“Within the gentle heart Love shelters him,
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in Nature’s scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.”
—GUIDO GUINICELLI (_Rossetti’s Translation_).
There was another house besides the white house at Pennicote, another
breast besides Rex Gascoigne’s, in which the news of Grandcourt’s death
caused both strong agitation and the effort to repress it.
It was Hans Meyrick’s habit to send or bring in the _Times_ for his
mother’s reading. She was a great reader of news, from the
widest-reaching politics to the list of marriages; the latter, she
said, giving her the pleasant sense of finishing the fashionable novels
without having read them, and seeing the heroes and heroines happy
without knowing what poor creatures they were. On a Wednesday, there
were reasons why Hans always chose to bring the paper, and to do so
about the time that Mirah had nearly ended giving Mab her weekly
lesson, avowing that he came then because he wanted to hear Mirah sing.
But on the particular Wednesday now in question, after entering the
house as quietly as usual with his latch-key, he appeared in the
parlor, shaking the _Times_ aloft with a crackling noise, in
remorseless interruption of Mab’s attempt to render _Lascia ch’io
pianga_ with a remote imitation of her teacher. Piano and song ceased
immediately; Mirah, who had been playing the accompaniment,
involuntarily started up and turned round, the crackling sound, after
the occasional trick of sounds, having seemed to her something
thunderous; and Mab said,
“O-o-o, Hans! why do you bring a more horrible noise than my singing?”
“What on earth is the wonderful news?” said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the
only other person in the room. “Anything about Italy—anything about
the Austrians giving up Venice?”
“Nothing about Italy, but something from Italy,” said Hans, with a
peculiarity in his tone and manner which set his mother interpreting.
Imagine how some of us feel and behave when an event, not disagreeable
seems to be confirming and carrying out our private constructions. We
say, “What do you think?” in a pregnant tone to some innocent person
who has not embarked his wisdom in the same boat with ours, and finds
our information flat.
“Nothing bad?” said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously, thinking immediately of
Deronda; and Mirah’s heart had been already clutched by the same
thought.
“Not bad for anybody we care much about,” said Hans, quickly; “rather
uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently
before. Considering what a dear gazelle I am, I am constantly wondering
to find myself alive.”
“Oh me, Hans!” said Mab, impatiently, “if you must talk of yourself,
let it be behind your own back. What _is_ it that has happened?”
“Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that’s all,” said
Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick, with his finger against a
paragraph. “But more than all is—Deronda was at Genoa in the same
hotel with them, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got
her out of the water time enough to save her from any harm. It seems
they saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious
action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However Deronda is a
lucky fellow in being there to take care of her.”
Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her
hands tightly clasped; and Mrs. Meyrick, giving up the paper to Mab,
said,
“Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after
him.”
“It was an inadvertence—a little absence of mind,” said Hans, creasing
his face roguishly, and throwing himself into a chair not far from
Mirah. “Who can be fond of a jealous baritone, with freezing glances,
always singing asides?—that was the husband’s _rôle_, depend upon it.
Nothing can be neater than his getting drowned. The Duchess is at
liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that
will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the
wedding.”
Here Mirah started from her sitting posture, and fixing her eyes on
Hans, with an angry gleam in them, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice
of indignation,
“Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Mr. Deronda would not
like you to speak so. Why will you say he is lucky—why will you use
words of that sort about life and death—when what is life to one is
death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs.
Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away
from my brother—I know she would. Mr. Deronda would not call that
lucky to pierce my brother’s heart.”
All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Mirah’s face,
with a look of anger that might have suited Ithuriel, pale, even to the
lips that were usually so rich of tint, was not far from poor Hans, who
sat transfixed, blushing under it as if he had been a girl, while he
said, nervously,
“I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word. I’ll go and hang
myself like Judas—if it’s allowable to mention him.” Even in Hans’s
sorrowful moments, his improvised words had inevitably some drollery.
But Mirah’s anger was not appeased: how could it be? She had burst into
indignant speech as creatures in intense pain bite and make their teeth
meet even through their own flesh, by way of making their agony
bearable. She said no more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed
the sheet of music before her, as if she thought of beginning to play
again.
It was Mab who spoke, while Mrs. Meyrick’s face seemed to reflect some
of Hans’ discomfort.
“Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. You are always taking Mr.
Deronda’s name in vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way about
his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men’s minds must be very black, I think,”
ended Mab, with much scorn.
“Quite true, my dear,” said Hans, in a low tone, rising and turning on
his heel to walk toward the back window.
“We had better go on, Mab; you have not given your full time to the
lesson,” said Mirah, in a higher tone than usual. “Will you sing this
again, or shall I sing it to you?”
“Oh, please sing it to me,” said Mab, rejoiced to take no more notice
of what had happened.
And Mirah immediately sang _Lascia ch’io pianga_, giving forth its
melodious sobs and cries with new fullness and energy. Hans paused in
his walk and leaned against the mantel-piece, keeping his eyes
carefully away from his mother’s. When Mirah had sung her last note and
touched the last chord, she rose and said, “I must go home now. Ezra
expects me.”
She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick and hung back a little, not
daring to look at her, instead of kissing her, as usual. But the little
mother drew Mirah’s face down to hers, and said, soothingly, “God bless
you, my dear.” Mirah felt that she had committed an offense against
Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking Hans, and mixed with the rest of her
suffering was the sense that she had shown something like a proud
ingratitude, an unbecoming assertion of superiority. And her friend had
divined this compunction.
Meanwhile Hans had seized his wide-awake, and was ready to open the
door.
“Now, Hans,” said Mab, with what was really a sister’s tenderness
cunningly disguised, “you are not going to walk home with Mirah. I am
sure she would rather not. You are so dreadfully disagreeable to-day.”
“I shall go to take care of her, if she does not forbid me,” said Hans,
opening the door.
Mirah said nothing, and when he had opened the outer door for her and
closed it behind him, he walked by her side unforbidden. She had not
the courage to begin speaking to him again—conscious that she had
perhaps been unbecomingly severe in her words to him, yet finding only
severer words behind them in her heart. Besides, she was pressed upon
by a crowd of thoughts thrusting themselves forward as interpreters of
that consciousness which still remained unaltered to herself.
Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. Mirah’s anger had waked in
him a new perception, and with it the unpleasant sense that he was a
dolt not to have had it before. Suppose Mirah’s heart were entirely
preoccupied with Deronda in another character than that of her own and
her brother’s benefactor; the supposition was attended in Hans’s mind
with anxieties which, to do him justice, were not altogether selfish.
He had a strong persuasion, which only direct evidence to the contrary
could have dissipated, and that was that there was a serious attachment
between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he had pieced together many
fragments of observation, and gradually gathered knowledge, completed
by what his sisters had heard from Anna Gascoigne, which convinced him
not only that Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, but also,
notwithstanding his friend’s austere self-repression, that Deronda’s
susceptibility about her was the sign of concealed love. Some men,
having such a conviction, would have avoided allusions that could have
roused that susceptibility; but Hans’s talk naturally fluttered toward
mischief, and he was given to a form of experiment on live animals
which consisted in irritating his friends playfully. His experiments
had ended in satisfying him that what he thought likely was true.
On the other hand, any susceptibility Deronda had manifested about a
lover’s attentions being shown to Mirah, Hans took to be sufficiently
accounted for by the alleged reason, namely, her dependent position;
for he credited his friend with all possible unselfish anxiety for
those whom he could rescue and protect. And Deronda’s insistence that
Mirah would never marry one who was not a Jew necessarily seemed to
exclude himself, since Hans shared the ordinary opinion, which he knew
nothing to disturb, that Deronda was the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger.
Thus he felt himself in clearness about the state of Deronda’s
affections; but now, the events which really struck him as concurring
toward the desirable union with Mrs. Grandcourt, had called forth a
flash of revelation from Mirah—a betrayal of her passionate feeling on
this subject which had made him melancholy on her account as well as
his own—yet on the whole less melancholy than if he had imagined
Deronda’s hopes fixed on her. It is not sublime, but it is common, for
a man to see the beloved object unhappy because his rival loves
another, with more fortitude and a milder jealousy than if he saw her
entirely happy in his rival. At least it was so with the mercurial
Hans, who fluctuated between the contradictory states of feeling,
wounded because Mirah was wounded, and of being almost obliged to
Deronda for loving somebody else. It was impossible for him to give
Mirah any direct sign of the way in which he had understood her anger,
yet he longed that his speechless companionship should be eloquent in a
tender, penitent sympathy which is an admissible form of wooing a
bruised heart.
Thus the two went side by side in a companionship that yet seemed an
agitated communication, like that of two chords whose quick vibrations
lie outside our hearing. But when they reached the door of Mirah’s
home, and Hans said “Good-bye,” putting out his hand with an appealing
look of penitence, she met the look with melancholy gentleness, and
said, “Will you not come in and see my brother?”
Hans could not but interpret this invitation as a sign of pardon. He
had not enough understanding of what Mirah’s nature had been wrought
into by her early experience, to divine how the very strength of her
late excitement had made it pass more quickly into the resolute
acceptance of pain. When he had said, “If you will let me,” and they
went in together, half his grief was gone, and he was spinning a little
romance of how his devotion might make him indispensable to Mirah in
proportion as Deronda gave his devotion elsewhere. This was quite fair,
since his friend was provided for according to his own heart; and on
the question of Judaism Hans felt thoroughly fortified:—who ever heard
in tale or history that a woman’s love went in the track of her race
and religion? Moslem and Jewish damsels were always attracted toward
Christians, and now if Mirah’s heart had gone forth too precipitately
toward Deronda, here was another case in point. Hans was wont to make
merry with his own arguments, to call himself a Giaour, and antithesis
the sole clue to events; but he believed a little in what he laughed
at. And thus his bird-like hope, constructed on the lightest
principles, soared again in spite of heavy circumstances.
They found Mordecai looking singularly happy, holding a closed letter
in his hand, his eyes glowing with a quiet triumph which in his
emaciated face gave the idea of a conquest over assailing death. After
the greeting between him and Hans, Mirah put her arm round her
brother’s neck and looked down at the letter in his hand, without the
courage to ask about it, though she felt sure that it was the cause of
his happiness.
“A letter from Daniel Deronda,” said Mordecai, answering her look.
“Brief—only saying that he hopes soon to return. Unexpected claims
have detained him. The promise of seeing him again is like the bow in
the cloud to me,” continued Mordecai, looking at Hans; “and to you it
must be a gladness. For who has two friends like him?”
While Hans was answering Mirah slipped away to her own room; but not to
indulge in any outburst of the passion within her. If the angels, once
supposed to watch the toilet of women, had entered the little chamber
with her and let her shut the door behind them, they would only have
seen her take off her hat, sit down and press her hands against her
temples as if she had suddenly reflected that her head ached; then rise
to dash cold water on her eyes and brow and hair till her backward
curls were full of crystal beads, while she had dried her brow and
looked out like a freshly-opened flower from among the dewy tresses of
the woodland; then give deep sighs of relief, and putting on her little
slippers, sit still after that action for a couple of minutes, which
seemed to her so long, so full of things to come, that she rose with an
air of recollection, and went down to make tea.
Something of the old life had returned. She had been used to remember
that she must learn her part, must go to rehearsal, must act and sing
in the evening, must hide her feelings from her father; and the more
painful her life grew, the more she had been used to hide. The force of
her nature had long found its chief action in resolute endurance, and
to-day the violence of feeling which had caused the first jet of anger
had quickly transformed itself into a steady facing of trouble, the
well-known companion of her young years. But while she moved about and
spoke as usual, a close observer might have discerned a difference
between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraining energy,
and the sweet genuine calm of the months when she first felt a return
of her infantine happiness.
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of
calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at
the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will
alter the course of the storm. Mirah felt no such surprise when
familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her
according to the old use and wont. And this habit of expecting trouble
rather than joy, hindered her from having any persistent belief in
opposition to the probabilities which were not merely suggested by
Hans, but were supported by her own private knowledge and long-growing
presentiment. An attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, to end
in their future marriage, had the aspect of a certainty for her
feeling. There had been no fault in him: facts had ordered themselves
so that there was a tie between him and this woman who belonged to
another world than hers and Ezra’s—nay, who seemed another sort of
being than Deronda, something foreign that would be a disturbance in
his life instead of blending with it. Well, well—but if it could have
been deferred so as to make no difference while Ezra was there! She did
not know all the momentousness of the relation between Deronda and her
brother, but she had seen, and instinctively felt enough to forebode
its being incongruous with any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt; at least
this was the clothing that Mirah first gave to her mortal repugnance.
But in the still, quick action of her consciousness, thoughts went on
like changing states of sensation unbroken by her habitual acts; and
this inward language soon said distinctly that the mortal repugnance
would remain even if Ezra were secured from loss.
“What I have read about and sung about and seen acted, is happening to
me—this that I am feeling is the love that makes jealousy;” so
impartially Mirah summed up the charge against herself. But what
difference could this pain of hers make to any one else? It must remain
as exclusively her own, and hidden, as her early yearning and devotion
to her lost mother. But unlike that devotion, it was something that she
felt to be a misfortune of her nature—a discovery that what should
have been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk into selfish pain, that
the feeling she had hitherto delighted to pour out in words was
degraded into something she was ashamed to betray—an absurd longing
that she who had received all and given nothing should be of importance
where she was of no importance—an angry feeling toward another woman
who possessed the good she wanted. But what notion, what vain reliance
could it be that had lain darkly within her and was now burning itself
into sight as disappointment and jealousy? It was as if her soul had
been steeped in poisonous passion by forgotten dreams of deep sleep,
and now flamed out in this unaccountable misery. For with her waking
reason she had never entertained what seemed the wildly unfitting
thought that Deronda could love her. The uneasiness she had felt before
had been comparatively vague and easily explained as part of a general
regret that he was only a visitant in her and her brother’s world, from
which the world where his home lay was as different as a portico with
lights and lacqueys was different from the door of a tent, where the
only splendor came from the mysterious inaccessible stars. But her
feeling was no longer vague: the cause of her pain—the image of Mrs.
Grandcourt by Deronda’s side, drawing him farther and farther into the
distance, was as definite as pincers on her flesh. In the Psyche-mould
of Mirah’s frame there rested a fervid quality of emotion, sometimes
rashly supposed to require the bulk of a Cleopatra; her impressions had
the thoroughness and tenacity that give to the first selection of
passionate feeling the character of a life-long faithfulness. And now a
selection had declared itself, which gave love a cruel heart of
jealousy: she had been used to a strong repugnance toward certain
objects that surrounded her, and to walk inwardly aloof from them while
they touched her sense. And now her repugnance concentrated itself on
Mrs. Grandcourt, of whom she involuntarily conceived more evil than she
knew. “I could bear everything that used to be—but this is worse—this
is worse,—I used not to have horrible feelings!” said the poor child
in a loud whisper to her pillow. Strange that she should have to pray
against any feeling which concerned Deronda!
But this conclusion had been reached through an evening spent in
attending to Mordecai, whose exaltation of spirit in the prospect of
seeing his friend again, disposed him to utter many thoughts aloud to
Mirah, though such communication was often interrupted by intervals
apparently filled with an inward utterance that animated his eyes and
gave an occasional silent action to his lips. One thought especially
occupied him.
“Seest thou, Mirah,” he said once, after a long silence, “the _Shemah_,
wherein we briefly confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional
exercise of the Hebrew; and this made our religion the fundamental
religion for the whole world; for the divine Unity embraced as its
consequence the ultimate unity of mankind. See, then—the nation which
has been scoffed at for its separateness, has given a binding theory to
the human race. Now, in complete unity a part possesses the whole as
the whole possesses every part: and in this way human life is tending
toward the image of the Supreme Unity: for as our life becomes more
spiritual by capacity of thought, and joy therein, possession tends to
become more universal, being independent of gross material contact; so
that in a brief day the soul of man may know in fuller volume the good
which has been and is, nay, is to come, than all he could possess in a
whole life where he had to follow the creeping paths of the senses. In
this moment, my sister, I hold the joy of another’s future within me: a
future which these eyes will not see, and which my spirit may not then
recognize as mine. I recognize it now, and love it so, that I can lay
down this poor life upon its altar and say: ‘Burn, burn indiscernibly
into that which shall be, which is my love and not me.’ Dost thou
understand, Mirah?”
“A little,” said Mirah, faintly, “but my mind is too poor to have felt
it.”
“And yet,” said Mordecai, rather insistently, “women are specially
framed for the love which feels possession in renouncing, and is thus a
fit image of what I mean. Somewhere in the later _Midrash_, I think, is
the story of a Jewish maiden who loved a Gentile king so well, that
this was what she did:—she entered into prison and changed clothes
with the woman who was beloved by the king, that she might deliver that
woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king to be happy
in his love which was not for her. This is the surpassing love, that
loses self in the object of love.”
“No, Ezra, no,” said Mirah, with low-toned intensity, “that was not it.
She wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and
feel that she was better than the other. It was her strong self,
wanting to conquer, that made her die.”
Mordecai was silent a little, and then argued,
“That might be, Mirah. But if she acted so, believing the king would
never know.”
“You can make the story so in your mind, Ezra, because you are great,
and like to fancy the greatest that could be. But I think it was not
really like that. The Jewish girl must have had jealousy in her heart,
and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king’s mind. That
is what she would die for.”
“My sister, thou hast read too many plays, where the writers delight in
showing the human passions as indwelling demons, unmixed with the
relenting and devout elements of the soul. Thou judgest by the plays,
and not by thy own heart, which is like our mother’s.”
Mirah made no answer.