Daniel Deronda

Chapter 4

It would be a little hard to blame the rector of Pennicote that in the

course of looking at things from every point of view, he looked at

Gwendolen as a girl likely to make a brilliant marriage. Why should he be

expected to differ from his contemporaries in this matter, and wish his

niece a worse end of her charming maidenhood than they would approve as

the best possible? It is rather to be set down to his credit that his

feelings on the subject were entirely good-natured. And in considering the

relation of means to ends, it would have been mere folly to have been

guided by the exceptional and idyllic--to have recommended that Gwendolen

should wear a gown as shabby as Griselda's in order that a marquis might

fall in love with her, or to have insisted that since a fair maiden was to

be sought, she should keep herself out of the way. Mr. Gascoigne's

calculations were of the kind called rational, and he did not even think

of getting a too frisky horse in order that Gwendolen might be threatened

with an accident and be rescued by a man of property. He wished his niece

well, and he meant her to be seen to advantage in the best society of the

neighborhood.

Her uncle's intention fell in perfectly with Gwendolen's own wishes. But

let no one suppose that she also contemplated a brilliant marriage as the

direct end of her witching the world with her grace on horseback, or with

any other accomplishment. That she was to be married some time or other

she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be

of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt

quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage

as the fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined

herself a heroine were not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued

or hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and

agreeable guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all

the domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious

necessity. Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it

rather a dreary state in which a woman could not do what she liked, had

more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became

irrevocably immersed in humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion;

she could not look forward to a single life; but promotions have sometimes

to be taken with bitter herbs--a peerage will not quite do instead of

leadership to the man who meant to lead; and this delicate-limbed sylph of

twenty meant to lead. For such passions dwell in feminine breasts also. In

Gwendolen's, however, they dwelt among strictly feminine furniture, and

had no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning or the balance

of the constitution; her knowledge being such as with no sort of standing-

room or length of lever could have been expected to move the world. She

meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather,

whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in

that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her

fancy.

"Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet," said Miss

Merry, the meek governess: hyperbolical words which have long come to

carry the most moderate meanings; for who has not heard of private persons

having the world at their feet in the shape of some half-dozen items of

flattering regard generally known in a genteel suburb? And words could

hardly be too wide or vague to indicate the prospect that made a hazy

largeness about poor Gwendolen on the heights of her young self-

exultation. Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to

have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no

will was present. It was not to be so with her; she would no longer be

sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would make the very

best of the chances that life offered her, and conquer circumstances by

her exceptional cleverness. Certainly, to be settled at Offendene, with

the notice of Lady Brackenshaw, the archery club, and invitations to dine

with the Arrowpoints, as the highest lights in her scenery, was not a

position that seemed to offer remarkable chances; but Gwendolen's

confidence lay chiefly in herself. She felt well equipped for the mastery

of life. With regard to much in her lot hitherto, she held herself rather

hardly dealt with, but as to her "education," she would have admitted that

it had left her under no disadvantages. In the school-room her quick mind

had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected

facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness; and what

remained of all things knowable, she was conscious of being sufficiently

acquainted with through novels, plays and poems. About her French and

music, the two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no

ground for uneasiness; and when to all these qualifications, negative and

positive, we add the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons

are born with, so that any subject they turn their attention to impresses

them with their own power of forming a correct judgment on it, who can

wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own destiny?

There were many subjects in the world--perhaps the majority--in which she

felt no interest, because they were stupid; for subjects are apt to appear

stupid to the young as light seems dull to the old; but she would not have

felt at all helpless in relation to them if they had turned up in

conversation. It must be remembered that no one had disputed her power or

her general superiority. As on the arrival at Offendene, so always, the

first thought of those about her had been, what will Gwendolen think?--if

the footman trod heavily in creaking boots, or if the laundress's work was

unsatisfactory, the maid said, "This will never do for Miss Harleth"; if

the wood smoked in the bedroom fireplace, Mrs. Davilow, whose own weak

eyes suffered much from this inconvenience, spoke apologetically of it to

Gwendolen. If, when they were under the stress of traveling, she did not

appear at the breakfast table till every one else had finished, the only

question was, how Gwendolen's coffee and toast should still be of the

hottest and crispest; and when she appeared with her freshly-brushed

light-brown hair streaming backward and awaiting her mamma's hand to coil

it up, her large brown eyes glancing bright as a wave-washed onyx from

under their long lashes, it was always she herself who had to be tolerant

--to beg that Alice who sat waiting on her would not stick up her

shoulders in that frightful manner, and that Isabel, instead of pushing up

to her and asking questions, would go away to Miss Merry.

Always she was the princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have

her breakfast-roll made of the finest-bolted flour from the seven thin

ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver folk

kept out of the baggage. How was this to be accounted for? The answer may

seem to lie quite on the surface:--in her beauty, a certain unusualness

about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her graceful

movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that if she came into the room

on a rainy day when everybody else was flaccid and the use of things in

general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a sudden, sufficient

reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even the waiters at hotels

showed the more alacrity in doing away with crumbs and creases and dregs

with struggling flies in them. This potent charm, added to the fact that

she was the eldest daughter, toward whom her mamma had always been in an

apologetic state of mind for the evils brought on her by a step-father,

may seem so full a reason for Gwendolen's domestic empire, that to look

for any other would be to ask the reason of daylight when the sun is

shining. But beware of arriving at conclusions without comparison. I

remember having seen the same assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to

persons who were not at all beautiful or unusual, whose firmness showed

itself in no very graceful or euphonious way, and who were not eldest

daughters with a tender, timid mother, compunctious at having subjected

them to inconveniences. Some of them were a very common sort of men. And

the only point of resemblance among them all was a strong determination to

have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves

disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it. Who is so much cajoled

and served with trembling by the weak females of a household as the

unscrupulous male--capable, if he has not free way at home, of going and

doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even without her

potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might not still have

played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her inborn energy of

egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to what she might say

or do. However, she had the charm, and those who feared her were also fond

of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what

may be called the iridescence of her character--the play of various, nay,

contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's rhetoric about the impossibility of

being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy

necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We

cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not

kill in the same moment; but a moment is wide enough for the loyal and

mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward

stroke of repentance.