“Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne,
Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort;
Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne
Und küsst dich rasch und flattert fort
Frau Unglück hat im Gegentheile
Dich liebefest an’s Herz gedrückt;
Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile,
Setzt sich zu dir an’s Bett und strickt.”
—HEINE.
Something which Mirah had lately been watching for as the fulfilment of
a threat, seemed now the continued visit of that familiar sorrow which
had lately come back, bringing abundant luggage.
Turning out of Knightsbridge, after singing at a charitable morning
concert in a wealthy house, where she had been recommended by Klesmer,
and where there had been the usual groups outside to see the departing
company, she began to feel herself dogged by footsteps that kept an
even pace with her own. Her concert dress being simple black, over
which she had thrown a dust cloak, could not make her an object of
unpleasant attention, and render walking an imprudence; but this
reflection did not occur to Mirah: another kind of alarm lay uppermost
in her mind. She immediately thought of her father, and could no more
look round than if she had felt herself tracked by a ghost. To turn and
face him would be voluntarily to meet the rush of emotions which
beforehand seemed intolerable. If it were her father he must mean to
claim recognition, and he would oblige her to face him. She must wait
for that compulsion. She walked on, not quickening her pace—of what
use was that?—but picturing what was about to happen as if she had the
full certainty that the man behind her was her father; and along with
her picturing went a regret that she had given her word to Mrs. Meyrick
not to use any concealment about him. The regret at last urged her, at
least, to try and hinder any sudden betrayal that would cause her
brother an unnecessary shock. Under the pressure of this motive, she
resolved to turn before she reached her own door, and firmly will the
encounter instead of merely submitting to it. She had already reached
the entrance of the small square where her home lay, and had made up
her mind to turn, when she felt her embodied presentiment getting
closer to her, then slipping to her side, grasping her wrist, and
saying, with a persuasive curl of accent, “Mirah!”
She paused at once without any start; it was the voice she expected,
and she was meeting the expected eyes. Her face was as grave as if she
had been looking at her executioner, while his was adjusted to the
intention of soothing and propitiating her. Once a handsome face, with
bright color, it was now sallow and deep-lined, and had that peculiar
impress of impudent suavity which comes from courting favor while
accepting disrespect. He was lightly made and active, with something of
youth about him which made the signs of age seem a disguise; and in
reality he was hardly fifty-seven. His dress was shabby, as when she
had seen him before. The presence of this unreverend father now, more
than ever, affected Mirah with the mingled anguish of shame and grief,
repulsion and pity—more than ever, now that her own world was changed
into one where there was no comradeship to fence him from scorn and
contempt.
Slowly, with a sad, tremulous voice, she said, “It is you, father.”
“Why did you run away from me, child?” he began with rapid speech which
was meant to have a tone of tender remonstrance, accompanied with
various quick gestures like an abbreviated finger-language. “What were
you afraid of? You knew I never made you do anything against your will.
It was for your sake I broke up your engagement in the Vorstadt,
because I saw it didn’t suit you, and you repaid me by leaving me to
the bad times that came in consequence. I had made an easier engagement
for you at the Vorstadt Theater in Dresden: I didn’t tell you, because
I wanted to take you by surprise. And you left me planted
there—obliged to make myself scarce because I had broken contract.
That was hard lines for me, after I had given up everything for the
sake of getting you an education which was to be a fortune to you. What
father devoted himself to his daughter more than I did to you? You know
how I bore that disappointment in your voice, and made the best of it:
and when I had nobody besides you, and was getting broken, as a man
must who has had to fight his way with his brains—you chose that time
to leave me. Who else was it you owed everything to, if not to me? and
where was your feeling in return? For what my daughter cared, I might
have died in a ditch.”
Lapidoth stopped short here, not from lack of invention, but because he
had reached a pathetic climax, and gave a sudden sob, like a woman’s,
taking out hastily an old yellow silk handkerchief. He really felt that
his daughter had treated him ill—a sort of sensibility which is
naturally strong in unscrupulous persons, who put down what is owing to
them, without any _per contra_. Mirah, in spite of that sob, had energy
enough not to let him suppose that he deceived her. She answered more
firmly, though it was the first time she had ever used accusing words
to him.
“You know why I left you, father; and I had reason to distrust you,
because I felt sure that you had deceived my mother. If I could have
trusted you, I would have stayed with you and worked for you.”
“I never meant to deceive your mother, Mirah,” said Lapidoth, putting
back his handkerchief, but beginning with a voice that seemed to
struggle against further sobbing. “I meant to take you back to her, but
chances hindered me just at the time, and then there came information
of her death. It was better for you that I should stay where I was, and
your brother could take care of himself. Nobody had any claim on me but
you. I had word of your mother’s death from a particular friend, who
had undertaken to manage things for me, and I sent him over money to
pay expenses. There’s one chance to be sure—” Lapidoth had quickly
conceived that he must guard against something unlikely, yet
possible—“he may have written me lies for the sake of getting the
money out of me.”
Mirah made no answer; she could not bear to utter the only true one—“I
don’t believe one word of what you say”—and she simply showed a wish
that they should walk on, feeling that their standing still might draw
down unpleasant notice. Even as they walked along, their companionship
might well have made a passer-by turn back to look at them. The figure
of Mirah, with her beauty set off by the quiet, careful dress of an
English lady, made a strange pendant to this shabby, foreign-looking,
eager, and gesticulating man, who withal had an ineffaceable jauntiness
of air, perhaps due to the bushy curls of his grizzled hair, the
smallness of his hands and feet, and his light walk.
“You seem to have done well for yourself, Mirah? _You_ are in no want,
I see,” said the father, looking at her with emphatic examination.
“Good friends who found me in distress have helped me to get work,”
said Mirah, hardly knowing what she actually said, from being occupied
with what she would presently have to say. “I give lessons. I have sung
in private houses. I have just been singing at a private concert.” She
paused, and then added, with significance, “I have very good friends,
who know all about me.”
“And you would be ashamed they should see your father in this plight?
No wonder. I came to England with no prospect, but the chance of
finding you. It was a mad quest; but a father’s heart is
superstitious—feels a loadstone drawing it somewhere or other. I might
have done very well, staying abroad: when I hadn’t you to take care of,
I could have rolled or settled as easily as a ball; but it’s hard being
lonely in the world, when your spirit’s beginning to break. And I
thought my little Mirah would repent leaving her father when she came
to look back. I’ve had a sharp pinch to work my way; I don’t know what
I shall come down to next. Talents like mine are no use in this
country. When a man’s getting out at elbows nobody will believe in him.
I couldn’t get any decent employ with my appearance. I’ve been obliged
to get pretty low for a shilling already.”
Mirah’s anxiety was quick enough to imagine her father’s sinking into a
further degradation, which she was bound to hinder if she could. But
before she could answer his string of inventive sentences, delivered
with as much glibness as if they had been learned by rote, he added
promptly,
“Where do you live, Mirah?”
“Here, in this square. We are not far from the house.”
“In lodgings?”
“Yes.”
“Any one to take care of you?”
“Yes,” said Mirah again, looking full at the keen face which was turned
toward hers—“my brother.”
The father’s eyelids fluttered as if the lightning had come across
them, and there was a slight movement of the shoulders. But he said,
after a just perceptible pause: “Ezra? How did you know—how did you
find him?”
“That would take long to tell. Here we are at the door. My brother
would not wish me to close it on you.”
Mirah was already on the doorstep, but had her face turned toward her
father, who stood below her on the pavement. Her heart had begun to
beat faster with the prospect of what was coming in the presence of
Ezra; and already in this attitude of giving leave to the father whom
she had been used to obey—in this sight of him standing below her,
with a perceptible shrinking from the admission which he had been
indirectly asking for, she had a pang of the peculiar, sympathetic
humiliation and shame—the stabbed heart of reverence—which belongs to
a nature intensely filial.
“Stay a minute, _Liebchen_,” said Lapidoth, speaking in a lowered tone;
“what sort of man has Ezra turned out?”
“A good man—a wonderful man,” said Mirah, with slow emphasis, trying
to master the agitation which made her voice more tremulous as she went
on. She felt urged to prepare her father for the complete penetration
of himself which awaited him. “But he was very poor when my friends
found him for me—a poor workman. Once—twelve years ago—he was strong
and happy, going to the East, which he loved to think of; and my mother
called him back because—because she had lost me. And he went to her,
and took care of her through great trouble, and worked for her till she
died—died in grief. And Ezra, too, had lost his health and strength.
The cold had seized him coming back to my mother, because she was
forsaken. For years he has been getting weaker—always poor, always
working—but full of knowledge, and great-minded. All who come near him
honor him. To stand before him is like standing before a prophet of
God”—Mirah ended with difficulty, her heart throbbing—“falsehoods are
no use.”
She had cast down her eyes that she might not see her father while she
spoke the last words—unable to bear the ignoble look of frustration
that gathered in his face. But he was none the less quick in invention
and decision.
“Mirah, _Liebchen_,” he said, in the old caressing way, “shouldn’t you
like me to make myself a little more respectable before my son sees me?
If I had a little sum of money, I could fit myself out and come home to
you as your father ought, and then I could offer myself for some decent
place. With a good shirt and coat on my back, people would be glad
enough to have me. I could offer myself for a courier, if I didn’t look
like a broken-down mountebank. I should like to be with my children,
and forget and forgive. But you have never seen your father look like
this before. If you had ten pounds at hand—or I could appoint you to
bring it me somewhere—I could fit myself out by the day after
to-morrow.”
Mirah felt herself under a temptation which she must try to overcome.
She answered, obliging herself to look at him again,
“I don’t like to deny you what you ask, father; but I have given a
promise not to do things for you in secret. It _is_ hard to see you
looking needy; but we will bear that for a little while; and then you
can have new clothes, and we can pay for them.” Her practical sense
made her see now what was Mrs. Meyrick’s wisdom in exacting a promise
from her.
Lapidoth’s good humor gave way a little. He said, with a sneer, “You
are a hard and fast young lady—you have been learning useful
virtues—keeping promises not to help your father with a pound or two
when you are getting money to dress yourself in silk—your father who
made an idol of you, and gave up the best part of his life to providing
for you.”
“It seems cruel—I know it seems cruel,” said Mirah, feeling this a
worse moment than when she meant to drown herself. Her lips were
suddenly pale. “But, father, it is more cruel to break the promises
people trust in. That broke my mother’s heart—it has broken Ezra’s
life. You and I must eat now this bitterness from what has been. Bear
it. Bear to come in and be cared for as you are.”
“To-morrow, then,” said Lapidoth, almost turning on his heel away from
this pale, trembling daughter, who seemed now to have got the
inconvenient world to back her; but he quickly turned on it again, with
his hands feeling about restlessly in his pockets, and said, with some
return to his appealing tone, “I’m a little cut up with all this,
Mirah. I shall get up my spirits by to-morrow. If you’ve a little money
in your pocket, I suppose it isn’t against your promise to give me a
trifle—to buy a cigar with.”
Mirah could not ask herself another question—could not do anything
else than put her cold trembling hands in her pocket for her
_portemonnaie_ and hold it out. Lapidoth grasped it at once, pressed
her fingers the while, said, “Good-bye, my little girl—to-morrow
then!” and left her. He had not taken many steps before he looked
carefully into all the folds of the purse, found two half-sovereigns
and odd silver, and, pasted against the folding cover, a bit of paper
on which Ezra had inscribed, in a beautiful Hebrew character, the name
of his mother, the days of her birth, marriage, and death, and the
prayer, “May Mirah be delivered from evil.” It was Mirah’s liking to
have this little inscription on many articles that she used. The father
read it, and had a quick vision of his marriage day, and the bright,
unblamed young fellow he was at that time; teaching many things, but
expecting by-and-by to get money more easily by writing; and very fond
of his beautiful bride Sara—crying when she expected him to cry, and
reflecting every phase of her feeling with mimetic susceptibility.
Lapidoth had traveled a long way from that young self, and thought of
all that this inscription signified with an unemotional memory, which
was like the ocular perception of a touch to one who has lost the sense
of touch, or like morsels on an untasting palate, having shape and
grain, but no flavor. Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy
selfish life is the capacity for ruth, compunction, or any unselfish
regret—which we may come to long for as one in slow death longs to
feel laceration, rather than be conscious of a widening margin where
consciousness once was. Mirah’s purse was a handsome one—a gift to
her, which she had been unable to reflect about giving away—and
Lapidoth presently found himself outside of his reverie, considering
what the purse would fetch in addition to the sum it contained, and
what prospect there was of his being able to get more from his daughter
without submitting to adopt a penitential form of life under the eyes
of that formidable son. On such a subject his susceptibilities were
still lively.
Meanwhile Mirah had entered the house with her power of reticence
overcome by the cruelty of her pain. She found her brother quietly
reading and sifting old manuscripts of his own, which he meant to
consign to Deronda. In the reaction from the long effort to master
herself, she fell down before him and clasped his knees, sobbing, and
crying, “Ezra, Ezra!”
He did not speak. His alarm for her spending itself on conceiving the
cause of her distress, the more striking from the novelty in her of
this violent manifestation. But Mirah’s own longing was to be able to
speak and tell him the cause. Presently she raised her hand, and still
sobbing, said brokenly,
“Ezra, my father! our father! He followed me. I wanted him to come in.
I said you would let him come in. And he said No, he would not—not
now, but to-morrow. And he begged for money from me. And I gave him my
purse, and he went away.”
Mirah’s words seemed to herself to express all the misery she felt in
them. Her brother found them less grievous than his preconceptions, and
said gently, “Wait for calm, Mirah, and then tell me all,”—putting off
her hat and laying his hands tenderly on her head. She felt the
soothing influence, and in a few minutes told him as exactly as she
could all that had happened.
“He will not come to-morrow,” said Mordecai. Neither of them said to
the other what they both thought, namely, that he might watch for
Mirah’s outgoings and beg from her again.
“Seest thou,” he presently added, “our lot is the lot of Israel. The
grief and the glory are mingled as the smoke and the flame. It is
because we children have inherited the good that we feel the evil.
These things are wedded for us, as our father was wedded to our mother.”
The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a
Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in
_Babli_—by which (to our ears) affectionate-sounding diminutive is
meant the voluminous Babylonian Talmud. “The Omnipresent,” said a
Rabbi, “is occupied in making marriages.” The levity of the saying lies
in the ear of him who hears it; for by marriages the speaker meant all
the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good
and evil.