Daniel Deronda

Chapter 32

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 Dinlow 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 that 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 both 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 authentic 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, so that we can remember her together. 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 piet* 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 Han'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.