บทที่ บทที่ 50 · Chapter L

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“If some mortal, born too soon,

Were laid away in some great trance—the ages

Coming and going all the while—till dawned

His true time’s advent; and could then record

The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,

Then I might tell more of the breath so light

Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm

Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never

So dull was I but, when that spirit passed,

I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns

A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep.”

—BROWNING: _Paracelsus_.

This was the letter which Sir Hugo put into Deronda’s hands:,

TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA.

My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that

I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire there should be

no time lost before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let

nothing hinder you from being at the _Albergo dell’ Italia_ in

Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am

uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where

I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for

me—the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that

Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again.—Your unknown mother,

LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN.

This letter with its colorless wording gave Deronda no clue to what was

in reserve for him; but he could not do otherwise than accept Sir

Hugo’s reticence, which seemed to imply some pledge not to anticipate

the mother’s disclosures; and the discovery that his life-long

conjectures had been mistaken checked further surmise. Deronda could

not hinder his imagination from taking a quick flight over what seemed

possibilities, but he refused to contemplate any of them as more likely

than another, lest he should be nursing it into a dominant desire or

repugnance, instead of simply preparing himself with resolve to meet

the fact bravely, whatever it might turn out to be.

In this state of mind he could not have communicated to any one the

reason for the absence which in some quarters he was obliged to mention

beforehand, least of all to Mordecai, whom it would affect as

powerfully as it did himself, only in rather a different way. If he

were to say, “I am going to learn the truth about my birth,” Mordecai’s

hope would gather what might prove a painful, dangerous excitement. To

exclude suppositions, he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by

Sir Hugo’s wish, and threw as much indifference as he could into his

manner of announcing it, saying he was uncertain of its duration, but

it would perhaps be very short.

“I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me,” said Mordecai,

comforting himself in this way, after the first mournful glances.

“I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come,” said Mirah.

“The grandmother will deny you nothing,” said Deronda. “I’m glad you

were a little wrong as well as I,” he added, smiling at Mordecai. “You

thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah.”

“I undervalued her heart,” said Mordecai. “She is capable of rejoicing

that another’s plant blooms though her own be withered.”

“Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each

other,” said Mirah, with a tinge of merriment in her smile.

“What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?” said

Deronda, mischievously—a little provoked that she had taken kindly at

once to people who had caused him so much prospective annoyance on her

account.

Mirah looked at him with a slight surprise for a moment, and then said,

“He is not a bad man—I think he would never forsake any one.” But when

she uttered the words she blushed deeply, and glancing timidly at

Mordecai, turned away to some occupation. Her father was in her mind,

and this was a subject on which she and her brother had a painful

mutual consciousness. “If he should come and find us!” was a thought

which to Mirah sometimes made the street daylight as shadowy as a

haunted forest where each turn screened for her an imaginary apparition.

Deronda felt what was her involuntary allusion, and understood the

blush. How could he be slow to understand feelings which now seemed

nearer than ever to his own? for the words of his mother’s letter

implied that his filial relation was not to be freed from painful

conditions; indeed, singularly enough that letter which had brought his

mother nearer as a living reality had thrown her into more remoteness

for his affections. The tender yearning after a being whose life might

have been the worse for not having his care and love, the image of a

mother who had not had all her dues, whether of reverence or

compassion, had long been secretly present with him in his observation

of all the women he had come near. But it seemed now that this

picturing of his mother might fit the facts no better than his former

conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered to find that when this mother’s

very handwriting had come to him with words holding her actual

feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into a state of comparative

neutrality toward her. A veiled figure with enigmatic speech had thrust

away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging thought

had gradually modeled and made the possessor of his tenderness and

duteous longing. When he set off to Genoa, the interest really

uppermost in his mind had hardly so much relation to his mother as to

Mordecai and Mirah.

“God bless you, Dan!” Sir Hugo had said, when they shook hands.

“Whatever else changes for you, it can’t change my being the oldest

friend you have known, and the one who has all along felt the most for

you. I couldn’t have loved you better if you’d been my own—only I

should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the

future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; and then you

would have seen it necessary for you to take a political line.

However—things must be as they may.” It was a defensive movement of

the baronet’s to mingle purposeless remarks with the expression of

serious feeling.

When Deronda arrived at the _Italia_ in Genoa, no Princess

Halm-Eberstein was there; but on the second day there was a letter for

him, saying that her arrival might happen within a week, or might be

deferred a fortnight and more; she was under circumstances which made

it impossible for her to fix her journey more precisely, and she

entreated him to wait as patiently as he could.

With this indefinite prospect of suspense on matters of supreme moment

to him, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement on

philosophic grounds, as a means of quieting excited feeling and giving

patience a lift over a weary road. His former visit to the superb city

had been only cursory, and left him much to learn beyond the prescribed

round of sight-seeing, by spending the cooler hours in observant

wandering about the streets, the quay, and the environs; and he often

took a boat that he might enjoy the magnificent view of the city and

harbor from the sea. All sights, all subjects, even the expected

meeting with his mother, found a central union in Mordecai and Mirah,

and the ideas immediately associated with them; and among the thoughts

that most filled his mind while his boat was pushing about within view

of the grand harbor was that of the multitudinous Spanish Jews

centuries ago driven destitute from their Spanish homes, suffered to

land from the crowded ships only for a brief rest on this grand quay of

Genoa, overspreading it with a pall of famine and plague—dying mothers

and dying children at their breasts—fathers and sons a-gaze at each

other’s haggardness, like groups from a hundred Hunger-towers turned

out beneath the midday sun. Inevitably dreamy constructions of a

possible ancestry for himself would weave themselves with historic

memories which had begun to have a new interest for him on his

discovery of Mirah, and now, under the influence of Mordecai, had

become irresistibly dominant. He would have sealed his mind against

such constructions if it had been possible, and he had never yet fully

admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai’s

conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter,

and that wishing was folly—nay, on the question of parentage, wishing

seemed part of that meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning

by anticipation. What he had to do was simply to accept the fact; and

he had really no strong presumption to go upon, now that he was assured

of his mistake about Sir Hugo. There had been a resolved concealment

which made all inference untrustworthy, and the very name he bore might

be a false one. If Mordecai was wrong—if he, the so-called Daniel

Deronda, were held by ties entirely aloof from any such course as his

friend’s pathetic hope had marked out?—he would not say “I wish”; but

he could not help feeling on which side the sacrifice lay.

Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one

can resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to

suspense, there came continually an anxiety which he made no effort to

banish—dwelling on it rather with a mournfulness, which often seems to

us the best atonement we can make to one whose need we have been unable

to meet. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful mixtures of

our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate

love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which

yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent

regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say—for it is a man

who is here concerned—hardly represents to himself this shade of

feeling toward a woman more nearly than in words, “I should have loved

her, if——”: the “if” covering some prior growth in the inclinations,

or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as

a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. The “if” in

Deronda’s case carried reasons of both kinds; yet he had never

throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous

consciousness that there was something to guard against not only on her

account but on his own—some precipitancy in the manifestations of

impulsive feeling—some ruinous inroad of what is but momentary on the

permanent chosen treasure of the heart—some spoiling of her trust,

which wrought upon him now as if it had been the retreating cry of a

creature snatched and carried out of his reach by swift horsemen or

swifter waves, while his own strength was only a stronger sense of

weakness. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his

feelings for other women, even when there was one by whose side he

desired to stand apart from them? Strangely the figure entered into the

pictures of his present and future; strangely (and now it seemed sadly)

their two lots had come in contact, hers narrowly personal, his charged

with far-reaching sensibilities, perhaps with durable purposes, which

were hardly more present to her than the reasons why men migrate are

present to the birds that come as usual for the crumbs and find them no

more. Not that Deronda was too ready to imagine himself of supreme

importance to a woman; but her words of insistence that he must “remain

near her—must not forsake her”—continually recurred to him with the

clearness and importunity of imagined sounds, such as Dante has said

pierce us like arrows whose points carry the sharpness of pity,

“Lamenti saettaron me diversi

Che di pietà ferrati avean gli strali”.

Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the

consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day

was a hurrying march of crowded Time toward the world-changing battle

of Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the

converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in

the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued

holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office—scattering

abroad those whom the midday had sent under shelter, and sowing all

paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and

whirrings of thrumbed strings, light footsteps and voices, if not

leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the

encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and

gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fullness of beauty after

their long siesta, till all strong color melted in the stream of

moonlight which made the Streets a new spectacle with shadows, both

still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the façades of massive

palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep

night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great

Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the

blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of

the days as he might have watched a wonderful clock where the striking

of the hours was made solemn with antique figures advancing and

retreating in monitory procession, while he still kept his ear open for

another kind of signal which would have its solemnity too: He was

beginning to sicken of occupation, and found himself contemplating all

activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his

letters to Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but

he was really getting into that state of mind to which all subjects

become personal; and the few books he had brought to make him a refuge

in study were becoming unreadable, because the point of view that life

would make for him was in that agitating moment of uncertainty which is

close upon decision.

Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window

of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the

heavens; often in struggling under the oppressive skepticism which

represented his particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing

Mordecai to give it, as of no more lasting effect than a dream—a set

of changes which made passion to him, but beyond his consciousness were

no more than an imperceptible difference of mass and shadow; sometimes

with a reaction of emotive force which gave even to sustained

disappointment, even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature

of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it

might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet

irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities

might befall him—the blending of a complete personal love in one

current with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion

(what human creature escapes it?) against things in general because

they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her

equivocal fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world

along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own

life, and which were acting in him now under the form of an afflicting

doubtfulness about the mother who had announced herself coldly and

still kept away.

But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting

there was a new kind of knock at the door. A servant in Chasseurs

livery entered and delivered in French the verbal message that, the

Princess Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during

the day, but would be obliged if Monsieur would dine early, so as to be

at liberty at seven, when she would be able to receive him.