Bab Bab 45 · Chapter XLV
.
Behold my lady’s carriage stop the way.
With powdered lacquey and with charming bay;
She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair.
Her arduous function solely “to be there.”
Like Sirius rising o’er the silent sea.
She hides her heart in lustre loftily.
So the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card
for the musical party at Lady Mallinger’s, there being reasons of
business which made Sir Hugo know beforehand that his ill-beloved
nephew was coming up. It was only the third evening after their
arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with
her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she
was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth
who had gone through so much, and was “capable of submitting to
anything in the form of duty.” For Gwendolen had remembered nearly
every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that
phrase, which she repeated to herself bitterly, having an ill-defined
consciousness that her own submission was something very different. She
would have been obliged to allow, if any one had said it to her, that
what she submitted to could not take the shape of duty, but was
submission to a yoke drawn on her by an action she was ashamed of, and
worn with a strength of selfish motives that left no weight for duty to
carry.
The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, all white, gold, and pale crimson, were
agreeably furnished, and not crowded with guests, before Mr. and Mrs.
Grandcourt entered; and more than half an hour of instrumental music
was being followed by an interval of movement and chat. Klesmer was
there with his wife, and in his generous interest for Mirah he proposed
to accompany her singing of Leo’s “_O patria mia_,” which he had before
recommended her to choose, as more distinctive of her than better known
music. He was already at the piano, and Mirah was standing there
conspicuously, when Gwendolen, magnificent in her pale green velvet and
poisoned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honor well in view of them.
With her long sight and self-command she had the rare power of quickly
distinguishing persons and objects on entering a full room, and while
turning her glance toward Mirah she did not neglect to exchange a bow
with Klesmer as she passed. The smile seemed to each a lightning-flash
back on that morning when it had been her ambition to stand as the
“little Jewess” was standing, and survey a grand audience from the
higher rank of her talent—instead of which she was one of the ordinary
crowd in silk and gems, whose utmost performance it must be to admire
or find fault. “He thinks I am in the right road now,” said the lurking
resentment within her.
Gwendolen had not caught sight of Deronda in her passage, and while she
was seated acquitting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round
her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful
lest an anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be
observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something “damnably
vulgar.” But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a
room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes
that met Gwendolen’s, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the
“amateur too fond of Meyerbeer,” Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to
find useful as a half-caste among gentlemen. He was standing near her
husband, who, however, turned a shoulder toward him, and was being
understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How was it that at this moment,
for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen, like a disagreeable
sensation, the idea that this man knew all about her husband’s life? He
had been banished from her sight, according to her will, and she had
been satisfied; he had sunk entirely into the background of her
thoughts, screened away from her by the agitating figures that kept up
an inward drama in which Lush had no place. Here suddenly he reappeared
at her husband’s elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an
instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being
connected with the secrets that made her wretched. She was conscious of
effort in turning her head away from him, trying to continue her
wandering survey as if she had seen nothing of more consequence than
the picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not
looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes from him, without having
got any recognition, consoling herself with the assurance that he must
have seen her come in. In fact, he was not standing far from the door
with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful to bring into Lady
Mallinger’s list. They were both a little more anxious than was
comfortable lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. Deronda even
felt himself on the brink of betraying emotion, Mirah’s presence now
being linked with crowding images of what had gone before and was to
come after—all centering in the brother he was soon to reveal to her;
and he had escaped as soon as he could from the side of Lady Pentreath,
who had said in her violoncello voice,
“Well, your Jewess is pretty—there’s no denying that. But where is her
Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned
that on the stage.”
He was beginning to feel on Mirah’s behalf something of what he had
felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him
if he would like to be a great singer—an indignant dislike to her
being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported
commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public, and he
winced the more because Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name
“Jewess” was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese
silk. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was
immediately appealed to by Hans about “that Vandyke duchess of a
beauty.” Pray excuse Deronda that in this moment he felt a transient
renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if she and her beauty
and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah as a
woman—a feeling something like class animosity, which affection for
what is not fully recognized by others, whether in persons or in
poetry, rarely allows us to escape. To Hans admiring Gwendolen with his
habitual hyperbole, he answered, with a sarcasm that was not quite
good-natured,
“I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice.”
“That is the style I worship—not admire,” said Hans. “Other styles of
women I might make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I could make
myself—well, pretty good, which is something much more difficult.”
“Hush,” said Deronda, under the pretext that the singing was going to
begin. He was not so delighted with the answer as might have been
expected, and was relieved by Hans’s movement to a more advanced spot.
Deronda had never before heard Mirah sing “_O patria mia_.” He knew
well Leopardi’s fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate
mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping), and the
few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole,
which seemed to breathe an inspiration through the music. Mirah singing
this, made Mordecai more than ever one presence with her. Certain words
not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies
from the invisible,
“Non ti difende
Nessun de’ tuoi! L’armi, qua l’armi: io solo
Combatterò, procomberò sol io”—[*]
[* Do none of thy children defend thee? Arms! bring me arms!
alone I will fight, alone I will fall.]
they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said
to devote itself in vain when it achieves the godlike end of
manifesting unselfish love. And that passion was present to Deronda now
as the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility
of battle.
Mirah was equal to his wishes. While the general applause was sounding,
Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only—“Good,
good—the crescendo better than before.” But her chief anxiety was to
know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on her part this
evening would have pained her as an especial injury to him. Of course
all her prospects were due to what he had done for her; still, this
occasion of singing in the house that was his home brought a peculiar
demand. She looked toward him in the distance, and he saw that she did;
but he remained where he was, and watched the streams of emulous
admirers closing round her, till presently they parted to make way for
Gwendolen, who was taken up to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier
now about “the little Jewess,” Daniel relented toward poor Gwendolen in
her splendor, and his memory went back, with some penitence for his
momentary hardness, over all the signs and confessions that she too
needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer
by the river—a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. The silent
question—“But is it not cowardly to make that a reason for turning
away?” was the form in which he framed his resolve to go near her on
the first opportunity, and show his regard for her past confidence, in
spite of Sir Hugo’s unwelcome hints.
Klesmer, having risen to Gwendolen as she approached, and being
included by her in the opening conversation with Mirah, continued near
them a little while, looking down with a smile, which was rather in his
eyes than on his lips, at the piquant contrast of the two charming
young creatures seated on the red divan. The solicitude seemed to be
all on the side of the splendid one.
“You must let me say how much I am obliged to you,” said Gwendolen. “I
had heard from Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat in your
singing, but I was too ignorant to imagine how great.”
“You are very good to say so,” answered Mirah, her mind chiefly
occupied in contemplating Gwendolen. It was like a new kind of
stage-experience to her to be close to genuine grand ladies with
genuine brilliants and complexions, and they impressed her vaguely as
coming out of some unknown drama, in which their parts perhaps got more
tragic as they went on.
“We shall all want to learn of you—I, at least,” said Gwendolen. “I
sing very badly, as Herr Klesmer will tell you,”—here she glanced
upward to that higher power rather archly, and continued—“but I have
been rebuked for not liking to be middling, since I can be nothing more. I
think that is a different doctrine from yours?” She was still looking
at Klesmer, who said quickly,
“Not if it means that it would be worth while for you to study further,
and for Miss Lapidoth to have the pleasure of helping you.” With that
he moved away, and Mirah taking everything with _naïve_ seriousness,
said,
“If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to
teach, but I have only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by
remembering how my master taught me.”
Gwendolen was in reality too uncertain about herself to be prepared for
this simple promptitude of Mirah’s, and in her wish to change the
subject, said, with some lapse from the good taste of her first
address,
“You have not been long in London, I think?—but you were perhaps
introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?”
“No,” said Mirah; “I never saw him before I came to England in the
summer.”
“But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he
not?” said Gwendolen, led on partly by the wish to hear anything about
Deronda, and partly by the awkwardness which besets the readiest
person, in carrying on a dialogue when empty of matter. “He spoke of
you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well.”
“Oh, I was poor and needed help,” said Mirah, in a new tone of feeling,
“and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is
the only way he came to know anything about me—because he was sorry
for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe
everything to him.”
Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a struggling artist herself, could
nevertheless not escape the impression that a mode of inquiry which
would have been rather rude toward herself was an amiable condescension
to this Jewess who was ready to give her lessons. The only effect on
Mirah, as always on any mention of Deronda, was to stir reverential
gratitude and anxiety that she should be understood to have the deepest
obligation to him.
But both he and Hans, who were noticing the pair from a distance, would
have felt rather indignant if they had known that the conversation had
led up to Mirah’s representation of herself in this light of neediness.
In the movement that prompted her, however, there was an exquisite
delicacy, which perhaps she could not have stated explicitly—the
feeling that she ought not to allow any one to assume in Deronda a
relation of more equality or less generous interest toward her than
actually existed. Her answer was delightful to Gwendolen: she thought
of nothing but the ready compassion which in another form she had
trusted in and found herself; and on the signals that Klesmer was about
to play she moved away in much content, entirely without presentiment
that this Jewish _protégé_ would ever make a more important difference
in her life than the possible improvement of her singing—if the
leisure and spirits of a Mrs. Grandcourt would allow of other lessons
than such as the world was giving her at rather a high charge.
With her wonted alternation from resolute care of appearances to some
rash indulgence of an impulse, she chose, under the pretext of getting
farther from the instrument, not to go again to her former seat, but
placed herself on a settee where she could only have one neighbor. She
was nearer to Deronda than before: was it surprising that he came up in
time to shake hands before the music began—then, that after he had
stood a little while by the elbow of the settee at the empty end, the
torrent-like confluences of bass and treble seemed, like a convulsion
of nature, to cast the conduct of petty mortals into insignificance,
and to warrant his sitting down?
But when at the end of Klesmer’s playing there came the outburst of
talk under which Gwendolen had hoped to speak as she would to Deronda,
she observed that Mr. Lush was within hearing, leaning against the wall
close by them. She could not help her flush of anger, but she tried to
have only an air of polite indifference in saying,
“Miss Lapidoth is everything you described her to be.”
“You have been very quick in discovering that,” said Deronda,
ironically.
“I have not found out all the excellencies you spoke of—I don’t mean
that,” said Gwendolen; “but I think her singing is charming, and
herself, too. Her face is lovely—not in the least common; and she is
such a complete little person. I should think she will be a great
success.”
This speech was grating on Deronda, and he would not answer it, but
looked gravely before him. She knew that he was displeased with her,
and she was getting so impatient under the neighborhood of Mr. Lush,
which prevented her from saying any word she wanted to say, that she
meditated some desperate step to get rid of it, and remained silent,
too. That constraint seemed to last a long while, neither Gwendolen nor
Deronda looking at the other, till Lush slowly relieved the wall of his
weight, and joined some one at a distance.
Gwendolen immediately said, “You despise me for talking artificially.”
“No,” said Deronda, looking at her coolly; “I think that is quite
excusable sometimes. But I did not think what you were last saying was
altogether artificial.”
“There was something in it that displeased you,” said Gwendolen. “What
was it?”
“It is impossible to explain such things,” said Deronda. “One can never
communicate niceties of feeling about words and manner.”
“You think I am shut out from understanding them,” said Gwendolen, with
a slight tremor in her voice, which she was trying to conquer. “Have I
shown myself so very dense to everything you have said?” There was an
indescribable look of suppressed tears in her eyes, which were turned
on him.
“Not at all,” said Deronda, with some softening of voice. “But
experience differs for different people. We don’t all wince at the same
things. I have had plenty of proof that you are not dense.” He smiled
at her.
“But one may feel things and are not able to do anything better for all
that,” said Gwendolen, not smiling in return—the distance to which
Deronda’s words seemed to throw her chilling her too much. “I begin to
think we can only get better by having people about us who raise good
feelings. You must not be surprised at anything in me. I think it is
too late for me to alter. I don’t know how to set about being wise, as
you told me to be.”
“I seldom find I do any good by my preaching. I might as well have kept
from meddling,” said Deronda, thinking rather sadly that his
interference about that unfortunate necklace might end in nothing but
an added pain to him in seeing her after all hardened to another sort
of gambling than roulette.
“Don’t say that,” said Gwendolen, hurriedly, feeling that this might be
her only chance of getting the words uttered, and dreading the increase
of her own agitation. “If you despair of me, I shall despair. Your
saying that I should not go on being selfish and ignorant has been some
strength to me. If you say you wish you had not meddled—that means you
despair of me and forsake me. And then you will decide for me that I
shall not be good. It is you who will decide; because you might have
made me different by keeping as near to me as you could, and believing
in me.”
She had not been looking at him as she spoke, but at the handle of the
fan which she held closed. With the last words she rose and left him,
returning to her former place, which had been left vacant; while every
one was settling into quietude in expectation of Mirah’s voice, which
presently, with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in
which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion, gave forth,
_Per pietà non dirmi addio_.
In Deronda’s ear the strain was for the moment a continuance of
Gwendolen’s pleading—a painful urging of something vague and
difficult, irreconcilable with pressing conditions, and yet cruel to
resist. However strange the mixture in her of a resolute pride and a
precocious air of knowing the world, with a precipitate, guileless
indiscretion, he was quite sure now that the mixture existed. Sir
Hugo’s hints had made him alive to dangers that his own disposition
might have neglected; but that Gwendolen’s reliance on him was
unvisited by any dream of his being a man who could misinterpret her
was as manifest as morning, and made an appeal which wrestled with his
sense of present dangers, and with his foreboding of a growing
incompatible claim on him in her mind. There was a foreshadowing of
some painful collision: on the one side the grasp of Mordecai’s dying
hand on him, with all the ideals and prospects it aroused; on the other
the fair creature in silk and gems, with her hidden wound and her
self-dread, making a trustful effort to lean and find herself
sustained. It was as if he had a vision of himself besought with
outstretched arms and cries, while he was caught by the waves and
compelled to mount the vessel bound for a far-off coast. That was the
strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes of
Mirah’s song; but when it ceased he moved from his seat with the
reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own
importance, and a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen’s view of
himself, as if he could really have any decisive power over her.
“What an enviable fellow you are,” said Hans to him, “sitting on a sofa
with that young duchess, and having an interesting quarrel with her!”
“Quarrel with her?” repeated Deronda, rather uncomfortably.
“Oh, about theology, of course; nothing personal. But she told you what
you ought to think, and then left you with a grand air which was
admirable. Is she an Antinomian—if so, tell her I am an Antinomian
painter, and introduce me. I should like to paint her and her husband.
He has the sort of handsome _physique_ that the Duke ought to have in
_Lucrezia Borgia_—if it could go with a fine baritone, which it can’t.”
Deronda devoutly hoped that Hans’s account of the impression his
dialogue with Gwendolen had made on a distant beholder was no more than
a bit of fantastic representation, such as was common with him.
And Gwendolen was not without her after-thoughts that her husband’s
eyes might have been on her, extracting something to reprove—some
offence against her dignity as his wife; her consciousness telling her
that she had not kept up the perfect air of equability in public which
was her own ideal. But Grandcourt made no observation on her behavior.
All he said as they were driving home was,
“Lush will dine with us among the other people to-morrow. You will
treat him civilly.”
Gwendolen’s heart began to beat violently. The words that she wanted to
utter, as one wants to return a blow, were. “You are breaking your
promise to me—the first promise you made me.” But she dared not utter
them. She was as frightened at a quarrel as if she had foreseen that it
would end with throttling fingers on her neck. After a pause, she said
in the tone rather of defeat than resentment,
“I thought you did not intend him to frequent the house again.”
“I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated
civilly.”
Silence. There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has
dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for
the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his
wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with
it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar.
If these are the sort of lovers’ vows at which Jove laughs, he must
have a merry time of it.