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Home -> George Eliot -> Daniel Deronda -> Chapter 43

Daniel Deronda - Chapter 43

1. Book I, Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Book II, Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Book III, Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Chapter 21

22. Chapter 22

23. Chapter 23

24. Chapter 24

25. Chapter 25

26. Chapter 26

27. Chapter 27

28. Book IV, Chapter 28

29. Chapter 29

30. Chapter 30

31. Chapter 31

32. Chapter 32

33. Chapter 33

34. Chapter 34

35. Book V, Chapter 35

36. Chapter 36

37. Chapter 37

38. Chapter 38

39. Chapter 39

40. Chapter 40

41. Book VI, Chapter 41

42. Chapter 42

43. Chapter 43

44. Chapter 44

45. Chapter 45

46. Chapter 46

47. Chapter 47

48. Chapter 48

49. Chapter 49

50. Book VII, Chapter 50

51. Chapter 51

52. Chapter 52

53. Chapter 53

54. Chapter 54

55. Chapter 55

56. Chapter 56

57. Chapter 57

58. Book VIII, Chapter 58

59. Chapter 59

60. Chapter 60

61. Chapter 61

62. Chapter 62

63. Chapter 63

64. Chapter 64

65. Chapter 65

66. Chapter 66

67. Chapter 67

68. Chapter 68

69. Chapter 69

70. Chapter 70







CHAPTER XLIII.

"My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky."
--KEATS.


After a few minutes the unwonted stillness had penetrated Mordecai's
consciousness, and he looked up at Deronda, not in the least with
bewilderment and surprise, but with a gaze full of reposing satisfaction.
Deronda rose and placed his chair nearer, where there could be no imagined
need for raising the voice. Mordecai felt the action as a patient feels
the gentleness that eases his pillow. He began to speak in a low tone, as
if he were only thinking articulately, not trying to reach an audience.

"In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in new
bodies till they are perfected and purified, and a soul liberated from a
worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that needs it, that they may be
perfected together, and their earthly work accomplished. Then they will
depart from the mortal region, and leave place for new souls to be born
out of the store in the eternal bosom. It is the lingering imperfection of
the souls already born into the mortal region that hinders the birth of
new souls and the preparation of the Messianic time:--thus the mind has
given shape to what is hidden, as the shadow of what is known, and has
spoken truth, though it were only in parable. When my long-wandering soul
is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will
be perfected."

Mordecai's pause seemed an appeal which Deronda's feeling would not let
him leave unanswered. He tried to make it truthful; but for Mordecai's ear
it was inevitably filled with unspoken meaning. He only said--

"Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will do."

"I know it," said Mordecai, in a tone of quiet certainty which dispenses
with further assurance. "I heard it. You see it all--you are by my side on
the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfillment which others
deny."

He was silent a moment or two, and then went on meditatively--

"You will take up my life where it was broken. I feel myself back in that
day when my life was broken. The bright morning sun was on the quay--it
was at Trieste--the garments of men from all nations shone like jewels--
the boats were pushing off--the Greek vessel that would land us at Beyrout
was to start in an hour. I was going with a merchant as his clerk and
companion. I said, I shall behold the lands and people of the East, and I
shall speak with a fuller vision. I breathed then as you do, without
labor; I had the light step and the endurance of youth, I could fast, I
could sleep on the hard ground. I had wedded poverty, and I loved my
bride--for poverty to me was freedom. My heart exulted as if it had been
the heart of Moses ben Maimon, strong with the strength of three score
years, and knowing the work that was to fill them. It was the first time I
had been south; the soul within me felt its former sun; and standing on
the quay, where the ground I stood on seemed to send forth light, and the
shadows had an azure glory as of spirits become visible, I felt myself in
the flood of a glorious life, wherein my own small year-counted existence
seemed to melt, so that I knew it not; and a great sob arose within me as
at the rush of waters that were too strong a bliss. So I stood there
awaiting my companion; and I saw him not till he said: 'Ezra, I have been
to the post and there is your letter.'"

"Ezra!" exclaimed Deronda, unable to contain himself.

"Ezra," repeated Mordecai, affirmatively, engrossed in memory. "I was
expecting a letter; for I wrote continually to my mother. And that sound
of my name was like the touch of a wand that recalled me to the body
wherefrom I had been released as it were to mingle with the ocean of human
existence, free from the pressure of individual bondage. I opened the
letter; and the name came again as a cry that would have disturbed me in
the bosom of heaven, and made me yearn to reach where that sorrow was--
'Ezra, my son!'"

Mordecai paused again, his imagination arrested by the grasp of that long-
passed moment. Deronda's mind was almost breathlessly suspended on what
was coming. A strange possibility had suddenly presented itself.
Mordecai's eyes were cast down in abstracted contemplation, and in a few
moments he went on--

"She was a mother of whom it might have come--yea, might have come to be
said, 'Her children arise up and call her blessed.' In her I understood
the meaning of that Master who, perceiving the footsteps of his mother,
rose up and said, 'The Majesty of the Eternal cometh near!' And that
letter was her cry from the depths of anguish and desolation--the cry of a
mother robbed of her little ones. I was her eldest. Death had taken four
babes one after the other. Then came, late, my little sister, who was,
more than all the rest, the desire of my mother's eyes; and the letter was
a piercing cry to me--'Ezra, my son, I am robbed of her. He has taken her
away and left disgrace behind. They will never come again.'"--Here Mordecai
lifted his eyes suddenly, laid his hand on Deronda's arm, and said, "Mine
was the lot of Israel. For the sin of the father my soul must go into
exile. For the sin of the father the work was broken, and the day of
fulfilment delayed. She who bore me was desolate, disgraced, destitute. I
turned back. On the instant I turned--her spirit and the spirit of her
fathers, who had worthy Jewish hearts, moved within me, and drew me. God,
in whom dwells the universe, was within me as the strength of obedience.
I turned and traveled with hardship--to save the scant money which she
would need. I left the sunshine, and traveled into freezing cold. In the
last stage I spent a night in exposure to cold and snow. And that was the
beginning of this slow death."

Mordecai let his eyes wander again and removed his hand. Deronda
resolutely repressed the questions which urged themselves within him.
While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, no other confidence must be
sought than what came spontaneously: nay, he himself felt a kindred
emotion which made him dread his own speech as too momentous.

"But I worked. We were destitute--every thing had been seized. And she was
ill: the clutch of anguish was too strong for her, and wrought with some
lurking disease. At times she could not stand for the beating of her
heart, and the images in her brain became as chambers of terror, where she
beheld my sister reared in evil. In the dead of night I heard her crying
for her child. Then I rose, and we stretched forth our arms together and
prayed. We poured forth our souls in desire that Mirah might be delivered
from evil."

"Mirah?" Deronda repeated, wishing to assure, himself that his ears had
not been deceived by a forecasting imagination. "Did you say Mirah?"

"That was my little sister's name. After we had prayed for her, my mother
would rest awhile. It lasted hardly four years, and in the minute before
she died, we were praying the same prayer--I aloud, she silently. Her soul
went out upon its wings."

"Have you never since heard of your sister?" said Deronda, as quietly as
he could.

"Never. Never have I heard whether she was delivered according to our
prayer. I know not, I know not. Who shall say where the pathways lie? The
poisonous will of the wicked is strong. It poisoned my life--it is slowly
stifling this breath. Death delivered my mother, and I felt it a
blessedness that I was alone in the winters of suffering. But what are the
winters now?--they are far off"--here Mordecai again rested his hand on
Deronda's arm, and looked at him with that joy of the hectic patient which
pierces us to sadness--"there is nothing to wail in the withering of my
body. The work will be the better done. Once I said the work of this
beginning was mine, I am born to do it. Well, I shall do it. I shall live
in you. I shall live in you."

His grasp had become convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as he
had never been before--the certainty that this was Mirah's brother
suffusing his own strange relation to Mordecai with a new solemnity and
tenderness--felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips
paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai's present state of
exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to utter a
word of revelation about Mirah. He feared to make an answer below that
high pitch of expectation which resembled a flash from a dying fire,
making watchers fear to see it die the faster. His dominant impulse was to
do as he had once done before: he laid his firm, gentle hand on the hand
that grasped him. Mordecai's, as if it had a soul of its own--for he was
not distinctly willing to do what he did--relaxed its grasp, and turned
upward under Deronda's. As the two palms met and pressed each other
Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings, and said--

"Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer."

And in fact they parted at Cohen's door without having spoken to each
other again--merely with another pressure of the hands,

Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy of
finding in Mirah's brother a nature even more than worthy of that relation
to her, had the weight of solemnity and sadness; the reunion of brother
and sister was in reality the first stage of a supreme parting--like that
farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which
becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there was the weight of anxiety
about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements it
would be desirable to make beforehand. I suppose we should all have felt
as Deronda did, without sinking into snobbishness or the notion that the
primal duties of life demand a morning and an evening suit, that it was an
admissible desire to free Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all
jarring outward conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded
relationship of the other Cohens, notwithstanding their good nature, made
him resolve if possible to keep them in the background for Mirah, until
her acquaintance with them would be an unmarred rendering of gratitude for
any kindness they had shown to her brother. On all accounts he wished to
give Mordecai's surroundings not only more suited to his frail bodily
condition, but less of a hindrance to easy intercourse, even apart from
the decisive prospect of Mirah's taken up her abode with her brother, and
tending him through the precious remnant of his life. In the heroic drama,
great recognitions are not encumbered with these details; and certainly
Deronda had as reverential an interest in Mordecai and Mirah as he could
have had in the offspring of Agamemnon; but he was caring for destinies
still moving in the dim streets of our earthly life, not yet lifted among
the constellations, and his task presented itself to him as difficult and
delicate, especially in persuading Mordecai to change his abode and
habits. Concerning Mirah's feeling and resolve he had no doubt: there
would be a complete union of sentiment toward the departed mother, and
Mirah would understand her brother's greatness. Yes, greatness: that was
the word which Deronda now deliberately chose to signify the impression
that Mordecai had made on him. He said to himself, perhaps rather
defiantly toward the more negative spirit within him, that this man,
however erratic some of his interpretations might be--this consumptive
Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering
himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching more
consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing
above their market-places--had the chief elements of greatness; a mind
consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human
destinies, but not the less full of conscience and tender heart for the
footsteps that tread near and need a leaning-place; capable of conceiving
and choosing a life's task with far-off issues, yet capable of the
unapplauded heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the call of
the nearer duty whose effect lies within the beatings of the hearts that
are close to us, as the hunger of the unfledged bird to the breast of its
parent.

Deronda to-night was stirred with, the feeling that the brief remnant of
this fervid life had become his charge. He had been peculiarly wrought on
by what he had seen at the club of the friendly indifference which
Mordecai must have gone on encountering. His own experience of the small
room that ardor can make for itself in ordinary minds had had the effect
of increasing his reserve; and while tolerance was the easiest attitude to
him, there was another bent in him also capable of becoming a weakness--
the dislike to appear exceptional or to risk an ineffective insistance on
his own opinion. But such caution appeared contemptible to him just now,
when he, for the first time, saw in a complete picture and felt as a
reality the lives that burn themselves out in solitary enthusiasm: martyrs
of obscure circumstance, exiled in the rarity of their own minds, whose
deliverances in other ears are no more than a long passionate soliloquy--
unless perhaps at last, when they are nearing the invisible shores, signs
of recognition and fulfilment may penetrate the cloud of loneliness; or
perhaps it may be with them as with the dying Copernicus made to touch the
first printed copy of his book when the sense of touch was gone, seeing it
only as a dim object through the deepening dusk.

Deronda had been brought near to one of those spiritual exiles, and it was
in his nature to feel the relation as a strong chain, nay, to feel his
imagination moving without repugnance in the direction of Mordecai's
desires. With all his latent objection to schemes only definite in their
generality and nebulous in detail--in the poise of his sentiments he felt
at one with this man who had made a visionary selection of him: the lines
of what may be called their emotional theory touched. He had not the
Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning, grown the stronger for the
denial which had been his grievance, after the obligation of avowed filial
and social ties. His feeling was ready for difficult obedience. In this
way it came that he set about his new task ungrudgingly; and again he
thought of Mrs. Meyrick as his chief helper. To her first he must make
known the discovery of Mirah's brother, and with her he must consult on
all preliminaries of bringing the mutually lost together. Happily the best
quarter for a consumptive patient did not lie too far off the small house
at Chelsea, and the first office Deronda had to perform for this Hebrew
prophet who claimed him as a spiritual inheritor, was to get him a healthy
lodging. Such is the irony of earthly mixtures, that the heroes have not
always had carpets and teacups of their own; and, seen through the open
window by the mackerel-vender, may have been invited with some hopefulness
to pay three hundred per cent, in the form of fourpence. However,
Deronda's mind was busy with a prospective arrangement for giving a
furnished lodging some faint likeness to a refined home by dismantling his
own chambers of his best old books in vellum, his easiest chair, and the
bas-reliefs of Milton and Dante.

But was not Mirah to be there? What furniture can give such finish to a
room as a tender woman's face?--and is there any harmony of tints that has
such stirrings of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice? Here is
one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes to Mordecai from his
having fixed his imagination on me. He has recovered a perfect sister,
whose affection is waiting for him.




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