CHAPTER LXIII.

"Moses, trotz seiner Bafeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein grosser
Kunstler war und den wahren Kunstlergeist besass. Nur war dieser
Kunstlergeist bei ihm, wie bei seinen agyptischen Landsleuteu, nurauf
das Colossale und Unverwustliche gerichtet. Aber nicht vie die
Aegypter formirte er seine Kunstwerke aus Backstem und Granit, sondern
er baute Menchen-pyramiden, er meisselte Menschen Obelisken, ernahm
einen armen Hirtenstamm und Schuf daraus ein Volk, das ebenfalls den
Jahrhahunderten, trotzen sollte * * * er Schuf Israel."--HEINE:
_Gestandnisse_.


Imagine the difference in Deronda's state of mind when he left England and
when he returned to it. He had set out for Genoa in total uncertainty how
far the actual bent of his wishes and affections would be encouraged--how
far the claims revealed to him might draw him into new paths, far away
from the tracks his thoughts had lately been pursuing with a consent of
desire which uncertainty made dangerous. He came back with something like
a discovered charter warranting the inherited right that his ambition had
begun to yearn for: he came back with what was better than freedom--with a
duteous bond which his experience had been preparing him to accept gladly,
even if it had been attended with no promise of satisfying a secret
passionate longing never yet allowed to grow into a hope. But now he dared
avow to himself the hidden selection of his love. Since the hour when he
left the house at Chelsea in full-hearted silence under the effect of
Mirah's farewell look and words--their exquisite appealingness stirring in
him that deep-laid care for womanhood which had begun when his own lip was
like a girl's--her hold on his feeling had helped him to be blameless in
word and deed under the difficult circumstances we know of. There seemed
no likelihood that he could ever woo this creature who had become dear to
him amidst associations that forbade wooing; yet she had taken her place
in his soul as a beloved type--reducing the power of other fascination and
making a difference in it that became deficiency. The influence had been
continually strengthened. It had lain in the course of poor Gwendolen's
lot that her dependence on Deronda tended to rouse in him the enthusiasm
of self-martyring pity rather than of personal love, and his less
constrained tenderness flowed with the fuller stream toward an indwelling
image in all things unlike Gwendolen. Still more, his relation to Mordecai
had brought with it a new nearness to Mirah which was not the less
agitating because there was no apparent change in his position toward her;
and she had inevitably been bound up in all the thoughts that made him
shrink from an issue disappointing to her brother. This process had not
gone on unconsciously in Deronda: he was conscious of it as we are of some
covetousness that it would be better to nullify by encouraging other
thoughts than to give it the insistency of confession even to ourselves:
but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans's pretensions, and when his
mother accused him of being in love with a Jewess any evasion suddenly
seemed an infidelity. His mother had compelled him to a decisive
acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had compelled him to a
definite expression of his resolve. This new state of decision wrought on
Deronda with a force which surprised even himself. There was a release of
all the energy which had long been spent in self-checking and suppression
because of doubtful conditions; and he was ready to laugh at his own
impetuosity when, as he neared England on his way from Mainz, he felt the
remaining distance more and more of an obstruction. It was as if he had
found an added soul in finding his ancestry--his judgment no longer
wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that
partiality which is man's best strength, the closer fellowship that makes
sympathy practical--exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars
to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the generous
reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like
inheritance. He wanted now to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth
instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain
dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence without the
embarrassment of obviously seeking it, to see her in the light of a new
possibility, to interpret her looks and words from a new starting-point.
He was not greatly alarmed about the effect of Hans's attentions, but he
had a presentiment that her feeling toward himself had from the first lain
in a channel from which it was not likely to be diverted into love. To
astonish a woman by turning into her lover when she has been thinking of
you merely as a Lord Chancellor is what a man naturally shrinks from: he
is anxious to create an easier transition.

What wonder that Deronda saw no other course than to go straight from the
London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in Brompton?
Every argument was in favor of his losing no time. He had promised to run
down the next day to see Lady Mallinger at the Abbey, and it was already
sunset. He wished to deposit the precious chest with Mordecai, who would
study its contents, both in his absence and in company with him; and that
he should pay this visit without pause would gratify Mordecai's heart.
Hence, and for other reasons, it gratified Deronda's heart. The strongest
tendencies of his nature were rushing in one current--the fervent
affectionateness which made him delight in meeting the wish of beings near
to him, and the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the
horizon of his immediate, daily acts. It has to be admitted that in this
classical, romantic, world-historic position of his, bringing as it were
from its hiding-place his hereditary armor, he wore--but so, one must
suppose, did the most ancient heroes, whether Semitic or Japhetic--the
summer costume of his contemporaries. He did not reflect that the drab
tints were becoming to him, for he rarely went to the expense of such
thinking; but his own depth of coloring, which made the becomingness, got
an added radiance in the eyes, a fleeting and returning glow in the skin,
as he entered the house wondering what exactly he should find. He made his
entrance as noiseless as possible.

It was the evening of that same afternoon on which Mirah had had the
interview with her father. Mordecai, penetrated by her grief, and also the
sad memories which the incident had awakened, had not resumed his task of
sifting papers: some of them had fallen scattered on the floor in the
first moments of anxiety, and neither he nor Mirah had thought of laying
them in order again. They had sat perfectly still together, not knowing
how long; while the clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and the light was
fading, Mirah, unable to think of the food that she ought to have been
taking, had not moved since she had thrown off her dust-cloak and sat down
beside Mordecai with her hand in his, while he had laid his head backward,
with closed eyes and difficult breathing, looking, Mirah thought, as he
would look when the soul within him could no longer live in its straitened
home. The thought that his death might be near was continually visiting
her when she saw his face in this way, without its vivid animation; and
now, to the rest of her grief, was added the regret that she had been
unable to control the violent outburst which had shaken him. She sat
watching him--her oval cheeks pallid, her eyes with the sorrowful
brilliancy left by young tears, her curls in as much disorder as a just-
awakened child's--watching that emaciated face, where it might have been
imagined that a veil had been drawn never to be lifted, as if it were her
dead joy which had left her strong enough to live on in sorrow. And life
at that moment stretched before Mirah with more than a repetition of
former sadness. The shadow of the father was there, and more than that, a
double bereavement--of one living as well as one dead.

But now the door was opened, and while none entered, a well-known voice
said: "Daniel Deronda--may he come in?"

"Come! come!" said Mordecai, immediately rising with an irradiated face
and opened eyes--apparently as little surprised as if he had seen Deronda
in the morning, and expected this evening visit; while Mirah started up
blushing with confused, half-alarmed expectation.

Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after
rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment.
As he held out his right hand to Mirah, who was close to her brother's
left, he laid his other hand on Mordecai's right shoulder, and stood so a
moment, holding them both at once, uttering no word, but reading their
faces, till he said anxiously to Mirah, "Has anything happened?--any
trouble?"

"Talk not of trouble now," said Mordecai, saving her from the need to
answer. "There is joy in your face--let the joy be ours."

Mirah thought, "It is for something he cannot tell us." But they all sat
down, Deronda drawing a chair close in front of Mordecai.

"That is true," he said, emphatically. "I have a joy which will remain to
us even in the worst trouble. I did not tell you the reason of my journey
abroad, Mordecai, because--never mind--I went to learn my parentage. And
you were right. I am a Jew."

The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash
from Mordecai's eyes, and passed through Mirah like an electric shock. But
Deronda went on without pause, speaking from Mordecai's mind as much as
from his own--

"We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall not
be separated by life or by death."

Mordecai's answer was uttered in Hebrew, and in no more than a loud
whisper. It was in the liturgical words which express the religious bond:
"Our God and the God of our fathers."

The weight of feeling pressed too strongly on that ready-winged speech
which usually moved in quick adaptation to every stirring of his fervor.

Mirah fell on her knees by her brother's side, and looked at his now
illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. The action was an
inevitable outlet of the violent reversal from despondency to a gladness
which came over her as solemnly as if she had been beholding a religious
rite. For the moment she thought of the effect on her own life only
through the effect on her brother.

"And it is not only that I am a Jew," Deronda went on, enjoying one of
those rare moments when our yearnings and our acts can be completely one,
and the real we behold is our ideal good; "but I come of a strain that has
ardently maintained the fellowship of our race--a line of Spanish Jews
that has borne many students and men of practical power. And I possess
what will give us a sort of communion with them. My grandfather, Daniel
Charisi, preserved manuscripts, family records stretching far back, in the
hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. And now his hope
is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to thwart it by hiding my parentage
from me. I possess the chest containing them, with his own papers, and it
is down below in this house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that
you may help me to study the manuscripts. Some of them I can read easily
enough--those in Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think,
Arabic; but there seem to be Latin translations. I was only able to look
at them cursorily while I stayed at Mainz. We will study them together."

Deronda ended with that bright smile which, beaming out from the habitual
gravity of his face, seemed a revelation (the reverse of the continual
smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy glance passed
from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little too much sunshine,
and made her change her attitude. She had knelt under an impulse with
which any personal embarrassment was incongruous, and especially any
thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to this new aspect of
things--thoughts which made her color under Deronda's glance, and rise to
take her seat again in her usual posture of crossed hands and feet, with
the effort to look as quiet as possible. Deronda, equally sensitive,
imagined that the feeling of which he was conscious, had entered too much
into his eyes, and had been repugnant to her. He was ready enough to
believe that any unexpected manifestation might spoil her feeling toward
him--and then his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred.
If Mirah could have no love for him, any advances of love on his part
would make her wretched in that continual contact with him which would
remain inevitable.

While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah, Mordecai,
seeing nothing in his friend's presence and words but a blessed
fulfillment, was already speaking with his old sense of enlargement in
utterance--

"Daniel, from the first, I have said to you, we know not all the pathways.
Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations in one soul,
where an idea being born and breathing draws the elements toward it, and
is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in that Omnipresence
which is the place and habitation of the world, and events are of a glass
wherethrough our eyes see some of the pathways. And if it seems that the
erring and unloving wills of men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was
prepared, to serve your people the better, that depends on another order
than the law which must guide our footsteps. For the evil will of man
makes not a people's good except by stirring the righteous will of man;
and beneath all the clouds with which our thought encompasses the Eternal,
this is clear--that a people can be blessed only by having counsellors and
a multitude whose will moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love.
For see, now, it was your loving will that made a chief pathway, and
resisted the effect of evil; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood
to my sister, and seeking out her brother in the flesh, your soul has been
prepared to receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, 'behold the
multitude of your brethren.'"

"It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers," said Deronda.
"If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you both, I think my
mind would have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should have felt then--'If
I could have chosen, I would not have been a Jew.' What I feel now is--
that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the gradual
accord between your mind and mine which has brought about that full
consent."

At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop
was vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he had
then felt from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature to
delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul, which
seemed to be looking out from the face before him, like the long-enduring
watcher who at last sees the mountain signal-flame; and he went on with
fuller fervor--

"It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my
life's task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an
inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many
ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my
grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought
up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting,
and born blind--the ancestral life would lie within them as a dim longing
for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their
inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument,
never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious meanings of
its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music.
Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since I began to
read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might
feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some social captainship,
which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal
prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me--to bind our race
together in spite of heresy. You have said to me--'Our religion united us
before it divided us--it made us a people before it made Rabbanites and
Karaites.' I mean to try what can be done with that union--I mean to work
in your spirit. Failure will not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for
me not to try."

"Even as my brother that fed at the breasts of my mother," said Mordecai,
falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose, as after some
finished labor.

To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must
remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of premature assent or
delusive encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself a
sacramental solemnity, both for his own mind and Mordecai's. On Mirah the
effect was equally strong, though with a difference: she felt a surprise
which had no place in her brother's mind, at Deronda's suddenly revealed
sense of nearness to them: there seemed to be a breaking of day around her
which might show her other facts unlike her forebodings in the darkness.
But after a moment's silence Mordecai spoke again--

"It has begun already--the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing
away of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite in a
stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I
have written, Daniel; for though our masters delivered rightly that
everything should be quoted in the name of him that said it--and their
rule is good--yet it does not exclude the willing marriage which melts
soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made
fuller, where the fullness is inseparable and the clearness is
inseparable. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body
that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but
let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called
yours."

"You must not ask me to promise that," said Deronda, smiling. "I must be
convinced first of special reasons for it in the writings themselves. And
I am too backward a pupil yet. That blent* transmission must go on without
any choice of ours; but what we can't hinder must not make our rule for
what we ought to choose. I think our duty is faithful tradition where we
can attain it. And so you would insist for any one but yourself. Don't ask
me to deny my spiritual parentage, when I am finding the clue of my life
in the recognition of natural parentage."

"I will ask for no promise till you see the reason," said Mordecai. "You
have said the truth: I would obey the Master's rule for another. But for
years my hope, nay, my confidence, has been, not that the imperfect image
of my thought, which is an ill-shaped work of the youthful carver who has
seen a heavenly pattern, and trembles in imitating the vision--not that
this should live, but that my vision and passion should enter into yours--
yea, into yours; for he whom I longed for afar, was he not you whom I
discerned as mine when you came near? Nevertheless, you shall judge. For
my soul is satisfied." Mordecai paused, and then began in a changed tone,
reverting to previous suggestions from Deronda's disclosure: "What moved
your parents----?" but he immediately checked himself, and added, "Nay, I
ask not that you should tell me aught concerning others, unless it is your
pleasure."

"Some time--gradually--you will know all," said Deronda. "But now tell me
more about yourselves, and how the time has passed since I went away. I am
sure there has been some trouble. Mirah has been in distress about
something."

He looked at Mirah, but she immediately turned to her brother, appealing
to him to give the difficult answer. She hoped he would not think it
necessary to tell Deronda the facts about her father on such an evening as
this. Just when Deronda had brought himself so near, and identified
himself with her brother, it was cutting to her that he should hear of
this disgrace clinging about them, which seemed to have become partly his.
To relieve herself she rose to take up her hat and cloak, thinking she
would go to her own room: perhaps they would speak more easily when she
had left them. But meanwhile Mordecai said--

"To day there has been a grief. A duty which seemed to have gone far into
the distance, has come back and turned its face upon us, and raised no
gladness--has raised a dread that we must submit to. But for the moment we
are delivered from any visible yoke. Let us defer speaking of it as if
this evening which is deepening about us were the beginning of the
festival in which we must offer the first fruits of our joy, and mingle no
mourning with them."

Deronda divined the hinted grief, and left it in silence, rising as he saw
Mirah rise, and saying to her, "Are you going? I must leave almost
immediately--when I and Mrs. Adam have mounted the precious chest, and I
have delivered the key to Mordecai--no, Ezra,--may I call him Ezra now? I
have learned to think of him as Ezra since I have heard you call him so."

"Please call him Ezra," said Mirah, faintly, feeling a new timidity under
Deronda's glance and near presence. Was there really something different
about him, or was the difference only in her feeling? The strangely
various emotions of the last few hours had exhausted her; she was faint
with fatigue and want of food. Deronda, observing her pallor and
tremulousness, longed to show more feeling, but dared not. She put out her
hand with an effort to smile, and then he opened the door for her. That
was all.

A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman
whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived;
but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which,
superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though to an ardent
reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth and rank
which makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses.
Deronda's difficulty was what any generous man might have felt in some
degree; but it affected him peculiarly through his imaginative sympathy
with a mind in which gratitude was strong. Mirah, he knew, felt herself
bound to him by deep obligations, which to her sensibilities might give
every wish of his the aspect of a claim; and an inability to fulfill it
would cause her a pain continually revived by their inevitable communion
in care of Ezra. Here were fears not of pride only, but of extreme
tenderness. Altogether, to have the character of a benefactor seemed to
Deronda's anxiety an insurmountable obstacle to confessing himself a
lover, unless in some inconceivable way it could be revealed to him that
Mirah's heart had accepted him beforehand. And the agitation on his own
account, too, was not small.

Even a man who has practised himself in love-making till his own glibness
has rendered him sceptical, may at last be overtaken by the lover's awe--
may tremble, stammer, and show other signs of recovered sensibility no
more in the range of his acquired talents than pins and needles after
numbness: how much more may that energetic timidity possess a man whose
inward history has cherished his susceptibilities instead of dulling them,
and has kept all the language of passion fresh and rooted as the lovely
leafage about the hill-side spring!

As for Mirah her dear head lay on its pillow that night with its former
suspicions thrown out of shape but still present, like an ugly story which
had been discredited but not therefore dissipated. All that she was
certain of about Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such fetters upon
him as she had been allowing herself to believe in. His whole manner as
well as his words implied that there were no hidden bonds remaining to
have any effect in determining his future. But notwithstanding this
plainly reasonable inference, uneasiness still clung about Mirah's heart.
Deronda was not to blame, but he had an importance for Mrs. Grandcourt
which must give her some hold on him. And the thought of any close
confidence between them stirred the little biting snake that had long lain
curled and harmless in Mirah's gentle bosom.

But did she this evening feel as completely as before that her jealousy
was no less remote from any possibility for herself personally than if her
human soul had been lodged in the body of a fawn that Deronda had saved
from the archers? Hardly. Something indefinable had happened and made a
difference. The soft warm rain of blossoms which had fallen just where she
was--did it really come because she was there? What spirit was there among
the boughs?