Daniel Deronda

Chapter 19

To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything

that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again

through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink,

with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When

he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the

printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard

everything as clearly as before--saw not only the actual events of two

hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those

events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope and

fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after her

mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. The first

prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons were

extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientific

experiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the mixed

feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturally

transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.

The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly

haunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly

occurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had been

parted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity. When she

was in the boat she said that her mother and brother were good; but the

goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and

yearning memory, and the ten or twelve years since the parting had been

time enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong tendency to side with

the objects of prejudice, and in general with those who got the worst of

it, his interest had never been practically drawn toward existing Jews,

and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous in fine

apparel or lurked in by-streets, were chiefly of a sort most repugnant to

him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had

dropped their religion, and wished to be merged in the people of their

native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his

sympathy in griefs of inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race

will often strike a specimen who has well earned it on his own account,

and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam. It appears that

the Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice

peculiarly connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allege

experimental grounds for this opinion. Deronda could not escape (who can?)

knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and though

one of his favorite protests was against the severance of past and present

history, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having cared

to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they

retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race. But now that

Mirah's longing roused his mind to a closer survey of details, very

disagreeable images urged themselves of what it might be to find out this

middle-aged Jewess and her son. To be sure, there was the exquisite

refinement and charm of the creature herself to make a presumption in

favor of her immediate kindred, but--he must wait to know more: perhaps

through Mrs. Meyrick he might gather some guiding hints from Mirah's own

lips. Her voice, her accent, her looks--all the sweet purity that clothed

her as with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from giving

her, either ideally or practically, an association with what was hateful

or contaminating. But these fine words with which we fumigate and becloud

unpleasant facts are not the language in which we think. Deronda's

thinking went on in rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided

by some official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dim

doorway, and saw a hawk-eyed woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapening

a hungry girl's last bit of finery; or in some quarter only the more

hideous for being smarter, he found himself under the breath of a young

Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with

gentlemen's tastes, and not fastidious in any transactions with which they

would favor him--and so on through the brief chapter of his experience in

this kind. Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into

insulting ideas, or to practice a form of wit which identifies Moses with

the advertisement sheet; but he was just now governed by dread, and if

Mirah's parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have been

that his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the

habit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this

case as well as his own there was enough to make the connection

reasonable.

But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection in

the fullest sense, and all his chivalrous sentiment roused itself to

insist that the sooner and the more fully he could engage for her the

interest of others besides himself, the better he should fulfill her

claims on him. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he

might be able to do so; the very depth of the impression she had produced

made him desire that she should understand herself to be entirely

independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried to

dispel as fantastic left their influence in an anxiety stronger than any

motive he could give for it, that those who saw his actions closely should

be acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. He

had learned to hate secrecy about the grand ties and obligations of his

life--to hate it the more because a strong spell of interwoven

sensibilities hindered him from breaking such secrecy. Deronda had made a

vow to himself that--since the truths which disgrace mortals are not all

of their own making--the truth should never be made a disgrace to another

by his act. He was not without terror lest he should break this vow, and

fall into the apologetic philosophy which explains the world into

containing nothing better than one's own conduct.

At one moment he resolved to tell the whole of his adventure to Sir Hugo

and Lady Mallinger the next morning at breakfast, but the possibility that

something quite new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs.

Meyrick's checked this impulse, and he finally went to sleep on the

conclusion that he would wait until that visit had been made.