Hebrew

in the book before him to know that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and

Old Testament passages or phrases, gave himself up to that strongest

effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal

meaning—like the effect of an Allegri’s _Miserere_ or a Palestrina’s

_Magnificat_. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is

the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape

from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good

to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of

Gladness, a _Gloria in excelsis_ 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

_Chazaris_ 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.”

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?”

Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off

hastily the touch on his arm; but he managed to slip it away and said

coldly, “I am an Englishman.”

The questioner looked at him dubiously still for an instant, then just

lifted his hat and turned away; whether under a sense of having made a

mistake or of having been repulsed, Deronda was uncertain. In his walk

back to the hotel he tried to still any uneasiness on the subject by

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.

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,

“See how different I am from the miserable creature by the river! all

because you found me and brought me to the very best.”

“It was my good chance to find you,” said Deronda. “Any other man would

have been glad to do what I did.”

“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.”

“I agree with Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “Saint Anybody is a bad saint

to pray to.”

“Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you,” said Mirah,

smiling at Mrs. 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

_little_ afraid.”

“What is it you are afraid of?” said Deronda with anxiety.

“That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father.

It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my

only sorrow,” said Mirah, plaintively.

“It is surely not very probable,” said 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?”

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.”

“In what way are you not a good Jewess?” said Deronda.

“I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among

Christians just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the

strictness of the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not

liking Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never

want me not to like those who are better to me than any of my own

people I have ever known. I think I could obey in other things that she

wished but not in that. It is so much easier to me to share in love

than in hatred. I 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.”

“_Antigone_,” said Deronda.

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

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,

“Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything

else? I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have

often fancied heaven might be made of voices.”

“Like your singing—yes,” said Mab, who had hitherto kept a modest

silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of

Prince Camaralzaman—“Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not

heard her.”

“Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?” said Deronda, with a

more deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.

“Oh, I shall like it,” said Mirah. “My voice has come back a little

with rest.”

Perhaps her ease of manner was due to 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.

She immediately rose and went to the piano—a somewhat worn instrument

that seemed to get the better of its infirmities under the firm touch

of her small fingers as she preluded. Deronda placed himself where he

could see her while she sang; and she took everything as quietly as if

she had been a child going to breakfast.

Imagine her—it is always good to imagine a human creature in whom

bodily loveliness seems as properly one with the entire being as the

bodily loveliness of those wondrous 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.

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.

“I think I never enjoyed a song more than that,” he said, gratefully.

“You like my singing? I am so glad,” she said, with a smile of delight.

“It has been a great pain to me, because it failed in what it was

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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

“It is too childish,” said Mirah. “It is like lisping.”

“What is the hymn?” said Deronda.

“It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother singing over her when

she lay in her cot,” said Mrs. Meyrick.

“I should like very much to hear it,” said Deronda, “if you think I am

worthy to hear what is so sacred.”

“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.”

Deronda shook his head. “It will be quite good Hebrew to me.”

Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her easiest attitude, and

then lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some

invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint

melancholy intervals, with syllables that really seemed childish

lisping to her audience; the voice in which she gave it forth had

gathered even a sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in her

other songs.

“If I were ever to know the real words, I should still go on in my old

way with them,” said Mirah, when she had repeated the hymn several

times.

“Why not?” said Deronda. “The lisped syllables are very full of

meaning.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “A mother hears something 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.”

“Is not that the way with friendship, too?” said Deronda, smiling. “We

must not let the mothers be too arrogant.”

The little woman shook her head over her darning.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“Ah no,” said Mirah, sadly. “I have seen that. I have seen them mock.

Is it not like mocking your parents?—like rejoicing in your parents’

shame?”

“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in,

and like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them,”

said Deronda apologetically.

“But you are not like that,” said Mirah, looking at him with

unconscious fixedness.

“No, I think not,” said Deronda; “but you know I was not brought up as

a Jew.”

“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a look of disappointed

recollection, and slightly blushing.

Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause,

which he put an end to by saying playfully,

“Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we

all went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just

the same.”

“To be sure. We should go on forever in 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.”

“But I could not make myself not a Jewess,” said Mirah, insistently,

“even if I changed my belief.”

“No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religion,

and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would

come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen,” said Mrs. Meyrick,

taking that consummation very cheerfully.

“Oh, please not to say that,” said Mirah, the tears gathering. “It is

the first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will

never separate myself from my mother’s people. I was forced to fly from

my father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed

me, should I say, ‘This is not my father’? If he had shame, I must

share it. It was he who was given to me for my father, and not another.

And so it is with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love

Christians when they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my

people. I will always worship with them.”

As Mirah had 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.”

“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.”

“I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life,” said Mirah, not

yet quite calm.

“Hush, hush, now,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I have been punished enough for

wagging my tongue foolishly—making an almanac for the Millennium, as

my husband used to say.”

“But everything in the world must come to an end 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.

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.”

Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda

seemed to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken

once is a tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said,

“I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is

hardly anything we can talk about.” Mab felt herself unanswerable here,

inclining to the opinion of Socrates: “What motive has a man to live,

if not for the pleasure of discourse?”

Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside

with him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, “Hans is to

share my chambers when he comes at Christmas.”

“You have written to Rome about that?” said Mrs. Meyrick, her face

lighting up. “How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah,

then?”

“Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.”

“I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I

have always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without

saying a word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However!—Thank

you a thousand times.”

Deronda divined something of what was in the mother’s mind, and his

divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His

inward colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could

see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love

with her; but all the 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.

“I have my hands on the reins now,” he thought, “and I will not drop

them. I shall go there as little as possible.”

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.

Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own

work well begun. It was a delight to have rescued this child acquainted

with sorrow, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected

paths. The creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet,

bruised and lost by the wayside—how we watch and fence it, and dote on

its signs of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, our self is a not-self

for whose sake we become virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of

reclaiming a life from misery and look for our triumph in the secret

joy—“This one is the better for me.”

“I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as set about

spoiling her peace,” said Deronda. “It was one of the rarest bits of

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?”

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.

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.

“At least, I will look about,” was his final determination. “I may find

some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after Christmas.”

What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a

disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by

which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which

it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.