CHAPTER XXXII.

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 pieta 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.