第 四十 章 · Chapter XL

.

“Within the soul a faculty abides,

That with interpositions, which would hide

And darken, so can deal, that they become

Contingencies of pomp; and serve to exalt

Her native brightness, as the ample moon,

In the deep stillness of a summer even,

Rising behind a thick and lofty grove,

Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light,

In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides

Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil

Into a substance glorious as her own,

Yea, with her own incorporated, by power

Capacious and serene.”

—WORDSWORTH: _Excursion_, B. IV.

Deronda came out of the narrow house at Chelsea in a frame of mind that

made him long for some good bodily exercise to carry off what he was

himself inclined to call the fumes of his temper. He was going toward

the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs with the waiting boats at

once determined him to avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in

a cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar.

His errand was to go to Ram’s book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived

too late for Mordecai’s midday watch, and had been told that he

invariably came there again between five and six. Some further

acquaintance with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens was particularly

desired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming his ring: he wished

that their conversation should not again end speedily with that drop of

Mordecai’s interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge, and

threatened to shut out any easy communication in future. As he got

warmed with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the errand before

him and the ends he wanted to achieve on Mirah’s account, he

experienced, as was wont with him, a quick change of mental light,

shifting his point of view to that of the person whom he had been

thinking of hitherto chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and

was inclined to taunt himself with being not much better than an

enlisting sergeant, who never troubles himself with the drama that

brings him the needful recruits.

“I suppose if I got from this man the information I am most anxious

about,” thought Deronda, “I should be contented enough if he felt no

disposition to tell me more of himself, or why he seemed to have some

expectation from me which was disappointed. The sort of curiosity he

stirs would die out; and yet it might be that he had neared and parted

as one can imagine two ships doing, each freighted with an exile who

would have recognized the other if the two could have looked out face

to face. Not that there is any likelihood of a peculiar tie between me

and this poor fellow, whose voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I

wonder whether there is much of that momentous mutual missing between

people who interchange blank looks, or even long for one another’s

absence in a crowded place. However, one makes one’s self chances of

missing by going on the recruiting sergeant’s plan.”

When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant

to land, it was half-past four, and the gray day was dying gloriously,

its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a

wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental

calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a

luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the

sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from

blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.

Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda gave up the oar and drew over

him again his Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while fastening

the topmost button his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking

toward him over the parapet of the bridge—brought out by the western

light into startling distinctness and brilliancy—an illuminated type

of bodily emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the face of

Mordecai, who also, in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of

the advancing boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first

simply because it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions

that made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing

figure lifted up its face toward him—the face of his visions—and then

immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again.

For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had

lost no time before signaling, and the answer came straightway.

Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it—feeling in that moment that his

inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted

into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this

outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely

different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first

stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of

concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured

friend had come from the golden background, and had signaled to him:

this actually was: the rest was to be.

In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was

joining Mordecai, whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and

wait for him.

“I was very glad to see you standing here,” said Deronda, “for I was

intending to go on to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there

yesterday—perhaps they mentioned it to you?”

“Yes,” said Mordecai; “that was the reason I came to the bridge.”

This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to

Deronda. Were the peculiarities of this man really associated with any

sort of mental alienation, according to Cohen’s hint?

“You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?” he said, after a moment.

“No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for

you these five years.” Mordecai’s deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of

the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate

dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Deronda’s sensitiveness was

not the less responsive because he could not but believe that this

strangely-disclosed relation was founded on an illusion.

“It will be a satisfaction to me if I can be of any real use to you,”

he answered, very earnestly. “Shall we get into a cab and drive

to—wherever you wish to go? You have probably had walking enough with

your short breath.”

“Let us go to the book-shop. It will soon be time for me to be there.

But now look up the river,” said Mordecai, turning again toward it and

speaking in undertones of what may be called an excited calm—so

absorbed by a sense of fulfillment that he was conscious of no barrier

to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. “See the sky, how

it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it

when I was a little boy. It is a meeting-place for the spiritual

messengers. It is true—what the Masters said—that each order of

things has its angel: that means the full message of each from what is

afar. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was

stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens.

But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has

sunk into me and dwelt with me—fading, slowly fading: it was my own

decline: it paused—it waited, till at last it brought me my new

life—my new self—who will live when this breath is all breathed out.”

Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely wrought upon. The

first-prompted suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to

hallucinations of thought—might have become a monomaniac on some

subject which had given too severe a strain to his diseased

organism—gave way to a more submissive expectancy. His nature was too

large, too ready to conceive regions beyond his own experience, to rest

at once in the easy explanation, “madness,” whenever a consciousness

showed some fullness and conviction where his own was blank. It

accorded with his habitual disposition that he should meet rather than

resist any claim on him in the shape of another’s need; and this claim

brought with it a sense of solemnity which seemed a radiation from

Mordecai, as utterly nullifying his outward poverty and lifting him

into authority as if he had been that preternatural guide seen in the

universal legend, who suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands a

manifest Power. That impression was the more sanctioned by a sort of

resolved quietude which the persuasion of fulfillment had produced in

Mordecai’s manner. After they had stood a moment in silence he said,

“Let us go now,” and when they were riding he added, “We will get down

at the end of the street and walk to the shop. You can look at the

books, and Mr. Ram will be going away directly and leave us alone.”

It seemed that this enthusiast was just as cautious, just as much alive

to judgments in other minds as if he had been that antipode of all

enthusiasm called “a man of the world.”

While they were rattling along in the cab, Mirah was still present with

Deronda in the midst of this strange experience, but he foresaw that

the course of conversation would be determined by Mordecai, not by

himself: he was no longer confident what questions he should be able to

ask; and with a reaction on his own mood, he inwardly said, “I suppose

I am in a state of complete superstition, just as if I were awaiting

the destiny that could interpret the oracle. But some strong relation

there must be between me and this man, since he feels it strongly.

Great heaven! what relation has proved itself more potent in the world

than faith even when mistaken—than expectation even when perpetually

disappointed? Is my side of the relation to be disappointing or

fulfilling?—well, if it is ever possible for me to fulfill I will not

disappoint.”

In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as if they

had been two undeclared lovers, felt themselves alone in the small

gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head from an

instinctive feeling that they wished to see each other fully. Mordecai

came forward to lean his back against the little counter, while Deronda

stood against the opposite wall hardly more than four feet off. I wish

I could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian’s “Tribute Money” has

perpetuated two types presenting another sort of contrast. Imagine—we

all of us can—the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of

glance to which the sharply-defined structure of features reminding one

of a forsaken temple, give already a far-off look as of one getting

unwillingly out of reach; and imagine it on a Jewish face naturally

accentuated for the expression of an eager mind—the face of a man

little above thirty, but with that age upon it which belongs to time

lengthened by suffering, the hair and beard, still black, throwing out

the yellow pallor of the skin, the difficult breathing giving more

decided marking to the mobile nostril, the wasted yellow hands

conspicuous on the folded arms: then give to the yearning consumptive

glance something of the slowly dying mother’s look, when her one loved

son visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out

as she says, “My boy!”—for the sense of spiritual perpetuation in

another resembles that maternal transference of self.

Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite to him was

a face not more distinctively oriental than many a type seen among what

we call the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible

masculine gravity in its repose, that gave the value of judgment to the

reverence with which he met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty

who claimed him as a long-expected friend. The more exquisite quality

of Deronda’s nature—that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness

which ran along with his speculative tendency—was never more

thoroughly tested. He felt nothing that could be called belief in the

validity of Mordecai’s impressions concerning him or in the probability

of any greatly effective issue: what he felt was a profound sensibility

to a cry from the depths of another and accompanying that, the summons

to be receptive instead of superciliously prejudging. Receptiveness is

a rare and massive power, like fortitude; and this state of mind now

gave Deronda’s face its utmost expression of calm benignant force—an

expression which nourished Mordecai’s confidence and made an open way

before him. He began to speak.

“You cannot know what has guided me to you and brought us together at

this moment. You are wondering.”

“I am not impatient,” said Deronda. “I am ready to listen to whatever

you may wish to disclose.”

“You see some of the reasons why I needed you,” said Mordecai, speaking

quietly, as if he wished to reserve his strength. “You see that I am

dying. You see that I am as one shut up behind bars by the wayside, who

if he spoke to any would be met only by head-shaking and pity. The day

is closing—the light is fading—soon we should not have been able to

discern each other. But you have come in time.”

“I rejoice that I am come in time,” said Deronda, feelingly. He would

not say, “I hope you are not mistaken in me,”—the very word

“mistaken,” he thought, would be a cruelty at that moment.

“But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off,” said Mordecai;

“began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then

ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because I was a Jew. They were a

trust to fulfill, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration,

because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me.

They were my life; I was not fully born till then. I counted this

heart, and this breath, and this right hand”—Mordecai had pathetically

pressed his hand upon his breast, and then stretched its wasted fingers

out before him—“I counted my sleep and my waking, and the work I fed

my body with, and the sights that fed my eyes—I counted them but as

fuel to the divine flame. But I had done as one who wanders and

engraves his thought in rocky solitudes, and before I could change my

course came care and labor and disease, and blocked the way before me,

and bound me with the iron that eats itself into the soul. Then I said,

‘How shall I save the life within me from being stifled with this

stifled breath?’”

Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath which had been taxed by the

rising excitement of his speech. And also he wished to check that

excitement. Deronda dared not speak: the very silence in the narrow

space seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this

struggling fervor. And presently Mordecai went on:

“But you may misunderstand me. I speak not as an ignorant dreamer—as

one bred up in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts anew, and

not knowing them ancient, never having stood by the great waters where

the world’s knowledge passes to and fro. English is my mother-tongue,

England is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot

of earth around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the

desert rejoice. But my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet

of my mother’s brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning: and when

he died I went to Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Göttingen, that I

might take a larger outlook on my people, and on the Gentile world, and

drank knowledge at all sources. I was a youth; I felt free; I saw our

chief seats in Germany; I was not then in utter poverty. And I had

possessed myself of a handicraft. For I said, I care not if my lot be

as that of Joshua ben Chananja: after the last destruction he earned

his bread by making needles, but in his youth he had been a singer on

the steps of the Temple, and had a memory of what was before the glory

departed. I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the

hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance

where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

I knew what I chose. They said, ‘He feeds himself on visions,’ and I

denied not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. I

see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew.

You are not listening to one who raves aloof from the lives of his

fellows.”

Mordecai paused, and Deronda, feeling that the pause was expectant,

said, “Do me the justice to believe that I was not inclined to call

your words raving. I listen that I may know, without prejudgment. I

have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a

spiritual destiny embraced willingly, and embraced in youth.”

“A spiritual destiny embraced willingly—in youth?” Mordecai repeated

in a corrective tone. “It was the soul fully born within me, and it

came in my boyhood. It brought its own world—a mediaeval world, where

there are men who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of

exile. They had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith

of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a center for our race. One of

their souls was born again within me, and awakened amid the memories of

their world. It traveled into Spain and Provence; it debated with

Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the

Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And when its dumb tongue

was loosed, it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood

of their ardor, their sorrow, and their martyred trust: it sang with

the cadence of their strain.”

Mordecai paused again, and then said in a loud, hoarse whisper,

“While it is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another.”

“Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?” said Deronda, remembering

with some anxiety the former question as to his own knowledge of that

tongue.

“Yes—yes,” said Mordecai, in a tone of deep sadness: “in my youth I

wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I

had the ranks of the great dead around me; the martyrs gathered and

listened. But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I

saw my life spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage

is an unbreaking patience; part is skill to seek divers methods and

find a rooting-place where the planters despair. But there came new

messengers from the Eternal. I had to bow under the yoke that presses

on the great multitude born of woman: family troubles called me—I had

to work, to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but

already the angel of death had turned to me and beckoned, and I felt

his skirts continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought

hearing and help. I spoke; I went to men of our people—to the rich in

influence or knowledge, to the rich in other wealth. But I found none

to listen with understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a

small sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of

Hebrew manuscript with me; I said, our chief teachers are misleading

the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant were both too busy to

listen. Scorn stood as interpreter between me and them. One said, ‘The

book of Mormon would never have answered in Hebrew; and if you mean to

address our learned men, it is not likely you can teach them anything.’

He touched a truth there.”

The last words had a perceptible irony in their hoarsened tone.

“But though you had accustomed yourself to write in Hebrew, few,

surely, can use English better,” said Deronda, wanting to hint

consolation in a new effort for which he could smooth the way.

Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered,

“Too late—too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this

gasping breath. But the breath may wake the fount of pity—the writing

not. If I could write now and used English, I should be as one who

beats a board to summon those who have been used to no signal but a

bell. My soul has an ear to hear the faults of its own speech. New

writing of mine would be like this body”—Mordecai spread his

arms—“within it there might be the Ruach-ha-kodesh—the breath of

divine thought—but, men would smile at it and say, ‘A poor Jew!’ and

the chief smilers would be of my own people.”

Mordecai let his hands fall, and his head sink in melancholy: for the

moment he had lost hold of his hope. Despondency, conjured up by his

own words, had floated in and hovered above him with eclipsing wings.

He had sunk into momentary darkness,

“I feel with you—I feel strongly with you,” said Deronda, in a clear

deep voice which was itself a cordial, apart from the words of

sympathy. “But forgive me if I speak hastily—for what you have

actually written there need be no utter burial. The means of

publication are within reach. If you will rely on me, I can assure you

of all that is necessary to that end.”

“That is not enough,” said Mordecai, quickly, looking up again with the

flash of recovered memory and confidence. “That is not all my trust in

you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul—believing my

belief—being moved by my reasons—hoping my hope—seeing the vision I

point to—beholding a glory where I behold it!”—Mordecai had taken a

step nearer as he spoke, and now laid his hand on Deronda’s arm with a

tight grasp; his face little more than a foot off had something like a

pale flame in it—an intensity of reliance that acted as a peremptory

claim, while he went on—“You will be my life: it will be planted

afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance; it has been

gathering for ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a

bridge: what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the

bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You

will take the inheritance which the base son refuses because of the

tombs which the plow and harrow may not pass over or the gold-seeker

disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew.”

Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm of flood or

fire, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of

discouraging this fellowman who urged a prayer as one in the last

agony, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and

being hurried on to a self-committal which might turn into a falsity.

The peculiar appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most

of us experience under a grasp and speech which assumed to dominate.

The difficulty to him was to inflict the accents of hesitation and

doubt on this ardent suffering creature, who was crowding too much of

his brief being into a moment of perhaps extravagant trust. With

exquisite instinct, Deronda, before he opened his lips, placed his palm

gently on Mordecai’s straining hand—an act just then equal to many

speeches. And after that he said, without haste, as if conscious that

he might be wrong,

“Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you

remember that I said I was not of your race?”

“It can’t be true,” Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of

shock. The sympathetic hand still upon him had fortified the feeling

which was stronger than those words of denial. There was a perceptible

pause, Deronda feeling it impossible to answer, conscious indeed that

the assertion “It can’t be true”—had the pressure of argument for him.

Mordecai, too entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the

relation between himself and Deronda to have any other care in his

speech, followed up that assertion by a second, which came to his lips

as a mere sequence of his long-cherished conviction—“You are not sure

of your own origin.”

“How do you know that?” said Daniel, with an habitual shrinking which

made him remove his hands from Mordecai’s, who also relaxed his hold,

and fell back into his former leaning position.

“I know it—I know it; what is my life else?” said Mordecai, with a low

cry of impatience. “Tell me everything: tell me why you deny.”

He could have no conception what that demand was to the hearer—how

probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly conscious

reticence of years; how the uncertainty he was insisting on as part of

his own hope had always for Daniel been a threatening possibility of

painful revelation about his mother. But the moment had influences

which were not only new but solemn to Deronda; any evasion here might

turn out to be a hateful refusal of some task that belonged to him,

some act of due fellowship; in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a

being who was appealing to him as a forlorn hope under the shadow of a

coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort over

himself—determined to tell all the truth briefly,

“I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have

never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an

Englishman.”

Deronda’s deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this

confession; and all the while there was an under-current of amazement in

him at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it. It seemed

as if Mordecai were hardly overrating his own power to determine the

action of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen.

“It will be seen—it will be declared,” said Mordecai, triumphantly.

“The world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul;

dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness

discerns remote stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake

us before they are fully discerned—so events—so beings: they are knit

with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a

thought not fully spelled; my soul is shaken before the words are all

there. The rest will come—it will come.”

“We must not lose sight of the fact that the outward event has not

always been a fulfillment of the firmest faith,” said Deronda, in a

tone that was made hesitating by the painfully conflicting desires, not

to give any severe blow to Mordecai, and not to give his confidence a

sanction which might have the severest of blows in reserve.

Mordecai’s face, which had been illuminated to the utmost in that last

declaration of his confidence, changed under Deronda’s words, not only

into any show of collapsed trust: the force did not disappear from the

expression, but passed from the triumphant into the firmly resistant.

“You would remind me that I may be under an illusion—that the history

of our people’s trust has been full of illusion. I face it all.” Here

Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending his head a little forward, he

said, in his hoarse whisper, “_So it might be with my trust, if you

would make it an illusion. But you will not._”

The very sharpness with which these words penetrated Deronda made him

feel the more that here was a crisis in which he must be firm.

“What my birth was does not lie in my will,” he answered. “My sense of

claims on me cannot be independent of my knowledge there. And I cannot

promise you that I will try to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have

struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I

have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know

more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it

would become if it were made a part of yours.”

Mordecai had folded his arms again while Deronda was speaking, and now

answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing,

“You _shall_ know. What are we met for, but that you should know. Your

doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. I know the philosophies of

this time and of other times; if I chose I could answer a summons

before their tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the

mother-tongue of my soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a

system, that gives you the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet

covering them all. I could silence them: may not a man silence his awe

or his love, and take to finding reasons, which others demand? But if

his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found? Man finds his

pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the

wilderness: now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through

the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways

yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it,

not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you has grown but as

false hopes grow. That doubt is in your mind? Well, my expectation was

there, and you are come. Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty,

and the water is on my lips! What are doubts to me? In the hour when

you come to me and say, ‘I reject your soul: I know that I am not a

Jew: we have no lot in common’—I shall not doubt. I shall be

certain—certain that I have been deluded. That hour will never come!”

Deronda felt a new chord sounding in his speech: it was rather

imperious than appealing—had more of conscious power than of the

yearning need which had acted as a beseeching grasp on him before. And

usually, though he was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change of

attitude toward him would have weakened his inclination to admit a

claim. But here there was something that balanced his resistance and

kept it aloof. This strong man whose gaze was sustainedly calm and his

finger-nails pink with health, who was exercised in all questioning,

and accused of excessive mental independence, still felt a subduing

influence over him in the tenacious certitude of the fragile creature

before him, whose pallid yellow nostril was tense with effort as his

breath labored under the burthen of eager speech. The influence seemed

to strengthen the bond of sympathetic obligation. In Deronda at this

moment the desire to escape what might turn into a trying embarrassment

was no more likely to determine action than the solicitations of

indolence are likely to determine it in one with whom industry is a

daily law. He answered simply,

“It is my wish to meet and satisfy your wishes wherever that is

possible to me. It is certain to me at least that I desire not to

undervalue your toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But

where can we meet?”

“I have thought of that,” said Mordecai. “It is not hard for you to

come into this neighborhood later in the evening? You did so once.”

“I can manage it very well occasionally,” said Deronda. “You live under

the same roof with the Cohens, I think?”

Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered to take his place

behind the counter. He was an elderly son of Abraham, whose childhood

had fallen on the evil times at the beginning of this century, and who

remained amid this smart and instructed generation as a preserved

specimen, soaked through and through with the effect of the poverty and

contempt which were the common heritage of most English Jews seventy

years ago. He had none of the oily cheerfulness observable in Mr.

Cohen’s aspect: his very features—broad and chubby—showed that

tendency to look mongrel without due cause, which, in a miscellaneous

London neighborhood, may perhaps be compared with the marvels of

imitation in insects, and may have been nature’s imperfect effort on

behalf of the pure Caucasian to shield him from the shame and spitting

to which purer features would have been exposed in the times of zeal.

Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt

in tins of meat and other commodities—without knowledge or

responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they

might contain. But he believed in Mordecai’s learning as something

marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by

a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He

greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver

spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts.

But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without

any explicit agreement as to their direction, were walking toward Ezra

Cohen’s.

“We can’t meet there: my room is too narrow,” said Mordecai, taking up

the thread of talk where they had dropped it. “But there is a tavern

not far from here where I sometimes go to a club. It is the _Hand and

Banner_, in the street at the next turning, five doors down. We can

have the parlor there any evening.”

“We can try that for once,” said Deronda. “But you will perhaps let me

provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and

comfort than where you are.”

“No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing

less precious from you than your soul’s brotherhood. I will think of

nothing else yet. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on

that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it.”

Deronda was a little startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he

could reply Mordecai added—“it is all one. Had you been in need of the

money, the great end would have been that we should meet again. But you

are rich?” he ended, in a tone of interrogation.

“Not rich, except in the sense that every one is rich who has more than

he needs for himself.”

“I desired that your life should be free,” said Mordecai,

dreamily—“mine has been a bondage.”

It was clear that he had no interest in the fact of Deronda’s

appearance at the Cohens’ beyond its relation to his own ideal purpose.

Despairing of leading easily up to the question he wished to ask,

Deronda determined to put it abruptly, and said,

“Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to

about her daughter?”

There was no immediate answer, and he thought that he should have to

repeat the question. The fact was that Mordecai had heard the words,

but had to drag his mind to a new subject away from his passionate

preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied with a careful effort

such as he would have used if he had been asked the road to Holborn:

“I know the reason. But I will not speak even of trivial family affairs

which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their tent

as in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as they injure none other, is

their own possession.”

Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks as a sort of rebuke he

was little used to, and he also found himself painfully baffled where

he had reckoned with some confidence on getting decisive knowledge. He

became the more conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of

the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his

ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens’,

which must be made not only under the former uncertainty, but under a

new disappointment as to the possibility of its removal.

“I will part from you now,” he said, just before they could reach

Cohen’s door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious

fatigued face under the gaslight.

“When will you come back?” he said, with slow emphasis.

“May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens’ any evening

after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to

their knowing that you and I meet in private?”

“None,” said Mordecai. “But the days I wait now are longer than the

years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the

half. My hope abides in you.”

“I will be faithful,” said Deronda—he could not have left those words

unuttered. “I will come the first evening I can after seven: on

Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me.”

He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to

feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered

energy—“This is come to pass, and the rest will come.”

That was their good-by.

BOOK VI.—REVELATIONS