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"Hush!" said the widow, "there's a carriage coming on the road--close to us." Mrs. Greenow, as she spoke these words, drew back from the Captain's arms before the first kiss of permitted ante-nuptial love had been exchanged. The scene was on the high road from Shap to Vavasor, and as she was still dressed in all the sombre habiliments of early widowhood, and as neither he nor his sweetheart were under forty, perhaps it was as well that they were not caught toying together in so very public a place. But they were only just in time to escape the vigilant eyes of a new visitor. Round the corner of the road, at a sharp trot, came the Shap post-horse, with the Shap gig behind him,--the same gig which had brought Bellfield to Vavasor on the previous day,--and seated in the gig, looming large, with his eyes wide awake to everything round him, was--Mr. Cheesacre. It was a sight terrible to the eyes of Captain Bellfield, and by no means welcome to those of Mrs. Greenow. As regarded her, her annoyance had chiefly reference to her two nieces, and especially to Alice. How was she to account for this second lover? Kate, of course, knew all about it; but how could Alice be made to understand that she, Mrs. Greenow, was not to blame,--that she had, in sober truth, told this ardent gentleman that there was no hope for him? And even as to Kate,--Kate, whom her aunt had absurdly chosen to regard as the object of Mr. Cheesacre's pursuit,--what sort of a welcome would she extend to the owner of Oileymead? Before the wheels had stopped, Mrs. Greenow had begun to reflect whether it might be possible that she should send Mr. Cheesacre back without letting him go on to the Hall; but if Mrs. Greenow was dismayed, what were the feelings of the Captain? For he was aware that Cheesacre knew that of him which he had not told. How ardently did he now wish that he had sailed nearer to the truth in giving in the schedule of his debts to Mrs. Greenow. "That man's wanted by the police," said Cheesacre, speaking while the gig was still in motion. "He's wanted by the police, Mrs. Greenow," and in his ardour he stood up in the gig and pointed at Bellfield. Then the gig stopped suddenly, and he fell back into his seat in his effort to prevent his falling forward. "He's wanted by the police," he shouted out again, as soon as he was able to recover his voice. Mrs. Greenow turned pale beneath the widow's veil which she had dropped. What might not her Captain have done? He might have procured things, to be sent to him, out of shops on false pretences; or, urged on by want and famine, he might have committed--forgery. "Oh, my!" she said, and dropped her hand from his arm, which she had taken. "It's false," said Bellfield. "It's true," said Cheesacre. "I'll indict you for slander, my friend," said Bellfield. "Pay me the money you owe me," said Cheesacre. "You're a swindler!" Mrs. Greenow cared little as to her lover being a swindler in Mr. Cheesacre's estimation. Such accusations from him she had heard before. But she did care very much as to this mission of the police against her Captain. If that were true, the Captain could be her Captain no longer. "What is this I hear, Captain Bellfield?" she said. "It's a lie and a slander. He merely wants to make a quarrel between us. What police are after me, Mr. Cheesacre?" "It's the police, or the sheriff's officer, or something of the kind," said Cheesacre. "Oh, the sheriff's officers!" exclaimed Mrs. Greenow, in a tone of voice which showed how great had been her relief. "Mr. Cheesacre, you shouldn't come and say such things;--you shouldn't, indeed. Sheriff's officers can be paid, and there's an end of them." "I'll indict him for the libel--I will, as sure as I'm alive," said Bellfield. "Nonsense," said the widow. "Don't you make a fool of yourself. When men can't pay their way they must put up with having things like that said of them. Mr. Cheesacre, where were you going?" "I was going to Vavasor Hall, on purpose to caution you." "It's too late," said Mrs. Greenow, sinking behind her veil. "Why, you haven't been and married him since yesterday? He only had twenty-four hours' start of me, I know. Or, perhaps, you had it done clandestine in Norwich? Oh, Mrs. Greenow!" He got out of the gig, and the three walked back towards the Hall together, while the boy drove on with Mr. Cheesacre's carpetbag. "I hardly know," said Mrs. Greenow, "whether we can welcome you. There are other visitors, and the house is full." "I'm not one to intrude where I'm not wanted. You may be sure of that. If I can't get my supper for love, I can get at for money. That's more than some people can say. I wonder when you're going to pay me what you owe me, Lieutenant Bellfield?" [Illustration: "I wonder when you're going to pay me what you owe me, Lieutenant Bellfield?"] Nevertheless, the widow had contrived to reconcile the two men before she reached the Hall. They had actually shaken hands, and the lamb Cheesacre had agreed to lie down with the wolf Bellfield. Cheesacre, moreover, had contrived to whisper into the widow's ears the true extent of his errand into Westmoreland. This, however, he did not do altogether in Bellfield's hearing. When Mrs. Greenow ascertained that there was something to be said, she made no scruple in sending her betrothed away from her "You won't throw a fellow over, will you, now?" whispered Bellfield into her ear as he went. She merely frowned at him, and bade him begone, so that the walk which Mrs. Greenow began with one lover she ended in company with the other. Bellfield, who was sent on to the house, found Alice and Kate surveying the newly arrived carpet bag. "He knows 'un," said the boy who had driven the gig, pointing to the Captain. "It belongs to your old friend, Mr. Cheesacre," said Bellfield to Kate. "And has he come too?" said Kate. The Captain shrugged his shoulders, and admitted that it was hard. "And it's not the slightest use," said he, "not the least in the world. He never had a chance in that quarter." "Not enough of the rocks and valleys about him, was there, Captain Bellfield?" said Kate. But Captain Bellfield understood nothing about the rocks and valleys, though he was regarded by certain eyes as being both a rock and a valley himself. In the meantime Cheesacre was telling his story. He first asked, in a melancholy tone, whether it was really necessary that he must abandon all his hopes. "He wasn't going to say anything against the Captain," he said, "if things were really fixed. He never begrudged any man his chance." "Things are really fixed," said Mrs. Greenow. He could, however, not keep himself from hinting that Oileymead was a substantial home, and that Bellfield had not as much as a straw mattress to lie upon. In answer to this Mrs. Greenow told him that there was so much more reason why some one should provide the poor man with a mattress. "If you look at it in that light, of course it's true," said Cheesacre. Mrs. Greenow told him that she did look at it in that light. "Then I've done about that," said Cheesacre; "and as to the little bit of money he owes me, I must give him his time about it, I suppose." Mrs. Greenow assured him that it should be paid as soon as possible after the nuptial benediction had been said over them. She offered, indeed, to pay it at once if he was in distress for it, but he answered contemptuously that he never was in distress for money. He liked to have his own,--that was all. After this he did not get away to his next subject quite so easily as he wished; and it must be admitted that there was a difficulty. As he could not have Mrs. Greenow he would be content to put up with Kate for his wife. That was his next subject. Rumours as to the old Squire's will had no doubt reached him, and he was now willing to take advantage of that assistance which Mrs. Greenow had before offered him in this matter. The time had come in which he ought to marry; of that he was aware. He had told many of his friends in Norfolk that Kate Vavasor had thrown herself at his head, and very probably he had thought it true. In answer to all his love speeches to herself, the aunt had always told him what an excellent wife her niece would make him. So now he had come to Westmoreland with this second string to his bow. "You know you put it into my head your own self," pleaded Mr. Cheesacre. "Didn't you, now?" "But things are so different since that," said the widow. "How different? I ain't different. There's Oileymead just where it always was, and the owner of it don't owe a shilling to any man. How are things different?" "My niece has inherited property." "And is that to make a change? Oh! Mrs. Greenow, who would have thought to find you mercenary like that? Inherited property! Is she going to fling a man over because of that?" Mrs. Greenow endeavoured to explain to him that her niece could hardly be said to have flung him over, and at last pretended to become angry when he attempted to assert his position. "Why, Mr. Cheesacre, I am quite sure she never gave you a word of encouragement in her life." "But you always told me I might have her for the asking." "And now I tell you that you mayn't. It's of no use your going on there to ask her, for she will only send you away with an answer you won't like. Look here, Mr. Cheesacre; you want to get married, and it's quite time you should. There's my dear friend Charlie Fairstairs. How could you get a better wife than Charlie?" "Charlie Fairstairs!" said Cheesacre, turning up his nose in disgust. "She hasn't got a penny, nor any one belonging to her. The man who marries her will have to find the money for the smock she stands up in." "Who's mercenary now, Mr. Cheesacre? Do you go home and think of it; and if you'll marry Charlie, I'll go to your wedding. You shan't be ashamed of her clothing. I'll see to that." They were now close to the gate, and Cheesacre paused before he entered. "Do you think there's no chance at all for me, then?" said he. "I know there's none. I've heard her speak about it." "Somebody else, perhaps, is the happy man?" "I can't say anything about that, but I know that she wouldn't take you. I like farming, you know, but she doesn't." "I might give that up," said Cheesacre readily,--"at any rate, for a time." "No, no, no; it would do no good. Believe me, my friend, that it is of no use." He still paused at the gate. "I don't see what's the use of my going in," said he. To this she made him no answer. "There's a pride about me," he continued, "that I don't choose to go where I'm not wanted." "I can't tell you, Mr. Cheesacre, that you are wanted in that light, certainly." "Then I'll go. Perhaps you'll be so good as to tell the boy with the gig to come after me? That's six pound ten it will have cost me to come here and go back. Bellfield did it cheaper, of course; he travelled second class. I heard of him as I came along." "The expense does not matter to you, Mr. Cheesacre." To this he assented, and then took his leave, at first offering his hand to Mrs. Greenow with an air of offended dignity, but falling back almost into humility during the performance of his adieu. Before he was gone he had invited her to bring the Captain to Oileymead when she was married, and had begged her to tell Miss Vavasor how happy he should be to receive her. "And Mr. Cheesacre," said the widow, as he walked back along the road, "don't forget dear Charlie Fairstairs." They were all standing at the front door of the house when Mrs. Greenow re-appeared,--Alice, Kate, Captain Bellfield, the Shap boy, and the Shap horse and gig. "Where is he?" Kate asked in a low voice, and everyone there felt how important was the question. "He has gone," said the widow. Bellfield was so relieved that he could not restrain his joy, but took off his little straw hat and threw it up into the air. Kate's satisfaction was almost as intense. "I am so glad," said she. "What on earth should we have done with him?" "I never was so disappointed in my life," said Alice. "I have heard so much of Mr. Cheesacre, but have never seen him." Kate suggested that she should get into the gig and drive after him. "He ain't a been and took hisself off?" suggested the boy, whose face became very dismal as the terrible idea struck him. But, with juvenile craft, he put his hand on the carpet-bag, and finding that it did not contain stones, was comforted. "You drive after him, young gentleman, and you'll find him on the road to Shap," said Mrs. Greenow. "Mind you give him my love," said the Captain in his glee, "and say I hope he'll get his turnips in well." This little episode went far to break the day, and did more than anything else could have done to put Captain Bellfield at his ease. It created a little joint-stock fund of merriment between the whole party, which was very much needed. The absence of such joint-stock fund is always felt when a small party is thrown together without such assistance. Some bond is necessary on these occasions, and no other bond is so easy or so pleasant. Now, when the Captain found himself alone for a quarter of an hour with Alice, he had plenty of subjects for small-talk. "Yes, indeed. Old Cheesacre, in spite of his absurdities, is not a bad sort of fellow at bottom;--awfully fond of his money, you know, Miss Vavasor, and always boasting about it." "That's not pleasant," said Alice. "No, the most unpleasant thing in the world. There's nothing I hate so much, Miss Vavasor, as that kind of talking. My idea is this,--when a man has lots of money, let him make the best use he can of it, and say nothing about it. Nobody ever heard me talking about my money." He knew that Alice knew that he was a pauper; but, nevertheless, he had the satisfaction of speaking of himself as though he were not a pauper. In this way the afternoon went very pleasantly. For an hour before dinner Captain Bellfield was had into the drawing-room and was talked to by his widow on matters of business; but he had of course known that this was necessary. She scolded him soundly about those sheriff's officers. Why had he not told her? "As long as there's anything kept back, I won't have you," said she. "I won't become your wife till I'm quite sure there's not a penny owing that is not shown in the list." Then I think he did tell her all,--or nearly all. When all was counted it was not so very much. Three or four hundred pounds would make him a new man, and what was such a sum as that to his wealthy widow! Indeed, for a woman wanting a husband of that sort, Captain Bellfield was a safer venture than would be a man of a higher standing among his creditors. It is true Bellfield might have been a forger, or a thief, or a returned convict,--but then his debts could not be large. Let him have done his best, he could not have obtained credit for a thousand pounds; whereas, no one could tell the liabilities of a gentleman of high standing. Burgo Fitzgerald was a gentleman of high standing, and his creditors would have swallowed up every shilling that Mrs. Greenow possessed; but with Captain Bellfield she was comparatively safe. Upon the whole I think that she was lucky in her choice; or, perhaps, I might more truly say, that she had chosen with prudence. He was no forger, or thief--in the ordinary sense of the word; nor was he a returned convict. He was simply an idle scamp, who had hung about the world for forty years, doing nothing, without principle, shameless, accustomed to eat dirty puddings, and to be kicked--morally kicked--by such men as Cheesacre. But he was moderate in his greediness, and possessed of a certain appreciation of the comfort of a daily dinner, which might possibly suffice to keep him from straying very wide as long as his intended wife should be able to keep the purse-strings altogether in her own hands. Therefore, I say that Mrs. Greenow had been lucky in her choice, and not altogether without prudence. "I think of taking this house," said she, "and of living here." "What, in Westmoreland!" said the Captain, with something of dismay in his tone. What on earth would he do with himself all his life in that gloomy place! "Yes, in Westmoreland. Why not in Westmoreland as well as anywhere else? If you don't like Westmoreland, it's not too late yet, you know." In answer to this the poor Captain was obliged to declare that he had no objection whatever to Westmoreland. "I've been talking to my niece about it," continued Mrs. Greenow, "and I find that such an arrangement can be made very conveniently. The property is left between her and her uncle,--the father of my other niece, and neither of them want to live here." "But won't you be rather dull, my dear?" "We could go to Yarmouth, you know, in the autumn." Then the Captain's visage became somewhat bright again. "And perhaps, if you are not extravagant, we could manage a month or so in London during the winter, just to see the plays and do a little shopping." Then the Captain's face became very bright. "That will be delightful," said he. "And as for being dull," said the widow, "when people grow old they must be dull. Dancing can't go on for ever." In answer to this the widow's Captain assured the widow that she was not at all old; and now, on this occasion, that ceremony came off successfully which had been interrupted on the Shap road by the noise of Mr. Cheesacre's wheels. "There goes my cap," said she. "What a goose you are! What will Jeannette say?" "Bother Jeannette," said the Captain in his bliss. "She can do another cap, and many more won't be wanted." Then I think the ceremony was repeated. Upon the whole the Captain's visit was satisfactory--at any rate to the Captain. Everything was settled. He was to go away on Saturday morning, and remain in lodgings at Penrith till the wedding, which they agreed to have celebrated at Vavasor Church. Kate promised to be the solitary bridesmaid. There was some talk of sending for Charlie Fairstairs, but the idea was abandoned. "We'll have her afterwards," said the widow to Kate, "when you are gone, and we shall want her more. And I'll get Cheesacre here, and make him marry her. There's no good in paying for two journeys." The Captain was to be allowed to come over from Penrith twice a week previous to his marriage; or perhaps, I might more fairly say, that he was commanded to do so. I wonder how he felt when Mrs. Greenow gave him his first five-pound note, and told him that he must make it do for a fortnight?--whether it was all joy, or whether there was about his heart any touch of manly regret? "Captain Bellfield, of Vavasor Hall, Westmoreland. It don't sound badly," he said to himself, as he travelled away on his first journey to Penrith.

Mrs. Greenow, as she spoke, drew back from the Captain's arms. They were on the high road to Shap, and as she was still dressed in mourning, and as neither of them were under forty, perhaps it was as well to escape the vigilant eyes of a new visitor. Round the corner of the road, at a sharp trot, came the Shap post-horse, with the Shap gig behind him - and seated in the gig, looming large, and staring around, was - Mr. Cheesacre. It was a sight terrible to Captain Bellfield, and by no means welcome to Mrs. Greenow. Her annoyance was chiefly because of Alice. How was she to account for this second lover? Kate, of course, knew all about it; but how could Alice be made aware that Mrs. Greenow was not to blame? She had told this ardent gentleman that there was no hope for him. And if Mrs. Greenow was dismayed, what were the Captain's feelings? For he was aware that Cheesacre knew things about him which he had not told. Now he wished ardently that he had sailed nearer to the truth in listing his debts to Mrs. Greenow. "That man's wanted by the police," said Cheesacre, speaking while the gig was still in motion; and he stood up in the gig and pointed at Bellfield. The gig stopped suddenly, and he fell back into his seat. "He's wanted by the police," he shouted out again. Mrs. Greenow turned pale. What might not her Captain have done? He might have ordered things from shops on false pretences; he might have committed forgery. "Oh, my!" she said. "It's false," said Bellfield. "It's true," said Cheesacre. "I'll sue you for slander, my friend," said Bellfield. "Pay me the money you owe me," said Cheesacre. "You're a swindler!" Mrs. Greenow cared little about her lover being a swindler in Mr. Cheesacre's eyes. She had heard such accusations from him before. But she did care very much about the police. "What is this I hear, Captain Bellfield?" she said. "It's a lie and a slander. He merely wants to make a quarrel between us. What police are after me, Mr. Cheesacre?" "It's the sheriff's officer, or something of the kind," said Cheesacre. "Oh, the sheriff's officers!" exclaimed Mrs. Greenow, in a tone of relief. "Mr. Cheesacre, you shouldn't come and say such things. Sheriff's officers can be paid, and there's an end of them." "I'll sue him for libel - I will," said Bellfield. "Nonsense," said the widow. "Don't you make a fool of yourself. When men can't pay their way they must put up with having things like that said about them. Mr. Cheesacre, where were you going?" "I was going to Vavasor Hall, to warn you." "It's too late," said Mrs. Greenow, sinking behind her veil. "Why, you haven't been and married him since yesterday? He only had twenty-four hours' start of me! Oh, Mrs. Greenow!" He got out of the gig, and the three walked back towards the Hall together, while the boy drove on with Mr. Cheesacre's carpetbag. "I hardly know," said Mrs. Greenow, "whether we can welcome you. There are other visitors, and the house is full." "I'm not one to intrude where I'm not wanted. I can pay for my supper. That's more than some people can say. I wonder when you're going to pay me what you owe me, Lieutenant Bellfield?" Nevertheless, the widow had managed to reconcile the two men before she reached the Hall. They had actually shaken hands. Cheesacre, moreover, had whispered into the widow's ears the true extent of his errand into Westmorland - but not in Bellfield's hearing. When Mrs. Greenow ascertained that there was something to be said, she sent her betrothed away into the house. There, Bellfield found Alice and Kate surveying the newly arrived carpet bag. "It belongs to your old friend, Mr. Cheesacre," said Bellfield to Kate. "Has he come too?" said Kate. The Captain shrugged his shoulders, and admitted that it was hard. "And it's not the slightest use," said he. "He never had a chance." In the meantime Cheesacre was telling his story. He first asked, in a melancholy tone, whether it was really necessary that he must abandon all his hopes. He wasn't going to say anything against the Captain, he told Mrs, Greenow, if things were really fixed. "Things are really fixed," said Mrs. Greenow. He could, however, not keep himself from hinting that Bellfield had not as much as a straw mattress to lie upon. Mrs. Greenow answered, so much more reason why someone should provide the poor man with a mattress. "If you look at it in that light, of course it's true," said Cheesacre; "and as to the bit of money he owes me, I must give him his time about it, I suppose." Mrs. Greenow offered to pay it at once if he needed it, but he answered contemptuously that he was never in distress for money. After this he did not get on to his next subject quite so easily as he wished; and it must be admitted that there was a difficulty. As he could not have Mrs. Greenow he would be content to put up with Kate for his wife. That was his next subject. Rumours about the old Squire's will had reached him, and he had decided that the time had come when he ought to marry. He had told his friends in Norfolk that Kate Vavasor had thrown herself at his head, and very probably he had thought it true. And the aunt had always told him what an excellent wife her niece would make. "You know you put it into my head your own self," pleaded Mr. Cheesacre. "But things are different now," said the widow. "How different? I ain't different." "My niece has inherited property." "And is that to make a change? Oh! Mrs. Greenow, how mercenary! Is she going to fling a man over because of that?" Mrs. Greenow tried to explain to him that her niece could hardly be said to have flung him over, and at last pretended to become angry. "Why, Mr. Cheesacre, I am quite sure she never gave you a word of encouragement." "But you always told me I might have her for the asking." "And now I tell you that you mayn't. It's of no use your asking her, for she will only send you away with an answer you won't like. Look here, Mr. Cheesacre; you want to get married, and there's my dear friend Charlie Fairstairs. How could you get a better wife than Charlie?" "Charlie Fairstairs!" said Cheesacre in disgust. "She hasn't got a penny." "Who's mercenary now, Mr. Cheesacre? Go home and think about it; and if you'll marry Charlie, I'll go to your wedding." They were now at the gate, and Cheesacre paused. "Do you think there's no chance at all for me, then?" said he. "I know there's none." "Somebody else, perhaps, is the happy man?" "I can't say anything about that, but I know she wouldn't take you." "Then I'll go. Perhaps you'll tell the boy with the gig to come after me? That's six pound ten it will have cost me to come here and go back. Bellfield did it cheaper, of course; he travelled second class." "The expense does not matter to you, Mr. Cheesacre." He agreed, and then took his leave, offering his hand to Mrs. Greenow almost with humility. Before he left he invited her to bring the Captain to Oileymead when she was married, and begged her to tell Miss Vavasor how happy he should be to receive her. "And Mr. Cheesacre," said the widow, as he walked away, "don't forget dear Charlie Fairstairs." She entered the house, and told her nieces and the Captain, "He has gone." Bellfield was so relieved that he took off his little straw hat and threw it in the air. Kate's satisfaction was almost as intense. "I am so glad," said she. "What on earth should we have done with him?" "I never was so disappointed in my life," said Alice. "I have heard so much of Mr. Cheesacre, but have never seen him." Kate suggested that she should get into the gig and drive after him. This little episode did more than anything else to put Captain Bellfield at his ease. It created a little fund of merriment between the whole party, which was very much needed. Now, when the Captain found himself alone for a quarter of an hour with Alice, he had plenty of small-talk. "Yes, indeed. Old Cheesacre is not a bad fellow at bottom; awfully fond of his money, you know, Miss Vavasor, and always boasting about it." "That's not pleasant," said Alice. "No, the most unpleasant thing in the world. I think that when a man has lots of money, let him make the best use he can of it, and say nothing about it. Nobody ever heard me talking about my money." In this way the afternoon went very pleasantly. For an hour before dinner Captain Bellfield was talked to by his widow; but he had known that this was necessary. She scolded him soundly about those sheriff's officers. Why had he not told her? "As long as there's anything kept back, I won't have you," said she. "I won't become your wife till I'm quite sure there's not a penny owing that is not in the list." Then I think he did tell her all - or nearly all. It was not so very much. Three or four hundred pounds would make him a new man, and what was such a sum as that to his wealthy widow! Indeed, for a woman wanting a husband of that sort, Captain Bellfield was a safer bet than someone of the standing of Burgo Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's creditors would have swallowed up every shilling that Mrs. Greenow possessed; but with Captain Bellfield she was comparatively safe. She had chosen with prudence. Bellfield was no forger, or thief. He was simply an idle scamp, who had hung about the world for forty years, doing nothing. But he was moderate in his greediness, with an appreciation of a daily dinner, which might keep him from straying very far as long as his intended wife could keep the purse-strings in her hands. "I am thinking of taking this house," said she, "and of living here." "What, in Westmorland!" said the Captain, with some dismay. What on earth would he do with himself in that gloomy place! "Yes. Why not in Westmorland as well as anywhere else? If you don't like it, it's not too late, you know." To which the poor Captain was obliged to declare that he had no objection whatever to Westmorland. "I've been talking to my niece about it," continued Mrs. Greenow, "and I find that such an arrangement can be made very conveniently. The property is left between her and her uncle, and neither of them want to live here." "But won't you be rather dull, my dear?" "We could go to Yarmouth in the autumn." Then the Captain's face brightened somewhat. "And perhaps, if you are not extravagant, we could manage a month or so in London during the winter, just to see the plays and do a little shopping." Then the Captain's face became very bright. "That will be delightful," said he. "And as for being dull," said the widow, "when people grow old they must be dull. Dancing can't go on for ever." In answer to this he assured this widow that she was not at all old; and now, on this occasion, his attempt to kiss her was successful. "There goes my cap," said she. "What a goose you are! What will Jeannette say?" "Bother Jeannette," said the Captain in his bliss. Then the ceremony was repeated. Upon the whole the Captain's visit was satisfactory - at any rate to the Captain. Everything was settled. He was to go away on Saturday morning, and remain in lodgings at Penrith till the wedding, which they agreed to have celebrated at Vavasor Church. Kate promised to be the solitary bridesmaid. The Captain was to be allowed to come over from Penrith twice a week before his marriage. I wonder how he felt when Mrs. Greenow gave him his first five-pound note, and told him that he must make it do for a fortnight? whether it was all joy, or whether there was any touch of manly regret? "Captain Bellfield, of Vavasor Hall. It don't sound badly," he said to himself, as he travelled away on his first journey to Penrith.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 65: The First Kiss

Vavasor, as he sat alone in his room, after Fitzgerald had left him, began to think of the days in which he had before wished to assist his friend in his views with reference to Lady Glencora;--or rather he began to think of Alice's behaviour then, and of Alice's words. Alice had steadfastly refused to give any aid. No less likely assistant for such a purpose could have been selected. But she had been very earnest in declaring that it was Glencora's duty to stand by her promise to Burgo. "He is a desperate spendthrift," Kate Vavasor had said to her. "Then let her teach him to be otherwise," Alice had answered. "That might have been a good reason for refusing his offer when he first made it; but it can be no excuse for untruth, now that she has told him that she loves him!" "If a woman," she had said again, "won't venture her fortune for the man she loves, her love is not worth having." All this George Vavasor remembered now; and as he remembered it he asked himself whether the woman that had once loved him would venture her fortune for him still. Though his sister had pressed him on the subject with all the vehemence that she could use, he had hardly hitherto made up his mind that he really desired to marry Alice. There had grown upon him lately certain Bohemian propensities,--a love of absolute independence in his thoughts as well as actions,--which were antagonistic to marriage. He was almost inclined to think that marriage was an old-fashioned custom, fitted indeed well enough for the usual dull life of the world at large,--as many men both in heathen and in Christian ages have taught themselves to think of religion,--but which was not adapted to his advanced intelligence. If he loved any woman he loved his cousin Alice. If he thoroughly respected any woman he respected her. But that idea of tying himself down to a household was in itself distasteful to him. "It is a thing terrible to think of," he once said to a congenial friend in these days of his life, "that a man should give permission to a priest to tie him to another human being like a Siamese twin, so that all power of separate and solitary action should be taken from him for ever! The beasts of the field do not treat each other so badly. They neither drink themselves drunk, nor eat themselves stupid;--nor do they bind themselves together in a union which both would have to hate." In this way George Vavasor, trying to imitate the wisdom of the brutes, had taught himself some theories of a peculiar nature. But, nevertheless, as he thought of Alice Vavasor on this occasion, he began to feel that if a Siamese twin were necessary for him, she of all others was the woman to whom he would wish to be so bound. And if he did it at all, he must do it now. Under the joint instigation of himself and his sister,--as he thought, and perhaps not altogether without reason,--she had broken her engagement with Mr. Grey. That she would renew it again if left to herself, he believed probable. And then, despite that advanced intelligence which had taught him to regard all forms and ceremonies with the eye of a philosopher, he had still enough of human frailty about him to feel keenly alive to the pleasure of taking from John Grey the prize which John Grey had so nearly taken from him. If Alice could have been taught to think as he did as to the absurdity of those indissoluble ties, that would have been better. But nothing would have been more impossible than the teaching of such a lesson to his cousin Alice. George Vavasor was a man of courage, and dared do most things;--but he would not have dared to commence the teaching of such a lesson to her. And now, at this moment, what was his outlook into life generally? He had very high ambition, and a fair hope of gratifying it if he could only provide that things should go well with him for a year or so. He was still a poor man, having been once nearly a rich man; but still so much of the result of his nearly acquired riches remained to him, that on the strength of them he might probably find his way into Parliament. He had paid the cost of the last attempt, and might, in a great degree, carry on this present attempt on credit. If he succeeded there would be open to him a mode of life, agreeable in itself, and honourable among men. But how was he to bear the cost of this for the next year, or the next two years? His grandfather was still alive, and would probably live over that period. If he married Alice he would do so with no idea of cheating her out of her money. She should learn,--nay, she had already learned from his own lips,--how perilous was his enterprise. But he knew her to be a woman who would boldly risk all in money, though no consideration would induce her to stir a hair's breadth towards danger in reputation. Towards teaching her that doctrine at which I have hinted, he would not have dared to make an attempt; but he felt that he should have no repugnance to telling her that he wanted to spend all her money in the first year or two of their married life! He was still in his arm-chair, thinking of all this, with that small untasted modicum of brandy and water beside him, when he heard some distant Lambeth clock strike three from over the river. Then he rose from his seat, and taking the candles in his hand, sat himself down at a writing-desk on the other side of the room. "I needn't send it when it's written," he said to himself, "and the chances are that I won't." Then he took his paper, and wrote as follows:-- DEAR ALICE, The time was when the privilege was mine of beginning my letters to you with a warmer show of love than the above word contains,--when I might and did call you dearest; but I lost that privilege through my own folly, and since that it has been accorded to another. But you have found,--with a thorough honesty of purpose than which I know nothing greater,--that it has behoved you to withdraw that privilege also. I need hardly say that I should not have written as I now write, had you not found it expedient to do as you have done. I now once again ask you to be my wife. In spite of all that passed in those old days,--of all the selfish folly of which I was then guilty, I think you know, and at the time knew, that I ever loved you. I claim to say for myself that my love to you was true from first to last, and I claim from you belief for that statement. Indeed I do not think that you ever doubted my love. Nevertheless, when you told me that I might no longer hope to make you my wife, I had no word of remonstrance that I could utter. You acted as any woman would act whom love had not made a fool. Then came the episode of Mr. Grey; and bitter as have been my feelings whilst that engagement lasted, I never made any attempt to come between you and the life you had chosen. In saying this I do not forget the words which I spoke last summer at Basle, when, as far as I knew, you still intended that he should be your husband. But what I said then was nothing to that which, with much violence, I refrained from saying. Whether you remember those few words I cannot tell; but certainly you would not have remembered them,--would not even have noticed them,--had your heart been at Nethercoats. But all this is nothing. You are now again a free woman; and once again I ask you to be my wife. We are both older than we were when we loved before, and will both be prone to think of marriage in a somewhat different light. Then personal love for each other was most in our thoughts. God forbid that it should not be much in our thoughts now! Perhaps I am deceiving myself in saying that it is not even now stronger in mine than any other consideration. But we have both reached that time of life, when it is probable that in any proposition of marriage we should think more of our adaptability to each other than we did before. For myself I know that there is much in my character and disposition to make me unfit to marry a woman of the common stamp. You know my mode of life, and what are my hopes and my chances of success. I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honour. The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal. If you were my wife to-morrow I should expect to use your money, if it were needed, in struggling to obtain a seat in Parliament and a hearing there. I will hardly stoop to tell you that I do not ask you to be my wife for the sake of this aid;--but if you were to become my wife I should expect all your cooperation;--with your money, possibly, but certainly with your warmest spirit. And now, once again, Alice,--dearest Alice, will you be my wife? I have been punished, and I have kissed the rod,--as I never kissed any other rod. You cannot accuse my love. Since the time in which I might sit with my arm round your waist, I have sat with it round no other waist. Since your lips were mine, no other lips have been dear to me. Since you were my counsellor, I have had no other counsellor,--unless it be poor Kate, whose wish that we may at length be married is second in earnestness only to my own. Nor do I think you will doubt my repentance. Such repentance indeed claims no merit, as it has been the natural result of the loss which I have suffered. Providence has hitherto been very good to me in not having made that loss irremediable by your marriage with Mr. Grey. I wish you now to consider the matter well, and to tell me whether you can pardon me and still love me. Do I flatter myself when I feel that I doubt your pardon almost more than I doubt your love? Think of this thing in all its bearings before you answer me. I am so anxious that you should think of it that I will not expect your reply till this day week. It can hardly be your desire to go through life unmarried. I should say that it must be essential to your ambition that you should join your lot to that of some man the nature of whose aspirations would be like to your own. It is because this was not so as regarded him whose suit you had accepted, that you found yourself at last obliged to part from him. May I not say that with us there would be no such difference? It is because I believe that in this respect we are fitted for each other, as man and woman seldom are fitted, that I once again ask you to be my wife. This will reach you at Vavasor, where you will now be with the old squire and Kate. I have told her nothing of my purpose in writing this letter. If it should be that your answer is such as I desire, I should use the opportunity of our re-engagement to endeavour to be reconciled to my grandfather. He has misunderstood me and has ill-used me. But I am ready to forgive that, if he will allow me to do so. In such case you and Kate would arrange that, and I would, if possible, go down to Vavasor while you are there. But I am galloping on a-head foolishly in thinking of this, and am counting up my wealth while the crockery in my basket is so very fragile. One word from you will decide whether or no I shall ever bring it into market. If that word is to be adverse do not say anything of a meeting between me and the Squire. Under such circumstances it would be impossible. But, oh, Alice! do not let it be adverse. I think you love me. Your woman's pride towards me has been great and good and womanly; but it has had its way; and, if you love me, might now be taught to succumb. Dear Alice, will you be my wife? Yours, in any event, most affectionately, GEORGE VAVASOR. Vavasor, when he had finished his letter, went back to his seat over the fire, and there he sat with it close at his hand for nearly an hour. Once or twice he took it up with fingers almost itching to throw it into the fire. He took it up and held the corners between his forefinger and thumb, throwing forward his hand towards the flame, as though willing that the letter should escape from him and perish if chance should so decide. But chance did not so decide, and the letter was put back upon the table at his elbow. Then when the hour was nearly over he read it again. "I'll bet two to one that she gives way," he said to himself, as he put the sheet of paper back into the envelope. "Women are such out-and-out fools." Then he took his candle, and carrying his letter with him, went into his bedroom. The next morning was the morning of Christmas Eve. At about nine o'clock a boy came into his room who was accustomed to call for orders for the day. "Jem," he said to the boy, "there's half a crown lying there on the looking-glass." Jem looked and acknowledged the presence of the half-crown. "Is it a head or a tail, Jem?" asked the boy's master. Jem scrutinized the coin, and declared that the uppermost surface showed a tail. "Then take that letter and post it," said George Vavasor. Whereupon Jem, asking no question and thinking but little of the circumstances under which the command was given, did take the letter and did post it. In due accordance with postal regulations it reached Vavasor Hall and was delivered to Alice on the Christmas morning. A merry Christmas did not fall to the lot of George Vavasor on the present occasion. An early Christmas-box he did receive in the shape of a very hurried note from his friend Burgo. "This will be brought to you by Stickling," the note said; but who Stickling was Vavasor did not know. "I send the bill. Couldn't you get the money and send it me, as I don't want to go up to town again before the thing comes off? You're a trump; and will do the best you can. Don't let that rogue off for less than a hundred and twenty.--Yours, B. F." Vavasor, therefore, having nothing better to do, spent his Christmas morning in calling on Mr. Magruin. "Oh, Mr. Vavasor," said Magruin; "really this is no morning for business!" "Time and tide wait for no man, Mr. Magruin, and my friend wants his money to-morrow." "Oh, Mr. Vavasor,--to-morrow!" "Yes, to-morrow. If time and tide won't wait, neither will love. Come, Mr. Magruin, out with your cheque-book, and don't let's have any nonsense." "But is the lady sure, Mr. Vavasor?" asked Mr. Magruin, anxiously. "Ladies never are sure," said Vavasor; "hardly more sure than bills made over to money-lenders. I'm not going to wait here all day. Are you going to give him the money?" "Christmas-day, Mr. Vavasor! There's no getting money in the city to-day." But Vavasor before he left did get the money from Mr. Magruin,--122 10s.--for which an acceptance at two months for 500 was given in exchange,--and carried it off in triumph. "Do tell him to be punctual," said Mr. Magruin, when Vavasor took his leave. "I do so like young men to be punctual. But I really think Mr. Fitzgerald is the most unpunctual young man I ever did know yet." "I think he is," said George Vavasor, as he went away. He ate his Christmas dinner in absolute solitude at an eating-house near his lodgings. It may be supposed that no man dares to dine at his club on a Christmas Day. He at any rate did not so dare;--and after dinner he wandered about through the streets, wondering within his mind how he would endure the restraints of married life. And the same dull monotony of his days was continued for a week, during which he waited, not impatiently, for an answer to his letter. And before the end of the week the answer came.

Vavasor, after Fitzgerald had left him, began to think of the days past when he had helped his friend; and he thought of Alice's behaviour then. Alice had steadfastly refused to give any aid. But she had been very earnest in declaring that it was Glencora's duty to stand by her promise to Burgo. "He is a desperate spendthrift," Kate Vavasor had said to her. "Then let her teach him to be otherwise," Alice had answered. "If a woman won't venture her fortune for the man she loves, her love is not worth having." All this George Vavasor remembered now; and he asked himself whether the woman that had once loved him would venture her fortune for him still. He had until now hardly made up his mind that he really wanted to marry Alice. He had grown to love his independence; and he was inclined to think that marriage was an old-fashioned custom, not adapted to his advanced intelligence. If he loved and respected any woman, it was his cousin Alice. But that idea of tying himself down was distasteful. Nevertheless, as he thought now of Alice Vavasor, he began to feel that if a Siamese twin were necessary for him, she of all others was the woman to whom he would wish to be bound. And if he did it at all, he must do it now. He and his sister, as Kate thought, had induced Alice to break her engagement with Mr. Grey. But he believed that if left to herself, Alice would probably renew it again. And then, despite that advanced intelligence of his, he still had enough human frailty to feel pleasure at the idea of taking John Grey's prize from him. George Vavasor had very high ambition, and a fair hope of gratifying it if only things would go well with him for a year or so. He was still a poor man, but if he succeeded in getting into Parliament he would be able to live an agreeable and honourable mode of life. But how was he to bear the cost of this for the next year or two? His grandfather would probably not die soon. If he married Alice he would do so with no idea of cheating her out of her money. She already knew how perilous was his enterprise. He knew her to be a woman who would boldly risk all in money; but could he tell her that he wanted to spend all her fortune in the first year or two of their married life! He was still in his arm-chair, thinking of all this, when he heard a distant clock strike three. Then he rose from his seat, and sat down at a writing-desk. "I needn't send it when it's written," he said to himself, "and the chances are that I won't." He wrote as follows: Dear Alice, Once I had the privilege of beginning my letters to you with a warmer show of love than 'dear' - when I could call you dearest; but I lost that privilege through my own folly, and since then it has been granted to another. But you have found, with a thorough honesty, that it has been best for you to withdraw that privilege also. Otherwise I should not be writing this. I now once again ask you to be my wife. In spite of all that passed in those old days - all my selfish folly - I think you know that I always loved you. Indeed my love to you was true from first to last, and I do not think you ever doubted it. Nevertheless, when you told me that I might no longer hope to make you my wife, I had no answer. You acted as any sensible woman would. Then came the episode of Mr. Grey; and bitter as have been my feelings during that engagement, I never tried to come between you and the life you had chosen. I do not forget the words which I spoke last summer at Basle, when you still intended to marry him. But what I said then was nothing to what I refrained from saying. Whether you remember those few words I cannot tell. But you are now again a free woman; and once again I ask you to be my wife. We are both older than we were when we loved before, and will both think of marriage in a somewhat different light. Then personal love for each other was most in our thoughts. God forbid that love should not be in our thoughts now - and my love for you is stronger than any other consideration. But we have both reached that time of life when we should think more of our adaptability to each other than we did before. I know that there is much in my character to make me unfit to marry an ordinary woman. You know my mode of life, and my hopes and my chances of success. I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for a career of honour. The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever my chances, I shall go on as long as I can. If you were my wife tomorrow I should expect to use your money, if it were needed, in struggling to obtain a seat in Parliament. I do not ask you to be my wife for the sake of this aid; but if you were to become my wife I should expect all your cooperation - with your money, possibly, but certainly with your warmest spirit. And now, once again, dearest Alice, will you be my wife? I have been punished, and no other woman has held any place in my heart. Providence has been very good to me in giving me another chance. Tell me whether you can pardon me and still love me. Think well before you answer me. I will not expect your reply for a week. It can hardly be your desire to go through life unmarried. I should say that it must be essential to your ambition that you should join your lot to that of some man with aspirations like your own. It is because of this that you found yourself obliged to part from Mr. Grey. May I not say that with us there would be no such difference? I believe that in this respect we are fitted for each other. This will reach you at Vavasor Hall, where you will now be with the old squire and Kate. I have told her nothing of my purpose in writing this letter. If you should accept me, I would try to be reconciled to my grandfather. He has misunderstood and ill-used me. But I am ready to forgive that, if he will allow me to. In that case I would, if possible, go down to Vavasor while you are there. But I am galloping on ahead foolishly. If your answer is to be adverse, a meeting between me and the Squire would be impossible. But, oh, Alice! do not let it be adverse. I think you love me. Your woman's pride towards me has been great and good and womanly; but it has had its way; and, if you love me, might now succumb. Dear Alice, will you be my wife? Yours, in any event, most affectionately, George Vavasor. Vavasor, when he had finished his letter, went back to his seat over the fire, and there he sat with it by his hand for nearly an hour. Once or twice he took it up and almost threw it in the fire. But the letter was put back upon the table. Then when the hour was nearly over he read it again. "I'll bet two to one that she gives way," he said to himself, as he put the sheet of paper into the envelope. "Women are such fools." Then he took his candle, and went to bed. The next day was Christmas Eve. At about nine o'clock in the morning a boy came into his room to ask for orders for the day. "Jem," he said to the boy, "there's half a crown lying there on the looking-glass. Is it a head or a tail?" Jem scrutinized the coin, and declared that the uppermost surface showed a tail. "Then take that letter and post it," said George Vavasor. So Jem took it and posted it. It reached Vavasor Hall and was delivered to Alice on Christmas morning. George Vavasor did not have a merry Christmas. He received an early gift in the shape of a very hurried note from his friend Burgo. "I am sending the bill. Could you get the money and send it me, as I don't want to go up to town again? Don't let that rogue off for less than a hundred and twenty. Yours, B. F." Vavasor, therefore, spent his Christmas morning in calling on Mr. Magruin. "Oh, Mr. Vavasor," said Magruin, "this is no morning for business!" "Time and tide wait for no man, Mr. Magruin, and my friend wants his money to-morrow. Come, Mr. Magruin, out with your cheque-book, and don't let's have any nonsense." "But is the lady sure, Mr. Vavasor?" asked Mr. Magruin, anxiously. "Ladies never are sure," said Vavasor. "I'm not going to wait here all day. Are you going to give him the money?" He did get the money from Mr. Magruin - 122 10s. - in exchange for a promise of 500 in two months. "Do tell him to be punctual," said Mr. Magruin. "I really think Mr. Fitzgerald is the most unpunctual young man I ever knew." "I think he is," said George Vavasor, as he went away. He ate his Christmas dinner in solitude at an eating-house near his lodgings. After dinner he wandered through the streets, wondering how he would endure the restraints of married life. The same dull monotony of his days was continued for a week, while he waited for an answer to his letter. And before the end of the week the answer came.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 30: Containing a Love Letter

When the first of the new year came round Lady Glencora was not keeping her appointment at Lady Monk's house. She went to Gatherum Castle, and let us hope that she enjoyed the magnificent Christmas hospitality of the Duke; but when the time came for moving on to Monkshade, she was indisposed, and Mr. Palliser went thither alone. Lady Glencora returned to Matching and remained at home, while her husband was away, in company with the two Miss Pallisers. When the tidings reached Monkshade that Lady Glencora was not to be expected, Burgo Fitzgerald was already there, armed with such pecuniary assistance as George Vavasor had been able to wrench out of the hands of Mr. Magruin. "Burgo," said his aunt, catching him one morning near his bedroom door as he was about to go down-stairs in hunting trim, "Burgo, your old flame, Lady Glencora, is not coming here." "Lady Glencora not coming!" said Burgo, betraying by his look and the tone of his voice too clearly that this change in the purpose of a married lady was to him of more importance than it should have been. Such betrayal, however, to Lady Monk was not perhaps matter of much moment. "No; she is not coming. It can't be matter of any moment to you now." "But, by heavens, it is," said he, putting his hand up to his forehead, and leaning back against the wall of the passage as though in despair. "It is matter of moment to me. I am the most unfortunate devil that ever lived." "Fie, Burgo, fie! You must not speak in that way of a married woman. I begin to think it is better that she should not come." At this moment another man booted and spurred came down the passage, upon whom Lady Monk smiled sweetly, speaking some pretty little word as he passed. Burgo spoke never a word, but still stood leaning against the wall, with his hand to his forehead, showing that he had heard something which had moved him greatly. "Come back into your room, Burgo," said his aunt; and they both went in at the door that was nearest to them, for Lady Monk had been on the look-out for him, and had caught him as soon as he appeared in the passage. "If this does annoy you, you should keep it to yourself! What will people say?" "How can I help what they say?" "But you would not wish to injure her, I suppose? I thought it best to tell you, for fear you should show any special sign of surprise if you heard of it first in public. It is very weak in you to allow yourself to feel that sort of regard for a married woman. If you cannot constrain yourself I shall be afraid to let you meet her in Brook Street." Burgo looked for a moment into his aunt's face without answering her, and then turned away towards the door. "You can do as you please about that," said he; "but you know as well as I do what I have made up my mind to do." "Nonsense, Burgo; I know nothing of the kind. But do you go down-stairs to breakfast, and don't look like that when you go among the people there." Lady Monk was a woman now about fifty years of age, who had been a great beauty, and who was still handsome in her advanced age. Her figure was very good. She was tall and of fine proportion, though by no means verging to that state of body which our excellent American friend and critic Mr. Hawthorne has described as beefy and has declared to be the general condition of English ladies of Lady Monk's age. Lady Monk was not beefy. She was a comely, handsome, upright, dame,--one of whom, as regards her outward appearance, England might be proud,--and of whom Sir Cosmo Monk was very proud. She had come of the family of the Worcestershire Fitzgeralds, of whom it used to be said that there never was one who was not beautiful and worthless. Looking at Lady Monk you would hardly think that she could be a worthless woman; but there were one or two who professed to know her, and who declared that she was a true scion of the family to which she belonged;--that even her husband's ample fortune had suffered from her extravagance, that she had quarrelled with her only son, and had succeeded in marrying her daughter to the greatest fool in the peerage. She had striven very hard to bring about a marriage between her nephew and the great heiress, and was a woman not likely to pardon those who had foiled her. At this moment Burgo felt very certain that his aunt was aware of his purpose, and could not forgive her for pretending to be innocent of it. In this he was most ungrateful, as well as unreasonable,--and very indiscreet also. Had he been a man who ever reflected he must have known that such a woman as his aunt could only assist him as long as she might be presumed to be ignorant of his intention. But Burgo never reflected. The Fitzgeralds never reflected till they were nearer forty than thirty, and then people began to think worse of them than they had thought before. When Burgo reached the dining-room there were many men there, but no ladies. Sir Cosmo Monk, a fine bald-headed hale man of about sixty, was standing up at the sideboard, cutting a huge game pie. He was a man also who did not reflect much, but who contrived to keep straight in his course through the world without much reflection. "Palliser is coming without her," he said in his loud clear voice, thinking nothing of his wife's nephew. "She's ill, she says." "I'm sorry for it," said one man. "She's a deal the better fellow of the two." "She has twice more go in her than Planty Pall," said another. "Planty is no fool, I can tell you," said Sir Cosmo, coming to the table with his plate full of pie. "We think he's about the most rising man we have." Sir Cosmo was the member for his county, and was a Liberal. He had once, when a much younger man, been at the Treasury, and had since always spoken of the Whig Government as though he himself were in some sort a part of it. "Burgo, do you hear that Palliser is coming without his wife?" said one man,--a very young man, who hardly knew what had been the circumstances of the case. The others, when they saw Burgo enter, had been silent on the subject of Lady Glencora. "I have heard,--and be d----d to him," said Burgo. Then there was suddenly a silence in the room, and everyone seemed to attend assiduously to his breakfast. It was very terrible, this clear expression of a guilty meaning with reference to the wife of another man! Burgo regarded neither his plate nor his cup, but thrusting his hands into his breeches pockets, sat back in his chair with the blackness as of a thunder cloud upon his brow. [Illustration: "I have heard," said Burgo.] "Burgo, you had better eat your breakfast," said Sir Cosmo. "I don't want any breakfast." He took, however, a bit of toast, and crumbling it up in his hand as he put a morsel into his mouth, went away to the sideboard and filled for himself a glass of cherry brandy. "If you don't eat any breakfast the less of that you take the better," said Sir Cosmo. "I'm all right now," said he, and coming back to the table, went through some form of making a meal with a roll and a cup of tea. They who were then present used afterwards to say that they should never forget that breakfast. There had been something, they declared, in the tone of Burgo's voice when he uttered his curse against Mr. Palliser, which had struck them all with dread. There had, too, they said, been a blackness in his face, so terrible to be seen, that it had taken from them all the power of conversation. Sir Cosmo, when he had broken the ominous silence, had done so with a manifest struggle. The loud clatter of glasses with which Burgo had swallowed his dram, as though resolved to show that he was regardless who might know that he was drinking, added to the feeling. It may easily be understood that there was no further word spoken at that breakfast-table about Planty Pall or his wife. On that day Burgo Fitzgerald startled all those who saw him by the mad way in which he rode. Early in the day there was no excuse for any such rashness. The hounds went from wood to wood, and men went in troops along the forest sides as they do on such occasions. But Burgo was seen to cram his horse at impracticable places, and to ride at gates and rails as though resolved to do himself and his uncle's steed a mischief. This was so apparent that some friend spoke to Sir Cosmo Monk about it. "I can do nothing," said Sir Cosmo. "He is a man whom no one's words will control. Something has ruffled him this morning, and he must run his chance till he becomes quiet." In the afternoon there was a good run, and Burgo again rode as hard as he could make his horse carry him;--but then there was the usual excuse for hard riding; and such riding in a straight run is not dangerous, as it is when the circumstances of the occasion do not warrant it, But, be that as it may, Burgo went on to the end of the day without accident, and as he went home, assured Sir Cosmo, in a voice which was almost cheery, that his mare Spinster was by far the best thing in the Monkshade stables. Indeed Spinster made quite a character that day, and was sold at the end of the season for three hundred guineas on the strength of it. I am, however, inclined to believe that there was nothing particular about the mare. Horses always catch the temperament of their riders, and when a man wishes to break his neck, he will generally find a horse willing to assist him in appearance, but able to save him in the performance. Burgo, at any rate, did not break his neck, and appeared at the dinner-table in a better humour than that which he had displayed in the morning. On the day appointed Mr. Palliser reached Monkshade. He was, in a manner, canvassing for the support of the Liberal party, and it would not have suited him to show any indifference to the invitation of so influential a man as Sir Cosmo. Sir Cosmo had a little party of his own in the House, consisting of four or five other respectable country gentlemen, who troubled themselves little with thinking, and who mostly had bald heads. Sir Cosmo was a man with whom it was quite necessary that such an aspirant as Mr. Palliser should stand well, and therefore Mr. Palliser came to Monkshade, although Lady Glencora was unable to accompany him. "We are so sorry," said Lady Monk. "We have been looking forward to having Lady Glencora with us beyond everything." Mr. Palliser declared that Lady Glencora herself was overwhelmed with grief in that she should have been debarred from making this special visit. She had, however, been so unwell at Gatherum, the anxious husband declared, as to make it unsafe for her to go again away from home. "I hope it is nothing serious," said Lady Monk, with a look of grief so well arranged that any stranger would have thought that all the Pallisers must have been very dear to her heart. Then Mr. Palliser went on to explain that Lady Glencora had unfortunately been foolish. During one of those nights of hard frost she had gone out among the ruins at Matching, to show them by moonlight to a friend. The friend had thoughtlessly, foolishly, and in a manner which Mr. Palliser declared to be very reprehensible, allowed Lady Glencora to remain among the ruins till she had caught cold. "How very wrong!" said Lady Monk with considerable emphasis. "It was very wrong," said Mr. Palliser, speaking of poor Alice almost maliciously. "However, she caught a cold which, unfortunately, has become worse at my uncle's, and so I was obliged to take her home." Lady Monk perceived that Mr. Palliser had in truth left his wife behind because he believed her to be ill, and not because he was afraid of Burgo Fitzgerald. So accomplished a woman as Lady Monk felt no doubt that the wife's absence was caused by fear of the lover, and not by any cold caught in viewing ruins by moonlight. She was not to be deceived in such a matter. But she became aware that Mr. Palliser had been deceived. As she was right in this we must go back for a moment, and say a word of things as they went on at Matching after Alice Vavasor had left that place. Alice had told Miss Palliser that steps ought to be taken, whatever might be their cost, to save Lady Glencora from the peril of a visit to Monkshade. To this Miss Palliser had assented, and, when she left Alice, was determined to tell Mr. Palliser the whole story. But when the time for doing so had come, her courage failed her. She could not find words in which to warn the husband that his wife would not be safe in the company of her old lover. The task with Lady Glencora herself, bad as that would be, might be easier, and this task she at last undertook,--not without success. "Glencora," she said, when she found a fitting opportunity, "you won't be angry, I hope, if I say a word to you?" "That depends very much upon what the word is," said Lady Glencora. And here it must be acknowledged that Mr. Palliser's wife had not done much to ingratiate herself with Mr. Palliser's cousins;--not perhaps so much as she should have done, seeing that she found them in her husband's house. She had taught herself to think that they were hard, stiff, and too proud of bearing the name of Palliser. Perhaps some little attempt may have been made by one or both of them to teach her something, and it need hardly be said that such an attempt on the part of a husband's unmarried female relations would not be forgiven by a young bride. She had undoubtedly been ungracious, and of this Miss Palliser was well aware. "Well,--the word shall be as little unpleasant as I can make it," said Miss Palliser, already appreciating fully the difficulty of her task. "But why say anything that is unpleasant? However, if it is to be said, let us have it over at once." "You are going to Monkshade, I believe, with Plantagenet." "Well;--and what of that?" "Dear Glencora, I think you had better not go. Do you not think so yourself?" "Who has been talking to you?" said Lady Glencora, turning upon her very sharply. "Nobody has been talking to me;--not in the sense you mean." "Plantagenet has spoken to you?" "Not a word," said Miss Palliser. "You may be sure that he would not utter a word on such a subject to anyone unless it were to yourself. But, dear Glencora, you should not go there;--I mean it in all kindness and love,--I do indeed." Saying this she offered her hand to Glencora, and Glencora took it. "Perhaps you do," said she in a low voice. "Indeed I do. The world is so hard and cruel in what it says." "I do not care two straws for what the world says." "But he might care." "It is not my fault. I do not want to go to Monkshade. Lady Monk was my friend once, but I do not care if I never see her again. I did not arrange this visit. It was Plantagenet who did it." "But he will not take you there if you say you do not wish it." "I have said so, and he told me that I must go. You will hardly believe me,--but I condescended even to tell him why I thought it better to remain away. He told me, in answer, that it was a silly folly which I must live down, and that it did not become me to be afraid of any man." "Of course you are not afraid, but--" "I am afraid. That is just the truth. I am afraid;--but what can I do more than I have done?" This was very terrible to Miss Palliser. She had not thought that Lady Glencora would say so much, and she felt a true regret in having been made to hear words which so nearly amounted to a confession. But for this there was no help now. There were not many more words between them, and we already know the result of the conversation. Lady Glencora became so ill from the effects of her imprudent lingering among the ruins that she was unable to go to Monkshade. Mr. Palliser remained three days at Monkshade, and cemented his political alliance with Sir Cosmo much in the same way as he had before done with the Duke of St. Bungay. There was little or nothing said about politics, and certainly not a word that could be taken as any definite party understanding between the men; but they sat at dinner together at the same table, drank a glass of wine or two out of the same decanters, and dropped a chance word now and again about the next session of Parliament. I do not know that anything more had been expected either by Mr. Palliser or by Sir Cosmo; but it seemed to be understood when Mr. Palliser went away that Sir Cosmo was of opinion that that young scion of a ducal house ought to become the future Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Whig Government. "I can't see that there's so much in him," said one young member of Parliament to Sir Cosmo. "I rather think that there is, all the same," said the baronet. "There's a good deal in him, I believe! I dare say he's not very bright, but I don't know that we want brightness. A bright financier is the most dangerous man in the world. We've had enough of that already. Give me sound common sense, with just enough of the gab in a man to enable him to say what he's got to say! We don't want more than that nowadays." From which it became evident that Sir Cosmo was satisfied with the new political candidate for high place. Lady Monk took an occasion to introduce Mr. Palliser to Burgo Fitzgerald; with what object it is difficult to say, unless she was anxious to make mischief between the men. Burgo scowled at him; but Mr. Palliser did not notice the scowl, and put out his hand to his late rival most affably. Burgo was forced to take it, and as he did so made a little speech. "I'm sorry that we have not the pleasure of seeing Lady Glencora with you," said he. "She is unfortunately indisposed," said Mr. Palliser. "I am sorry for it," said Burgo--"very sorry indeed." Then he turned his back and walked away. The few words he had spoken, and the manner in which he had carried himself, had been such as to make all those around them notice it. Each of them knew that Lady Glencora's name should not have been in Burgo's mouth, and all felt a fear not easily to be defined that something terrible would come of it. But Mr. Palliser himself did not seem to notice anything, or to fear anything; and nothing terrible did come of it during that visit of his to Monkshade.

In the new year Lady Glencora did not go to Lady Monk's house. When the time came for moving on to Monkshade, she was unwell, and Mr. Palliser went there alone. Lady Glencora remained at Matching with the two Miss Pallisers. When the tidings reached Monkshade that Lady Glencora was not to be expected, Burgo Fitzgerald was already there, armed with the money George Vavasor had been able to wrench out of the hands of Mr. Magruin. "Burgo," said his aunt, Lady Monk, catching him one morning as he was about to go downstairs in his hunting-clothes, "Burgo, your old flame, Lady Glencora, is not coming." "Not coming!" said Burgo, betraying too clearly by his look and voice that this was more important to him than it should have been. "No. It can't matter much to you." "But it does," said he, putting his hand up to his forehead, and leaning back against the wall as though in despair. "It does matter. I am the most unfortunate devil that ever lived." "Burgo! You must not speak in that way of a married woman. I begin to think it is better that she should not come." As another guest approached, she said, "Come back into your room, Burgo." There Lady Monk continued. "If this annoys you, keep it to yourself! What will people say?" "How can I help what they say?" "I thought it best to tell you, for fear you should show surprise if you heard it in public. It is very weak in you to allow yourself to feel that sort of regard for a married woman. If you cannot control yourself I shall be afraid to let you meet her in Brook Street." Burgo looked for a moment at his aunt, and then turned towards the door. "You can do as you please about that," said he; "but you know what I have made up my mind to do." "Nonsense, Burgo; I know nothing of the kind. Go downstairs to breakfast, and don't look like that when you get there." Lady Monk was about fifty years of age, had been a great beauty, and was still good-looking, with a fine, tall figure. She was outwardly a handsome, upright, dame, of whom England might be proud - and of whom Sir Cosmo Monk was very proud. She had come of the family of the Worcestershire Fitzgeralds, of whom it was said that there never was one who was not beautiful and worthless. Looking at Lady Monk you would hardly think that she could be a worthless woman; but her husband's fortune had suffered from her extravagance, she had quarrelled with her only son, and had married her daughter to the greatest fool in the peerage. She had striven very hard to bring about a marriage between her nephew Burgo and the great heiress Lady Glencora, and she was not a woman to pardon those who had foiled her. Burgo felt certain that his aunt was aware of his purpose, and could not forgive her for pretending not to know it. Had he been a man who ever reflected, he must have known that his aunt could only assist him if she was presumed to be ignorant of his intention. But Burgo never reflected. When Burgo reached the dining-room Sir Cosmo Monk, a fine bald-headed man of about sixty, was standing at the sideboard, cutting a huge game pie. He also was a man who did not reflect much, but who managed to keep straight in his course through the world without much reflection. "Palliser is coming without her," he was saying in his loud clear voice. "She's ill, she says." "I'm sorry for it," said one man. "She's the better fellow of the two." "She has more go in her than Planty Pall," said another. "Planty is no fool, I can tell you," said Sir Cosmo, coming to the table with his plate full of pie. "He's about the most rising man we have." Sir Cosmo was the member of parliament for his county, and was a Liberal. "Burgo, do you hear that Palliser is coming without his wife?" said one man, who did not know Burgo's history. "I have heard, and be d--d to him," said Burgo. There was suddenly silence in the room, and everyone attended assiduously to breakfast. Burgo sat back with his hands thrust into his breeches pockets, and the blackness of a thunder cloud upon his brow. "Burgo, you had better eat your breakfast," said Sir Cosmo. "I don't want any breakfast." He took, however, a morsel of toast, and went to the sideboard and filled himself a glass of cherry brandy. "If you don't eat any breakfast the less of that you take the better," said Sir Cosmo. "I'm all right now," said he, and coming back to the table, went through some form of making a meal with a roll and a cup of tea. Those who were present used afterwards to say that they would never forget that breakfast. There had been something, they declared, in the tone of Burgo's voice when he uttered his curse against Mr. Palliser, which struck them all with dread. And the expression on his face had been terrible. On that day Burgo Fitzgerald startled everyone by the mad way in which he rode. He steered at gates and rails as though resolved to do himself and his uncle's horse a mischief. This was so apparent that some friend spoke to Sir Cosmo Monk about it. "I can do nothing," said Sir Cosmo. "No words will control him. He must run his chance till he becomes quiet." In the afternoon Burgo again rode as hard as he could; but he finished the day without accident, and as he went home, assured Sir Cosmo, in a voice which was almost cheery, that his mare Spinster was the best horse in the Monkshade stables. Burgo appeared at the dinner-table in a better humour than in the morning. On the day appointed Mr. Palliser reached Monkshade. He could not have declined the invitation of so influential a man as Sir Cosmo, who had a little party of his own in the House, consisting of four or five other respectable and bald-headed country gentlemen. Therefore Mr. Palliser came to Monkshade, although Lady Glencora was unable to accompany him. "We are so sorry," said Lady Monk. "We have been looking forward to having Lady Glencora with us. I hope it is nothing serious." Then Mr. Palliser explained that Lady Glencora had unfortunately been foolish, and had gone out on a frosty night among the ruins at Matching, to show them to a friend. The friend had thoughtlessly allowed Lady Glencora to remain among the ruins till she had caught cold. "How very wrong!" said Lady Monk with considerable emphasis. "It was very wrong," said Mr. Palliser. "Glencora caught a cold which, unfortunately, became worse at my uncle's, and so I was obliged to take her home." Lady Monk perceived that Mr. Palliser had in truth left his wife behind because he believed her to be ill, and not because he was afraid of Burgo Fitzgerald. But she was sure that the wife's absence was caused by fear of Burgo. She felt that Mr. Palliser had been deceived. As she was right in this, we must go back for a moment, to the events after Alice had left Matching. Alice had told Miss Palliser that steps ought to be taken to save Lady Glencora from the peril of a visit to Monkshade. Miss Palliser had agreed, and, when she left Alice, was determined to tell Mr. Palliser. But her courage failed her. She could not find words in which to warn the husband that his wife would not be safe in the company of her old lover. However, she managed to speak to Lady Glencora herself. "Glencora," she said, "you won't be angry, I hope, if I say a word to you?" "That depends on what the word is," said Lady Glencora. She had not done much to ingratiate herself with Mr. Palliser's cousins; not perhaps so much as she should have done. She had taught herself to think that they were hard, stiff, and too proud of bearing the name of Palliser. If they tried to teach her on any point, she did not easily forgive them. "Well, the word shall be as little unpleasant as I can make it," said Miss Palliser. "You are going to Monkshade, I believe, with Plantagenet." "What of that?" "Dear Glencora, I think you had better not go. Do you not think so yourself?" "Who has been talking to you?" said Lady Glencora, turning upon her very sharply. "Plantagenet has spoken to you?" "Not a word," said Miss Palliser. "But, dear Glencora, you should not go there; I mean it in all kindness and love - I do indeed." Saying this she offered her hand to Glencora, and Glencora took it. "Perhaps you do," said she in a low voice. "Indeed I do. The world is so hard and cruel in what it says." "I do not care two straws for what the world says. But I do not want to go to Monkshade. Lady Monk was my friend once, but I do not care if I never see her again. I did not arrange this visit. It was Plantagenet." "But he will not take you there if you say you do not wish it." "I have said so, and he told me that I must go. I even told him why I thought it better to stay away. He told me that it was a silly folly which I must overcome, and that I should not be afraid of any man." "Of course you are not afraid, but-" "I am afraid. That is just the truth. I am afraid; but what more can I do?" This was very terrible to Miss Palliser. There were not many more words between them, and we already know the result of the conversation. Lady Glencora became so ill from the effects of her imprudent lingering among the ruins that she was unable to go to Monkshade. Mr. Palliser remained three days at Monkshade, and cemented his political alliance with Sir Cosmo in the same way as he had done with the Duke of St. Bungay. There was little said about politics; but they sat at dinner together, drank a glass of wine or two out of the same decanters, and dropped a chance word now and again about the next session of Parliament. "I can't see that there's so much in him," said one young member of Parliament to Sir Cosmo, once Mr. Palliser had left. "I rather think that there is," said the baronet. "There's a good deal in him, I believe! I dare say he's not very bright, but a bright financier is the most dangerous man in the world. We've had enough of that already. Give me sound common sense!" From which it became evident that Sir Cosmo was satisfied with Mr. Palliser. Lady Monk took an opportunity of introducing Mr. Palliser to Burgo Fitzgerald; why, it is difficult to say, unless it was to make mischief between the men. Burgo scowled at him; but Mr. Palliser did not notice, and put out his hand so affably that Burgo was forced to take it. "I'm sorry that we have not the pleasure of seeing Lady Glencora," said he. "She is unfortunately indisposed," said Mr. Palliser. "I am very sorry for it," said Burgo. Then he turned his back and walked away. His speech and manner were such that everyone around noticed, and felt an indefinable fear. But Mr. Palliser himself did not seem to notice anything; and nothing terrible came of it during his visit to Monkshade.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 33: Monkshade

Mr. Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future. He could afford to learn to be a statesman, and had the industry wanted for such training. He was born in the purple, noble himself, and heir to the highest rank as well as one of the greatest fortunes of the country, already very rich, surrounded by all the temptations of luxury and pleasure; and yet he devoted himself to work with the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife, and did so without any motive more selfish than that of being counted in the roll of the public servants of England. He was not a brilliant man, and understood well that such was the case. He was now listened to in the House, as the phrase goes; but he was listened to as a laborious man, who was in earnest in what he did, who got up his facts with accuracy, and who, dull though he be, was worthy of confidence. And he was very dull. He rather prided himself on being dull, and on conquering in spite of his dullness. He never allowed himself a joke in his speeches, nor attempted even the smallest flourish of rhetoric. He was very careful in his language, labouring night and day to learn to express himself with accuracy, with no needless repetition of words, perspicuously with regard to the special object he might have in view. He had taught himself to believe that oratory, as oratory, was a sin against that honesty in politics by which he strove to guide himself. He desired to use words for the purpose of teaching things which he knew and which others did not know; and he desired also to be honoured for his knowledge. But he had no desire to be honoured for the language in which his knowledge was conveyed. He was an upright, thin, laborious man; who by his parts alone could have served no political party materially, but whose parts were sufficient to make his education, integrity, and industry useful in the highest degree. It is the trust which such men inspire which makes them so serviceable;--trust not only in their labour,--for any man rising from the mass of the people may be equally laborious; nor yet simply in their honesty and patriotism. The confidence is given to their labour, honesty, and patriotism joined to such a personal stake in the country as gives them a weight and ballast which no politician in England can possess without it. If he was dull as a statesman he was more dull in private life, and it may be imagined that such a woman as his wife would find some difficulty in making his society the source of her happiness. Their marriage, in a point of view regarding business, had been a complete success,--and a success, too, when on the one side, that of Lady Glencora, there had been terrible dangers of shipwreck, and when on his side also there had been some little fears of a mishap. As regards her it has been told how near she went to throwing herself, with all her vast wealth, into the arms of a young man, whom no father, no guardian could have regarded as a well-chosen husband for any girl;--one who as yet had shown no good qualities, who had been a spendthrift, unprincipled, and debauched. Alas, she had loved him! It is possible that her love and her wealth might have turned him from evil to good. But who would have ventured to risk her,--I will not say her and her vast inheritances,--on such a chance? That evil, however, had been prevented, and those about her had managed to marry her to a young man, very steady by nature, with worldly prospects as brilliant as her own, and with a station than which the world offers nothing higher. His little threatened mischance,--a passing fancy for a married lady who was too wise to receive vows which were proffered not in the most ardent manner,--had, from special reasons, given some little alarm to his uncle, which had just sufficed at the time to make so very judicious a marriage doubly pleasant to that noble duke, So that all things and all people had conspired to shower substantial comforts on the heads of this couple, when they were joined together, and men and women had not yet ceased to declare how happy were both in the accumulated gifts of fortune. And as regards Mr. Palliser, I think that his married life, and the wife, whom he certainly had not chosen, but who had dropped upon him, suited him admirably. He wanted great wealth for that position at which he aimed. He had been rich before his marriage with his own wealth,--so rich that he could throw thousands away if he wished it; but for him and his career was needed that colossal wealth which would make men talk about it,--which would necessitate an expansive expenditure, reaching far and wide, doing nothing, or less than nothing, for his own personal comfort, but giving to him at once that rock-like solidity which is so necessary to our great aristocratic politicians. And his wife was, as far as he knew, all that he desired. He had not dabbled much in the fountains of Venus, though he had forgotten himself once, and sinned in coveting another man's wife. But his sin then had hardly polluted his natural character, and his desire had been of a kind which was almost more gratified in its disappointment than it would have been in its fruition. On the morning after the lady had frowned on him he had told himself that he was very well out of that trouble. He knew that it would never be for him to hang up on the walls of a temple a well-worn lute as a votive offering when leaving the pursuits of love. _Idoneus puellis_ he never could have been. So he married Lady Glencora and was satisfied. The story of Burgo Fitzgerald was told to him, and he supposed that most girls had some such story to tell. He thought little about it, and by no means understood her when she said to him, with all the impressiveness which she could throw into the words, "You must know that I have really loved him." "You must love me now," he had replied with a smile; and then as regarded his mind, the thing was over. And since his marriage he had thought that things matrimonial had gone well with him, and with her too. He gave her almost unlimited power of enjoying her money, and interfered but little in her way of life. Sometimes he would say a word of caution to her with reference to those childish ways which hardly became the dull dignity of his position; and his words then would have in them something of unintentional severity,--whether instigated or not by the red-haired Radical Member of Parliament, I will not pretend to say;--but on the whole he was contented and loved his wife, as he thought, very heartily, and at least better than he loved any one else. One cause of unhappiness, or rather one doubt as to his entire good fortune, was beginning to make itself felt, as his wife had to her sorrow already discovered. He had hoped that before this he might have heard that she would give him a child. But the days were young yet for that trouble, and the care had not become a sorrow. But this judicious arrangement as to properties, this well-ordered alliance between families, had not perhaps suited her as well as it had suited him. I think that she might have learned to forget her early lover, or to look back upon it with a soft melancholy hardly amounting to regret, had her new lord been more tender in his ways with her. I do not know that Lady Glencora's heart was made of that stern stuff which refuses to change its impressions; but it was a heart, and it required food. To love and fondle someone,--to be loved and fondled, were absolutely necessary to her happiness. She wanted the little daily assurance of her supremacy in the man's feelings, the constant touch of love, half accidental half contrived, the passing glance of the eye telling perhaps of some little joke understood only between them two rather than of love, the softness of an occasional kiss given here and there when chance might bring them together, some half-pretended interest in her little doings, a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, or even a pout. It should have been given to her to feed upon such food as this daily, and then she would have forgotten Burgo Fitzgerald. But Mr. Palliser understood none of these things; and therefore the image of Burgo Fitzgerald in all his beauty was ever before her eyes. But not the less was Mr. Palliser a prosperous man, as to the success of whose career few who knew him had much doubt. It might be written in the book of his destiny that he would have to pass through some violent domestic trouble, some ruin in the hopes of his home, of a nature to destroy then and for ever the worldly prospects of other men. But he was one who would pass through such violence, should it come upon him, without much scathe. To lose his influence with his party would be worse to him than to lose his wife, and public disgrace would hit him harder than private dishonour. And the present was the very moment in which success was, as was said, coming to him. He had already held laborious office under the Crown, but had never sat in the Cabinet. He had worked much harder than Cabinet Ministers generally work,--but hitherto had worked without any reward that was worth his having. For the stipend which he had received had been nothing to him,--as the great stipend which he would receive, if his hopes were true, would also be nothing to him. To have ascendancy over other men, to be known by his countrymen as one of their real rulers, to have an actual and acknowledged voice in the management of nations,--those were the rewards for which he looked; and now in truth it seemed as though they were coming to him. It was all but known that the existing Chancellor of the Exchequer would separate himself from the Government, carrying various others with him, either before or immediately consequent on the meeting of Parliament;--and it was all but known, also, that Mr. Palliser would fill his place, taking that high office at once, although he had never hitherto sat in that august assembly which men call the Cabinet. He could thus afford to put up with the small everyday calamity of having a wife who loved another man better than she loved him. The presence of the Duke of St. Bungay at Matching was assumed to be a sure sign of Mr. Palliser's coming triumph. The Duke was a statesman of a very different class, but he also had been eminently successful as an aristocratic pillar of the British Constitutional Republic. He was a minister of very many years' standing, being as used to cabinet sittings as other men are to their own armchairs; but he had never been a hard-working man. Though a constant politician, he had ever taken politics easy whether in office or out. The world had said before now that the Duke might be Premier, only that he would not take the trouble. He had been consulted by a very distinguished person,--so the papers had said more than once,--as to the making of Prime Ministers. His voice in council was esteemed to be very great. He was regarded as a strong rock of support to the liberal cause, and yet nobody ever knew what he did; nor was there much record of what he said. The offices which he held, or had held, were generally those to which no very arduous duties were attached. In severe debates he never took upon himself the brunt of opposition oratory. What he said in the House was generally short and pleasant,--with some slight, drolling, undercurrent of uninjurious satire running through it. But he was a walking miracle of the wisdom of common sense. He never lost his temper. He never made mistakes. He never grew either hot or cold in a cause. He was never reckless in politics, and never cowardly. He snubbed no man, and took snubbings from no man. He was a Knight of the Garter, a Lord Lieutenant of his county, and at sixty-two had his digestion unimpaired and his estate in excellent order. He was a great buyer of pictures, which, perhaps, he did not understand, and a great collector of books which certainly he never read. All the world respected him, and he was a man to whom the respect of all the world was as the breath of his nostrils. But even he was not without his peacock on the wall, his skeleton in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the peacock did not scream loud, the skeleton was not very terrible in his anatomical arrangement, nor was the thorn likely to fester to a gangrene. The Duke was always in awe about his wife. He was ever uneasy about his wife, but it must not be supposed that he feared the machinations of any Burgo Fitzgerald as being destructive of his domestic comfort. The Duchess was and always had been all that is proper. Ladies in high rank, when gifted with excelling beauty, have often been made the marks of undeserved calumny;--but no breath of slander had ever touched her name. I doubt if any man alive had ever had the courage even to wink at her since the Duke had first called her his own. Nor was she a spendthrift, or a gambler. She was not fast in her tastes, or given to any pursuit that was objectionable. She was simply a fool, and as a fool was ever fearing that she was the mark of ridicule. In all such miseries she would complain sorrowfully, piteously, and occasionally very angrily, to her dear Duke and protector; till sometimes her dear Duke did not quite know what to do with her or how to protect her. It did not suit him, a Knight of the Garter and a Duke of St. Bungay, to beg mercy for that poor wife of his from such a one as Mrs. Conway Sparkes; nor would it be more in his way to lodge a formal complaint against that lady before his host or hostess,--as one boy at school may sometimes do as regards another. "If you don't like the people, my dear, we will go away," he said to her late on that evening of which we have spoken. "No," she replied, "I do not wish to go away. I have said that we would stay till December, and Longroyston won't be ready before that. But I think that something ought to be done to silence that woman." And the accent came strong upon "something," and then again with terrific violence upon "woman." The Duke did not know how to silence Mrs. Conway Sparkes. It was a great principle of his life never to be angry with any one. How could he get at Mrs. Conway Sparkes? "I don't think she is worth your attention," said the husband. "That's all very well, Duke," said the wife, "and perhaps she is not. But I find her in this house, and I don't like to be laughed at. I think Lady Glencora should make her know her place." "Lady Glencora is very young, my dear." "I don't know about being so very young," said the Duchess, whose ear had perhaps caught some little hint of poor Lady Glencora's almost unintentional mimicry. Now as appeals of this kind were being made frequently to the Duke, and as he was often driven to say some word, of which he himself hardly approved, to some one in protection of his Duchess, he was aware that the matter was an annoyance, and at times almost wished that her Grace was at--Longroyston. And there was a third politician staying at Matching Priory who had never yet risen to the rank of a statesman, but who had his hopes. This was Mr. Bott, the member for St. Helens, whom Lady Glencora had described as a man who stood about, with red hair,--and perhaps told tales of her to her husband. Mr. Bott was a person who certainly had had some success in life and who had won it for himself. He was not very young, being at this time only just on the right side of fifty. He was now enjoying his second session in Parliament, having been returned as a pledged disciple of the Manchester school. Nor had he apparently been false to his pledges. At St. Helens he was still held to be a good man and true. But they who sat on the same side with him in the House and watched his political manoeuvres, knew that he was striving hard to get his finger into the public pie. He was not a rich man, though he had made calico and had got into Parliament. And though he claimed to be a thoroughgoing Radical, he was a man who liked to live with aristocrats, and was fond of listening to the whispers of such as the Duke of St. Bungay or Mr. Palliser. It was supposed that he did understand something of finance. He was at any rate great in figures; and as he was possessed of much industry, and was obedient withal, he was a man who might make himself useful to a Chancellor of the Exchequer ambitious of changes. There are men who get into such houses as Matching Priory and whose presence there is a mystery to many;--as to whom the ladies of the house never quite understand why they are entertaining such a guest. "And Mr. Bott is coming," Mr. Palliser had said to his wife. "Mr. Bott!" Lady Glencora had answered. "Goodness me! who is Mr. Bott?" "He is member for St. Helens," said Mr. Palliser. "A very serviceable man in his way." "And what am I to do with him?" asked Lady Glencora. "I don't know that you can do anything with him. He is a man who has a great deal of business, and I dare say he will spend most of his time in the library." So Mr. Bott arrived. But though a huge pile of letters and papers came to him every morning by post, he unfortunately did not seem to spend much of his time in the library. Perhaps he had not found the clue to that lost apartment. Twice he went out shooting, but as on the first day he shot the keeper, and on the second very nearly shot the Duke, he gave that up. Hunting he declined, though much pressed to make an essay in that art by Jeffrey Palliser. He seemed to spend his time, as Lady Glencora said, in standing about,--except at certain times when he was closeted with Mr. Palliser, and when, it may be presumed, he made himself useful. On such days he would be seen at the hour of lunch with fingers much stained with ink, and it was generally supposed that on those occasions he had been counting up taxes and calculating the effect of great financial changes. He was a tall, wiry, strong man, with a bald head and bristly red beard, which, however, was cut off from his upper and under lip. This was unfortunate, as had he hidden his mouth he would not have been in so marked a degree an ugly man. His upper lip was very long, and his mouth was mean. But he had found that without the help of a razor to these parts he could not manage his soup to his satisfaction, and preferring cleanliness to beauty had shaved himself accordingly. "I shouldn't dislike Mr. Bott so much," Lady Glencora said to her husband, "if he didn't rub his hands and smile so often, and seem to be going to say something when he really is not going to say anything." "I don't think you need trouble yourself about him, my dear," Mr. Palliser had answered. "But when he looks at me in that way, I can't help stopping, as I think he is going to speak; and then he always says, 'Can I do anything for you, Lady Glen-cowrer?'" She instantly saw that her husband did not like this. "Don't be angry with me, dear," she said. "You must admit that he is rather a bore." "I am not at all angry, Glencora," said the husband; "and if you insist upon it, I will see that he leaves;--and in such case will of course never ask him again. But that might be prejudicial to me, as he is a man whom I trust in politics, and who may perhaps be serviceable to me." Of course Lady Glencora declared that Mr. Bott might remain as long as he and her husband desired, and of course she mentioned his name no more to Mr. Palliser; but from that time forth she regarded Mr. Bott as an enemy, and felt also that Mr. Bott regarded her in the same light. When it was known among outside politicians that the Duke of St. Bungay was staying at Matching Priory, outside politicians became more sure than ever that Mr. Palliser would be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. The old minister and the young minister were of course arranging matters together. But I doubt whether Mr. Palliser and the Duke ever spoke on any such topic during the entire visit. Though Mr. Bott was occasionally closeted with Mr. Palliser, the Duke never troubled himself with such closetings. He went out shooting--on his pony, read his newspaper, wrote his notes, and looked with the eye of a connoisseur over all Mr. Palliser's farming apparatus. "You seem to have a good man, I should say," said the Duke. "What! Hubbings? Yes;--he was a legacy from my uncle when he gave me up the Priory." "A very good man, I should say. Of course he won't make it pay; but he'll make it look as though it did;--which is the next best thing. I could never get rent out of land that I farmed myself,--never." "I suppose not," said Mr. Palliser, who did not care much about it. The Duke would have talked to him by the hour together about farming had Mr. Palliser been so minded; but he talked to him very little about politics. Nor during the whole time of his stay at Matching did the Duke make any other allusion to Mr. Palliser's hopes as regarded the ministry, than that in which he had told Lady Glencora at the dinner-table that her husband's ambition was the highest by which any man could be moved. But Mr. Bott was sometimes honoured by a few words with the Duke. "We shall muster pretty strong, your Grace," Mr. Bott had said to him one day before dinner. "That depends on how the changes go," said the Duke. "I suppose there will be a change?" "Oh yes; there'll be a change,--certainly, I should say. And it will be in your direction." "And in Palliser's?" "Yes; I should think so;--that is, if it suits him. By-the-by, Mr. Bott--" Then there was a little whispered communication, in which perhaps Mr. Bott was undertaking some commission of that nature which Lady Glencora had called "telling."

Mr. Palliser was one of those politicians of whom England can be prouder than of any other of her resources, giving her that combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future. He had both the money and the industry needed by a statesman. He was born into the nobility, and heir to the highest rank, already very rich; and yet he devoted himself to work with the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister, and did so unselfishly, wishing only to serve his country. He was not a brilliant man, and he knew it. He was listened to in the House as a laborious, earnest man, who was accurate in his facts, and who, though dull, was worthy of confidence. And he was very dull. He rather prided himself on being dull, and on succeeding in spite of his dullness. He never allowed himself a joke in his speeches, nor attempted the smallest flourish of rhetoric. He was very careful in his language, labouring to learn to express himself accurately, with no needless repetition. He had taught himself to believe that oratory was a sin against honesty in politics. He desired to use words for the purpose of teaching things which he knew and which others did not know. He was an upright, thin, laborious man; but his parts were sufficient to make his education, integrity, and industry useful in the highest degree. It is the trust which such men inspire which makes them so useful. Their labour, honesty, and patriotism gives them weight in politics. If he was dull as a statesman he was more dull in private life, and it may be imagined that Lady Glencora would find some difficulty in making his society the source of her happiness., As a business arrangement, their marriage had been a complete success - and a success, too, when on Lady Glencora's side there had been terrible dangers of shipwreck, and on his side also there had been some little fears of a mishap. It has been told how close Lady Glencora went to throwing herself and her vast wealth into the arms of an unsuitable young man. Mr. Palliser's little threatened mischance - a passing fancy for a married lady who was too wise to receive his vows - had given some alarm to his uncle, enough to make so very judicious a marriage doubly pleasant to that noble duke. And as regards Mr. Palliser, I think that his married life, and the wife whom he had not chosen, but who had dropped upon him, suited him admirably. He needed great wealth for that position at which he aimed. He had been rich before his marriage; but for his career he needed that colossal wealth which would give him the rock-like solidity which is so necessary to our great aristocratic politicians. And his wife was, as far as he knew, all that he desired. He had not dabbled much in love, though he had forgotten himself once, and sinned in coveting another man's wife. But his desire had been of a kind which was almost thankful for its disappointment. After the lady had frowned on him he had told himself that he was very well out of that trouble. So he married Lady Glencora and was satisfied. The story of Burgo Fitzgerald was told to him, and he supposed that most girls had some such story to tell. He thought little about it, and did not understood her when she said to him, as impressively as she could, "You must know that I really loved him." "You must love me now," he had replied with a smile; and then he forgot about it. Since his marriage he had thought that things matrimonial had gone well with him, and with her too. He gave her almost unlimited power of enjoying her money, and interfered little in her way of life. Sometimes he would say a word of caution to her about her childish ways; and his words would hold some unintentional severity - whether instigated or not by the red-haired Member of Parliament, I will not say - but on the whole he was contented and loved his wife, as he thought, very heartily, and at least better than he loved anyone else. One cause of care was beginning to make itself felt: he had hoped that his wife might soon give him a child. But the days were young, and the care had not become a sorrow. But this well-ordered alliance had not perhaps suited her as well as it had suited him. She might have learned to forget her early lover if her new lord had been more tender. To love and caress someone, to be loved and caressed, were absolutely necessary to her happiness. She wanted the little daily assurance of her supremacy in the man's feelings, the constant touch of love, the passing glance of the eye telling perhaps of some little private joke, the softness of an occasional chance kiss, some half-pretended interest in her little doings. Such food should have been given to her daily, and then she would have forgotten Burgo Fitzgerald. But Mr. Palliser understood none of these things; and therefore the image of Burgo Fitzgerald was always before her eyes. Even if Mr. Palliser were to pass through some violent domestic trouble, some ruin in the hopes of his home, it would not destroy him as it would other men. To lose his influence with his party would be worse to him than to lose his wife, and public disgrace would hit him harder than private dishonour. And now success was coming to him. He had already held office, but had never sat in the Cabinet. He had worked much harder than Cabinet Ministers generally work, without much reward. For the income which he had received had been nothing to him. To have ascendancy over other men, to be known by his countrymen as one of their real rulers, to have an actual and acknowledged voice in the management of nations - those were the rewards he wished for; and now it seemed as though they were coming to him. It was known that the existing Chancellor of the Exchequer was about to separate himself from the Government, taking others with him; and it was thought that Mr. Palliser would fill his place. He could thus afford to put up with the small everyday calamity of having a wife who loved another man better than she loved him. The presence of the Duke of St. Bungay at Matching was assumed to be a sure sign of Mr. Palliser's coming triumph. The Duke was a statesman of a very different class, but he also had been eminently successful as an aristocratic pillar of the government. He was a minister of very many years' standing; but he had never been a hard-working man. The world had said before now that the Duke might be Prime Minister, only he would not take the trouble. He was regarded as a strong rock of support to the liberal cause, and yet nobody ever knew what he did. His speeches in the House were generally short and pleasant, with some slight, droll undercurrent of satire. But he had a good deal of common sense. He never lost his temper. He never made mistakes. He was never reckless in politics, nor cowardly. He snubbed no man, and took snubbings from no man. He was a Knight of the Garter, a Lord Lieutenant of his county, and at sixty-two had good health and his estate in excellent order. He was a great buyer of pictures, which, perhaps, he did not understand, and a great collector of books which he never read. All the world respected him. But even he was not without his skeleton in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the skeleton was not very terrible, nor the thorn very dangerous. The Duke was always uneasy about his wife. It must not be supposed that he feared any Burgo Fitzgerald would destroy his domestic comfort. The Duchess was all that is proper. No breath of slander had ever touched her name. Nor was she a spendthrift, or a gambler. She was simply a fool, and always fearing that she was the object of ridicule. In such miseries she would complain sorrowfully, and occasionally angrily, to her dear Duke and protector, who did not quite know what to do with her. It did not suit him to beg mercy for his poor wife from such a one as Mrs. Conway Sparkes; nor could he lodge a formal complaint with his host. "If you don't like the people, my dear, we will go away," he said to her late that evening. "No," she replied, "I do not wish to go away. I have said that we would stay till December, and Longroyston won't be ready before that. But I think that something ought to be done to silence that woman." The Duke did not know how to silence Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "I don't think she is worth your attention," said he. "That's all very well, Duke," said the wife, "and perhaps she is not. But I don't like to be laughed at. I think Lady Glencora should make her know her place." "Lady Glencora is very young, my dear." "I don't know about that," said the Duchess, who had perhaps heard poor Lady Glencora's almost unintentional mimicry. As appeals of this kind were being made frequently to the Duke, he felt that the matter was an annoyance. And there was a third politician staying at Matching Priory: Mr. Bott, the member for St. Helens, whom Lady Glencora had described as a man who stood about, with red hair, and perhaps told tales of her to her husband. Mr. Bott, at almost fifty, was now enjoying his second session in Parliament; but they who watched his political manuvres in the House knew that he was striving hard to get his finger into the public pie. Though he claimed to be a thoroughgoing Radical, he was a man who liked to live with aristocrats. He was good with figures, industrious and obedient; a man who might make himself useful to a Chancellor of the Exchequer. A huge pile of letters arrived for Mr. Bott every morning by post, but unfortunately he did not seem to spend much time attending to them. Twice he went out shooting, but as on the first day he shot the keeper, and on the second very nearly shot the Duke, he gave that up. Hunting he declined. He seemed to spend his time, as Lady Glencora said, in standing about - except when he was closeted with Mr. Palliser. He was a tall, wiry, strong man, with a bald head and bristly red beard, which unfortunately did not hide his thin mouth. "I shouldn't dislike Mr. Bott so much," Lady Glencora said to her husband, "if he didn't rub his hands and smile so often, and seem to be going to say something when he is not." "Don't trouble yourself about him, my dear," Mr. Palliser had answered. "But when he looks at me in that way, I can't help stopping, as I think he is going to speak; and then he always says, 'Can I do anything for you, Lady Glen-cowrer?'" She instantly saw that her husband did not like this. "Don't be angry with me, dear," she said. "You must admit that he is rather a bore." "I am not at all angry, Glencora," said the husband; "and if you insist upon it, I will see that he leaves; and will of course never ask him again. But that might be prejudicial to me, as he is a man whom I trust in politics, and who may be useful." Of course Lady Glencora declared that Mr. Bott might remain as long as he desired, and mentioned his name no more. But from that time forth she regarded Mr. Bott as an enemy, and felt that Mr. Bott regarded her in the same light. When it was known that the Duke of St. Bungay was staying at Matching Priory, people became more sure than ever that Mr. Palliser would be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that the old minister and the young one were arranging matters together. But I doubt whether the two ever spoke on the topic during the entire visit. The Duke went out shooting, read his newspaper, and looked with a connoisseur's eye over all Mr. Palliser's farming apparatus. "You seem to have a good man, I should say," said the Duke. "Of course he won't make it pay, but he'll make it look as though it did; which is the next best thing." "I suppose so," said Mr. Palliser, who did not care much about it. The Duke would have talked to him by the hour together about farming if he could; but he talked very little about politics. Mr. Bott was sometimes honoured by a few words with the Duke. "We shall muster pretty strong, your Grace," Mr. Bott had said to him one day before dinner. "That depends on how the changes go," said the Duke. "I suppose there will be a change?" "Oh yes; certainly. And it will be in your direction." "And in Palliser's?" "Yes; I should think so, if it suits him. By-the-by, Mr. Bott-" Then there was a little whispered communication, in which perhaps Mr. Bott was undertaking some commission in what Lady Glencora had called "telling."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 24: Three Politicians

When Alice heard of her cousin's success, and understood that he was actually Member of Parliament for the Chelsea Districts, she resolved that she would be triumphant. She had sacrificed nearly everything to her desire for his success in public life, and now that he had achieved the first great step towards that success, it would have been madness on her part to decline her share in the ovation. If she could not rejoice in that, what source of joy would then be left for her? She had promised to be his wife, and at present she was under the bonds of that promise. She had so promised because she had desired to identify her interests with his,--because she wished to share his risks, to assist his struggles, and to aid him in his public career. She had done all this, and he had been successful. She strove, therefore, to be triumphant on his behalf, but she knew that she was striving ineffectually. She had made a mistake, and the days were coming in which she would have to own to herself that she had done so in sackcloth, and to repent with ashes. But yet she struggled to be triumphant. The tidings were first brought to her by her servant, and then she at once sat down to write him a word or two of congratulation. But she found the task more difficult than she had expected, and she gave it up. She had written no word to him since the day on which he had left her almost in anger, and now she did not know how she was to address him. "I will wait till he comes," she said, putting away from her the paper and pens. "It will be easier to speak than to write." But she wrote to Kate, and contrived to put some note of triumph into her letter. Kate had written to her at length, filling her sheet with a loud pan of sincere rejoicing. To Kate, down in Westmoreland, it had seemed that her brother had already done everything. He had already tied Fortune to his chariot wheels. He had made the great leap, and had overcome the only obstacle that Fate had placed in his way. In her great joy she almost forgot whence had come the money with which the contest had been won. She was not enthusiastic in many things;--about herself she was never so; but now she was elated with an enthusiasm which seemed to know no bounds. "I am proud," she said, in her letter to Alice. "No other thing that he could have done would have made me so proud of him. Had the Queen sent for him and made him an earl, it would have been as nothing to this. When I think that he has forced his way into Parliament without any great friend, with nothing to back him but his own wit"--she had, in truth, forgotten Alice's money as she wrote;--"that he has achieved his triumph in the metropolis, among the most wealthy and most fastidious of the richest city in the world, I do feel proud of my brother. And, Alice, I hope that you are proud of your lover." Poor girl! One cannot but like her pride, nay, almost love her for it, though it was so sorely misplaced. It must be remembered that she had known nothing of Messrs. Grimes and Scruby, and the River Bank, and that the means had been wanting to her of learning the principles upon which some metropolitan elections are conducted. "And, Alice, I hope that you are proud of your lover!" "He is not my lover," Alice said to herself. "He knows that he is not. He understands it, though she may not." And if not your lover, Alice Vavasor, what is he then to you? And what are you to him, if not his love? She was beginning to understand that she had put herself in the way of utter destruction;--that she had walked to the brink of a precipice, and that she must now topple over it. "He is not my lover," she said; and then she sat silent and moody, and it took her hours to get her answer written to Kate. On the same afternoon she saw her father for a moment or two. "So George has got himself returned," he said, raising his eyebrows. "Yes, he has been successful. I'm sure you must be glad, papa." "Upon my word, I'm not. He has bought a seat for three months; and with whose money has he purchased it?" "Don't let us always speak of money, papa." "When you discuss the value of a thing just purchased, you must mention the price before you know whether the purchaser has done well or badly. They have let him in for his money because there are only a few months left before the general election. Two thousand pounds he has had, I believe?" "And if as much more is wanted for the next election he shall have it." "Very well, my dear;--very well, If you choose to make a beggar of yourself, I cannot help it. Indeed, I shall not complain though he should spend all your money, if you do not marry him at last." In answer to this, Alice said nothing. On that point her father's wishes were fast growing to be identical with her own. "I tell you fairly what are my feelings and my wishes," he continued. "Nothing, in my opinion, would be so deplorable and ruinous as such a marriage. You tell me that you have made up your mind to take him, and I know well that nothing that I can say will turn you. But I believe that when he has spent all your money he will not take you, and that thus you will be saved. Thinking as I do about him, you can hardly expect that I should triumph because he has got himself into Parliament with your money!" Then he left her, and it seemed to Alice that he had been very cruel. There had been little, she thought, nay, nothing of a father's loving tenderness in his words to her. If he had spoken to her differently, might she not even now have confessed everything to him? But herein Alice accused him wrongfully. Tenderness from him on this subject had, we may say, become impossible. She had made it impossible. Nor could he tell her the extent of his wishes without damaging his own cause. He could not let her know that all that was done was so done with the view of driving her into John Grey's arms. But what words were those for a father to speak to a daughter! Had she brought herself to such a state that her own father desired to see her deserted and thrown aside? And was it probable that this wish of his should come to pass? As to that, Alice had already made up her mind. She thought that she had made up her mind that she would never become her cousin's wife. It needed not her father's wish to accomplish her salvation, if her salvation lay in being separated from him. On the next morning George went to her. The reader will, perhaps, remember their last interview. He had come to her after her letter to him from Westmoreland, and had asked her to seal their reconciliation with a kiss; but she had refused him. He had offered to embrace her, and she had shuddered before him, fearing his touch, telling him by signs much more clear than any words, that she felt for him none of the love of a woman. Then he had turned from her in anger, declaring to her honestly that he was angry. Since that he had borrowed her money,--had made two separate assaults upon her purse,--and was now come to tell her of the results. How was he to address her? I beg that it may be also remembered that he was not a man to forget the treatment he had received. When he entered the room, Alice looked at him, at first, almost furtively. She was afraid of him. It must be confessed that she already feared him. Had there been in the man anything of lofty principle he might still have made her his slave, though I doubt whether he could ever again have forced her to love him. She looked at him furtively, and perceived that the gash on his face was nearly closed. The mark of existing anger was not there. He had come to her intending to be gentle, if it might be possible. He had been careful in his dress, as though he wished to try once again if the rle of lover might be within his reach. Alice was the first to speak. "George, I am so glad that you have succeeded! I wish you joy with my whole heart." "Thanks, dearest. But before I say another word, let me acknowledge my debt. Unless you had aided me with your money, I could not have succeeded." "Oh, George! pray don't speak of that!" "Let me rather speak of it at once, and have done. If you will think of it, you will know that I must speak of it sooner or later." He smiled and looked pleasant, as he used to do in those Swiss days. "Well, then, speak and have done." "I hope you have trusted me in thus giving me the command of your fortune?" "Oh, yes." "I do believe that you have. I need hardly say that I could not have stood for this last election without it; and I must try to make you understand that if I had not come forward at this vacancy, I should have stood no chance for the next; otherwise, I should not have been justified in paying so dearly for a seat for one session. You can understand that; eh, Alice?" "Yes; I think so? "Anybody, even your father, would tell you that; though, probably, he regards my ambition to be a Member of Parliament as a sign of downright madness. But I was obliged to stand now, if I intended to go on with it, as that old lord died so inopportunely. Well, about the money! It is quite upon the cards that I may be forced to ask for another loan when the autumn comes." "You shall have it, George." "Thanks, Alice. And now I will tell you what I propose. You know that I have been reconciled,--with a sort of reconciliation,--to my grandfather? Well, when the next affair is over, I propose to tell him exactly how you and I then stand." "Do not go into that now, George. It is enough for you at present to be assured that such assistance as I can give you is at your command. I want you to feel the full joy of your success, and you will do so more thoroughly if you will banish all these money troubles from your mind for a while." "They shall, at any rate, be banished while I am with you," said he. "There; let them go!" And he lifted up his right hand, and blew at the tips of his fingers. "Let them vanish," said he. "It is always well to be rid of such troubles for a time." It is well to be rid of them at any time, or at all times, if only they can be banished without danger. But when a man has overused his liver till it will not act for him any longer, it is not well for him to resolve that he will forget the weakness of his organ just as he sits down to dinner. It was a pretty bit of acting, that of Vavasor's, when he blew away his cares; and, upon the whole, I do not know that he could have done better. But Alice saw through it, and he knew that she did so. The whole thing was uncomfortable to him, except the fact that he had the promise of her further moneys. But he did not intend to rest satisfied with this. He must extract from her some meed of approbation, some show of sympathy, some spark of affection, true or pretended, in order that he might at least affect to be satisfied, and be enabled to speak of the future without open embarrassment. How could even he take her money from her, unless he might presume that he stood with her upon some ground that belonged mutually to them both? "I have already taken my seat," said he. "Yes; I saw that in the newspapers. My acquaintance among Members of Parliament is very small, but I see that you were introduced, as they call it, by one of the few men that I do know. Is Mr. Bott a friend of yours?" "No,--certainly not a friend. I may probably have to act with him in public." "Ah, that's just what they said of Mr. Palliser when they felt ashamed of his having such a man as his guest. I think if I were in public life I should try to act with people that I could like." "Then you dislike Mr. Bott?" "I do not like him, but my feelings about him are not violent." "He is a vulgar ass," said George, "with no more pretensions to rank himself a gentleman than your footman." "If I had one." "But he will get on in Parliament, to a certain extent." "I'm afraid I don't quite understand what are the requisites for Parliamentary success, or indeed of what it consists. Is his ambition, do you suppose, the same as yours?" "His ambition, I take it, does not go beyond a desire to be Parliamentary flunkey to a big man,--with wages, if possible, but without, if the wages are impossible." "And yours?" "Oh, as to mine;--there are some things, Alice, that a man does not tell to any one." "Are there? They must be very terrible things." "The schoolboy, when he sits down to make his rhymes, dares not say, even to his sister, that he hopes to rival Milton; but he nurses such a hope. The preacher, when he preaches his sermon, does not whisper, even to his wife, his belief that thousands may perhaps be turned to repentance by the strength of his words; but he thinks that the thousand converts are possible." "And you, though you will not say so, intend to rival Chatham, and to make your thousand converts in politics." "I like to hear you laugh at me,--I do, indeed. It does me good to hear your voice again with some touch of satire in it. It brings back the old days,--the days to which I hope we may soon revert without pain. Shall it not be so, dearest?" Her playful manner at once deserted her. Why had he made this foolish attempt to be tender? "I do not know," she said, gloomily. For a few minutes he sat silent, fingering some article belonging to her which was lying on the table. It was a small steel paper-knife, of which the handle was cast and gilt; a thing of no great value, of which the price may have been five shillings. He sat with it, passing it through his fingers, while she went on with her work. "Who gave you this paper-cutter?" he said, suddenly. "Goodness me, why do you ask? and especially, why do you ask in that way?" "I asked simply because if it is a present to you from any one, I will take up something else." "It was given me by Mr. Grey." He let it drop from his fingers on to the table with a noise, and then pushed it from him, so that it fell on the other side, near to where she sat. "George," she said, as she stooped and picked it up, "your violence is unreasonable; pray do not repeat it." "I did not mean it," he said, "and I beg your pardon. I was simply unfortunate in the article I selected. And who gave you this?" In saying which he took up a little ivory foot-rule that was folded up so as to bring it within the compass of three inches. "It so happens that no one gave me that; I bought it at a stupid bazaar." "Then this will do. You shall give it me as a present, on the renewal of our love." "It is too poor a thing to give," said she, speaking still more gloomily than she had done before. "By no means; nothing is too poor, if given in that way. Anything will do; a ribbon, a glove, a broken sixpence. Will you give me something that I may take, and, taking it, may know that your heart is given with it?" "Take the rule, if you please," she said. "And about the heart?" he asked. He should have been more of a rascal or less. Seeing how very much of a rascal he was already, I think it would have been better that he should have been more,--that he should have been able to content his spirit with the simple acquisition of her money, and that he should have been free from all those remains of a finer feeling which made him desire her love also. But it was not so. It was necessary for his comfort that she should, at any rate, say she loved him. "Well, Alice, and what about the heart?" he asked again. "I would so much rather talk about politics, George," said she. The cicatrice began to make itself very visible in his face, and the debonair manner was fast vanishing. He had fixed his eyes upon her, and had inserted his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. "Alice, that is not quite fair," he said. "I do not mean to be unfair." "I am not so sure of that. I almost think that you do mean it. You have told me that you intend to become my wife. If, after that, you wilfully make me miserable, will not that be unfair?" "I am not making you miserable,--certainly not wilfully." "Did that letter which you wrote to me from Westmoreland mean anything?" "George, do not strive to make me think that it meant too much." "If it did, you had better say so at once." But Alice, though she would have said so had she dared, made no answer to this. She sat silent, turning her face away from his gaze, longing that the meeting might be over, and feeling that she had lost her own self-respect. "Look here, Alice," he said, "I find it very hard to understand you. When I look back over all that has passed between us, and to that other episode in your life, summing it all up with your conduct to me at present, I find myself at a loss to read your character." "I fear I cannot help you in the reading of it." "When you first loved me;--for you did love me. I understood that well enough. There is no young man who in early life does not read with sufficient clearness that sweetest morsel of poetry.--And when you quarrelled with me, judging somewhat harshly of my offences, I understood that also; for it is the custom of women to be hard in their judgement on such sins. When I heard that you had accepted the offer made to you by that gentleman in Cambridgeshire, I thought that I understood you still,--knowing how natural it was that you should seek some cure for your wound. I understood it, and accused myself, not you, in that I had driven you to so fatal a remedy." Here Alice turned round towards him sharply, as though she were going to interrupt him, but she said nothing, though he paused for her to speak; and then he went on. "And I understood it well when I heard that this cure had been too much for you. By heavens, yes! there was no misunderstanding that. I meant no insult to the man when I upset his little toy just now. I have not a word to say against him. For many women he would make a model husband, but you are not one of them. And when you discovered this yourself, as you did, I understood that without difficulty. Yes, by heavens! if ever woman had been driven to a mistake, you had been driven to one there." Here she looked at him again, and met his eyes. She looked at him with something of his own fierceness in her face, as though she were preparing herself to fight with him; but she said nothing at the moment, and then he again went on. "And, Alice, I understood it also when you again consented to be my wife. I thought that I still understood you then. I may have been vain to think so, but surely it was natural. I believed that the old love had come back upon you, and again warmed your heart. I thought that it had been cold during our separation, and I was pleased to think so. Was that unnatural? Put yourself in my place, and say if you would not have thought so. I told myself that I understood you then, and I told myself that in all that you had done you had acted as a true, and good, and loving woman. I thought of you much, and I saw that your conduct, as a whole, was intelligible and becoming." The last word grated on Alice's ears, and she showed her anger by the motion of her foot upon the floor. Her cousin noted it all, but went on as though he had not noted it. "But now your present behaviour makes all the rest a riddle. You have said that you would be my wife, declaring thereby that you had forgiven my offences, and, as I suppose, reassuring me of your love; and yet you receive me with all imaginable coldness. What am I to think of it, and in what way would you have me behave to you? When last I was here I asked you for a kiss." As he said this he looked at her with all his eyes, with his mouth just open, so as to show the edges of his white teeth, with the wound down his face all wide and purple. The last word came with a stigmatizing hiss from his lips. Though she did not essay to speak, he paused again, as if he were desirous that she might realize the full purport of such a request. I think that, in the energy of his speaking, a touch of true passion had come upon him; that he had forgotten his rascaldom, and his need of her money, and that he was punishing her with his whole power of his vengeance for the treatment which he had received from her. "I asked you for a kiss. If you are to be my wife you can have no shame in granting me such a request. Within the last two months you have told me that you would marry me. What am I to think of such a promise if you deny me all customary signs of your affection?" Then he paused again, and she found that the time had come in which she must say something to him. [Illustration: "I asked you for a kiss."] "I wonder you cannot understand," she said, "that I have suffered much." "And is that to be my answer?" "I don't know what answer you want." "Come, Alice, do not be untrue; you do know what answer I want, and you know also whether my wanting it is unreasonable." "No one ever told me that I was untrue before," she said. "You do know what it is that I desire. I desire to learn that the woman who is to be my wife, in truth, loves me." She was standing up, and so was he also, but still she said nothing. He had in his hand the little rule which she had told him that he might take, but he held it as though in doubt what he would do with it. "Well, Alice, am I to hear anything from you?" "Not now, George; you are angry, and I will not speak to you in your anger." "Have I not cause to be angry? Do you not know that you are treating me badly?" "I know that my head aches, and that I am very wretched. I wish you would leave me." "There, then, is your gift," said he, and he threw the rule over on to the sofa behind her. "And there is the trumpery trinket which I had hoped you would have worn for my sake." Whereupon something which he had taken from his waistcoat-pocket was thrown violently into the fender, beneath the fire-grate. He then walked with quick steps to the door; but when his hand was on the handle, he turned. "Alice," he said, "when I am gone, try to think honestly of your conduct to me." Then he went, and she remained still, till she heard the front door close behind him. When she was sure that he was gone, her first movement was made in search of the trinket. I fear that this was not dignified on her part; but I think that it was natural. It was not that she had any desire for the jewel, or any curiosity even to see it. She would very much have preferred that he should have brought nothing of the kind to her. But she had a feminine reluctance that anything of value should be destroyed without a purpose. So she took the shovel, and poked among the ashes, and found the ring which her cousin had thrown there. It was a valuable ring, bearing a ruby on it between two small diamonds. Such at least, she became aware, had been its bearing; but one of the side stones had been knocked out by the violence with which the ring had been flung. She searched even for this, scorching her face and eyes, but in vain. Then she made up her mind that the diamond should be lost for ever, and that it should go out among the cinders into the huge dust-heaps of the metropolis. Better that, though it was distasteful to her feminine economy, than the other alternative of setting the servants to search, and thereby telling them something of what had been done. When her search was over, she placed the ring on the mantelpiece; but she knew that it would not do to leave it there,--so she folded it up carefully in a new sheet of note-paper, and put it in the drawer of her desk. After that she sat herself down at the table to think what she would do; but her head was, in truth, racked with pain, and on that occasion she could bring her thoughts to no conclusion.

When Alice heard of her cousin's success, she resolved that she would be triumphant. She had sacrificed nearly everything to this aim, and now he had achieved the first great step. If she could not rejoice in that, what source of joy would be left for her? She had promised to be his wife because she wished to assist his struggles, and to aid him in his public career. She strove, therefore, to be triumphant, but she knew that she was striving in vain. She had made a mistake, and the days were coming in which she would have admit it to herself, and to repent. When the news was first brought to her, she sat down at once to write him a word of congratulation. But she found the task more difficult than she had expected, and gave it up. She did not know how to address him. "I will wait till he comes," she said. "It will be easier to speak than to write." But she wrote to Kate, and managed to put some note of triumph into her letter. Kate had written to her at length, with sincere rejoicing. To Kate in Westmorland, it seemed that her brother had already done everything. He had made the great leap, and had overcome the only obstacle that Fate had placed in his way - the lack of money. In her great joy and enthusiasm she almost forgot where the money had come from. "I am proud," she wrote. "No other thing would have made me so proud of him. If the Queen had made him an earl, it would have been as nothing compared to this. When I think that he has forced his way into Parliament without any great friend, with nothing to back him but his own wit," - she had, in truth, forgotten Alice's money as she wrote - "I do feel proud of my brother. And, Alice, I hope that you are proud of your lover." Poor girl! She knew nothing of Messrs. Grimes and Scruby, and the River Bank, and could not have learnt how elections are conducted. "He is not my lover," Alice said to herself. "He understands that, though she may not." And if not your lover, Alice Vavasor, what is he then to you? And what are you to him? She was beginning to understand that she had put herself in the way of utter destruction; that she had walked to the brink of a precipice, and that she must now topple over it. She sat silent and moody, and it took her hours to get her answer written to Kate. On the same afternoon she saw her father for a moment or two. "So George has got himself returned," he said. "Yes, he has been successful. I'm sure you must be glad, papa." "Upon my word, I'm not. He has bought a seat for three months; and with whose two thousand pounds?" "Don't let us always speak of money, papa. If as much is wanted for the next election he shall have it." "Very well, my dear. If you choose to make a beggar of yourself, I cannot help it. Indeed, I shall not complain about him spending all your money, if you do not marry him at last." Alice said nothing. On that point her father's wishes were fast growing to be identical with her own. "I tell you what I think," he continued. "Nothing, in my opinion, would be so deplorable and ruinous as such a marriage. You tell me that you have made up your mind to take him, and I know that nothing that I can say will turn you. But I believe that when he has spent all your money he will not take you after all. You can hardly expect that I should triumph because he has got himself into Parliament with your money!" When he left, it seemed to Alice that he had been very cruel. There had been nothing of a father's loving tenderness in his words - although Alice herself had made tenderness on this subject impossible. On the next morning George went to her. The reader will, perhaps, remember their last interview, when he had asked for a kiss; but she had refused him. She had shuddered, showing him more clearly than any words that she felt none of the love of a woman for him. He had turned from her in anger; and since then, he had borrowed her money twice. How would he address her? He was not a man to forget the treatment he had received. When he entered the room, Alice looked at him almost furtively. She was afraid of him. But she perceived that the gash on his face was nearly closed; the mark of anger was not there. He had come to her intending to be gentle, if possible. "George, I am so glad that you have succeeded!" she said. "I wish you joy with my whole heart." "Thanks, dearest. But before I say another word, let me acknowledge my debt. Unless you had aided me with your money, I could not have succeeded." "Oh, George! pray don't speak of that!" "Let me rather speak of it at once, and have done. You know that I must speak of it sooner or later." He smiled and looked pleasant, as he used to do in those Swiss days. "I hope you have trusted me in giving me the command of your fortune?" "Oh, yes." "I do believe that you have. I could not have stood for this last election without it; and if I had not come forward at this vacancy, I should have stood no chance for the next. You can understand that; eh, Alice?" "Yes." "Even your father would tell you that; though he probably regards my ambition to be a Member of Parliament as a sign of downright madness. But about the money! It is quite possible that I may be forced to ask for another loan when the autumn comes." "You shall have it, George." "Thanks, Alice. And now I will tell you what I propose. You know that I have been reconciled - in a way - with my grandfather? Well, when the next election is over, I wish to tell him exactly how you and I stand." "Do not go into that now, George. Simply be assured that I will help you all I can. I want you to feel the full joy of your success, and you will do so more thoroughly if you will banish money troubles from your mind for a while." "They shall, at any rate, be banished while I am with you," said he. "There; let them go!" And he lifted up his right hand, and blew at the tips of his fingers. "Let them vanish," said he. It was a pretty bit of acting; and, upon the whole, I do not know that he could have done better. But Alice saw through it, and he knew that she did so. The whole thing was uncomfortable to him, except the fact that he had the promise of her further money. But he was not satisfied with this. He must extract from her some show of sympathy or approval, some spark of affection, true or pretended, so that he might speak of the future without open embarrassment. "I have already taken my seat," said he. "Yes; I saw that in the newspapers. My acquaintance among Members of Parliament is very small, but I see that you were introduced by one of the few men that I do know. Is Mr. Bott a friend of yours?" "No, certainly not. I may have to act with him in public." "Ah, that's just what they said about Mr. Palliser when they felt ashamed of his having him as his guest. I think if I were in public life I should try to act with people that I could like." "Then you dislike Mr. Bott?" "I do not like him." "He is a vulgar ass," said George, "with no more pretensions to rank himself a gentleman than a footman. But he will get on in Parliament, to a certain extent." "I'm afraid I don't quite understand what Parliamentary success requires. Is his ambition, do you suppose, the same as yours?" "His ambition, I think, does not go beyond a desire to be Parliamentary flunkey to a big man - with wages, if possible." "And yours?" "There are some things, Alice, that a man does not tell to anyone." "Are there? They must be very terrible things." "The schoolboy, when he sits down to make his rhymes, dares not say, even to his sister, that he hopes to rival Milton; but he nurses such a hope. The preacher, when he preaches his sermon, does not whisper, even to his wife, his belief that thousands may be turned to repentance by his words; but he thinks that it is possible." "And you intend to make your thousand converts in politics." "I like to hear you laugh at me. It does me good to hear your voice again with some touch of satire in it. It brings back the old days - the days to which I hope we may soon revert without pain. Shall it not be so, dearest?" Her playful manner at once deserted her. "I do not know," she said, gloomily. For a few minutes he sat silent, fingering a small steel paper-knife, of no great value, which was lying on the table. He sat with it, passing it through his fingers, while she went on with her needlework. "Who gave you this paper-cutter?" he said, suddenly. "Goodness me, why do you ask in that way?" "I asked simply because if it is a present to you from any one, I will take up something else." "It was given me by Mr. Grey." He let it drop from his fingers on to the table with a noise, and then pushed it away, so that it fell off the other side. "George," she said, as she stooped and picked it up, "your violence is unreasonable." "I beg your pardon. I was simply unfortunate in the article I selected. Who gave you this?" He picked up a little folding ivory ruler. "No one gave me that; I bought it at a stupid bazaar." "Then this will do. You shall give it me as a present, on the renewal of our love." "It is too poor a thing to give," said she, more gloomily than before. "By no means; nothing is too poor. Anything will do; a ribbon, a glove, a broken sixpence. Will you give me something that I may take, and know that your heart is given with it?" "Take the ruler, if you please," she said. "And the heart?" he asked. He should have been either more of a rascal, or less. He should have been content with simply acquiring her money. But it was necessary for his comfort that she should say she loved him. "Well, Alice, and what about the heart?" he asked again. "I would much rather talk about politics, George," said she. The scar began to make itself very visible in his face, and the debonair manner was fast vanishing. He had fixed his eyes upon her, and inserted his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. "Alice, that is not quite fair," he said. "I do not mean to be unfair." "I am not so sure. I think you do mean it. You have told me that you intend to become my wife. If, after that, you wilfully make me miserable, will not that be unfair?" "I am not making you miserable, certainly not wilfully." "Did that letter which you wrote to me from Westmorland mean anything?" Alice sat silent, turning her face away, longing that the meeting might be over, and feeling that she had lost her own self-respect. "Look here, Alice," he said, "I find it very hard to understand you. When I look back over all that has passed between us, and to that other episode in your life, compared to your conduct to me now, I find myself at a loss." "I fear I cannot help you." "When you first loved me - for you did love me; I understood that well enough - and when you quarrelled with me, judging my offences somewhat harshly, I understood that also; for it is the custom of women to be hard in their judgement on such sins. When I heard that you had accepted the offer made to you by that gentleman in Cambridgeshire, I thought it was natural that you should seek some cure for your wound. I understood it, and accused myself, not you, in that I had driven you to so fatal a remedy." Here Alice turned round towards him sharply, as though she were going to interrupt him, but she said nothing. He went on. "And I understood it well when I heard that this cure had been too much for you. I have not a word to say against him. For many women he would make a model husband, but you are not one of them. And you discovered this yourself. Yes, by heavens! if ever woman had been driven to a mistake, you had been driven to one there." Here she met his eyes with something of his own fierceness in her face, as though she were preparing to fight with him; but she still said nothing, and he again went on. "And, Alice, when you again consented to be my wife, I thought that I still understood you. I may have been vain to think so, but surely it was natural. I believed that the old love had come back to you, and warmed your heart. Was that unnatural? Put yourself in my place, and say if you would not have thought so. I told myself that you had acted as a true, and good, and loving woman. I thought of you much, and I saw that your conduct, as a whole, was intelligible and becoming." The last word grated on Alice's ears, and she showed her anger by tapping her foot upon the floor. Her cousin noticed it, but went on as though he had not. "But now your behaviour is a riddle. You have said that you would be my wife, and yet you receive me with coldness. What am I to think? How would you have me behave to you? When I was last here I asked you for a kiss." He said this with the wound down his face all wide and purple. I think that, in speaking, a touch of true passion had come upon him; that he had forgotten his rascaldom, and his need of her money, and his wish to punish her. "I asked you for a kiss. If you are to be my wife you can have no shame in granting me one. What am I to think?" Then he paused again, and she found that she must say something. "I wonder you cannot understand," she said, "that I have suffered much." "And is that to be my answer?" "I don't know what answer you want." "Come, Alice; you do know what answer I want. I desire to learn that the woman who is to be my wife loves me." Still she said nothing. He held the little ruler as though in doubt what he would do with it. "Well, Alice, am I to hear anything from you?" "Not now, George; you are angry, and I will not speak to you in your anger." "Have I not cause to be angry? Do you not know that you are treating me badly?" "I know that my head aches, and that I am very wretched. I wish you would leave me." "There, then, is your gift," said he, and he threw the ruler on to the sofa behind her. "And there is the trumpery trinket which I had hoped you would have worn for my sake." Something which he had taken from his waistcoat-pocket was thrown violently into the fender, beneath the fire-grate. He then walked quickly to the door; but when his hand was on the handle, he turned. "Alice," he said, "when I am gone, try to think honestly of your conduct to me." Then he went, and she remained still, till she heard the front door close. When she was sure that he was gone, her first movement was to search for the trinket. This was not very dignified; but I think that it was natural. It was not that she had any desire for the jewel, but she had a reluctance that anything of value should be destroyed without a purpose. So she took the shovel, and poked among the ashes, and found the ring which her cousin had thrown there. It was a valuable ring, with a ruby between two small diamonds; but one of the side stones had been knocked out by the violence with which the ring had been flung. She searched for this in vain, before deciding that the diamond should be lost for ever amongst the cinders. Then she folded the ring up carefully in a sheet of note-paper, and put it in the drawer of her desk. After that she sat down at the table to think; but her head was racked with pain, and she could bring her thoughts to no conclusion.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 46: A Love Gift

It cannot perhaps fairly be said that George Vavasor was an unhospitable man, seeing that it was his custom to entertain his friends occasionally at Greenwich, Richmond, or such places; and he would now and again have a friend to dine with him at his club. But he never gave breakfasts, dinners, or suppers under his own roof. During a short period of his wine-selling career, at which time he had occupied handsome rooms over his place of business in New Burlington Street, he had presided at certain feasts given to customers or expectant customers by the firm; but he had not found this employment to his taste, and had soon relinquished it to one of the other partners. Since that he had lived in lodgings in Cecil Street,--down at the bottom of that retired nook, near to the river and away from the Strand. Here he had simply two rooms on the first floor, and hither his friends came to him very rarely. They came very rarely on any account. A stray man might now and then pass an hour with him here; but on such occasions the chances were that the visit had some reference, near or distant, to affairs of business. Eating or drinking there was never any to be found here by the most intimate of his allies. His lodgings were his private retreat, and they were so private that but few of his friends knew where he lived. And had it been possible he would have wished that no one should have known his whereabouts. I am not aware that he had any special reason for this peculiarity, or that there was anything about his mode of life that required hiding; but he was a man who had always lived as though secrecy in certain matters might at any time become useful to him. He had a mode of dressing himself when he went out at night that made it almost impossible that any one should recognise him. The people at his lodgings did not even know that he had relatives, and his nearest relatives hardly knew that he had lodgings. Even Kate had never been at the rooms in Cecil Street, and addressed all her letters to his place of business or his club. He was a man who would bear no inquiry into himself. If he had been out of view for a month, and his friends asked him where he had been, he always answered the question falsely, or left it unanswered. There are many men of whom everybody knows all about all their belongings;--as to whom everybody knows where they live, whither they go, what is their means, and how they spend it. But there are others of whom no man knows anything, and George Vavasor was such a one. For myself I like the open babbler the best. Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice. Vavasor also maintained another little establishment, down in Oxfordshire; but the two establishments did not even know of each other's existence. There was a third, too, very closely hidden from the world's eye, which shall be nameless; but of the establishment in Oxfordshire he did sometimes speak, in very humble words, among his friends. When he found himself among hunting men, he would speak of his two nags at Roebury, saying that he had never yet been able to mount a regular hunting stable, and that he supposed he never would; but that there were at Roebury two indifferent beasts of his if any one chose to buy them. And men very often did buy Vavasor's horses. When he was on them they always went well and sold themselves readily. And though he thus spoke of two, and perhaps did not keep more during the summer, he always seemed to have horses enough when he was down in the country. No one even knew George Vavasor not to hunt because he was short of stuff. And here, at Roebury, he kept a trusty servant, an ancient groom with two little bushy grey eyes which looked as though they could see through a stable door. Many were the long whisperings which George and Bat Smithers carried on at the stable door, in the very back depth of the yard attached to the hunting inn at Roebury. Bat regarded his master as a man wholly devoted to horses, but often wondered why he was not more regular in his sojournings in Oxfordshire. Of any other portion of his master's life Bat knew nothing. Bat could give the address of his master's club in London, but he could give no other address. But though Vavasor's private lodgings were so very private, he had, nevertheless, taken some trouble in adorning them. The furniture in the sitting-room was very neat, and the book-shelves were filled with volumes that shone with gilding on their backs. The inkstand, the paper-weight, the envelope case on his writing-table were all handsome. He had a single good portrait of a woman's head hanging on one of his walls. He had a special place adapted for his pistols, others for his foils, and again another for his whips. The room was as pretty a bachelor's room as you would wish to enter, but you might see, by the position of the single easy-chair that was brought forward, that it was seldom appropriated to the comfort of more than one person. Here he sat lounging over his breakfast, late on a Sunday morning in September, when all the world was out of town. He was reading a letter which had just been brought down to him from his club. Though the writer of it was his sister Kate, she had not been privileged to address it to his private lodgings. He read it very quickly, running rapidly over its contents, and then threw it aside from him as though it were of no moment, keeping, however, an enclosure in his hand. And yet the letter was of much moment, and made him think deeply. "If I did it at all," said he, "it would be more with the object of cutting him out than with any other." The reader will hardly require to be told that the him in question was John Grey, and that Kate's letter was one instigating her brother to renew his love affair with Alice. And Vavasor was in truth well inclined to renew it, and would have begun the renewing it at once, had he not doubted his power with his cousin. Indeed it has been seen that he had already attempted some commencement of such renewal at Basle. He had told Kate more than once that Alice's fortune was not much, and that her beauty was past its prime; and he would no doubt repeat the same objections to his sister with some pretence of disinclination. It was not his custom to show his hand to the players at any game that he played. But he was, in truth, very anxious to obtain from Alice a second promise of her hand. How soon after that he might marry her, would be another question. Perhaps it was not Alice's beauty that he coveted, nor yet her money exclusively. Nevertheless he thought her very beautiful, and was fully aware that her money would be of great service to him. But I believe that he was true in that word that he spoke to himself, and that his chief attraction was the delight which he would have in robbing Mr. Grey of his wife. Alice had once been his love, had clung to his side, had whispered love to him, and he had enough of the weakness of humanity in him to feel the soreness arising from her affection for another. When she broke away from him he had acknowledged that he had been wrong, and when, since her engagement with Mr. Grey, he had congratulated her, he had told her in his quiet, half-whispered, impressive words how right she was; but not the less, therefore, did he feel himself hurt that John Grey should be her lover. And when he had met this man he had spoken well of him to his sister, saying that he was a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of parts; but not the less had he hated him from the first moment of his seeing him. Such hatred under such circumstances was almost pardonable. But George Vavasor, when he hated, was apt to follow up his hatred with injury. He could not violently dislike a man and yet not wish to do him any harm. At present, as he sat lounging in his chair, he thought that he would like to marry his cousin Alice; but he was quite sure that he would like to be the means of putting a stop to the proposed marriage between Alice and John Grey. Kate had been very false to her friend, and had sent up to her brother the very letter which Alice had written to her after that meeting in Queen Anne Street which was described in the last chapter,--or rather a portion of it, for with the reserve common to women she had kept back the other half. Alice had declared to herself that she would be sure of her cousin's sympathy, and had written out all her heart on the matter, as was her wont when writing to Kate. "But you must understand," she wrote, "that all that I said to him went with him for nothing. I had determined to make him know that everything between us must be over, but I failed. I found that I had no words at command, but that he was able to talk to me as though I were a child. He told me that I was sick and full of phantasies, and bade me change the air. As he spoke in this way, I could not help feeling how right he was to use me so; but I felt also that he, in his mighty superiority, could never be a fitting husband for a creature so inferior to him as I am. Though I altogether failed to make him understand that it was so, every moment that we were together made me more fixed in my resolution." This letter from Alice to Kate, Vavasor read over and over again, though Kate's letter to himself, which was the longer one, he had thrown aside after the first glance. There was nothing that he could learn from that. He was as good a judge of the manner in which he would play his own game as Kate could be; but in this matter he was to learn how he would play his game from a knowledge of the other girl's mind. "She'll never marry him, at any rate," he said to himself, "and she is right. He'd make an upper servant of her; very respectable, no doubt, but still only an upper servant. Now with me;--well, I hardly know what I should make of her. I cannot think of myself as a man married." Then he threw her letter after Kate's, and betook himself to his newspaper and his cigar. It was two hours after this, and he still wore his dressing-gown, and he was still lounging in his easy-chair, when the waiting-maid at the lodgings brought him up word that a gentleman wished to see him. Vavasor kept no servant of his own except that confidential groom down at Bicester. It was a rule with him that people could be better served and cheaper served by other people's servants than by their own. Even in the stables at Bicester the innkeeper had to find what assistance was wanted, and charge for it in the bill. And George Vavasor was no Sybarite. He did not deem it impracticable to put on his own trousers without having a man standing at his foot to hold up the leg of the garment. A valet about a man knows a great deal of a man's ways, and therefore George had no valet. "A gentleman!" said he to the girl. "Does the gentleman look like a public-house keeper?" "Well, I think he do," said the girl. "Then show him up," said George. And the gentleman was a public-house keeper. Vavasor was pretty sure of his visitor before he desired the servant to give him entrance. It was Mr. Grimes from the "Handsome Man" public-house and tavern, in the Brompton Road, and he had come by appointment to have a little conversation with Mr. Vavasor on matters political. Mr. Grimes was a man who knew that business was business, and as such had some considerable weight in his own neighbourhood. With him politics was business, as well as beer, and omnibus-horses, and foreign wines;--in the fabrication of which latter article Mr. Grimes was supposed to have an extended experience. To such as him, when intent on business, Mr. Vavasor was not averse to make known the secrets of his lodging-house; and now, when the idle of London world was either at morning church or still in bed, Mr. Grimes had come out by appointment to do a little political business with the lately-rejected member for the Chelsea Districts. Vavasor had been, as I have said, lately rejected, and the new member who had beaten him at the hustings had sat now for one session in parliament. Under his present reign he was destined to the honour of one other session, and then the period of his existing glory,--for which he was said to have paid nearly six thousand pounds,--would be over. But he might be elected again, perhaps for a full period of six sessions; and it might be hoped that this second election would be conducted on more economical principles. To this, the economical view of the matter, Mr. Grimes was very much opposed, and was now waiting upon George Vavasor in Cecil Street, chiefly with the object of opposing the new member's wishes on this head. No doubt Mr. Grimes was personally an advocate for the return of Mr. Vavasor, and would do all in his power to prevent the re-election of the young Lord Kilfenora, whose father, the Marquis of Bunratty, had scattered that six thousand pounds among the electors and non-electors of Chelsea; but his main object was that money should be spent. "'Tain't altogether for myself," he said to a confidential friend in the same way of business; "I don't get so much on it. Perhaps sometimes not none. May be I've a bill agin some of those gents not paid this werry moment. But it's the game I looks to. If the game dies away, it'll never be got up again;--never. Who'll care about elections then? Anybody'd go and get hisself elected if we was to let the game go by!" And so, that the game might not go by, Mr. Grimes was now present in Mr. George Vavasor's rooms. "Well Mr. Grimes," said George, "how are you this morning? Sit down, Mr. Grimes. If every man were as punctual as you are, the world would go like clock-work; wouldn't it?" "Business is business, Mr. Vavasor," said the publican, after having made his salute, and having taken his chair with some little show of mock modesty. "That's my maxim. If I didn't stick to that, nothing wouldn't ever stick to me; and nothing doesn't much as it is. Times is very bad, Mr. Vavasor." "Of course they are. They're always bad. What was the Devil made for, except that they should be bad? But I should have thought you publicans were the last men who ought to complain." "Lord love you, Mr. Vavasor; why, I suppose of all the men as is put upon, we're put upon the worst. What's the good of drawing of beer, if the more you draw the more you don't make. Yesterday as ever was was Saturday, and we drawed three pound ten and nine. What'll that come to, Mr. Vavasor, when you reckons it up with the brewer? Why, it's a next to nothing. You knows that well enough." "Upon my word I don't. But I know you don't sell a pint of beer without getting a profit out of it." "Lord love you, Mr. Vavasor. If I hadn't nothink to look to but beer I couldn't keep a house over my head; no I couldn't. That house of mine belongs to Meux's people; and very good people they are too;--have made a sight of money; haven't they, Mr. Vavasor? I has to get my beer from them in course. Why not, when it's their house? But if I sells their stuff as I gets it, there ain't a halfpenny coming to me out of a gallon. Look at that, now." "But then you don't sell it as you get it. You stretch it." "That's in course. I'm not going to tell you a lie, Mr. Vavasor. You know what's what as well as I do, and a sight better, I expect. There's a dozen different ways of handling beer, Mr. Vavasor. But what's the use of that, when they can take four or five pounds a day over the counter for their rot-gut stuff at the 'Cadogan Arms,' and I can't do no better nor yet perhaps so well, for a real honest glass of beer. Stretch it! It's my belief the more you poison their liquor, the more the people likes it!" Mr. Grimes was a stout man, not very tall, with a mottled red face, and large protruding eyes. As regards his own person, Mr. Grimes might have been taken as a fair sample of the English innkeeper, as described for many years past. But in his outer garments he was very unlike that description. He wore a black, swallow-tailed coat, made, however, to set very loose upon his back, a black waistcoat, and black pantaloons. He carried, moreover, in his hands a black chimney-pot hat. Not only have the top-boots and breeches vanished from the costume of innkeepers, but also the long, particoloured waistcoat, and the birds'-eye fogle round their necks. They get themselves up to look like Dissenting ministers or undertakers, except that there is still a something about their rosy gills which tells a tale of the spigot and corkscrew. Mr. Grimes had only just finished the tale of his own hard ways as a publican, when the door-bell was again rung. "There's Scruby," said George Vavasor, "and now we can go to business."

George Vavasor was not an unhospitable man. He would sometimes invite a friend to dine with him at his club. But he never gave dinners under his own roof. During his wine-selling career, he had presided at feasts given to customers by the firm; but he had not enjoyed it. Since then he had moved to lodgings in Cecil Street, a quiet area near the river. Here he had two rooms on the first floor, and his friends came to him very rarely, and generally on business. Only a few of his friends knew where he lived. And he wished that no one knew it. He was a man who had always lived as though secrecy might be useful to him. When he went out at night he dressed in a style that meant nobody would recognise him. The people at his lodgings did not even know that he had relatives. Kate had never been to Cecil Street, and addressed all her letters to his club. He would bear no inquiry into himself. If he had been away for a month, and his friends asked him where he had been, he answered the question falsely, or left it unanswered. Vavasor also maintained another little establishment, down in Oxfordshire; but the two establishments did not even know of each other's existence. There was a third, too, very closely hidden from the world's eye, which shall be nameless; but of Roebury, the place in Oxfordshire, he did sometimes speak among his friends. When talking about hunting, he would speak of his two nags at Roebury, saying that they were for sale. And men very often did buy Vavasor's horses. When he rode them they always went well and sold themselves readily. And though he spoke of two, and perhaps did not keep more during the summer, he always seemed to have horses to hunt with when he was in the country. At Roebury, he kept an ancient, trusted groom; and many were the long whisperings between George and Bat Smithers at the stable door, behind the yard of the hunting inn. Of any other portion of his master's life Bat knew nothing. But though Vavasor's lodgings were so very private, he had, nevertheless, adorned them with care. The furniture was very neat, and the book-shelves were filled. He had a good portrait of a woman's head hanging on a wall. He had special places for his pistols, his fencing foils, and his hunting whips. The room was a pretty bachelor's room, but it had only one easy-chair. Here George sat lounging over his breakfast, late on a Sunday morning in September, reading a letter from his sister Kate which had just been brought to him from his club. He read it very quickly, and then threw it aside as though it were of no importance, keeping, however, an enclosure in his hand. And yet the letter was of much importance, and made him think deeply. "If I did it at all," said he, "it would be more to cut him out than any other reason." The him in question was John Grey, and Kate's letter was urging her brother to renew his love affair with Alice. And Vavasor was inclined to renew it, and would have begun the renewing it at once, if he had not doubted his power with his cousin. Indeed he had already tried some such renewal at Basle. He had told Kate that Alice's fortune was not much, and that her beauty was past its prime; but he was, in truth, very anxious to obtain from Alice a second promise of her hand. Perhaps it was not Alice's beauty that he coveted, nor her money alone. He thought her very beautiful, and was fully aware that her money would be of great use to him. But I believe that he spoke truly to himself - that his chief attraction was the delight which he would have in robbing Mr. Grey of his wife. Alice had once been his love, and although he had been in the wrong, he had enough human weakness to feel hurt that John Grey should be her lover. And when he had met the man, he had hated him. George Vavasor, when he hated, was apt to follow up his hatred with injury. At present, as he sat lounging in his chair, he thought that he would like to marry his cousin Alice; but he was quite sure that he would like to stop the marriage between Alice and John Grey. Kate had been very false to her friend, and had sent to her brother part of the letter which Alice had written to her after seeing John Grey. Alice had written out all her heart on the matter. "But you must understand," she wrote, "that all that I said to him had no effect. I tried to make him know that everything between us must be over, but I failed. He talked to me as though I were a child. He told me that I was sick and full of fantasies, and needed a change of air. I could not blame him; but I felt also that he, in his mighty superiority, could never be a fitting husband for a creature so inferior to him as I am. Though I altogether failed to make him understand this, every moment that we were together made me more fixed in my resolution." This letter from Alice to Kate, Vavasor read over and over again. He wished to learn how he would play his game from a knowledge of Alice's mind. "She'll never marry him, at any rate," he said to himself, "and she is right. He'd make an upper servant of her. Now with me;- well, I hardly know what I should make of her. I cannot think of myself as a married man." Then took up his newspaper and cigar. Two hours later, when he was still lounging in his dressing-gown, the waiting-maid at the lodgings brought word that a gentleman wished to see him. "A gentleman!" said he. "Does the gentleman look like a public-house keeper?" "I think he do," said the girl. "Then show him up," said George. As Vavasor expected, the gentleman was Mr. Grimes from the "Handsome Man" tavern, in the Brompton Road, and he had come by appointment to have a little conversation on political matters. Mr. Grimes had considerable weight in his own neighbourhood, and politics to him meant business. Vavasor had been, as I have said, lately rejected as a member of Parliament for Chelsea, and the new member who had beaten him would sit in Parliament for one more session. Then his period of glory - for which he was said to have paid nearly six thousand pounds - would be over. But he might be elected again; and it might be hoped that this second election would be conducted more economically. Mr. Grimes was very much opposed to the economical view, and was now visiting George Vavasor with the object of opposing the new member on this head. No doubt Mr. Grimes was personally in favour of Mr. Vavasor, and would do all in his power to prevent the re-election of the young Lord Kilfenora; but his main object was that money should be spent. "Well Mr. Grimes," said George, "how are you this morning?" "Times is very bad, Mr. Vavasor," said the publican. "Of course they are. They're always bad. But I should have thought you publicans were doing well." "Lord love you, Mr. Vavasor; we're the worst put upon of men. Yesterday was Saturday, yet we only took three pound ten and nine. What'll that come to, Mr. Vavasor, when you reckons it up with the brewer? Why, it's next to nothing. If I had nothink to look to but beer I couldn't keep a house over my head; no I couldn't. But if I sells that beer as I gets it, there ain't a halfpenny coming to me out of a gallon." "But you don't sell it as you get it. You stretch it." "Well, I won't lie, Mr. Vavasor. You know what's what as well as I do." Mr. Grimes was a stout man dressed all in black, with a mottled red face, and large protruding eyes: a fair sample of the English innkeeper. He had just finished speaking when the door-bell was again rung. "There's Scruby," said George Vavasor, "and now we can get down to business."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 12: Mr. George Vavasor at Home

Before the day came on which Alice was to go to Matching Priory, she had often regretted that she had been induced to make the promise, and yet she had as often resolved that there was no possible reason why she should not go to Matching Priory. But she feared this commencement of a closer connection with her great relations. She had told herself so often that she was quite separated from them, that the slight accident of blood in no way tied her to them or them to her,--this lesson had been so thoroughly taught to her by the injudicious attempts of Lady Macleod to teach an opposite lesson, that she did not like the idea of putting aside the effect of that teaching. And perhaps she was a little afraid of the great folk whom she might probably meet at her cousin's house. Lady Glencora herself she had liked,--and had loved too with that momentary love which certain circumstances of our life will sometimes produce, a love which is strong while it lasts, but which can be laid down when the need of it is passed. She had liked and loved Lady Glencora, and had in no degree been afraid of her during those strange visitings in Queen Anne Street;--but she was by no means sure that she should like Lady Glencora in the midst of her grandeur and surrounded by the pomp of her rank. She would have no other friend or acquaintance in that house, and feared that she might find herself desolate, cold, and wounded in her pride. She had been tricked into the visit, too, or rather had tricked herself into it. She had been sure that there had been a joint scheme between her cousin and Lady Midlothian, and could not resist the temptation of repudiating it in her letter to Lady Glencora. But there had been no such scheme; she had wronged Lady Glencora, and had therefore been unable to resist her second request. But she felt unhappy, fearing that she would be out of her element, and more than once half made up her mind to excuse herself. Her aunt had, from the first, thought well of her going, believing that it might probably be the means of reconciling her to Mr. Grey. Moreover, it was a step altogether in the right direction. Lady Glencora would, if she lived, become a Duchess, and as she was decidedly Alice's cousin, of course Alice should go to her house when invited. It must be acknowledged that Lady Macleod was not selfish in her worship of rank. She had played out her game in life, and there was no probability that she would live to be called cousin by a Duchess of Omnium. She bade Alice go to Matching Priory, simply because she loved her niece, and therefore wished her to live in the best and most eligible way within her reach. "I think you owe it as a duty to your family to go," said Lady Macleod. What further correspondence about her affairs had passed between Lady Macleod and Lady Midlothian Alice never knew. She steadily refused all entreaty made that she would answer the Countess's letter, and at last threatened her aunt that if the request were further urged she would answer it,--telling Lady Midlothian that she had been very impertinent. "I am becoming a very old woman, Alice," the poor lady said, piteously, "and I suppose I had better not interfere any further. Whatever I have said I have always meant to be for your good." Then Alice got up, and kissing her aunt, tried to explain to her that she resented no interference from her, and felt grateful for all that she both said and did; but that she could not endure meddling from people whom she did not know, and who thought themselves entitled to meddle by their rank. "And because they are cousins as well," said Lady Macleod, in a softly sad, apologetic voice. Alice left Cheltenham about the middle of November on her road to Matching Priory. She was to sleep in London one night, and go down to Matching in Yorkshire with her maid on the following day. Her father undertook to meet her at the Great Western Station, and to take her on the following morning to the Great Northern. He said nothing in his letter about dining with her, but when he met her, muttered something about an engagement, and taking her home graciously promised that he would breakfast with her on the following morning. "I'm very glad you are going, Alice," he said when they were in the cab together. "Why, papa?" "Why?--because I think it's the proper thing to do. You know I've never said much to you about these people. They're not connected with me, and I know that they hate the name of Vavasor;--not but what the name is a deal older than any of theirs, and the family too." "And therefore I don't understand why you think I'm specially right. If you were to say I was specially wrong, I should be less surprised, and of course I shouldn't go." "You should go by all means. Rank and wealth are advantages, let anybody say what they will to the contrary. Why else does everybody want to get them?" "But I shan't get them by going to Matching Priory." "You'll get part of their value. Take them as a whole, the nobility of England are pleasant acquaintances to have. I haven't run after them very much myself, though I married, as I may say, among them. That very thing rather stood in my way than otherwise. But you may be sure of this, that men and women ought to grow, like plants, upwards. Everybody should endeavour to stand as well as he can in the world, and if I had a choice of acquaintance between a sugar-baker and a peer, I should prefer the peer,--unless, indeed, the sugar-baker had something very strong on his side to offer. I don't call that tuft-hunting, and it does not necessitate toadying. It's simply growing up, towards the light, as the trees do." Alice listened to her father's worldly wisdom with a smile, but she did not attempt to answer him. It was very seldom, indeed, that he took upon himself the labour of lecturing her, or that he gave her even as much counsel as he had given now. "Well, papa, I hope I shall find myself growing towards the light," she said as she got out of the cab. Then he had not entered the house, but had taken the cab on with him to his club. On her table Alice found a note from her cousin George. "I hear you are going down to the Pallisers at Matching Priory to-morrow, and as I shall be glad to say one word to you before you go, will you let me see you this evening,--say at nine?--G. V." She felt immediately that she could not help seeing him, but she greatly regretted the necessity. She wished that she had gone directly from Cheltenham to the North,--regardless even of those changes of wardrobe which her purposed visit required. Then she set herself to considering. How had George heard of her visit to the Priory, and how had he learned the precise evening which she would pass in London? Why should he be so intent on watching all her movements as it seemed that he was? As to seeing him she had no alternative, so she completed her arrangements for her journey before nine, and then awaited him in the drawing-room. "I'm so glad you're going to Matching Priory," were the first words he said. He, too, might have taught her to grow towards the light, if she had asked him for his reasons;--but this she did not do just then. "How did you learn that I was going?" she said. "I heard it from a friend of mine. Well;--from Burgo Fitzgerald, if you must know." "From Mr. Fitzgerald?" said Alice, in profound astonishment: "How could Mr. Fitzgerald have heard of it?" "That's more than I know, Alice. Not directly from Lady Glencora, I should say." "That would be impossible." "Yes; quite so, no doubt. I think she keeps up her intimacy with Burgo's sister, and perhaps it got round to him in that way." "And did he tell you also that I was going to-morrow? He must have known all about it very accurately." "No; then I asked Kate, and Kate told me when you were going. Yes; I know. Kate has been wrong, hasn't she? Kate was cautioned, no doubt, to say nothing about your comings and goings to so inconsiderable a person as myself. But you must not be down upon Kate. She never mentioned it till I showed by my question to her that I knew all about your journey to Matching. I own I do not understand why it should be necessary to keep me so much in the dark." Alice felt that she was blushing. The caution had been given to Kate because Kate still transgressed in her letters, by saying little words about her brother. And Alice did not even now believe Kate to have been false to her; but she saw that she herself had been imprudent. "I cannot understand it," continued George, speaking without looking at her. "It was but the other day that we were such dear friends! Do you remember the balcony at Basle? and now it seems that we are quite estranged;--nay, worse than estranged; that I am, as it were, under some ban. Have I done anything to offend you, Alice? If so, speak out, like a woman of spirit as you are." "Nothing," said Alice. "Then why am I tabooed? Why was I told the other day that I might not congratulate you on your happy emancipation? I say boldly, that had you resolved on that while we were together in Switzerland, you would have permitted me, as a friend, almost as a brother, to discuss it with you." "I think not, George." "I am sure you would. And why has Kate been warned not to tell me of this visit to the Pallisers? I know she has been warned though she has not confessed it." Alice sat silent, not knowing what to say in answer to this charge brought against her,--thinking, perhaps, that the questioner would allow his question to pass without an answer. But Vavasor was not so complaisant. "If there be any reason, Alice, I think that I have a right to ask it." For a few seconds she did not speak a word, but sat considering. He also remained silent with his eyes fixed upon her. She looked at him and saw nothing but his scar,--nothing but his scar and the brightness of his eyes, which was almost fierce. She knew that he was in earnest, and therefore resolved that she would be in earnest also. "I think that you have such a right," she said at last. "Then let me exercise it." "I think that you have such a right, but I think also that you are ungenerous to exercise it." "I cannot understand that. By heavens, Alice, I cannot be left in this suspense! If I have done anything to offend you, perhaps I can remove the offence by apology." "You have done nothing to offend me." "Or if there be any cause why our friendship should be dropped,--why we should be on a different footing to each other in London than we were in Switzerland, I may acknowledge it, if it be explained to me. But I cannot put up with the doubt, when I am told that I have a right to demand its solution." "Then I will be frank with you, George, though my being so will, as you may guess, be very painful." She paused again, looking at him to see if yet he would spare her; but he was all scar and eyes as before, and there was no mercy in his face. "Your sister, George, has thought that my parting with Mr. Grey might lead to a renewal of a purpose of marriage between you and me. You know her eagerness, and will understand that it may have been necessary that I should require silence from her on that head. You ought now to understand it all." "I then am being punished for her sins," he said; and suddenly the scar on his face was healed up again, and there was something of the old pleasantness in his eyes. "I have said nothing about any sins, George, but I have found it necessary to be on my guard." "Well," he said, after a short pause, "You are an honest woman, Alice,--the honestest I ever knew. I will bring Kate to order,--and, now, we may be friends again; may we not?" And he extended his hand to her across the table. "Yes," she said, "certainly, if you wish it." She spoke doubtingly, with indecision in her voice, as though remembering at the moment that he had given her no pledge. "I certainly do wish it very much," said he; and then she gave him her hand. "And I may now talk about your new freedom?" "No," said she; "no. Do not speak of that. A woman does not do what I have done in that affair without great suffering. I have to think of it daily; but do not make me speak of it." "But this other subject, this visit to Matching; surely I may speak of that?" There was something now in his voice so bright, that she felt the influence of it, and answered him cheerfully, "I don't see what you can have to say about it." "But I have a great deal. I am so glad you are going. Mind you cement a close intimacy with Mr. Palliser." "With Mr. Palliser?" "Yes; with Mr. Palliser. You must read all the blue books about finance. I'll send them to you if you like it." "Oh, George!" "I'm quite in earnest. That is, not in earnest about the blue books, as you would not have time; but about Mr. Palliser. He will be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer without a doubt." "Will he indeed? But why should I make a bosom friend of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I don't want any public money." "But I do, my girl. Don't you see?" "No; I don't." "I think I shall get returned at this next election." "I'm sure I hope you will." "And if I do, of course it will be my game to support the ministry;--or rather the new ministry; for of course there will be changes." "I hope they will be on the right side." "Not a doubt of that, Alice." "I wish they might be changed altogether." "Ah! that's impossible. It's very well as a dream; but there are no such men as you want to see,--men really from the people,--strong enough to take high office. A man can't drive four horses because he's a philanthropist,--or rather a philhorseophist, and is desirous that the team should be driven without any hurt to them. A man can't govern well, simply because he is genuinely anxious that men should be well governed." "And will there never be any such men?" "I won't say that. I don't mind confessing to you that it is my ambition to be such a one myself. But a child must crawl before he can walk. Such a one as I, hoping to do something in politics, must spare no chance. It would be something to me that Mr. Palliser should become the friend of any dear friend of mine,--especially of a dear friend bearing the same name." "I'm afraid, George, you'll find me a bad hand at making any such friendship." "They say he is led immensely by his wife, and that she is very clever. But I mean this chiefly, Alice, that I do hope I shall have all your sympathy in any political career that I may make, and all your assistance also." "My sympathy I think I can promise you. My assistance, I fear, would be worthless." "By no means worthless, Alice; not if I see you take that place in the world which I hope to see you fill. Do you think women nowadays have no bearing upon the politics of the times? Almost as much as men have." In answer to which Alice shook her head; but, nevertheless, she felt in some way pleased and flattered. George left her without saying a word more about her marriage prospects past or future, and Alice as she went to bed felt glad that this explanation between them had been made.

Before she left for Matching Priory, Alice regretted that she had promised to go. She feared this closer connection with her great relations. She had told herself so often that she was quite separated from them that she did not to put her idea aside. And perhaps she was a little afraid of the great folk whom she might meet at her cousin's house. Lady Glencora herself she had liked - and loved too, with that momentary love which is strong while it lasts, but which can be laid down when the need of it is passed. However, she was by no means sure that she should like Lady Glencora in the midst of her grandeur and pomp. She would have no other acquaintance in that house. She felt unhappy, fearing that she would be out of her element, and half made up her mind to excuse herself. Her aunt approved of her going, for Lady Glencora would become a Duchess. Lady Macleod was not selfish in her worship of rank. She bade Alice go to Matching Priory, simply because she loved her niece, and therefore wished her to live in the best way within her reach. What letters had passed between Lady Macleod and Lady Midlothian Alice never knew. She steadily refused to answer the Countess's letter, and at last threatened her aunt that if she were asked again, she would answer by telling Lady Midlothian that she had been very impertinent. "I am becoming an old woman, Alice," the poor lady said, piteously, "and I won't interfere any further. Whatever I have said I have always meant for your good." Then Alice kissed her aunt, and tried to explain that she felt grateful; but that she could not endure meddling from people whom she did not know. Alice left Cheltenham about the middle of November. She was to sleep in London one night, and go to Matching in Yorkshire with her maid on the following day. Her father met her at the Great Western Station, and was to take her on the following morning to the Great Northern. "I'm very glad you are going, Alice," he said when they were in the cab together. "Why, papa?" "Why? because it's the proper thing to do. I've never said much to you about these people. I know they hate the name of Vavasor - although the name is a deal older than theirs, and the family too." "So I don't understand why you think I'm right to go." "Because rank and wealth are advantages." "But I shan't get them by going to Matching Priory." "You'll get part of their value. On the whole, the nobility of England are pleasant acquaintances to have. I haven't run after them very much myself; but men and women ought to grow, like plants, upwards. Everybody should endeavour to stand as well as he can in the world. It's not toadying. It's simply growing up, towards the light, as the trees do." Alice listened to her father's worldly wisdom with a smile. It was very seldom that he lectured her. "Well, papa, I hope I shall find myself growing towards the light," she said as she got out of the cab at their house. He continued on to his club. On her table Alice found a note from her cousin George. "I hear you are going down to the Pallisers at Matching Priory tomorrow, and as I shall be glad to say one word to you before you go, will you let me see you this evening, say at nine? G. V." She felt immediately that she could not help seeing him, but she greatly regretted the necessity. Then she began wondering how George had heard of her visit to the Priory, and how had he learned the precise evening which she would pass in London? Why should he be so intent on watching all her movements? At nine she awaited him in the drawing-room. "I'm so glad you're going to Matching Priory," were the first words he said. She did not ask him why. "How did you learn that I was going?" she said. "I heard it from a friend of mine. Burgo Fitzgerald, if you must know." "How could Mr. Fitzgerald have heard of it?" said Alice, in profound astonishment. "That's more than I know, Alice. Not directly from Lady Glencora, I should say. I think she keeps up her intimacy with Burgo's sister, and perhaps it got round to him that way." "And did he tell you also that I was going tomorrow?" "No; then I asked Kate, and Kate told me. Yes; I know. Kate has been wrong, hasn't she? But she never mentioned it till I told her that I knew all about your journey to Matching. I do not understand why it should be necessary to keep me so much in the dark." Alice felt that she was blushing. "I cannot understand it," continued George, speaking without looking at her. "The other day we were such dear friends! Do you remember the balcony at Basle? and now it seems that we are quite estranged; nay, worse; that I am under some ban. Have I done anything to offend you, Alice?" "Nothing." "Then why am I tabooed? Why was I told the other day that I might not congratulate you on your freedom? If you had resolved on that while we were together in Switzerland, you would have permitted me, as a friend, almost as a brother, to discuss it with you." "I think not, George." "I am sure you would. And why has Kate been warned not to tell me of this visit to the Pallisers? I know she has been warned though she has not confessed it. If there be any reason, Alice, I think that I have a right to ask it." For a few seconds she sat considering. He also remained silent with his eyes fixed upon her. She looked at him and saw nothing but his scar, and the fierce brightness of his eyes. She knew that he was in earnest, and therefore resolved that she would be in earnest also. "I think that you have a right to ask," she said at last, "but I think also that you are ungenerous to exercise it." "By heavens, Alice, I cannot be left in this suspense! If I have done anything to offend you, perhaps I can apologise." "You have done nothing to offend me." "Or if there be any cause why our friendship should be dropped, I may acknowledge it, if it is explained to me. But I cannot put up with the doubt." "Then I will be frank with you, George, though it may be very painful." She paused again, looking at him to see if he would spare her; but he was all scar and eyes as before, with no mercy in his face. "Your sister has thought that my parting with Mr. Grey might lead to a renewal of an engagement between you and me. You know her eagerness, and you ought now to understand." "Then I am being punished for her sins," he said; and suddenly the scar on his face was healed up again, and there was something of the old pleasantness in his eyes. "I have said nothing about any sins, George, but I have found it necessary to be on my guard." "Well," he said, "You are an honest woman, Alice, the honestest I ever knew. Now, we may be friends again; may we not?" And he extended his hand to her across the table. "Yes," she said doubtingly, "certainly, if you wish it." "I certainly do wish it very much," said he; and then she gave him her hand. "And I may now talk about your new freedom?" "No. A woman does not do what I have done without great suffering. I have to think of it daily; but do not make me speak of it." "But this visit to Matching; surely I may speak of that?" There was something now in his voice so bright that she answered him cheerfully. "I don't see what you can have to say about it." "But I have a great deal. I am glad you are going. Mind you make friends with Mr. Palliser." "Why?" "He will be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer without a doubt." "Will he indeed? But why should I make a bosom friend of the Chancellor of the Exchequer? I don't want any public money." "But I do, my girl. I think I shall get returned at this next election." "I hope you will." "And if I do, of course it will be my game to support the ministry; or rather the new ministry, for of course there will be changes." "I wish they might be changed altogether." "Ah! that's impossible. There are no such men as you want to see - men really of the people - strong enough to take high office. A man can't govern well, simply because he is genuinely anxious that men should be well governed." "And will there never be any such men?" "I won't say that. I don't mind confessing that it is my ambition to be such a one myself. It would be something to me that Mr. Palliser should become the friend of any dear friend of mine." "I'm afraid, George, you'll find me a bad hand at making any such friendship." "They say he is led by his wife, and that she is very clever. But what I really mean, Alice, is that I do hope I shall have your sympathy in any political career, and your assistance also." "My sympathy I can promise you. My assistance, I fear, would be worthless." "By no means worthless, Alice; do you think women nowadays have no bearing upon politics?" Alice shook her head; but, nevertheless, she felt in some way pleased and flattered. George left, and Alice as she went to bed felt glad that this explanation between them had been made.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 21: Alice Is Taught to Grow Upwards, Towards the Light

I am not going to describe the Vavasors' Swiss tour. It would not be fair on my readers. "Six Weeks in the Bernese Oberland, by party of three," would have but very small chance of success in the literary world at present, and I should consider myself to be dishonest if I attempt to palm off such matter on the public in the pages of a novel. It is true that I have just returned from Switzerland, and should find such a course of writing very convenient. But I dismiss the temptation, strong as it is. _Retro age, Satanas._ No living man or woman any longer wants to be told anything of the Grimsell or of the Gemmi. Ludgate Hill is now-a-days more interesting than the Jungfrau. The Vavasors were not very energetic on their tour. As George had said, they had gone out for pleasure and not for work. They went direct to Interlaken and then hung about between that place and Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, It delighted him to sit still on some outer bench, looking at the mountains, with a cigar in his mouth, and it seemed to delight them to be with him. Much that Mr. Grey prophesied had come true. The two girls were ministers to him, instead of having him as their slave. "What fine fellows those Alpine club men think themselves," he said on one of these occasions, "and how thoroughly they despise the sort of enjoyment I get from mountains. But they're mistaken." "I don't see why either need be mistaken," said Alice. "But they are mistaken," he continued. "They rob the mountains of their poetry, which is or should be their greatest charm. Mont Blanc can have no mystery for a man who has been up it half a dozen times. It's like getting behind the scenes at a ballet, or making a conjuror explain his tricks." "But is the exercise nothing?" said Kate. "Yes; the exercise is very fine;--but that avoids the question." "And they all botanize," said Alice. "I don't believe it. I believe that the most of them simply walk up the mountain and down again. But if they did, that avoids the question also. The poetry and mystery of the mountains are lost to those who make themselves familiar with their details, not the less because such familiarity may have useful results. In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares. Look in there, through that valley, where you just see the distant little peak at the end. Are you not dreaming of the unknown beautiful world that exists up there;--beautiful, as heaven is beautiful, because you know nothing of the reality? If you make your way up there and back to-morrow, and find out all about it, do you mean to say that it will be as beautiful to you when you come back?" "Yes;--I think it would," said Alice. "Then you've no poetry in you. Now I'm made up of poetry." After that they began to laugh at him and were very happy. I think that Mr. Grey was right in answering Alice's letter as he did; but I think that Lady Macleod was also right in saying that Alice should not have gone to Switzerland in company with George Vavasor. A peculiar familiarity sprang up, which, had all its circumstances been known to Mr. Grey, would not have entirely satisfied him, even though no word was said which might in itself have displeased him. During the first weeks of their travelling no word was said which would have displeased him; but at last, when the time for their return was drawing nigh, when their happiness was nearly over, and that feeling of melancholy was coming on them which always pervades the last hours of any period that has been pleasant,--then words became softer than they had been, and references were made to old days,--allusions which never should have been permitted between them. Alice had been very happy,--more happy perhaps in that she had been a joint minister with Kate to her cousin George's idle fantasies, than she would have been hurrying about with him as her slave. They had tacitly agreed to spoil him with comforts; and girls are always happier in spoiling some man than in being spoiled by men. And he had taken it all well, doing his despotism pleasantly, exacting much, but exacting nothing that was disagreeable. And he had been amusing always, as Alice thought without any effort. But men and women, when they show themselves at their best, seldom do so without an effort. If the object be near the heart the effort will be pleasant to him who makes it, and if it be made well, it will be hidden; but, not the less, will the effort be there. George Vavasor had on the present occasion done his very best to please his cousin. They were sitting at Basle one evening in the balcony of the big hotel which overlooks the Rhine. The balcony runs the length of the house, and is open to all the company; but it is spacious, and little parties can be formed there with perfect privacy. The swift broad Rhine runs underneath, rushing through from the bridge which here spans the river; and every now and then on summer evenings loud shouts come up from strong swimmers in the water, who are glorying in the swiftness of the current. The three were sitting there, by themselves, at the end of the balcony. Coffee was before them on a little table, and George's cigar, as usual, was in his mouth. "It's nearly all over," said he, after they had remained silent for some minutes. "And I do think it has been a success," said Kate. "Always excepting about the money. I'm ruined for ever." "I'll make your money all straight," said George. "Indeed you'll do nothing of the kind," said Kate. "I'm ruined, but you are ruineder. But what signifies? It is such a great thing ever to have had six weeks' happiness, that the ruin is, in point of fact, a good speculation. What do you say, Alice? Won't you vote, too, that we've done it well?" "I think we've done it very well. I have enjoyed myself thoroughly." "And now you've got to go home to John Grey and Cambridgeshire! It's no wonder you should be melancholy." That was the thought in Kate's mind, but she did not speak it out on this occasion. "That's good of you, Alice," said Kate. "Is it not, George? I like a person who will give a hearty meed of approbation." "But I am giving the meed of approbation to myself." "I like a person even to do that heartily," said Kate. "Not that George and I are thankful for the compliment. We are prepared to admit that we owe almost everything to you,--are we not, George?" "I'm not; by any means," said George. "Well, I am, and I expect to have something pretty said to me in return. Have I been cross once, Alice?" "No; I don't think you have. You are never cross, though you are often ferocious." "But I haven't been once ferocious,--nor has George." "He would have been the most ungrateful man alive if he had," said Alice. "We've done nothing since we've started but realize from him that picture in 'Punch' of the young gentleman at Jeddo who had a dozen ladies to wait upon him." "And now he has got to go home to his lodgings, and wait upon himself again. Poor fellow! I do pity you, George." "No, you don't;--nor does Alice. I believe girls always think that a bachelor in London has the happiest of all lives. It's because they think so that they generally want to put an end to the man's condition." "It's envy that makes us want to get married,--not love," said Kate. "It's the devil in some shape, as often as not," said he. "With a man, marriage always seems to him to be an evil at the instant." "Not always," said Alice. "Almost always;--but he does it, as he takes physic, because something worse will come if he don't. A man never likes having his tooth pulled out, but all men do have their teeth pulled out,--and they who delay it too long suffer the very mischief." "I do like George's philosophy," said Kate, getting up from her chair as she spoke; "it is so sharp, and has such a pleasant acid taste about it; and then we all know that it means nothing. Alice, I'm going up-stairs to begin the final packing." "I'll come with you, dear." "No, don't. To tell the truth I'm only going into that man's room because he won't put up a single thing of his own decently. We'll do ours, of course, when we go up to bed. Whatever you disarrange to-night, Master George, you must rearrange for yourself to-morrow morning, for I promise I won't go into your room at five o'clock." "How I do hate that early work," said George. "I'll be down again very soon," said Kate. "Then we'll take one turn on the bridge and go to bed." Alice and George were left together sitting in the balcony. They had been alone together before many times since their travels had commenced; but they both of them felt that there was something to them in the present moment different from any other period of their journey. There was something that each felt to be sweet, undefinable, and dangerous. Alice had known that it would be better for her to go up-stairs with Kate; but Kate's answer had been of such a nature that had she gone she would have shown that she had some special reason for going. Why should she show such a need? Or why, indeed, should she entertain it? Alice was seated quite at the end of the gallery, and Kate's chair was at her feet in the corner. When Alice and Kate had seated themselves, the waiter had brought a small table for the coffee-cups, and George had placed his chair on the other side of that. So that Alice was, as it were, a prisoner. She could not slip away without some special preparation for going, and Kate had so placed her chair in leaving, that she must actually have asked George to move it before she could escape. But why should she wish to escape? Nothing could be more lovely and enticing than the scene before her. The night had come on, with quick but still unperceived approach, as it does in those parts; for the twilight there is not prolonged as it is with us more northern folk. The night had come on, but there was a rising moon, which just sufficed to give a sheen to the water beneath her. The air was deliciously soft;--of that softness which produces no sensation either of warmth or cold, but which just seems to touch one with loving tenderness, as though the unseen spirits of the air kissed one's forehead as they passed on their wings. The Rhine was running at her feet, so near, that in the soft half light it seemed as though she might step into its ripple. The Rhine was running by with that delicious sound of rapidly moving waters, that fresh refreshing gurgle of the river, which is so delicious to the ear at all times. If you be talking, it wraps up your speech, keeping it for yourselves, making it difficult neither to her who listens nor to him who speaks. If you would sleep, it is of all lullabies the sweetest. If you are alone and would think, it aids all your thoughts. If you are alone, and, alas! would not think,--if thinking be too painful,--it will dispel your sorrow, and give the comfort which music alone can give. Alice felt that the air kissed her, that the river sang for her its sweetest song, that the moon shone for her with its softest light,--that light which lends the poetry of half-developed beauty to everything that it touches. Why should she leave it? Nothing was said for some minutes after Kate's departure, and Alice was beginning to shake from her that half feeling of danger which had come over her. Vavasor had sat back in his chair, leaning against the house, with his feet raised upon a stool; his arms were folded across his breast, and he seemed to have divided himself between his thoughts and his cigar. Alice was looking full upon the river, and her thoughts had strayed away to her future home among John Grey's flower-beds and shrubs; but the river, though it sang to her pleasantly, seemed to sing a song of other things than such a home as that,--a song full of mystery, as are all river songs when one tries to understand their words. "When are you to be married, Alice?" said George at last. "Oh, George!" said she. "You ask me a question as though you were putting a pistol to my ear." "I'm sorry the question was so unpleasant." "I didn't say that it was unpleasant; but you asked it so suddenly! The truth is, I didn't expect you to speak at all just then. I suppose I was thinking of something." "But if it be not unpleasant,--when are you to be married?" "I do not know. It is not fixed." "But about when, I mean? This summer?" "Certainly not this summer, for the summer will be over when we reach home." "This winter? Next spring? Next year?--or in ten years' time?" "Before the expiration of the ten years, I suppose. Anything more exact than that I can't say." "I suppose you like it?" he then said. "What, being married? You see I've never tried yet." "The idea of it,--the anticipation, You look forward with satisfaction to the kind of life you will lead at Nethercoats? Don't suppose I am saying anything against it, for I have no conception what sort of a place Nethercoats is. On the whole I don't know that there is any kind of life better than that of an English country gentleman in his own place;--that is, if he can keep it up, and not live as the old squire does, in a state of chronic poverty." "Mr. Grey's place doesn't entitle him to be called a country gentleman." "But you like the prospect of it?" "Oh, George, how you do cross-question one! Of course I like it, or I shouldn't have accepted it." "That does not follow. But I quite acknowledge that I have no right to cross-question you. If I ever had such right on the score of cousinship, I have lost it on the score of--; but we won't mind that, will we, Alice?" To this she at first made no answer, but he repeated the question. "Will we, Alice?" "Will we what?" "Recur to the old days." "Why should we recur to them? They are passed, and as we are again friends and dear cousins the sting of them is gone." "Ah, yes! The sting of them is gone. It is for that reason, because it is so, that we may at last recur to them without danger. If we regret nothing,--if neither of us has anything to regret, why not recur to them, and talk of them freely?" "No, George; that would not do." "By heavens, no! It would drive me mad; and if I know aught of you, it would hardly leave you as calm as you are at present." "As I would wish to be left calm--" "Would you? Then I suppose I ought to hold my tongue. But, Alice, I shall never have the power of speaking to you again as I speak now. Since we have been out together, we have been dear friends; is it not so?" "And shall we not always be dear friends?" "No, certainly not. How will it be possible? Think of it. How can I really be your friend when you are the mistress of that man's house in Cambridgeshire?" "George!" "I mean nothing disrespectful. I truly beg your pardon if it has seemed so. Let me say that gentleman's house;--for he is a gentleman." "That he certainly is." "You could not have accepted him were he not so. But how can I be your friend when you are his wife? I may still call you cousin Alice, and pat your children on the head if I chance to see them; and shall stop in the streets and shake hands with him if I meet him;--that is if my untoward fate does not induce him to cut my acquaintance;--but as for friendship, that will be over when you and I shall have parted next Thursday evening at London Bridge." "Oh, George, don't say so!" "But I do." "And why on Thursday? Do you mean that you won't come to Queen Anne Street any more?" "Yes, that is what I do mean. This trip of ours has been very successful, Kate says. Perhaps Kate knows nothing about it." "It has been very pleasant,--at least to me." "And the pleasure has had no drawback?" "None to me." "It has been very pleasant to me, also;--but the pleasure has had its alloy. Alice, I have nothing to ask from you,--nothing." "Anything that you should ask, I would do for you." "I have nothing to ask;--nothing. But I have one word to say." "George, do not say it. Let me go up-stairs. Let me go to Kate." "Certainly; if you wish it you shall go." He still held his foot against the chair which barred her passage, and did not attempt to rise as he must have done to make way for her passage out. "Certainly you shall go to Kate, if you refuse to hear me. But after all that has passed between us, after these six weeks of intimate companionship, I think you ought to listen to me. I tell you that I have nothing to ask. I am not going to make love to you." Alice had commenced some attempt to rise, but she had again settled herself in her chair. And now, when he paused for a moment, she made no further sign that she wished to escape, nor did she say a word to intimate her further wish that he should be silent. "I am not going to make love to you," he said again. "As for making love, as the word goes, that must be over between you and me. It has been made and marred, and cannot be remade. It may exist, or it may have been expelled; but where it does not exist, it will never be brought back again." "It should not be spoken of between you and me." "So, no doubt, any proper-going duenna would say, and so, too, little children should be told; but between you and me there can be no necessity for falsehood. We have grown beyond our sugar-toothed ages, and are now men and women. I perfectly understood your breaking away from me. I understood you, and in spite of my sorrow knew that you were right. I am not going to accuse or to defend myself; but I knew that you were right." "Then let there be no more about it." "Yes; there must be more about it. I did not understand you when you accepted Mr. Grey. Against him I have not a whisper to make. He may be perfect for aught I know. But, knowing you as I thought I did, I could not understand your loving such a man as him. It was as though one who had lived on brandy should take himself suddenly to a milk diet,--and enjoy the change! A milk diet is no doubt the best. But men who have lived on brandy can't make those changes very suddenly. They perish in the attempt." "Not always, George." "It may be done with months of agony;--but there was no such agony with you." "Who can tell?" "But you will tell me the cure was made. I thought so, and therefore thought that I should find you changed. I thought that you, who had been all fire, would now have turned yourself into soft-flowing milk and honey, and have become fit for the life in store for you. With such a one I might have travelled from Moscow to Malta without danger. The woman fit to be John Grey's wife would certainly do me no harm,--could not touch my happiness. I might have loved her once,--might still love the memory of what she had been; but her, in her new form, after her new birth,--such a one as that, Alice, could be nothing to me. Don't mistake me. I have enough of wisdom in me to know how much better, ay, and happier a woman she might be. It was not that I thought you had descended in the scale; but I gave you credit for virtues which you have not acquired. Alice, that wholesome diet of which I spoke is not your diet. You would starve on it, and perish." He had spoken with great energy, but still in a low voice, having turned full round upon the table, with both his arms upon it, and his face stretched out far over towards her. She was looking full at him; and, as I have said before, that scar and his gloomy eyes and thick eyebrows seemed to make up the whole of his face. But the scar had never been ugly to her. She knew the story, and when he was her lover she had taken pride in the mark of the wound. She looked at him, but though he paused she did not speak. The music of the river was still in her ears, and there came upon her a struggle as though she were striving to understand its song. Were the waters also telling her of the mistake she had made in accepting Mr. Grey as her husband? What her cousin was now telling her,--was it not a repetition of words which she had spoken to herself hundreds of times during the last two months? Was she not telling herself daily,--hourly,--always,--in every thought of her life, that in accepting Mr. Grey she had assumed herself to be mistress of virtues which she did not possess? Had she not, in truth, rioted upon brandy, till the innocence of milk was unfitted for her? This man now came and rudely told her all this,--but did he not tell her the truth? She sat silent and convicted; only gazing into his face when his speech was done. "I have learned this since we have been again together, Alice; and finding you, not the angel I had supposed, finding you to be the same woman I had once loved,--the safety that I anticipated has not fallen to my lot. That's all. Here's Kate, and now we'll go for our walk."

I am not going to describe the Vavasors' Swiss tour. It would not be fair on my readers to palm off "Six Weeks in the Bernese Oberland" in the pages of a novel. It is true that I have just returned from Switzerland, and should find such a course of writing very convenient. But I dismiss the temptation, strong as it is. The Vavasors were not very energetic on their tour, having gone for pleasure and not for work. They went direct to Interlaken and then hung about between that place and Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, It delighted George to sit on some bench, looking at the mountains, with a cigar in his mouth, and it seemed to delight them to be with him. The two girls were ministers to him, instead of having him as their slave. "What fine fellows those Alpine club men think themselves," he said on one of these occasions. "They rob the mountains of their poetry. Mont Blanc can have no mystery for a man who has been up it half a dozen times. It's like getting behind the scenes at a ballet, or making a conjuror explain his tricks." "But is the exercise nothing?" said Kate. "Yes; the exercise is very fine." "And they all botanize," said Alice. "I don't believe it. I believe that the most of them simply walk up the mountain and down again. But that is beside the point. The poetry and mystery of the mountains are lost to those who make themselves familiar with their details. In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares. Look through that valley, where you just see the distant little peak at the end. Are you not dreaming of the unknown beautiful world that exists up there; beautiful because you know nothing of the reality? If you travel up there and back tomorrow, and find out all about it, will it be as beautiful to you when you come back?" "Yes; I think it would," said Alice. "Then you've no poetry in you. Now I'm made up of poetry." They began to laugh at him and were very happy. I think that Mr. Grey was right in answering Alice's letter as he did; but I think that Lady Macleod was also right in saying that Alice should not have gone to Switzerland with George Vavasor. A peculiar familiarity sprang up, which would not have entirely satisfied Mr. Grey, even though no word was said which might have displeased him - at least, during the first few weeks. But at last, when the time for return was drawing near, when their happiness was nearly over, and that melancholy was coming on them which always pervades the last hours of any pleasant time - then unwise references were made to old days. Alice had been very happy, more happy perhaps as a joint minister to her cousin George's idle fantasies, than she would have been with him as her slave. She and Kate had tacitly agreed to spoil him with comforts; and he had been amusing always, apparently without any effort. But it had not been effortless. George Vavasor had done his very best to please his cousin. They were sitting at Basle one evening on the balcony of the big hotel which overlooks the Rhine. The swift broad river runs underneath, rushing through from the bridge; and on summer evenings shouts come up from strong swimmers, glorying in the swiftness of the current. The three were sitting there, by themselves, with their coffee on a little table, and George's cigar in his mouth. "It's nearly all over," said he. "I do think it has been a success," said Kate. "Except about the money. I'm ruined for ever." "I'll make your money all straight," said George. "You'll do nothing of the kind," said Kate. "I'm ruined, but you are ruineder. But what does it matter? It is such a great thing to have had six weeks' happiness, that the ruin is a good investment. What do you say, Alice? Have we done it well?" "I think we've done it very well. I have enjoyed myself thoroughly." "And now you've got to go home to John Grey and Cambridgeshire! It's no wonder you are melancholy." That was the thought in Kate's mind, but she did not speak it aloud. "That's good of you, Alice," she said. "We are prepared to admit that we owe almost everything to you, are we not, George?" "I'm not, by any means," said George. "Well, I am, and I expect to have something pretty said to me in return. Have I been cross once, Alice?" "No; I don't think you have. You are never cross, though you are often ferocious." "But I haven't once been ferocious; nor has George." "He would have been the most ungrateful man alive if he had," said Alice. "We've done nothing but wait upon him." "And now he has got to go home to his lodgings, and wait upon himself again. Poor fellow! I pity you, George." "No, you don't; nor does Alice. I believe girls always think that a bachelor in London has the happiest of lives. That's why they generally want to put an end to the man's condition." "So it's envy that makes us want to get married," said Kate. "It's the devil in some shape, as often as not," said he. "With a man, marriage always seems to him to be an evil." "Not always," said Alice. "Almost always; but he does it, as he takes medicine, because something worse will come if he don't. A man never likes having his tooth pulled, but all men do have teeth pulled, and those who delay it suffer the very mischief." "I do like George's philosophy," said Kate, getting up from her chair as she spoke; "it is so sharp, and pleasantly acid; and we all know that it means nothing. Alice, I'm going upstairs to finish packing." "I'll come with you, dear." "No, don't. To tell the truth I'm going into that man's room because he won't pack a single thing of his own decently. Whatever you disarrange tonight, Master George, you must rearrange for yourself tomorrow morning. I'll be down again very soon," said Kate. "Then we'll take one turn on the bridge and go to bed." Alice and George were left together sitting in the balcony. They had been alone together many times during their travels; but they both felt that there was something different now - something sweet, undefinable, and dangerous. Alice knew that it would be better for her to go upstairs with Kate; but she could have given no good reason why she needed to go. Why should she show such a need? Alice was seated at the end of the balcony, and George sat at the other side of the small coffee-table, so that Alice was, as it were, a prisoner. She could not slip away. But why should she wish to escape? Nothing could be more lovely and enticing than the scene before her. The night had come on quickly, but there was a rising moon, which gave a sheen to the water beneath her. The air was deliciously soft, seeming to touch her with loving tenderness. The Rhine was running at her feet, so near that in the soft half light it seemed as though she might step into its ripple. Its refreshing gurgle was delicious to the ear. Alice felt that the air kissed her, that the river sang for her its sweetest song, that the moon shone for her with its softest light. Why should she leave it? Nothing was said for some minutes after Kate's departure, and Alice was beginning to shake off that half feeling of danger which had come over her. Vavasor had sat back in his chair, his arms folded, smoking silently. As Alice looked upon the river, her thoughts strayed to her future home among John Grey's flower-beds and shrubs; but the river seemed to sing a song of other things - a song full of mystery, as are all river songs. "When are you to be married, Alice?" "Oh, George! You startled me." "I'm sorry. But when are you to be married?" "I do not know. It is not fixed." "But this summer?" "Certainly not this summer, for the summer will be over when we reach home." "This winter? Next spring? Next year? - or in ten years' time?" "Before ten years are up, I suppose. Anything more exact than that I can't say." "I suppose you like it?" he said. "What, being married? I've never tried it yet." "The idea of it. You look forward with satisfaction to the life you will lead at Nethercoats? I am not saying anything against it, for I don't know what sort of a place Nethercoats is. On the whole there is no kind of life better than that of an English country gentleman in his own place; that is, if he can keep it up, and not live as my grandfather does, in a state of chronic poverty." "Mr. Grey's place doesn't entitle him to be called a country gentleman." "But you like the prospect of it?" "Oh, George, how you do cross-question one! Of course I like it, or I shouldn't have accepted it." "That does not follow. But I quite acknowledge that I have no right to cross-question you. If I ever had such right on the score of cousinship, I have lost it on the score of - but we won't mind that, will we, Alice?" When she did not answer, he repeated, "Will we, Alice?" "Will we what?" "Recur to the old days." "Why should we recur to them? They are passed, and as we are again friends and dear cousins the sting of them is gone." "Ah, yes! The sting of them is gone. So why not talk of them freely?" "No, George; that would not do." "By heavens, no! It would drive me mad; and if I know aught of you, it would hardly leave you as calm as you are now." "As I wish to be left calm-" "I suppose I ought to hold my tongue. But, Alice, I shall never be able to speak to you again as I speak now. On this trip, we have been dear friends; is it not so?" "And shall we not always be dear friends?" "No, certainly not. How can we, when you are the mistress of that man's house in Cambridgeshire?" "George!" "I mean nothing disrespectful. Let me say that gentleman's house; for he is a gentleman." "That he certainly is." "But how can I be your friend when you are his wife? I may still call you cousin Alice, and pat your children on the head if I chance to see them; but as for friendship, that will be over when we part next Thursday at London Bridge." "Oh, George, don't say so!" "But I do." "And why on Thursday? Do you mean that you won't come to Queen Anne Street any more?" "Yes, that is what I do mean. This trip of ours has been very successful, Kate says. Perhaps Kate knows nothing about it." "It has been very pleasant - at least, to me." "It has been very pleasant to me, also; - but the pleasure has been mixed. Alice, I have nothing to ask, but I have one word to say." "George, do not say it. Let me go upstairs to Kate." "Certainly; if you wish it you shall go." He did not attempt to rise and clear the way. "But after six weeks of companionship, I think you ought to listen to me. I am not going to make love to you." Alice had begun to stand, but again sank down in her chair and waited. "I am not going to make love to you," he said again. "As for love, that must be over between you and me. It has been made and marred, and cannot be remade." "It should not be spoken of between us." "So little children should be told; but we are adults. I perfectly understood your breaking away from me, and in spite of my sorrow I knew that you were right." "Then let there be no more about it." "Yes; there must be more about it. I did not understand you when you accepted Mr. Grey. He may be perfect for all I know. But I could not understand your loving such a man as him. It was as though one who had lived on brandy should take himself suddenly to a milk diet! A milk diet is no doubt the best. But men who have lived on brandy can't make those changes suddenly. They perish in the attempt." "Not always, George." "You will tell me the cure was made, so I thought to find you changed. I thought that you, who had been all fire, would now have turned yourself into soft-flowing milk and honey. With such a one I might have travelled from Moscow to Malta without danger. The woman fit to be John Grey's wife would certainly do me no harm. I might have loved her once - but in her new form, she could be nothing to me. I am wise enough to know how much better and happier a woman she might be; it was not that I thought you had descended in the scale; but, Alice, you do not possess those virtues. That wholesome diet of milk and honey is not your diet. You would starve on it, and perish." He had spoken with great energy, but in a low voice. She was looking full at him; and that scar and his gloomy eyes seemed to make up the whole of his face. But the scar had never been ugly to her. When he was her lover she had taken pride in the mark. When he paused she did not speak. The music of the river was still in her ears, and there came upon her a struggle as though she were striving to understand its song. Were the waters telling her of the mistake she had made in accepting Mr. Grey as her husband? What her cousin was now telling her - had she not said it to herself hundreds of times during the last two months? Was she not telling herself daily - hourly - that in accepting Mr. Grey she had assumed herself to have virtues which she did not possess? She sat silent and convicted. "I have learned this since we have been again together, Alice; and finding you, not the angel I had supposed, but the same woman I had once loved - I have not been safe from you at all. Here's Kate, and now we'll go for our walk."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 5: The Balcony at Basle

Mr. Palliser did not remain long in Baden after the payment of Burgo's bill. Perhaps I shall not throw any undeserved discredit on his courage if I say that he was afraid to do so. What would he have said,--what would he have been able to say, if that young man had come to him demanding an explanation? So he hurried away to Strasbourg the same day, much to his wife's satisfaction. The journey home from thence was not marked by any incidents. Gradually Mr. Palliser became a little more lenient to his wife and slightly less oppressive in his caution. If he still inquired about the springs of the carriages, he did so in silence, and he ceased to enjoin the necessity of a day's rest after each day's journey. By the time that they reached Dover he had become so used to his wife's condition that he made but little fluttering as she walked out of the boat by that narrow gangway which is so contrived as to make an arrival there a serious inconvenience to a lady, and a nuisance even to a man. He was somewhat staggered when a big man, in the middle of the night, insisted on opening the little basket which his wife carried, and was uncomfortable when obliged to stop her on the plank while he gave up the tickets which he thought had been already surrendered; but he was becoming used to his position, and bore himself like a man. During their journey home Mr. Palliser had by no means kept his seat opposite to Lady Glencora with constancy. He had soon found that it was easier to talk to Mr. Grey than to his wife, and, consequently, the two ladies had been much together, as had also the two gentlemen. What the ladies discussed may be imagined. One was about to become a wife and the other a mother, and that was to be their fate after each had made up her mind that no such lot was to be hers. It may, however, be presumed that for every one word that Alice spoke Lady Glencora spoke ten. The two men, throughout these days of close intimacy, were intent upon politics. Mr. Palliser, who may be regarded as the fox who had lost his tail,--the tail being, in this instance, the comfort of domestic privacy,--was eager in recommending his new friend to cut off his tail also. "Your argument would be very well," said he, "if men were to be contented to live for themselves only." "Your argument would be very well," said the other, "if it were used to a man who felt that he could do good to others by going into public life. But it is wholly inefficacious if it recommends public life simply or chiefly because a man may gratify his own ambition by public services." "Of course there is personal gratification, and of course there is good done," said Mr. Palliser. "Is,--or should be," said Mr. Grey. "Exactly; and the two things must go together. The chief gratification comes from the feeling that you are of use." "But if you feel that you would not be of use?" We need not follow the argument any further. We all know its nature, and what between two such men would be said on both sides. We all know that neither of them would put the matter altogether in a true light. Men never can do so in words, let the light within themselves be ever so clear. I do not think that any man yet ever had such a gift of words as to make them a perfect exponent of all the wisdom within him. But the effect was partly that which the weaker man of the two desired,--the weaker in the gifts of nature, though art had in some respects made him stronger. Mr. Grey was shaken in his quiescent philosophy, and startled Alice,--startled her as much as he delighted her,--by a word or two he said as he walked with her in the courts of the Louvre. "It's all hollow here," he said, speaking of French politics. "Very hollow," said Alice, who had no love for the French mode of carrying on public affairs. "Of all modes of governing this seems to me to be the surest of coming to a downfall. Men are told that they are wise enough to talk, but not wise enough to have any power of action. It is as though men were cautioned that they were walking through gunpowder, and that no fire could be allowed them, but were at the same time enjoined to carry lucifer matches in their pockets. I don't believe in the gunpowder, and I think there should be fire, and plenty of it; but if I didn't want the fire I wouldn't have the matches." "It's so odd to hear you talk politics," said Alice, laughing. After this he dropped the subject for a while, as though he were ashamed of it, but in a very few minutes he returned to it manfully. "Mr. Palliser wants me to go into Parliament." Upon hearing this Alice said nothing. She was afraid to speak. After all that had passed she felt that it would not become her to show much outward joy on hearing such a proposition, so spoken by him, and yet she could say nothing without some sign of exultation in her voice. So she walked on without speaking, and was conscious that her fingers trembled on his arm. "What do you say about it?" he asked. "What do I say? Oh, John, what right can I have to say anything?" "No one else can have so much right,--putting aside of course myself, who must be responsible for my own actions. He asked me whether I could afford it, and he seems to think that a smaller income suffices for such work now than it did a few years since. I believe that I could afford it, if I could get a seat that was not very expensive at the first outset. He could help me there." "On that point, of course, I can have no opinion." "No; not on that point. I believe we may take that for granted. Living in London for four or five months in the year might be managed. But as to the mode of life!" Then Alice was unable to hold her tongue longer, and spoke out her thoughts with more vehemence than discretion. No doubt he combated them with some amount of opposition. He seldom allowed out-spoken enthusiasm to pass by him without some amount of hostility. But he was not so perverse as to be driven from his new views by the fact that Alice approved them, and she, as she drew near home, was able to think that the only flaw in his character was in process of being cured. When they reached London they all separated. It was Mr. Palliser's purpose to take his wife down to Matching with as little delay as possible. London was at this time nearly empty, and all the doings of the season were over. It was now the first week of August, and as Parliament had not been sitting for nearly two months, the town looked as it usually looks in September. Lady Glencora was to stay but one day in Park Lane, and it had been understood between her and Alice that they were not to see each other. "How odd it is parting in this way, when people have been together so long," said Lady Glencora. "It always seems as though there had been a separate little life of its own which was now to be brought to a close. I suppose, Mr. Grey, you and I, when we next meet, will be far too distant to fight with each other." "I hope that may never be the case," said Mr. Grey. "I suppose nothing would prevent his fighting; would it Alice? But, remember, there must be no fighting when we do meet next, and that must be in September." "With all my heart," said Mr. Grey. But Alice said nothing. Then Mr. Palliser made his little speech. "Alice," he said, as he gave his hand to Miss Vavasor, "give my compliments to your father, and tell him that I shall take the liberty of asking him to come down to Matching for the early shooting in September, and that I shall expect him to bring you with him. You may tell him also that he will have to stay to see you off, but that he will not be allowed to take you away." Lady Glencora thought that this was very pretty as coming from her husband, and so she told him on their way home. Alice insisted on going to Queen Anne Street in a cab by herself. Mr. Palliser had offered a carriage, and Mr. Grey, of course, offered himself as a protector; but she would have neither the one nor the other. If he had gone with her he might by chance have met her father, and she was most anxious that she should not be encumbered by her lover's presence when she first received her father's congratulations. They had slept at Dover, and had come up by a mid-day train. When she reached Queen Anne Street, the house was desolate, and she might therefore have allowed Mr. Grey to attend her. But she found a letter waiting for her which made her for the moment forget both him and her father. Lady Macleod, at Cheltenham, was very ill, and wished to see her niece, as she said, before she died. "I have got your letter," said the kind old woman, "and am now quite happy. It only wanted that to reconcile me to my departure. I thought through it all that my girl would be happy at last. Will she forgive me if I say that I have forgiven her?" The letter then went on to beg Alice to come to Cheltenham at once. "It is not that I am dying now," said Lady Macleod, "though you will find me much altered and keeping my bed. But the doctor says he fears the first cold weather. I know what that means, my dear; and if I don't see you now, before your marriage, I shall never see you again. Pray get married as soon as you can. I want to know that you are Mrs. Grey before I go. If I were to hear that it was postponed because of my illness, I think it would kill me at once." There was another letter for her from Kate, full, of course, of congratulations, and promising to be at the wedding; "that is," said Kate, "unless it takes place at the house of some one of your very grand friends;" and telling her that aunt Greenow was to be married in a fortnight;--telling her of this, and begging her to attend that wedding. "You should stand by your family," said Kate. "And only think what my condition will be if I have no one here to support me. Do come. Journeys are nothing nowadays. Don't you know I would go seven times the distance for you? Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield are friends after all, and Mr. Cheesacre is to be best man. Is it not beautiful? As for poor me, I'm told I haven't a chance left of becoming mistress of Oileymead and all its wealth." Alice began to think that her hands were almost too full. If she herself were to be married in September, even by the end of September, her hands were very full indeed. Yet she did not know how to refuse any of the requests made to her. As to Lady Macleod, her visit to her was a duty which must of course be performed at once. She would stay but one day in London, and then go down to Cheltenham. Having resolved upon this she at once wrote to her aunt to that effect. As to that other affair down in Westmoreland, she sighed as she thought of it, but she feared that she must go there also. Kate had suffered too much on her behalf to allow of her feeling indifferent to such a request. Then her father came in. "I didn't in the least know when you might arrive," said he, beginning with an apology for his absence. "How could I, my dear?" Alice scorned to remind him that she herself had named the precise hour of the train by which they had arrived. "It's all right, papa," said she. "I was very glad to have an hour to write a letter or two. Poor Lady Macleod is very ill. I must go to her the day after to-morrow." "Dear, dear, dear! I had heard that she was poorly. She is very old, you know. So, Alice, you've made it all square with Mr. Grey at last?" "Yes, papa;--if you call that square." "Well; I do call it square. It has all come round to the proper thing." "I hope he thinks so." "What do you think yourself, my dear?" "I've no doubt it's the proper thing for me, papa." "Of course not; of course not; and I can tell you this, Alice, he is a man in a thousand. You've heard about the money?" "What money, papa?" "The money that George had." As the reader is aware, Alice had heard nothing special about this money. She only knew, or supposed she knew, that she had given three thousand pounds to her cousin. But now her father explained to her the whole transaction. "We couldn't have realized your money for months, perhaps," said he; "but Grey knew that some men must have rope enough before they can hang themselves." Alice was unable to say anything on this subject to her father, but to herself she did declare that not in that way or with that hope had John Grey produced his money. "He must be paid, papa," she said. "Paid!" he answered; "he can pay himself now. It may make some difference in the settlements, perhaps, but he and the lawyers may arrange that. I shan't think of interfering with such a man as Grey. If you could only know, my dear, what I've suffered!" Alice in a penitential tone expressed her sorrow, and then he too assured her that he had forgiven her. "Bless you, my child!" he said, "and make you happy, and good, and--and--and very comfortable." After that he went back to his club. Alice made her journey down to Cheltenham without any adventure, and was received by Lady Macleod with open arms. "Dearest Alice, it is so good of you." "Good!" said Alice, "would I not have gone a thousand miles to you?" Lady Macleod was very eager to know all about the coming marriage. "I can tell you now, my dear, though I couldn't do it before, that I knew he'd persist for ever. He told me so himself in confidence." "He has persisted, aunt; that is certain." "And I hope you'll reward him. A beautiful woman without discretion is like a pearl in a swine's snout; but a good wife is a crown of glory to her husband. Remember that, my dear, and choose your part for his sake." "I won't be that unfortunate pearl, if I can help it, aunt." "We can all help it, if we set about it in the right way. And Alice, you must be careful to find out all his likes and his dislikes. Dear me! I remember how hard I found it, but then I don't think I was so clever as you are." "Sometimes I think nobody has ever been so stupid as I have." "Not stupid, my dear; if I must say the word, it is self-willed. But, dear, all that is forgiven now. Is it not?" "There is a forgiveness which it is rather hard to get," said Alice. There was something said then as to the necessity of looking for pardon beyond this world, which I need not here repeat. To all her old friend's little sermons Alice was infinitely more attentive than had been her wont, so that Lady Macleod was comforted and took heart of grace, and at last brought forth from under her pillow a letter from the Countess of Midlothian, which she had received a day or two since, and which bore upon Alice's case. "I was not quite sure whether I'd show it you," said Lady Macleod, "because you wouldn't answer her when she wrote to you. But when I'm gone, as I shall be soon, she will be the nearest relative you have on your mother's side, and from her great position, you know, Alice--" But here Alice became impatient for the letter. Her aunt handed it to her, and she read as follows:-- Castle Reekie, July, 186--. DEAR LADY MACLEOD,-- I am sorry to hear of the symptoms you speak about. I strongly advise you to depend chiefly on beef-tea. They should be very careful to send it up quite free from grease, and it should not be too strong of the meat. There should be no vegetables in it. Not soup, you know, but beef-tea. If any thing acts upon your strength, that will. I need not tell one who has lived as you have done where to look for that other strength which alone can support you at such a time as this. I would go to you if I thought that my presence would be any comfort to you, but I know how sensitive you are, and the shock might be too much for you. If you see Alice Vavasor on her return to England, as you probably will, pray tell her from me that I give her my warmest congratulations, and that I am heartily glad that matters are arranged. I think she treated my attempts to heal the wound in a manner that they did not deserve; but all that shall be forgiven, as shall also her original bad behaviour to poor Mr. Grey. Alice was becoming weary of so much forgiveness, and told herself, as she was reading the letter, that that of Lady Midlothian was at any rate unnecessary. "I trust that we may yet meet and be friends," continued Lady Midlothian. "I am extremely gratified at finding that she has been thought so much of by Mr. Palliser. I'm told that Mr. Palliser and Mr. Grey have become great friends, and if this is so, Alice must be happy to feel that she has had it in her power to confer so great a benefit on her future husband as he will receive from this introduction." "I ain't a bit happy, and I have conferred no benefit on Mr. Grey," exclaimed Alice, who was unable to repress the anger occasioned by the last paragraph. "But it is a great benefit, my dear." "Mr. Palliser has every bit as much cause to be gratified for that as Mr. Grey, and perhaps more." Poor Lady Macleod could not argue the matter in her present state. She merely sighed, and moved her shrivelled old hand up and down upon the counterpane. Alice finished the letter without further remarks. It merely went on to say how happy the writer would be to know something of her cousin as Mrs. Grey, as also to know something of Mr. Grey, and then gave a general invitation to both Mr. and Mrs. Grey, asking them to come to Castle Reekie whenever they might be able. The Marchioness, with whom Lady Midlothian was staying, had expressly desired her to give this message. Alice, however, could not but observe that Lady Midlothian's invitation applied only to another person's house. "I'm sure she means well," said Alice. "Indeed she does," said Lady Macleod, "and then you know you'll probably have children; and think what a thing it will be for them to know the Midlothian family. You shouldn't rob them of their natural advantages." Alice remained a week with her aunt, and went from thence direct to Westmoreland. Some order as to bridal preparations we must presume she gave on that single day which she passed in London. Much advice she had received on this head from Lady Glencora, and no inconsiderable amount of assistance was to be rendered to her at Matching during the fortnight she would remain there before her marriage. Something also, let us hope, she might do at Cheltenham. Something no doubt she did do. Something also might probably be achieved among the wilds in Westmoreland, but that something would necessarily be of a nature not requiring fashionable tradespeople. While at Cheltenham, she determined that she would not again return to London before her marriage. This resolve was caused by a very urgent letter from Mr. Grey, and by another, almost equally urgent, from Lady Glencora. If the marriage did not take place in September she would not be present at it. The gods of the world,--of Lady Glencora's world,--had met together and come to a great decision. Lady Glencora was to be removed in October to Gatherum Castle, and remain there till the following spring, so that the heir might, in truth, be born in the purple. "It is such a bore," said Lady Glencora, "and I know it will be a girl. But the Duke isn't to be there, except for the Christmas week." An invitation for the ceremony at Matching had been sent from Mr. Palliser to Mr. Vavasor, and another from Lady Glencora to Kate, "whom I long to know," said her ladyship, "and with whom I should like to pick a crow, if I dared, as I'm sure she did all the mischief."

The Pallisers did not remain long in Baden after the payment of Burgo's bill. They hurried away to Strasbourg the same day. The journey home from there was uneventful. Gradually Mr. Palliser became a little more lenient to his wife and slightly less oppressive in his caution. By the time that they reached Dover he had become so used to his wife's condition that he made only a little fluttering as she walked out of the boat by the narrow gangway. During their journey home Mr. Palliser had soon found that it was easier to talk to Mr. Grey than to his wife, and, consequently, the two ladies were much together, as were the two gentlemen. What the ladies discussed may be imagined. One was about to become a wife and the other a mother, after each had made up her mind that neither thing would happen. It may, however, be presumed that for every word that Alice spoke Lady Glencora spoke ten. The two men were intent upon politics. Mr. Palliser was eager in recommending public life to his new friend. "Your argument would be very well," said Mr. Grey, "for a man who felt that he could do good to others by going into public life. But it is wholly ineffective if it recommends public life simply because a man may gratify his own ambition by public services." "Of course there is personal gratification, and of course there is good done," said Mr. Palliser. "The two things go together. The chief gratification comes from the feeling that you are of use." "But if you feel that you would not be of use?" We need not follow the argument any further. We all know its nature. But the effect was partly that which the weaker man of the two desired - the weaker in being less gifted, though art had in some respects made him stronger. Mr. Grey was shaken in his philosophy, and startled and delighted Alice by what he said as he walked with her in the courts of the Louvre. "It's all hollow here," he said, speaking of French politics. "Very hollow," said Alice. "Of all modes of governing this seems to me to be the surest of coming to a downfall. Men are told that they are wise enough to talk, but not wise enough to have any power of action." "It's so odd to hear you talk politics," said Alice, laughing. After this he dropped the subject for a while, as though he were ashamed of it, but in a few minutes he returned to it manfully. "Mr. Palliser wants me to go into Parliament." Alice said nothing. She was afraid to speak. After all that had passed she felt that it would not become her to show much outward joy on hearing this, and yet she could not speak without some sign of exultation in her voice. So she walked on without speaking, and was conscious that her fingers trembled on his arm. "What do you say about it?" he asked. "Oh, John, what right can I have to say anything?" "No one else can have so much right. He asked me whether I could afford it. I believe that I could, if I could get a seat that was not very expensive at the first outset. He could help me there. Living in London for four or five months in the year might be managed. But as to the mode of life!" Then Alice was unable to hold her tongue, and spoke her thoughts. No doubt he combated them. He seldom allowed outspoken enthusiasm to pass by him without some opposition. But he was not so perverse as to be driven from his new views by the fact that Alice approved them, and she was able to think that the only flaw in his character was in the process of being cured. When they reached London they all separated. Mr. Palliser intended to take his wife down to Matching with as little delay as possible. London was nearly empty; it was now the first week of August, and Parliament had not been sitting for nearly two months. Lady Glencora was to stay only one day in Park Lane, and she and Alice would not see each other. "How odd it is parting in this way, when people have been together so long," said Lady Glencora. "It seems as though the time had a separate little life of its own which is now brought to a close." "Alice," said Mr. Palliser, as he gave her his hand, "give my compliments to your father, and tell him that I shall invite him to come down to Matching for the shooting in September, and that I shall expect him to bring you. You may tell him also that he will have to stay to see you off after your marriage, but that he will not be allowed to take you away." Lady Glencora thought that this was very prettily put, and so she told her husband on their way home. Alice insisted on going to Queen Anne Street in a cab by herself. She wished to be alone when she first received her father's congratulations. But when she reached Queen Anne Street, the house was desolate. She found a letter waiting for her which made her forget everything else. Lady Macleod, at Cheltenham, was very ill, and wished to see her niece before she died. "I have got your letter," said the kind old woman, "and am now quite happy, because my girl will be happy at last. Will she forgive me if I say that I have forgiven her?" The letter then went on to beg Alice to come to Cheltenham at once. "It is not that I am dying now," said Lady Macleod, "though you will find me much altered and keeping my bed. But the doctor says he fears the first cold weather. I know what that means, my dear; and if I don't see you now, before your marriage, I shall never see you again. Pray get married as soon as you can. I want to know that you are Mrs. Grey before I go." There was another letter for her from Kate, full of congratulations, and promising to be at the wedding; "that is," said Kate, "unless it takes place at the house of some of your very grand friends;" and also telling her that aunt Greenow was to be married in a fortnight, and begging her to attend that wedding. "Do come," said Kate. "Journeys are nothing nowadays. Don't you know I would go seven times the distance for you? Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield are friends again, and Mr. Cheesacre is to be best man. Is it not beautiful? As for poor me, I'm told I haven't a chance left of becoming mistress of Oileymead. " Alice began to think that her hands were almost too full. Yet she did not know how to refuse any of the requests. She must of course visit Lady Macleod at once. She would stay one day in London, and then go down to Cheltenham. As to that wedding in Westmorland, she sighed as she thought of it, but she feared that she must go there also, for Kate's sake. Then her father came in. "I didn't know when you might arrive," said he apologetically. Alice refrained from reminding him that she had told him the precise time of the train. "It's all right, papa. I was very glad to have an hour to write a letter or two. Poor Lady Macleod is very ill. I must go to her the day after tomorrow." "Dear, dear! I had heard that she was poorly. So, Alice, you've made it all square with Mr. Grey at last?" "Yes, papa." "Well; I can tell you this, Alice, he is a man in a thousand. You've heard about the money?" "What money, papa?" "The money that George had." As the reader is aware, Alice had heard nothing about this money. She thought that she had given three thousand pounds to her cousin. But now her father explained the whole transaction. "Grey knew that some men must have rope enough before they can hang themselves," he said. "Mr. Grey must be paid, papa," she said. "Paid! He can pay himself now. It may make some difference in the settlements, but he and the lawyers can arrange that. I shan't think of interfering. If you could only know, my dear, what I've suffered!" Alice expressed her sorrow, and he assured her that he had forgiven her. "Bless you, my child!" he said, "and make you happy, and good - and very comfortable." After that he went back to his club. Alice travelled down to Cheltenham, and was received by Lady Macleod with open arms. The old lady was very eager to know all about the coming marriage. "I knew he'd persist for ever, my dear. He told me so himself in confidence." "He has persisted, aunt, certainly." "And I hope you'll reward him. A beautiful woman without discretion is like a pearl in a swine's snout; but a good wife is a crown of glory to her husband. Remember that, my dear." "I won't be that unfortunate pearl, if I can help it, aunt." "And Alice, you must be careful to find out all his likes and dislikes. Dear me! I remember how hard I found it, but then I don't think I was so clever as you are." "Sometimes I think nobody has ever been so stupid as I have." "Not stupid, my dear; self-willed, perhaps. But all that is forgiven now. Is it not?" "There is a forgiveness which it is rather hard to get," said Alice. Her aunt said something about looking for pardon beyond this world, which I need not here repeat. Alice was much more attentive than usual to her old friend's little sermons, so that Lady Macleod took heart, and at last brought forth a letter from the Countess of Midlothian, which she had received a day or two since. "I was not quite sure whether I'd show it you," said Lady Macleod, "because you wouldn't answer her when she wrote to you. But when I'm gone, she will be your nearest relative on your mother's side, you know, Alice." The letter was as follows: Dear Lady Macleod,- I am sorry to hear of your symptoms. I strongly advise you to depend chiefly on beef-tea. They should be very careful to send it up quite free from grease, and there should be no vegetables in it. I would go to you if I thought that my presence would be any comfort to you, but I know how sensitive you are, and the shock might be too much for you. If you see Alice Vavasor on her return to England, pray tell her from me that I give her my warmest congratulations, and that I am heartily glad that matters are arranged. I think she treated my attempts to heal the wound in a manner that they did not deserve; but all that shall be forgiven, as shall also her original bad behaviour to poor Mr. Grey. I trust that we may yet meet and be friends. I am extremely gratified at finding that she has been thought so much of by Mr. Palliser. I'm told that Mr. Palliser and Mr. Grey have become great friends, and if this is so, Alice must be happy to feel that she has had it in her power to confer so great a benefit on her future husband as he will receive from this introduction. "I ain't a bit happy, and I have conferred no benefit on Mr. Grey," exclaimed Alice, unable to repress her anger at the last paragraph. "But it is a great benefit, my dear." "Mr. Palliser has every bit as much cause to be gratified as Mr. Grey, and perhaps more." Poor Lady Macleod could not argue. She merely sighed, and moved her shrivelled old hand up and down upon the counterpane. Alice finished the letter without further remarks. It merely went on to say how happy the writer would be to see her cousin as Mrs. Grey, and gave a general invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Grey to come to Castle Reekie whenever they might be able. "I'm sure she means well," said Alice. "Indeed she does," said Lady Macleod. Alice remained a week with her aunt, and went from there direct to Westmorland. On her single day in London, we must presume she gave some order about bridal preparations; and she had a very urgent letter from Glencora. If the marriage did not take place in September she would not be present at it. It had been decided that Lady Glencora was to be moved in October to Gatherum Castle, and remain there till the following spring, so that the heir would be born there. "It is such a bore," said Lady Glencora, "and I know it will be a girl. But the Duke isn't to be there, except for the Christmas week." An invitation for the wedding ceremony at Matching had been sent from Mr. Palliser to Mr. Vavasor, and another from Lady Glencora to Kate, "whom I long to know," said her ladyship, "and with whom I should like to pick an argument, if I dared, as I'm sure she did all the mischief."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 77: The Travellers Return Home

One morning, early in May, a full week before Alice's visit to the bankers' at Charing Cross, a servant in grand livery, six feet high, got out of a cab at the door in Queen Anne Street, and sent up a note for Miss Vavasor, declaring that he would wait in the cab for her answer. He had come from Lady Glencora, and had been specially ordered to go in a cab and come back in a cab, and make himself as like a Mercury, with wings to his feet, as may be possible to a London footman. Mr. Palliser had arranged his plans with his wife that morning,--or, I should more correctly say, had given her his orders, and she, in consequence, had sent away her Mercury in hot pressing haste to Queen Anne Street. "Do come;--instantly if you can," the note said. "I have so much to tell you, and so much to ask of you. If you can't come, when shall I find you, and where?" Alice sent back a note, saying that she would be in Park Lane as soon as she could put on her bonnet and walk down; and then the Mercury went home in his cab. Alice found her friend in the small breakfast-room up-stairs, sitting close by the window. They had not as yet met since the evening of Lady Monk's party, nor had Lady Glencora seen Alice in the mourning which she now wore for her grandfather. "Oh, dear, what a change it makes in you," she said. "I never thought of your being in black." "I don't know what it is you want, but shan't I do in mourning as well as I would in colours?" "You'll do in anything, dear. But I have so much to tell you, and I don't know how to begin. And I've so much to ask of you, and I'm so afraid you won't do it." "You generally find me very complaisant." "No I don't, dear. It is very seldom you will do anything for me. But I must tell you everything first. Do take your bonnet off, for I shall be hours in doing it." "Hours in telling me!" "Yes; and in getting your consent to what I want you to do. But I think I'll tell you that first. I'm to be taken abroad immediately." "Who is to take you?" "Ah, you may well ask that. If you could know what questions I have asked myself on that head! I sometimes say things to myself as though they were the most proper and reasonable things in the world, and then within an hour or two I hate myself for having thought of them." "But why don't you answer me? Who is going abroad with you?" "Well; you are to be one of the party." "I!" "Yes; you. When I have named so very respectable a chaperon for my youth, of course you will understand that my husband is to take us." "But Mr. Palliser can't leave London at this time of the year?" "That's just it. He is to leave London at this time of the year. Don't look in that way, for it's all settled. Whether you go with me or not, I've got to go. To-day is Tuesday. We are to be off next Tuesday night, if you can make yourself ready. We shall breakfast in Paris on Wednesday morning, and then it will be to us all just as if we were in a new world. Mr. Palliser will walk up and down the new court of the Louvre, and you will be on his left arm, and I shall be on his right,--just like English people,--and it will be the most proper thing that ever was seen in life. Then we shall go on to Basle"--Alice shuddered as Basle was mentioned, thinking of the balcony over the river--"and so to Lucerne--. But no; that was the first plan, and Mr. Palliser altered it. He spent a whole day up here with maps and Bradshaw's and Murray's guide-books, and he scolded me so because I didn't care whether we went first to Baden or to some other place. How could I care? I told him I would go anywhere he chose to take me. Then he told me I was heartless;--and I acknowledged that I was heartless. 'I am heartless,' I said. 'Tell me something I don't know.'" "Oh, Cora, why did you say that?" "I didn't choose to contradict my husband. Besides, it's true. Then he threw the Bradshaw away, and all the maps flew about. So I picked them up again, and said we'd go to Switzerland first. I knew that would settle it, and of course he decided on stopping at Baden. If he had said Jericho, it would have been the same thing to me. Wouldn't you like to go to Jericho?" "I should have no special objection to Jericho." "But you are to go to Baden instead." "I've said nothing about that yet. But you have not told me half your story. Why is Mr. Palliser going abroad in the middle of Parliament in this way?" "Ah; now I must go back to the beginning. And indeed, Alice, I hardly know how to tell you; not that I mind you knowing it, only there are some things that won't get themselves told. You can hardly guess what it is that he is giving up. You must swear that you won't repeat what I'm going to tell you now?" "I'm not a person apt to tell secrets, but I shan't swear anything." "What a woman you are for discretion! it is you that ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer; you are so wise. Only you haven't brought your own pigs to the best market, after all." "Never mind my own pigs now, Cora." "I do mind them, very much. But the secret is this. They have asked Mr. Palliser to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he has--refused. Think of that!" "But why?" "Because of me,--of me, and my folly, and wickedness, and abominations. Because he has been fool enough to plague himself with a wife--he who of all men ought to have kept himself free from such troubles. Oh, he has been so good! It is almost impossible to make any one understand it. If you could know how he has longed for this office;--how he has worked for it day and night, wearing his eyes out with figures when everybody else has been asleep, shutting himself up with such creatures as Mr. Bott when other men have been shooting and hunting and flirting and spending their money. He has been a slave to it for years,--all his life I believe,--in order that he might sit in the Cabinet, and be a minister and a Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has hoped and feared, and has been, I believe, sometimes half-mad with expectation. This has been his excitement,--what racing and gambling are to other men. At last, the place was there, ready for him, and they offered it to him. They begged him to take it, almost on their knees. The Duke of St. Bungay was here all one morning about it; but Mr. Palliser sent him away, and refused the place. It's all over now, and the other man, whom they all hate so much, is to remain in." "But why did he refuse it?" "I keep on telling you--because of me. He found that I wanted looking after, and that Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott between them couldn't do it." "Oh, Cora! how can you talk in that way?" "If you knew all, you might well ask how I could. You remember about Lady Monk's ball, that you would not go to,--as you ought to have done. If you had gone, Mr. Palliser would have been Chancellor of the Exchequer at this minute; he would, indeed. Only think of that! But though you did not go, other people did who ought to have remained at home. I went for one,--and you know who was there for another." "What difference could that make to you?" said Alice, angrily. "It might have made a great deal of difference. And, for the matter of that, so it did. Mr. Palliser was there too, but, of course, he went away immediately. I can't tell you all the trouble there had been about Mrs. Marsham,--whether I was to take her with me or not. However, I wouldn't take her, and didn't take her. The carriage went for her first, and there she was when we got there; and Mr. Bott was there too. I wonder whether I shall ever make you understand it all." "There are some things I don't want to understand." "There they both were watching me,--looking at me the whole evening; and, of course, I resolved that I would not be put down by them." "I think, if I had been you, I would not have allowed their presence to make any difference to me." "That is very easily said, my dear, but by no means so easily done. You can't make yourself unconscious of eyes that are always looking at you. I dared them, at any rate, to do their worst, for I stood up to dance with Burgo Fitzgerald." "Oh, Cora!" "Why shouldn't I? At any rate I did; and I waltzed with him for half an hour. Alice, I never will waltz again;--never. I have done with dancing now. I don't think, even in my maddest days, I ever kept it up so long as I did then. And I knew that everybody was looking at me. It was not only Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott, but everybody there. I felt myself to be desperate,--mad, like a wild woman. There I was, going round and round and round with the only man for whom I ever cared two straws. It seemed as though everything had been a dream since the old days. Ah! how well I remember the first time I danced with him,--at his aunt's house in Cavendish Square. They had only just brought me out in London then, and I thought that he was a god." "Cora! I cannot bear to hear you talk like that." "I know well enough that he is no god now; some people say that he is a devil, but he was like Apollo to me then. Did you ever see anyone so beautiful as he is?" "I never saw him at all." "I wish you could have seen him; but you will some day. I don't know whether you care for men being handsome." Alice thought of John Grey, who was the handsomest man that she knew, but she made no answer. "I do; or, rather, I used to do," continued Lady Glencora. "I don't think I care much about anything now; but I don't see why handsome men should not be run after as much as handsome women." "But you wouldn't have a girl run after any man, would you; whether handsome or ugly?" "But they do, you know. When I saw him the other night he was just as handsome as ever;--the same look, half wild and half tame, like an animal you cannot catch, but which you think would love you so if you could catch him. In a little while it was just like the old time, and I had made up my mind to care nothing for the people looking at me." "And you think that was right?" "No, I don't. Yes, I do; that is. It wasn't right to care about dancing with him, but it was right to disregard all the people gaping round. What was it to them? Why should they care who I danced with?" "That is nonsense, dear, and you must know that it is so. If you were to see a woman misbehaving herself in public, would not you look on and make your comments? Could you help doing so if you were to try?" "You are very severe, Alice. Misbehaving in public!" "Yes, Cora. I am only taking your own story. According to that, you were misbehaving in public." Lady Glencora got up from her chair near the window, on which she had been crouching close to Alice's knees, and walked away towards the fireplace. "What am I to say to you, or how am I to talk to you?" said Alice. "You would not have me tell you a lie?" "Of all things in the world, I hate a prude the most," said Lady Glencora. "Cora, look here. If you consider it prudery on my part to disapprove of your waltzing with Mr. Fitzgerald in the manner you have described,--or, indeed, in any other manner,--you and I must differ so totally about the meaning of words and the nature of things that we had better part." "Alice, you are the unkindest creature that ever lived. You are as cold as stone. I sometimes think that you can have no heart." "I don't mind your saying that. Whether I have a heart or not I will leave you to find out for yourself; but I won't be called a prude by you. You know you were wrong to dance with that man. What has come of it? What have you told me yourself this morning? In order to preserve you from misery and destruction, Mr. Palliser has given up all his dearest hopes. He has had to sacrifice himself that he might save you. That, I take it, is about the truth of it,--and yet you tell me that you have done no wrong." "I never said so." Now she had come back to her chair by the window, and was again sitting in that crouching form. "I never said that I was not wrong. Of course I was wrong. I have been so wrong throughout that I have never been right yet. Let me tell it on to the end, and then you can go away if you like, and tell me that I am too wicked for your friendship." "Have I ever said anything like that, Cora?" "But you will, I dare say, when I have done. Well; what do you think my senior duenna did,--the female one, I mean? She took my own carriage, and posted off after Mr. Palliser as hard as ever she could, leaving the male duenna on the watch. I was dancing as hard as I could, but I knew what was going on all the time as well as though I had heard them talking. Of course Mr. Palliser came after me. I don't know what else he could do, unless, indeed, he had left me to my fate. He came there, and behaved so well,--so much like a perfect gentleman. Of course I went home, and I was prepared to tell him everything, if he spoke a word to me,--that I intended to leave him, and that cart-ropes should not hold me!" "To leave him, Cora!" "Yes, and go with that other man whose name you won't let me mention. I had a letter from him in my pocket asking me to go. He asked me a dozen times that night. I cannot think how it was that I did not consent." "That you did not consent to your own ruin and disgrace?" "That I did not consent to go off with him,--anywhere. Of course it would have been my own destruction. I'm not such a fool as not to know that. Do you suppose I have never thought of it;--what it would be to be a man's mistress instead of his wife. If I had not I should be a thing to be hated and despised. When once I had done it I should hate and despise myself. I should feel myself to be loathsome, and, as it were, a beast among women. But why did they not let me marry him, instead of driving me to this? And though I might have destroyed myself, I should have saved the man who is still my husband. Do you know, I told him all that,--told him that if I had gone away with Burgo Fitzgerald he would have another wife, and would have children, and would--?" "You told your husband that you had thought of leaving him?" "Yes; I told him everything. I told him that I dearly loved that poor fellow, for whom, as I believe, nobody else on earth cares a single straw." "And what did he say?" "I cannot tell you what he said, only that we are all to go to Baden together, and then to Italy. But he did not seem a bit angry; he very seldom is angry, unless at some trumpery thing, as when he threw the book away. And when I told him that he might have another wife and a child, he put his arm round me and whispered to me that he did not care so much about it as I had imagined. I felt more like loving him at that moment than I had ever done before." "He must be fit to be an angel." "He's fit to be a cabinet minister, which, I'm quite sure, he'd like much better. And now you know everything; but no,--there is one thing you don't know yet. When I tell you that, you'll want to make him an archangel or a prime minister. 'We'll go abroad,' he said,--and remember, this was his own proposition, made long before I was able to speak a word;--'We'll go abroad, and you shall get your cousin Alice to go with us.' That touched me more than anything. Only think if he had proposed Mrs. Marsham!" "But yet he does not like me." "You're wrong there, Alice. There has been no question of liking or of disliking. He thought you would be a kind of Mrs. Marsham, and when you were not, but went out flirting among the ruins with Jeffrey Palliser, instead--" "I never went out flirting with Jeffrey Palliser." "He did with you, which is all the same thing. And when Plantagenet knew of that,--for, of course, Mr. Bott told him--" "Mr. Bott can't see everything." "Those men do. The worst is, they see more than everything. But, at any rate, Mr. Palliser has got over all that now. Come, Alice; the fact of the offer having come from himself should disarm you of any such objection as that. As he has held out his hand to you, you have no alternative but to take it." "I will take his hand willingly." "And for my sake you will go with us? He understands himself that I am not fit to be his companion, and to have no companion but him. Now there is a spirit of wisdom about you that will do for him, and a spirit of folly that will suit me. I can manage to put myself on a par with a girl who has played such a wild game with her lovers as you have done." Alice would give no promise then. Her first objection was that she had undertaken to go down to Westmoreland and comfort Kate in the affliction of her broken arm. "And I must go," said Alice, remembering how necessary it was that she should plead her own cause with George Vavasor's sister. But she acknowledged that she had not intended to stay long in Westmoreland, probably not more than a week, and it was at last decided that the Pallisers should postpone their journey for four or five days, and that Alice should go with them immediately upon her return from Vavasor Hall. "I have no objection;" said her father, speaking with that voice of resignation which men use when they are resolved to consider themselves injured whatever may be done. "I can get along in lodgings. I suppose we had better leave the house, as you have given away so much of your own fortune?" Alice did not think it worth her while to point out to him, in answer to this, that her contribution to their joint housekeeping should still remain the same as ever. Such, however, she knew would be the fact, and she knew also that she would find her father in the old house when she returned from her travels. To her, in her own great troubles, the absence from London would be as serviceable as it could be to Lady Glencora. Indeed, she had already begun to feel the impossibility of staying quietly at home. She could lecture her cousin, whose faults were open, easy to be defined, and almost loud in their nature; but she was not on that account the less aware of her own. She knew that she too had cause to be ashamed of herself. She was half afraid to show her face among her friends, and wept grievously over her own follies. Those cruel words of her father rang in her ears constantly:--"Things of that sort are so often over with you." The reproach, though cruel, was true, and what reproach more galling could be uttered to an unmarried girl such as was Alice Vavasor? She had felt from the first moment in which the proposition was made to her, that it would be well that she should for a while leave her home, and especially that drawing-room in Queen Anne Street, which told her so many tales that she would fain forget, if it were possible. Mr. Palliser would not allow his wife to remain in London for the ten or twelve days which must yet elapse before they started, nor could he send her into the country alone. He took her down to Matching Priory, having obtained leave to be absent from the House for the remainder of the Session, and remained with her there till within two days of their departure. That week down at Matching, as she afterwards told Alice, was very terrible. He never spoke a word to rebuke her. He never hinted that there had been aught in her conduct of which he had cause to complain. He treated her with a respect that was perfect, and indeed with more outward signs of affection than had ever been customary with him. "But," as Lady Glencora afterwards expressed it, "he was always looking after me. I believe he thought that Burgo Fitzgerald had hidden himself among the ruins," she said once to Alice. "He never suspected me, I am sure of that; but he thought that he ought to look after me." And Lady Glencora in this had very nearly hit the truth. Mr. Palliser had resolved, from that hour in which he had walked out among the elms in Kensington Gardens, that he would neither suspect his wife, nor treat her as though he suspected her. The blame had been his, perhaps, more than it had been hers. So much he had acknowledged to himself, thinking of the confession she had made to him before their marriage. But it was manifestly his imperative duty,--his duty of duties,--to save her from that pitfall into which, as she herself had told him, she had been so ready to fall. For her sake and for his this must be done. It was a duty so imperative, that in its performance he had found himself forced to abandon his ambition. To have his wife taken from him would be terrible, but the having it said all over the world that such a misfortune had come upon him would be almost more terrible even than that. So he went with his wife hither and thither, down at Matching, allowing himself to be driven about behind Dandy and Flirt. He himself proposed these little excursions. They were tedious to him, but doubly tedious to his wife, who now found it more difficult than ever to talk to him. She struggled to talk, and he struggled to talk, but the very struggles themselves made the thing impossible. He sat with her in the mornings, and he sat with her in the evenings; he breakfasted with her, lunched with her, and dined with her. He went to bed early, having no figures which now claimed his attention. And so the week at last wore itself away. "I saw him yawning sometimes," Lady Glencora said afterwards, "as though he would fall in pieces."

One morning in May, before Alice's visit to the bank, a servant in grand livery got out of a cab in Queen Anne Street, and sent up a note for Miss Vavasor, declaring that he would wait for her answer. He had come from Lady Glencora, for Mr. Palliser had arranged his plans with his wife that morning. "Do come - instantly if you can," the note said. "I have so much to tell you, and so much to ask of you." Alice sent back a note, saying that she would be in Park Lane as soon as she could put on her bonnet and walk down. Alice found her friend in the small breakfast-room upstairs, sitting by the window. They had not met since the evening of Lady Monk's party, nor had Lady Glencora seen Alice in the mourning which she now wore for her grandfather. "Oh, dear," she said. "I never thought of your being in black." "I don't know what you want, but shan't I do in mourning as well as I would in colours?" "You'll do in anything, dear. But I have so much to tell you. Do take your bonnet off, for I shall be hours in doing it." "Hours in telling me!" "Yes; and in getting your consent to what I want you to do. But I think I'll tell you that first. I'm to be taken abroad immediately." "Who is to take you?" "Ah, you may well ask. If you could know what questions I have asked myself on that head! But you are to be one of the party." "I!" "Yes; you. So of course you will understand that my husband is to take us." "But Mr. Palliser can't leave London at this time of the year!" "That's just it. He is to leave London. Don't look like that, for it's all settled. Whether you come or not, I've got to go in one week from now, on Tuesday evening, if you can make yourself ready. We shall breakfast in Paris on Wednesday morning, and we shall be in a new world. Mr. Palliser will walk up and down the Louvre, with you on his left arm, and I on his right, and it will be the most proper thing that ever was seen. Then we shall go on to Basle" - Alice shuddered, thinking of the balcony over the river - "and so to Lucerne. But no; that was the first plan, and Mr. Palliser altered it. He spent a whole day with maps and guide-books, and scolded me because I didn't care whether we went first to Baden or somewhere else. How could I care? I told him I would go anywhere he chose to take me. Then he told me I was heartless; and I agreed. 'I am heartless,' I said. 'Tell me something I don't know.'" "Oh, Cora, why did you say that?" "I didn't choose to contradict my husband. Besides, it's true. Then he threw the guide-book away, and all the maps flew about. So I picked them up again, and said we'd go to Switzerland first. If he had said Jericho, it would have been all the same to me. Wouldn't you like to go to Jericho?" "I should have no special objection to Jericho." "But you are to go to Baden instead." "I've not agreed yet. But you have not told me half your story. Why is Mr. Palliser going abroad in the middle of Parliament?" "Ah; now I must go back to the beginning. And indeed, Alice, I scarcely know how to tell you. You can hardly guess what he is giving up. You must swear that you won't repeat what I'm going to say?" "I don't tell secrets." "Well, they have asked Mr. Palliser to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he has - refused. Think of that!" "But why?" "Because of me, and my folly, and wickedness. Because he has been fool enough to plague himself with a wife. Oh, he has been so good! If you knew how he has longed for the position - how he has worked for it day and night, wearing his eyes out when everybody else has been asleep, shutting himself up with such creatures as Mr. Bott. He has been a slave to it for years, in order that he might sit in the Cabinet, and be Chancellor of the Exchequer. This has been his excitement - what racing and gambling are to other men. At last, the place was open, and they offered it to him. They begged him to take it. The Duke of St. Bungay was here one morning about it; but Mr. Palliser refused. It's all over now, and the other man is to remain in." "But why did he refuse it?" "I keep telling you - because of me. He found that I wanted looking after, and that Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott between them couldn't do it." "Oh, Cora! how can you talk in that way?" "If you had gone to Lady Monk's ball, Mr. Palliser would now be Chancellor of the Exchequer! But though you did not go, other people did who ought to have remained at home. I, for one - and you know who for another." "What difference could that make to you?" said Alice, angrily. "It might have made a great deal of difference. Mr. Palliser was there too, but, of course, he went away immediately. Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott were watching me the whole evening; and, of course, I resolved that I would not be put down by them. So I stood up to dance with Burgo Fitzgerald." "Oh, Cora!" "Why shouldn't I? I waltzed with him for half an hour. Alice, I never will waltz again; I have done with dancing now. I knew that everybody was looking at me. I felt desperate, mad, like a wild woman. There I was, going round and round and round with the only man for whom I ever cared two straws. Ah! how well I remember the first time I danced with him. I thought he was a god." "Cora! I cannot bear to hear you talk like that." "I know well enough now that he is no god, but he was like Apollo to me then. Did you ever see anyone so beautiful as he is?" "I never saw him at all." "I wish you could have seen him; but you will some day." Alice thought of John Grey, who was the handsomest man that she knew, but she made no answer. "When I saw him the other night," Lady Glencora went on, "he was just as handsome as ever - the same look, half wild and half tame, like an animal you cannot catch, but which you think would love you so if you could catch him. It was just like the old time, and I decided to care nothing for the people looking at me. Why should they care who I danced with?" "That is nonsense, dear. If you were to see a woman misbehaving herself in public, would you not look on and make your comments?" "You are very severe, Alice. Misbehaving in public!" "Yes, Cora." Lady Glencora got up from her chair and walked away towards the fireplace. "How am I to talk to you, then?" said Alice. "You would not have me tell you a lie?" "Of all things in the world, I hate a prude the most," said Lady Glencora. "Cora, look here. If you consider it prudery to disapprove of your waltzing with Mr. Fitzgerald in the way you have described, we must differ so totally about the nature of things that we had better part." "Alice, you are as cold as stone. I sometimes think that you can have no heart." "I don't mind your saying that; but I won't be called a prude. You know you were wrong to dance with that man. What has come of it? In order to preserve you from misery and destruction, Mr. Palliser has given up all his dearest hopes. He has had to sacrifice himself to save you. That, I take it, is about the truth of it - and yet you tell me that you have done no wrong." "I never said so." Now she had come back to her chair again. "Of course I was wrong. I have been so wrong throughout that I have never been right yet. Let me tell it on to the end, and then you can go away if you like, and tell me that I am too wicked for your friendship." "Have I ever said anything like that, Cora?" "But you will, I dare say, when I have done. Well; what do you think my senior duenna did? She set off after Mr. Palliser as hard as she could. Of course Mr. Palliser came after me. He came there, and behaved so well - so much like a perfect gentleman. Of course I went home, and I was prepared to tell him everything, if he spoke a word to me - that I intended to leave him!" "To leave him, Cora!" "Yes, and go with that other man. I had a letter from him in my pocket asking me to go. He asked me a dozen times that night. I cannot think how it was that I did not consent." "That you did not consent to your own ruin and disgrace?" "Of course it would have been my destruction. I know that. Do you suppose I have never thought of it? When once I had done it I should hate and despise myself. I should feel myself to be loathsome. But why did they not let me marry him, instead of driving me to this? And though I might have destroyed myself, I should have saved my husband. Do you know, I told him all that - told him that if I had gone away with Burgo Fitzgerald he would have another wife, and would have children?" "You told your husband that you had thought of leaving him?" "Yes; I told him everything." "And what did he say?" "I cannot tell you what he said, only that we are all to go to Baden together, and then to Italy. But he did not seem a bit angry; he very seldom is angry. And when I told him that he might have another wife and a child, he put his arm round me and told me that he did not care so much about it as I had imagined. I felt more like loving him at that moment than I had ever done before." "He must be an angel." "'We'll go abroad,' he said, and before I could say a word, he added, "and you shall get your cousin Alice to go with us.' That touched me more than anything. Only think if he had proposed Mrs. Marsham!" "But he does not like me." "You're wrong there, Alice. When you went out flirting among the ruins with Jeffrey Palliser-" "I never flirted with Jeffrey Palliser." "He flirted with you, which is the same thing. And when Plantagenet knew about that - for, of course, Mr. Bott told him - but he has got over that now. Come, Alice; as he has held out his hand to you, you should take it." "I will take his hand willingly." "And for my sake you will go with us? There is a spirit of wisdom about you that will suit him, and a spirit of folly that will suit me. I can manage to put myself on a par with a girl who has played such a wild game with her lovers as you have done." Alice would give no promise then. She said she had promised to go to Westmorland and comfort Kate in the affliction of her broken arm. But she acknowledged that she had not intended to stay more than a week in Westmorland, and it was at last decided that the Pallisers should postpone their journey for four or five days, and that Alice should go with them immediately upon her return from Vavasor Hall. "I have no objection;" said her father, speaking with that resigned voice which men use when they are resolved to consider themselves injured. "I can get along in lodgings. I suppose we had better leave the house, as you have given away so much of your own fortune?" Alice did not think it worth her while to point out to him that her contribution to their housekeeping would remain the same as ever. She knew that she would find her father in the old house when she returned from her travels. The absence from London would be as useful to her as to Lady Glencora. She had already begun to feel the impossibility of staying quietly at home. She was half afraid to show her face among her friends, and wept grievously over her own follies. Those cruel words of her father rang in her ears constantly: "Things of that sort are so often over with you." The reproach, though cruel, was true, and what more galling reproach could be uttered? It would be well that she should leave her home for a while. Mr. Palliser would not allow his wife to remain in London for the ten or twelve days before they started, so he took her down to Matching Priory, having obtained leave to be absent from the House for the remainder of the Session. That week down at Matching, as she afterwards told Alice, was very terrible. He never spoke a word to rebuke her. He treated her with perfect respect, and indeed with more signs of affection than usual. "But," as Lady Glencora said afterwards, "he was always looking after me. I believe he thought that Burgo Fitzgerald had hidden himself among the ruins." In this she very nearly hit the truth. Mr. Palliser had resolved that he would neither suspect his wife, nor treat her as though he suspected her. But it was his imperative duty to save her from that pitfall into which she had been so ready to fall. So he went with his wife hither and thither, allowing himself to be driven about behind Dandy and Flirt. He himself proposed these little excursions. They were tedious to him, but doubly tedious to his wife, who now found it more difficult than ever to talk to him. They both struggled. He sat with her in the mornings, and he sat with her in the evenings; he breakfasted with her, lunched with her, and dined with her. He went to bed early, having no figures which now claimed his attention. And so the week at last wore itself away.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 62: Going Abroad

Alice reached the Matching Road Station about three o'clock in the afternoon without adventure, and immediately on the stopping of the train became aware that all trouble was off her own hands. A servant in livery came to the open window, and touching his hat to her, inquired if she were Miss Vavasor. Then her dressing-bag and shawls and cloaks were taken from her, and she was conveyed through the station by the station-master on one side of her, the footman on the other, and by the railway porter behind. She instantly perceived that she had become possessed of great privileges by belonging even for a time to Matching Priory, and that she was essentially growing upwards towards the light. Outside, on the broad drive before the little station, she saw an omnibus that was going to the small town of Matching, intended for people who had not grown upwards as had been her lot; and she saw also a light stylish-looking cart which she would have called a Whitechapel had she been properly instructed in such matters, and a little low open carriage with two beautiful small horses, in which was sitting a lady enveloped in furs. Of course this was Lady Glencora. Another servant was standing on the ground, holding the horses of the carriage and the cart. "Dear Alice, I'm so glad you've come," said a voice from the furs. "Look here, dear; your maid can go in the dog-cart with your things,"--it wasn't a dog-cart, but Lady Glencora knew no better;--"she'll be quite comfortable there; and do you get in here. Are you very cold?" "Oh, no; not cold at all." "But it is awfully cold. You've been in the stuffy carriage, but you'll find it cold enough out here, I can tell you." "Oh! Lady Glencora, I am so sorry that I've brought you out on such a morning," said Alice, getting in and taking the place assigned her next to the charioteer. "What nonsense! Sorry! Why I've looked forward to meeting you all alone, ever since I knew you were coming. If it had snowed all the morning I should have come just the same. I drive out almost every day when I'm down here,--that is, when the house is not too crowded, or I can make an excuse. Wrap these things over you; there are plenty of them. You shall drive if you like." Alice, however, declined the driving, expressing her gratitude in what prettiest words she could find. "I like driving better than anything, I think. Mr. Palliser doesn't like ladies to hunt, and of course it wouldn't do as he does not hunt himself. I do ride, but he never gets on horseback. I almost fancy I should like to drive four-in-hand,--only I know I should be afraid." "It would look very terrible," said Alice. "Yes; wouldn't it? The look would be the worst of it; as it is all the world over. Sometimes I wish there were no such things as looks. I don't mean anything improper, you know; only one does get so hampered, right and left, for fear of Mrs. Grundy. I endeavour to go straight, and get along pretty well on the whole, I suppose. Baker, you must put Dandy in the bar; he pulls so, going home, that I can't hold him in the check." She stopped the horses, and Baker, a very completely-got-up groom of some forty years of age, who sat behind, got down and put the impetuous Dandy "in the bar," thereby changing the rein, so that the curb was brought to bear on him. "They're called Dandy and Flirt," continued Lady Glencora, speaking to Alice. "Ain't they a beautiful match? The Duke gave them to me and named them himself. Did you ever see the Duke?" [Illustration: "Baker, you must put Dandy in the bar."] "Never," said Alice. "He won't be here before Christmas, but you shall be introduced some day in London. He's an excellent creature and I'm a great pet of his; though, after all, I never speak half a dozen words to him when I see him. He's one of those people who never talk. I'm one of those who like talking, as you'll find out. I think it runs in families; and the Pallisers are non-talkers. That doesn't mean that they are not speakers, for Mr. Palliser has plenty to say in the House, and they declare that he's one of the few public men who've got lungs enough to make a financial statement without breaking down." Alice was aware that she had as yet hardly spoken herself, and began to bethink herself that she didn't know what to say. Had Lady Glencora paused on the subject of Dandy and Flirt, she might have managed to be enthusiastic about the horses, but she could not discuss freely the general silence of the Palliser family, nor the excellent lungs, as regarded public purposes, of the one who was the husband of her present friend. So she asked how far it was to Matching Priory. "You're not tired of me already, I hope," said Lady Glencora. "I didn't mean that," said Alice. "I delight in the drive. But somehow one expects Matching Station to be near Matching." "Ah, yes; that's a great cheat. It's not Matching Station at all but Matching Road Station, and it's eight miles. It is a great bore, for though the omnibus brings our parcels, we have to be constantly sending over, and it's very expensive, I can assure you. I want Mr. Palliser to have a branch, but he says he would have to take all the shares himself, and that would cost more, I suppose." "Is there a town at Matching?" "Oh, a little bit of a place. I'll go round by it if you like, and in at the further gate." "Oh, no!" said Alice. "Ah, but I should like. It was a borough once, and belonged to the Duke; but they put it out at the Reform Bill. They made some kind of bargain;--he was to keep either Silverbridge or Matching, but not both. Mr. Palliser sits for Silverbridge, you know. The Duke chose Silverbridge,--or rather his father did, as he was then going to build his great place in Barsetshire;--that's near Silverbridge. But the Matching people haven't forgiven him yet. He was sitting for Matching himself when the Reform Bill passed. Then his father died, and he hasn't lived there much since. It's a great deal nicer place than Gatherum Castle, only not half so grand. I hate grandeur; don't you?" "I never tried much of it, as you have." "Come now; that's not fair. There's no one in the world less grand than I am." "I mean that I've not had grand people about me." "Having cut all your cousins,--and Lady Midlothian in particular, like a naughty girl as you are. I was so angry with you when you accused me of selling you about that. You ought to have known that I was the last person in the world to have done such a thing." "I did not think you meant to sell me, but I thought--" "Yes, you did, Alice. I know what you thought; you thought that Lady Midlothian was making a tool of me that I might bring you under her thumb, so that she might bully you into Mr. Grey's arms. That's what you thought. I don't know that I was at all entitled to your good opinion, but I was not entitled to that special bad opinion." "I had no bad opinion;--but it was so necessary that I should guard myself." "You shall be guarded. I'll take you under my shield. Mr. Grey shan't be named to you, except that I shall expect you to tell me all about it; and you must tell me all about that dangerous cousin, too, of whom they were saying such terrible things down in Scotland. I had heard of him before." These last words Lady Glencora spoke in a lower voice and in an altered tone,--slowly, as though she were thinking of something that pained her. It was from Burgo Fitzgerald that she had heard of George Vavasor. Alice did not know what to say. She found it impossible to discuss all the most secret and deepest of her feelings out in that open carriage, perhaps in the hearing of the servant behind, on this her first meeting with her cousin,--of whom, in fact, she knew very little. She had not intended to discuss these things at all, and certainly not in such a manner as this. So she remained silent. "This is the beginning of the park," said Lady Glencora, pointing to a grand old ruin of an oak tree, which stood on the wide margin of the road, outside the rounded corner of the park palings, propped up with a skeleton of supporting sticks all round it. "And that is Matching oak, under which Coeur de Lion or Edward the Third, I forget which, was met by Sir Guy de Palisere as he came from the war, or from hunting, or something of that kind. It was the king, you know, who had been fighting or whatever it was, and Sir Guy entertained him when he was very tired. Jeffrey Palliser, who is my husband's cousin, says that old Sir Guy luckily pulled out his brandy-flask. But the king immediately gave him all the lands of Matching,--only there was a priory then and a lot of monks, and I don't quite understand how that was. But I know one of the younger brothers always used to be abbot and sit in the House of Lords. And the king gave him Littlebury at the same time, which is about seven miles away from here. As Jeffrey Palliser says, it was a great deal of money for a pull at his flask. Jeffrey Palliser is here now, and I hope you'll like him. If I have no child, and Mr. Palliser were not to marry again, Jeffrey would be the heir." And here again her voice was low and slow, and altogether changed in its tone. "I suppose that's the way most of the old families got their estates." "Either so, or by robbery. Many of them were terrible thieves, my dear, and I dare say Sir Guy was no better than he should be. But since that they have always called some of the Pallisers Plantagenet. My husband's name is Plantagenet. The Duke is called George Plantagenet, and the king was his godfather. The queen is my godmother, I believe, but I don't know that I'm much the better for it. There's no use in godfathers and godmothers;--do you think there is?" "Not much as it's managed now." "If I had a child,-- Oh, Alice, it's a dreadful thing not to have a child when so much depends on it!" "But you're such a short time married yet." "Ah, well; I can see it in his eyes when he asks me questions; but I don't think he'd say an unkind word, not if his own position depended on it. Ah, well; this is Matching. That other gate we passed, where Dandy wanted to turn in,--that's where we usually go up, but I've brought you round to show you the town. That's the inn,--whoever can possibly come to stay there I don't know; I never saw anybody go in or out. That's the baker who bakes our bread,--we baked it at the house at first, but nobody could eat it; and I know that that man there mends Mr. Palliser's shoes. He's very particular about his shoes. We shall see the church as we go in at the other gate. It is in the park, and is very pretty,--but not half so pretty as the priory ruins close to the house. The ruins are our great lion. I do so love to wander about them at moonlight. I often think of you when I do; I don't know why.--But I do know why, and I'll tell you some day. Come, Miss Flirt!" As they drove up through the park, Lady Glencora pointed out first the church and then the ruins, through the midst of which the road ran, and then they were at once before the front door. The corner of the modern house came within two hundred yards of the gateway of the old priory. It was a large building, very pretty, with two long fronts; but it was no more than a house. It was not a palace, nor a castle, nor was it hardly to be called a mansion. It was built with gabled roofs, four of which formed the side from which the windows of the drawing-rooms opened out upon a lawn which separated the house from the old ruins, and which indeed surrounded the ruins, and went inside them, forming the present flooring of the old chapel, and the old refectory, and the old cloisters. Much of the cloisters indeed was standing, and there the stone pavement remained; but the square of the cloisters was all turfed, and in the middle of it stood a large modern stone vase, out of the broad basin of which hung flowering creepers and green tendrils. As Lady Glencora drove up to the door, a gentleman, who had heard the sound of the wheels, came forth to meet them. "There's Mr. Palliser," said she; "that shows that you are an honoured guest, for you may be sure that he is hard at work and would not have come out for anybody else. Plantagenet, here is Miss Vavasor, perished. Alice, my husband." Then Mr. Palliser put forth his hand and helped her out of the carriage. "I hope you've not found it very cold," said he. "The winter has come upon us quite suddenly." He said nothing more to her than this, till he met her again before dinner. He was a tall thin man, apparently not more than thirty years of age, looking in all respects like a gentleman, but with nothing in his appearance that was remarkable. It was a face that you might see and forget, and see again and forget again; and yet when you looked at it and pulled it to pieces, you found that it was a fairly good face, showing intellect in the forehead, and much character in the mouth. The eyes too, though not to be called bright, had always something to say for themselves, looking as though they had a real meaning. But the outline of the face was almost insignificant, being too thin; and he wore no beard to give it character. But, indeed, Mr. Palliser was a man who had never thought of assisting his position in the world by his outward appearance. Not to be looked at, but to be read about in the newspapers, was his ambition. Men said that he was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and no one thought of suggesting that the insignificance of his face would stand in his way. "Are the people all out?" his wife asked him. "The men have not come in from shooting;--at least I think not;--and some of the ladies are driving, I suppose. But I haven't seen anybody since you went." "Of course you haven't. He never has time, Alice, to see any one. But we'll go up-stairs, dear. I told them to let us have tea in my dressing-room, as I thought you'd like that better than going into the drawing-room before you had taken off your things. You must be famished, I know. Then you can come down, or if you want to avoid two dressings you can sit over the fire up-stairs till dinner-time." So saying she skipped up-stairs and Alice followed her. "Here's my dressing-room, and here's your room all but opposite. You look out into the park. It's pretty, isn't it? But come into my dressing-room, and see the ruins out of the window." Alice followed Lady Glencora across the passage into what she called her dressing-room, and there found herself surrounded by an infinitude of feminine luxuries. The prettiest of tables were there;--the easiest of chairs;--the most costly of cabinets;--the quaintest of old china ornaments. It was bright with the gayest colours,--made pleasant to the eye with the binding of many books, having nymphs painted on the ceiling and little Cupids on the doors. "Isn't it pretty?" she said, turning quickly on Alice. "I call it my dressing-room because in that way I can keep people out of it, but I have my brushes and soap in a little closet there, and my clothes,--my clothes are everywhere I suppose, only there are none of them here. Isn't it pretty?" "Very pretty." "The Duke did it all. He understands such things thoroughly. Now to Mr. Palliser a dressing-room is a dressing-room, and a bedroom a bedroom. He cares for nothing being pretty; not even his wife, or he wouldn't have married me." "You wouldn't say that if you meant it." "Well, I don't know. Sometimes when I look at myself, when I simply am myself, with no making up or grimacing, you know, I think I'm the ugliest young woman the sun ever shone on. And in ten years' time I shall be the ugliest old woman. Only think,--my hair is beginning to get grey, and I'm not twenty-one yet. Look at it;" and she lifted up the wavy locks just above her ear. "But there's one comfort; he doesn't care about beauty. How old are you?" "Over five-and-twenty," said Alice. "Nonsense;--then I oughtn't to have asked you. I am so sorry." "That's nonsense at any rate. Why should you think I should be ashamed of my age?" "I don't know why, only somehow, people are; and I didn't think you were so old. Five-and-twenty seems so old to me. It would be nothing if you were married; only, you see, you won't get married." "Perhaps I may yet; some day." "Of course you will. You'll have to give way. You'll find that they'll get the better of you. Your father will storm at you, and Lady Macleod will preach at you, and Lady Midlothian will jump upon you." "I'm not a bit afraid of Lady Midlothian." "I know what it is, my dear, to be jumped upon. We talked with such horror of the French people giving their daughters in marriage, just as they might sell a house or a field, but we do exactly the same thing ourselves. When they all come upon you in earnest how are you to stand against them? How can any girl do it?" "I think I shall be able." "To be sure you're older,--and you are not so heavily weighted. But never mind; I didn't mean to talk about that;--not yet at any rate. Well, now, my dear, I must go down. The Duchess of St. Bungay is here, and Mr. Palliser will be angry if I don't do pretty to her. The Duke is to be the new President of the Council, or rather, I believe he is President now. I try to remember it all, but it is so hard when one doesn't really care two pence how it goes. Not but what I'm very anxious that Mr. Palliser should be Chancellor of the Exchequer. And now, will you remain here, or will you come down with me, or will you go to your own room, and I'll call for you when I go down to dinner? We dine at eight." Alice decided that she would stay in her own room till dinner time, and was taken there by Lady Glencora. She found her maid unpacking her clothes, and for a while employed herself in assisting at the work; but that was soon done, and then she was left alone. "I shall feel so strange, ma'am, among all those people down-stairs," said the girl. "They all seem to look at me as though they didn't know who I was." "You'll get over that soon, Jane." "I suppose I shall; but you see, they're all like knowing each other, miss." Alice, when she sat down alone, felt herself to be very much in the same condition as her maid. What would the Duchess of St. Bungay or Mr. Jeffrey Palliser,--who himself might live to be a duke if things went well for him,--care for her? As to Mr. Palliser, the master of the house, it was already evident to her that he would not put himself out of his way for her. Had she not done wrong to come there? If it were possible for her to fly away, back to the dullness of Queen Anne Street, or even to the preachings of Lady Macleod, would she not do so immediately? What business had she,--she asked herself,--to come to such a house as that? Lady Glencora was very kind to her, but frightened her even by her kindness. Moreover, she was aware that Lady Glencora could not devote herself especially to any such guest as she was. Lady Glencora must of course look after her duchesses, and do pretty, as she called it, to her husband's important political alliances. And then she began to think about Lady Glencora herself. What a strange, weird nature she was,--with her round blue eyes and wavy hair, looking sometimes like a child and sometimes almost like an old woman! And how she talked! What things she said, and what terrible forebodings she uttered of stranger things that she meant to say! Why had she at their first meeting made that allusion to the mode of her own betrothal,--and then, checking herself for speaking of it so soon, almost declare that she meant to speak more of it hereafter? "She should never mention it to any one," said Alice to herself. "If her lot in life has not satisfied her, there is so much the more reason why she should not mention it." Then Alice protested to herself that no father, no aunt, no Lady Midlothian should persuade her into a marriage of which she feared the consequences. But Lady Glencora had made for herself excuses which were not altogether untrue. She had been very young, and had been terribly weighted with her wealth. And it seemed to Alice that her cousin had told her everything in that hour and a half that they had been together. She had given a whole history of her husband and of herself. She had said how indifferent he was to her pleasures, and how vainly she strove to interest herself in his pursuits. And then, as yet, she was childless and without prospect of a child, when, as she herself had said,--"so much depended on it." It was very strange to Alice that all this should have been already told to her. And why should Lady Glencora think of Alice when she walked out among the priory ruins by moonlight? The two hours seemed to her very long,--as though she were passing her time in absolute seclusion at Matching. Of course she did not dare to go down-stairs. But at last her maid came to dress her. "How do you get on below, Jane?" her mistress asked her. "Why, miss, they are uncommon civil, and I don't think after all it will be so bad. We had our teas very comfortable in the housekeeper's room. There are five or six of us altogether, all ladies'-maids, miss; and there's nothing on earth to do all the day long, only sit and do a little needlework over the fire." A few minutes before eight Lady Glencora knocked at Alice's door, and took her arm to lead her to the drawing-room. Alice saw that she was magnificently dressed, with an enormous expanse of robe, and that her locks had been so managed that no one could suspect the presence of a grey hair. Indeed, with all her magnificence, she looked almost a child. "Let me see," she said, as they went down-stairs together. "I'll tell Jeffrey to take you in to dinner. He's about the easiest young man we have here. He rather turns up his nose at everything, but that doesn't make him the less agreeable; does it, dear?--unless he turns up his nose at you, you know." "But perhaps he will." "No; he won't do that. That would be uncourteous,--and he's the most courteous man in the world. There's nobody here, you see," she said as they entered the room, "and I didn't suppose there would be. It's always proper to be first in one's own house. I do so try to be proper,--and it is such trouble. Talking of people earning their bread, Alice;--I'm sure I earn mine. Oh dear!--what fun it would be to be sitting somewhere in Asia, eating a chicken with one's fingers, and lighting a big fire outside one's tent to keep off the lions and tigers. Fancy your being on one side of the fire and the lions and tigers on the other, grinning at you through the flames!" Then Lady Glencora strove to look like a lion, and grinned at herself in the glass. "That sort of grin wouldn't frighten me," said Alice. "I dare say not. I have been reading about it in that woman's travels. Oh, here they are, and I mustn't make any more faces. Duchess, do come to the fire. I hope you've got warm again. This is my cousin, Miss Vavasor." The Duchess made a stiff little bow of condescension, and then declared that she was charmingly warm. "I don't know how you manage in your house, but the staircases are so comfortable. Now at Longroyston we've taken all the trouble in the world,--put down hot-water pipes all over the house, and everything else that could be thought of, and yet, you can't move about the place without meeting with draughts at every corner of the passages." The Duchess spoke with an enormous emphasis on every other word, sometimes putting so great a stress on some special syllable, as almost to bring her voice to a whistle. This she had done with the word "pipes" to a great degree,--so that Alice never afterwards forgot the hot-water pipes of Longroyston. "I was telling Lady Glencora, Miss Palliser, that I never knew a house so warm as this,--or, I'm sorry to say,"--and here the emphasis was very strong on the word sorry,--"so cold as Longroyston." And the tone in which Longroyston was uttered would almost have drawn tears from a critical audience in the pit of a playhouse. The Duchess was a woman of about forty, very handsome, but with no meaning in her beauty, carrying a good fixed colour in her face, which did not look like paint, but which probably had received some little assistance from art. She was a well-built, sizeable woman, with good proportions and fine health,--but a fool. She had addressed herself to one Miss Palliser; but two Miss Pallisers, cousins of Plantagenet Palliser, had entered the room at the same time, of whom I may say, whatever other traits of character they may have possessed, that at any rate they were not fools. "It's always easy to warm a small house like this," said Miss Palliser, whose Christian names, unfortunately for her, were Iphigenia Theodata, and who by her cousin and sister was called Iphy--"and I suppose equally difficult to warm a large one such as Longroyston." The other Miss Palliser had been christened Euphemia. "We've got no pipes, Duchess, at any rate," said Lady Glencora; and Alice, as she sat listening, thought she discerned in Lady Glencora's pronunciation of the word pipes an almost hidden imitation of the Duchess's whistle. It must have been so, for at the moment Lady Glencora's eye met Alice's for an instant, and was then withdrawn, so that Alice was compelled to think that her friend and cousin was not always quite successful in those struggles she made to be proper. Then the gentlemen came in one after another, and other ladies, till about thirty people were assembled. Mr. Palliser came up and spoke another word to Alice in a kind voice,--meant to express some sense of connection if not cousinship. "My wife has been thinking so much of your coming. I hope we shall be able to amuse you." Alice, who had already begun to feel desolate, was grateful, and made up her mind that she would try to like Mr. Palliser. Jeffrey Palliser was almost the last in the room, but directly he entered Lady Glencora got up from her seat, and met him as he was coming into the crowd. "You must take my cousin, Alice Vavasor, in to dinner," she said, "and;--will you oblige me to-day?" "Yes;--as you ask me like that." "Then try to make her comfortable." After that she introduced them, and Jeffrey Palliser stood opposite to Alice, talking to her, till dinner was announced.

Alice reached the Matching Road Station at about three o'clock in the afternoon. A servant in livery came to the train window, and touching his hat, inquired if she were Miss Vavasor. Then her dressing-bag and shawls and cloaks were taken from her, and she was conveyed through the station by the station-master on one side, the footman on the other, and the railway porter behind. She instantly perceived that she had acquired great privileges by belonging even for a time to Matching Priory. Outside the little station, she saw an omnibus that was going to the small town of Matching, intended for people who were not growing upwards to the light; and she saw also a stylish-looking cart, and a little low open carriage with two beautiful small horses, in which was sitting a lady enveloped in furs. Of course this was Lady Glencora. Another servant was holding the horses. "Dear Alice, I'm so glad you've come," said a voice from the furs. "Your maid can go in the dog-cart with your things, and you get in here. Are you very cold?" "Oh, no." "But it is awfully cold out here, I can tell you." "Oh! Lady Glencora, I am so sorry that I've brought you out on such a morning," said Alice, getting in. "What nonsense! Why, I've looked forward to meeting you all alone, ever since I knew you were coming. If it had snowed all morning I should have come just the same. Wrap these things over you. You shall drive if you like." Alice, however, declined with pretty thanks. "I like driving better than anything, I think," said Lady Glencora. "Mr. Palliser doesn't like ladies to hunt, and he does not hunt himself. I do ride, but he never gets on horseback. I almost fancy I should like to drive four-in-hand, only I know I should be afraid." "It would look very terrible," said Alice. "Yes; wouldn't it? I get along pretty well on the whole, I suppose. Baker, you must put Dandy in the bar; he pulls so that I can't hold him." She stopped the horses, and Baker, a very completely-got-up groom, put the impetuous Dandy in the bar to curb him. "They're called Dandy and Flirt," continued Lady Glencora to Alice. "Ain't they a beautiful match? The Duke gave them to me and named them himself. Did you ever see the Duke of Omnium? He won't be here before Christmas, but you shall be introduced some day in London. He's an excellent creature and I'm a great pet of his; though I hardly speak half a dozen words when I see him. He's one of those people who never talk. I'm one of those who like talking, as you'll find out. I think it runs in families; and the Pallisers are non-talkers. That doesn't mean that they are not speakers, for Mr. Palliser has plenty to say in the House." Alice was aware that she had as yet hardly spoken herself, and did not know what to say. So she asked how far it was to Matching Priory. "You're not tired of me already, I hope," said Lady Glencora. "I didn't mean that," said Alice. "I'm enjoying the drive. But somehow one expects Matching Station to be near Matching." "Ah, yes; that's a great cheat. It's eight miles, so we have to be constantly sending over, and it's very expensive, I can assure you. I want Mr. Palliser to have a branch line of the railway, but he says he would have to take all the shares himself, and that would cost more, I suppose." "Is there a town at Matching?" "A little one. I'll go round by it if you like." "Oh, no!" said Alice. "Ah, but I should like. It was a borough once, and belonged to the Duke; but they put it out at the Reform Bill. They made some kind of bargain; he could keep either Silverbridge or Matching constituency, but not both. Mr. Palliser sits for Silverbridge, you know. The Duke chose Silverbridge, or rather his father did, as he was going to build his great place there, in Barsetshire. Then his father died, and the Duke hasn't lived here much since. It's a great deal nicer place than Gatherum Castle, only not half so grand. I hate grandeur; don't you?" "I never tried much of it, as you have." "Come now; that's not fair. There's no one in the world less grand than I am." "I mean that I've not had grand people about me." "Having cut all your cousins, and Lady Midlothian in particular, like the naughty girl you are. I was so angry with you when you accused me of selling you about that. You ought to have known that I was the last person in the world to have done such a thing." "I did not think that-" "Yes, you did, Alice. You thought that Lady Midlothian was making a tool of me so that I might bring you under her thumb." "But it was so necessary that I should guard myself," pleaded Alice. "You shall be guarded. I'll take you under my shield. Mr. Grey shan't be named to you, except that I shall expect you to tell me all about it; and you must tell me all about that dangerous cousin, too, of whom they were saying such terrible things down in Scotland. I had heard of him before." These last words Lady Glencora spoke in a lower voice and in an altered tone, as though she were thinking of something that pained her. She had heard of George from Burgo Fitzgerald. Alice did not know what to say. She found it impossible to discuss all her most secret and deepest feelings out in that open carriage, perhaps in the hearing of the servant behind, on this first meeting with her cousin - of whom she actually knew very little. She had not intended to discuss these things at all. "This is the beginning of the park," said Lady Glencora, pointing to a grand old oak tree, by the corner of the park palings. "And that is Matching oak, under which Cur de Lion or Edward the Third, I forget which, was met by Sir Guy de Palisere as he came from the war, or from hunting, or something. Jeffrey Palliser, who is my husband's cousin, says that old Sir Guy luckily pulled out his brandy-flask for the king, and the king immediately gave him all the lands of Matching - only there was a priory then and a lot of monks. And the king gave him Littlebury at the same time, which is about seven miles away from here. As Jeffrey Palliser says, it was a great deal of money for a pull at his flask. Jeffrey Palliser is here now, and I hope you'll like him. If I have no child, and Mr. Palliser were not to marry again, Jeffrey would be the heir." And here again her voice was low and slow, and altogether changed in its tone. "I suppose that's the way most of the old families got their estates." "Yes, or else by robbery. Many of them were terrible thieves, and I dare say Sir Guy was no better than he should be. But since that they have always called some of the Pallisers Plantagenet. My husband's name is Plantagenet. The Duke is called George Plantagenet, and the king was his godfather. But there's no use in godfathers and godmothers, is there?" "Not much as it's managed now." "If I had a child - oh, Alice, it's a dreadful thing not to have a child when so much depends on it!" "But you're such a short time married." "I can see it in his eyes; but I don't think he'd say an unkind word, not if his own position depended on it. Ah, well; this is the town. That's the inn. That's our baker; and I know that man there mends Mr. Palliser's shoes. He's very particular about his shoes. We shall see the church as we go in at the other gate. It is in the park, and is very pretty, but not half so pretty as the priory ruins near the house. I do so love to wander about our ruins at moonlight. I often think of you when I do; I don't know why. No, I do know why, and I'll tell you some day." As they drove up through the park, Lady Glencora pointed out the church and the ruins, through the midst of which the road ran, and then they were at the front door. The modern house came within two hundred yards of the gateway of the old priory. It was a large house, very pretty, with two long fronts and gabled roofs; but it was not a palace, nor even a mansion. The windows of the drawing-rooms opened out upon a lawn which separated the house from the old ruins, and which indeed surrounded the ruins, and went inside them, forming the floor of the old chapel, refectory, and cloisters. In the middle of the cloisters stood a large modern stone vase, out of whose broad basin hung flowering creepers and green tendrils. As Lady Glencora drove up to the door, a gentleman came forth to meet them. "There's Mr. Palliser," said she; "that shows that you are an honoured guest, for he is hard at work and would not have come out for anybody else. Plantagenet, here is Miss Vavasor. Alice, my husband." Mr. Palliser helped her out of the carriage. "I hope you've not found it very cold," said he. "The winter has come upon us quite suddenly." He said nothing more to her than this, till he met her again before dinner. He was a tall thin man, about thirty years of age, looking like a gentleman, but with nothing in his appearance that was remarkable. It was a face that you might see and forget, and see again and forget again; and yet it was a fairly good face, showing intellect in the forehead, and much character in the mouth. The eyes too, though not bright, had always something to say for themselves, looking as though they had a real meaning. But his face was perhaps too thin; and he wore no beard to give it character. Indeed, Mr. Palliser was a man who wished not to be looked at, but to be read about in the newspapers. Men said that he was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and no one thought of suggesting that his face would stand in his way. "Are the people all out?" his wife asked him. "The men have not come in from shooting; and some of the ladies are driving, I suppose. But I haven't seen anybody since you went." "Of course you haven't. He never has time, Alice, to see any one. But we'll go upstairs, dear. I told them to let us have tea in my dressing-room, as I thought you'd like that better than going into the drawing-room. You must be famished, I know. Then you can come down, or you can sit over the fire upstairs till dinner-time." So saying she skipped upstairs and Alice followed her. "Here's my dressing-room, and here's your room opposite. You look out into the park. It's pretty, isn't it? But come into my dressing-room, and see the ruins out of the window." Alice followed Lady Glencora across the passage into what she called her dressing-room, and there found herself surrounded by an infinitude of feminine luxuries. The prettiest of tables - the easiest of chairs - the most costly of cabinets. It was bright with colour, with books, and with nymphs painted on the ceiling and little Cupids on the doors. "I call it my dressing-room because in that way I can keep people out of it," said Lady Glencora, "but it isn't really. Isn't it pretty?" "Very pretty." "The Duke did it all. He understands such things thoroughly. Now to Mr. Palliser a dressing-room is a dressing-room. He cares for nothing being pretty; not even his wife, or he wouldn't have married me." "You wouldn't say that if you meant it." "Well, I don't know. Sometimes when I look at myself, when I simply am myself, I think I'm the ugliest young woman the sun ever shone on. And in ten years' time I shall be the ugliest old woman. Only think - my hair is beginning to get grey, and I'm not twenty-one yet. Look at it;" and she lifted up the wavy locks just above her ear. "But there's one comfort; he doesn't care about beauty. How old are you?" "Over five-and-twenty," said Alice. "I oughtn't to have asked you. I am so sorry." "That's nonsense. Why should I be ashamed of my age?" "I don't know, only somehow, people are; and I didn't think you were so old. Five-and-twenty seems old to me. It would be nothing if you were married; only, you see, you won't get married." "Perhaps I may some day." "Of course you will. You'll have to give way. They'll get the better of you. Your father will storm at you, and Lady Macleod will preach at you, and Lady Midlothian will jump upon you." "I'm not a bit afraid of Lady Midlothian." "I know what it is, my dear, to be jumped upon. When they all come upon you in earnest how are you to stand against them? How can any girl do it?" "I think I shall be able." "To be sure you're older - and not so heavily weighted. But I didn't mean to talk about that; not yet at any rate. Well, now, my dear, I must go down. The Duchess of St. Bungay is here, and Mr. Palliser will be angry if I don't behave prettily to her. The Duke is to be the new President of the Council, or rather, I believe he is President now. I try to remember it all, but it is so hard when one doesn't really care two pence. Although I'm very anxious that Mr. Palliser should be Chancellor of the Exchequer. And now, will you stay here, or come down with me, or will you go to your own room until dinner? We dine at eight." Alice decided that she would stay in her own room till dinner time, and was taken there by Lady Glencora. She found her maid unpacking her clothes, and helped her; but that was soon done. "I shall feel so strange, ma'am, among all those people downstairs," said the girl. "They all look at me as though they didn't know who I was." "You'll get over that soon, Jane." "I suppose I shall; but you see, they all know each other, miss." Alice, when she sat down alone, felt herself to be very much in the same condition as her maid. What would the Duchess of St. Bungay or Mr. Jeffrey Palliser care for her? As to Mr. Palliser, the master of the house, it was already evident that he would not put himself out of his way for her. Had she done wrong to come? Lady Glencora was very kind to her, but she was aware that Lady Glencora could not devote herself especially to her. Lady Glencora must look after her duchesses. And then she began to think about Lady Glencora herself. What a strange, weird nature, with her round blue eyes and wavy hair, looking sometimes like a child and sometimes almost like an old woman! And how she talked! What things she said! Why had she made that allusion to her own betrothal - and then, checking herself, almost declare that she meant to say more of it later? "She should never mention it to anyone," said Alice to herself. She vowed that no father, no aunt, no Lady Midlothian should persuade her into a marriage of which she feared the consequences. But then Lady Glencora had been very young, and had been terribly weighted with her wealth. It seemed to Alice that her cousin had told her everything in that hour and a half that they had been together. She had given a whole history of her husband and of herself. She had said how indifferent he was to her pleasures, and how vainly she strove to interest herself in his pursuits. And she was still childless when, as she herself had said, "so much depended on it." It was very strange to Alice that all this should have been already told to her. And why should Lady Glencora think of Alice when she walked among the priory ruins by moonlight? The two hours seemed very long; but at last her maid came to dress her for dinner. "How do you get on below, Jane?" Alice asked her. "Why, miss, they are uncommon civil, and I don't think after all it will be so bad. We had our teas very comfortable in the housekeeper's room." A few minutes before eight Lady Glencora knocked at Alice's door, to lead her to the drawing-room. Alice saw that she was magnificently dressed, with an enormous expanse of robe, and with her locks arranged so that no one could suspect the presence of a grey hair. For all her magnificence, she looked almost a child. "I'll tell Jeffrey to take you in to dinner," she told Alice. "He's about the easiest young man we have here. He rather turns up his nose at everything, but that doesn't make him less agreeable - unless he turns up his nose at you, you know." "Perhaps he will." "No, he won't. He's the most courteous man in the world. Good, there's nobody here," she said as they entered the room. "It's always proper to be first in one's own house. I do so try to be proper - and it is such trouble. Oh dear! what fun it would be to be sitting somewhere in Asia, eating a chicken with one's fingers, and lighting a big fire outside one's tent to keep off the lions and tigers!" Then Lady Glencora strove to look like a lion, and grinned at herself in the glass. "I have been reading about it in that woman's travels. Oh, here they are; I mustn't make any more faces. Duchess, do come to the fire. This is my cousin, Miss Vavasor." The Duchess made a stiff little bow, and declared that she was charmingly warm. "I don't know how you manage it, but the staircases are so comfortable. Now at Longroyston we've taken all the trouble in the world - put down hot-water pipes all over the house, yet there are draughts at every corner of the passages." The Duchess spoke with an enormous emphasis on every other word, sometimes putting so great a stress on some special syllable, as almost to bring her voice to a whistle - especially when she said pipes. She was a woman of about forty, very handsome - but a fool. Two Miss Pallisers, cousins of Plantagenet Palliser, had entered the room at the same time, and they were certainly not fools. "It's always easy to warm a small house like this," said Miss Palliser, whose Christian name, unfortunately, was Iphigenia Theodata, and whom her cousin and sister called Iphy; "and I suppose it's difficult to warm a large one such as Longroyston." The other Miss Palliser was called Euphemia. "We've got no pipes, Duchess, at any rate," said Lady Glencora; and Alice, as she sat listening, thought she discerned in Lady Glencora's pronunciation of the word pipes an almost hidden imitation of the Duchess's whistle. Lady Glencora's eye met Alice's for an instant, and was then withdrawn, so that Alice was compelled to think that her friend was not always quite successful in her struggles to be proper. Then the gentlemen came in, and other ladies, till about thirty people were assembled. Mr. Palliser came up and spoke a kind word to Alice. "My wife has been thinking so much of your coming. I hope we shall be able to amuse you." Alice, who had already begun to feel desolate, was grateful, and made up her mind that she would try to like Mr. Palliser. Jeffrey Palliser was almost the last in the room. Lady Glencora went to meet him, saying, "You must take my cousin, Alice Vavasor, in to dinner, and try to make her comfortable." She introduced them, and Jeffrey Palliser stood talking to Alice till dinner was announced.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 22: Dandy and Flirt

In the meantime Kate Vavasor was living down in Westmoreland, with no other society than that of her grandfather, and did not altogether have a very pleasant life of it. George had been apt to represent the old man to himself as being as strong as an old tower, which, though it be but a ruin, shows no sign of falling. To his eyes the Squire had always seemed to be full of life and power. He could be violent on occasions, and was hardly ever without violence in his eyes and voice. But George's opinion was formed by his wish, or rather by the reverses of his wish. For years he had been longing that his grandfather should die,--had been accusing Fate of gross injustice in that she did not snap the thread; and with such thoughts in his mind he had grudged every ounce which the Squire's vigour had been able to sustain. He had almost taught himself to believe that it would be a good deed to squeeze what remained of life out of that violent old throat. But, indeed, the embers of life were burning low; and had George known all the truth, he would hardly have inclined his mind to thoughts of murder. He was, indeed, very weak with age, and tottering with unsteady steps on the brink of his grave, though he would still come down early from his room, and would, if possible, creep out about the garden and into the farmyard. He would still sit down to dinner, and would drink his allotted portion of port wine, in the doctor's teeth. The doctor by no means desired to rob him of his last luxury, or even to stint his quantity; but he recommended certain changes in the mode and time of taking it. Against this, however, the old Squire indignantly rebelled, and scolded Kate almost off her legs when she attempted to enforce the doctor's orders. "What the mischief does it signify," the old man said to her one evening;--"what difference will it make whether I am dead or alive, unless it is that George would turn you out of the house directly he gets it." "I was not thinking of any one but yourself, sir," said Kate, with a tear in her eye. "You won't be troubled to think of me much longer," said the Squire; and then he gulped down the remaining half of his glass of wine. Kate was, in truth, very good to him. Women always are good under such circumstances; and Kate Vavasor was one who would certainly stick to such duties as now fell to her lot. She was eminently true and loyal to her friends, though she could be as false on their behalf as most false people can be on their own. She was very good to the old man, tending all his wants, taking his violence with good-humour rather than with submission, not opposing him with direct contradiction when he abused his grandson, but saying little words to mitigate his wrath, if it were possible. At such times the Squire would tell her that she also would learn to know her brother's character some day. "You'll live to be robbed by him, and turned out as naked as you were born," he said to her one day. Then Kate fired up and declared that she fully trusted her brother's love. Whatever faults he might have, he had been staunch to her, So she said, and the old man sneered at her for saying so. One morning, soon after this, when she brought him up to his bedroom some mixture of thin porridge, which he still endeavoured to swallow for his breakfast, he bade her sit down, and began to talk to her about the property. "I know you are a fool," he said, "about all matters of business;--more of a fool than even women generally are." To this Kate acceded with a little smile,--acknowledging that her understanding was limited. "I want to see Gogram," he said. "Do you write to him a line, telling him to come here to-day,--he or one of his men,--and send it at once by Peter." Gogram was an attorney who lived at Penrith, and who was never summoned to Vavasor Hall unless the Squire had something to say about his will. "Don't you think you'd better put it off till you are a little stronger?" said Kate. Whereupon the Squire fired at her such a volley of oaths that she sprang off the chair on which she was sitting, and darted across to a little table at which there was pen and ink, and wrote her note to Mr. Gogram, before she had recovered from the shaking which the battery had given her. She wrote the note, and ran away with it to Peter, and saw Peter on the pony on his way to Penrith, before she dared to return to her grandfather's bedside. "What should you do with the estate if I left it you?" the Squire said to her the first moment she was again back with him. This was a question she could not answer instantly. She stood by his bedside for a while thinking,--holding her grandfather's hand and looking down upon the bed. He, with his rough watery old eyes, was gazing up into her face, as though he were trying to read her thoughts. "I think I should give it to my brother," she said. "Then I'm d---- if I'll leave it to you," said he. She did not jump now, though he had sworn at her. She still stood, holding his hand softly, and looking down upon the bed. "If I were you, grandfather," she said almost in a whisper, "I would not trust myself to alter family arrangements whilst I was ill. I'm sure you would advise any one else against doing so." "And if I were to leave it to Alice, she'd give it to him too," he said, speaking his thoughts out loud. "What it is you see in him, I never could even guess. He's as ugly as a baboon, with his scarred face. He has never done anything to show himself a clever fellow. Kate, give me some of that bottle the man sent." Kate handed him his medicine, and then stood again by his bedside. "Where did he get the money to pay for his election?" the Squire asked, as soon as he had swallowed the draught. "They wouldn't give such a one as him credit a yard further than they could see him." "I don't know where he got it," said Kate, lying. "He has not had yours; has he?" "He would not take it, sir." "And you offered it to him?" "Yes, sir." "And he has not had it?" "Not a penny of it, sir." "And what made you offer it to him after what I said to you?" "Because it was my own," said Kate, stoutly. "You're the biggest idiot that ever I heard of, and you'll know it yourself some day. Go away now, and let me know when Gogram comes." She went away, and for a time employed herself about her ordinary household work. Then she sat down alone in the dingy old dining-room, to think what had better be done in her present circumstances. The carpet of the room was worn out, as were also the covers of the old chairs and the horsehair sofa which was never moved from its accustomed place along the wall. It was not a comfortable Squire's residence, this old house at Vavasor. In the last twenty years no money had been spent on furniture or embellishments, and for the last ten years there had been no painting, either inside or out. Twenty years ago the Squire had been an embarrassed man, and had taken a turn in his life and had lived sparingly. It could not be said that he had become a miser. His table was kept plentifully, and there had never been want in his house. In some respects, too, he had behaved liberally to Kate and to others, and he had kept up the timber and fences on the property. But the house had become wretched in its dull, sombre, dirty darkness, and the gardens round it were as bad. What ought she now to do? She believed that her grandfather's last days were coming, and she knew that others of the family should be with him besides herself. For their sakes, for his, and for her own, it would be proper that she should not be alone there when he died. But for whom should she send? Her brother was the natural heir, and would be the head of the family. Her duty to him was clear, and the more so as her grandfather was at this moment speaking of changes in his will. But it was a question to her whether George's presence at Vavasor, even if he would come, would not at this moment do more harm than good to his own interests. It would make some prejudicial change in the old man's will more probable instead of less so. George would not become soft and mild-spoken even by a death-bed side, and it would be likely enough that the Squire would curse his heir with his dying breath. She might send for her uncle John; but if she did so without telling George she would be treating George unfairly; and she knew that it was improbable that her uncle and her brother should act together in anything. Her aunt Greenow, she thought, would come to her, and her presence would not influence the Squire in any way with reference to the property. So she made up her mind at last that she would ask her aunt to come to Vavasor, and that she would tell her brother accurately all that she could tell,--leaving him to come or stay, as he might think. Alice would, no doubt, learn all the facts from him, and her uncle John would hear them from Alice. Then they could do as they pleased. As soon as Mr. Gogram had been there she would write her letters, and they should be sent over to Shap early on the following morning. Mr. Gogram came and was closeted with the Squire, and the doctor also came. The doctor saw Kate, and, shaking his head, told her that her grandfather was sinking lower and lower every hour. It would be infinitely better for him if he would take that port wine at four doses in the day, or even at two, instead of taking it all together. Kate promised to try again, but stated her conviction that the trial would be useless. The doctor, when pressed on the matter, said that his patient might probably live a week, not improbably a fortnight,--perhaps a month, if he would be obedient,--and so forth. Gogram went away without seeing Kate; and Kate, who looked upon a will as an awful and somewhat tedious ceremony, was in doubt whether her grandfather would live to complete any new operation. But, in truth, the will had been made and signed and witnessed,--the parish clerk and one of the tenants having been had up into the room as witnesses. Kate knew that the men had been there, but still did not think that a new will had been perfected. That evening when it was dusk the Squire came into the dining-room, having been shuffling about the grand sweep before the house for a quarter of an hour. The day was cold and the wind bleak, but still he would go out, and Kate had wrapped him up carefully in mufflers and great-coats. Now he came in to what he called dinner, and Kate sat down with him. He had drank no wine that day, although she had brought it to him twice during the morning. Now he attempted to swallow a little soup, but failed; and after that, while Kate was eating her bit of chicken, had the decanter put before him. "I can't eat, and I suppose it won't hurt you if I take my wine at once," he said. It went against the grain with him, even yet, that he could not wait till the cloth was gone from the table, but his impatience for the only sustenance that he could take was too much for him. "But you should eat something, sir; will you have a bit of toast to sop in your wine?" The word "sop" was badly chosen, and made the old Squire angry. "Sopped toast! why am I to spoil the only thing I can enjoy?" "But the wine would do you more good if you would take something with it." "Good! Nothing will do me any good any more. As for eating, you know I can't eat. What's the use of bothering me?" Then he filled his second glass, and paused awhile before he put it to his lips. He never exceeded four glasses, but the four he was determined that he would have, as long as he could lift them to his mouth. Kate finished, or pretended to finish, her dinner within five minutes, in order that the table might be made to look comfortable for him. Then she poked the fire, and brushed up the hearth, and closed the old curtains with her own hands, moving about silently. As she moved his eye followed her, and when she came behind his chair, and pushed the decanter a little more within his reach, he put out his rough, hairy hand, and laid it upon one of hers which she had rested on the table, with a tenderness that was unusual with him. "You are a good girl, Kate. I wish you had been a boy, that's all." "If I had, I shouldn't, perhaps, have been here to take care of you," she said, smiling. "No; you'd have been like your brother, no doubt. Not that I think there could have been two so bad as he is." "Oh, grandfather, if he has offended you, you should try to forgive him." "Try to forgive him! How often have I forgiven him without any trying? Why did he come down here the other day, and insult me for the last time? Why didn't he keep away, as I had bidden him?" "But you gave him leave to see you, sir." "I didn't give him leave to treat me like that. Never mind; he will find that, old as I am, I can punish an insult." "You haven't done anything, sir, to injure him?" said Kate. "I have made another will, that's all. Do you suppose I had that man here all the way from Penrith for nothing?" "But it isn't done yet?" "I tell you it is done. If I left him the whole property it would be gone in two years' time. What's the use of doing it?" "But for his life, sir! You had promised him that he should have it for his life." "How dare you tell me that? I never promised him. As my heir, he would have had it all, if he would have behaved himself with common decency. Even though I disliked him, as I always have done, he should have had it." "And you have taken it from him altogether?" "I shall answer no questions about it, Kate." Then a fit of coughing came upon him, his four glasses of wine having been all taken, and there was no further talk about business. During the evening Kate read a chapter of the Bible out loud. But the Squire was very impatient under the reading, and positively refused permission for a second. "There isn't any good in so much of it, all at once," he said, using almost exactly the same words which Kate had used to him about the port wine. There may have been good produced by the small quantity to which he listened, as there is good from the physic which children take with wry faces, most unwillingly. Who can say? For many weeks past Kate had begged her uncle to allow the clergyman of Vavasor to come to him; but he had positively declined. The vicar was a young man to whom the living had lately been given by the Chancellor, and he had commenced his career by giving instant offence to the Squire. This vicar's predecessor had been an old man, almost as old as the Squire himself, and had held the living for forty years. He had been a Westmoreland man, had read the prayers and preached his one Sunday sermon in a Westmoreland dialect, getting through the whole operation rather within an hour and a quarter. He had troubled none of his parishioners by much advice, and had been meek and obedient to the Squire. Knowing the country well, and being used to its habits, he had lived, and been charitable too, on the proceeds of his living, which had never reached two hundred a year. But the new comer was a close-fisted man, with higher ideas of personal comfort, who found it necessary to make every penny go as far as possible, who made up in preaching for what he could not give away in charity; who established an afternoon service, and who had rebuked the Squire for saying that the doing so was trash and nonsense. Since that the Squire had never been inside the church, except on the occasion of Christmas-day. For this, indeed, the state of his health gave ample excuse; but he had positively refused to see the vicar, though that gentleman had assiduously called, and had at last desired the servant to tell the clergyman not to come again unless he were sent for. Kate's task was, therefore, difficult, both as regarded the temporal and spiritual wants of her grandfather. When the reading was finished, the old man dozed in his chair for half an hour. He would not go up to bed before the enjoyment of that luxury. He was daily implored to do so, because that sleep in the chair interfered so fatally with his chance of sleeping in bed. But sleep in his chair he would and did. Then he woke, and after a fit of coughing, was induced, with much ill-humour, to go up to his room. Kate had never seen him so weak. He was hardly able, even with her assistance and that of the old servant, to get up the broad stairs. But there was still some power left to him for violence of language after he got to his room, and he rated Kate and the old woman loudly, because his slippers were not in the proper place. "Grandfather," said Kate, "would you like me to stay in the room with you to-night?" He rated her again for this proposition, and then, with assistance from the nurse, he was gotten into bed and was left alone. [Illustration: The last of the old squire.] After that Kate went to her own room and wrote her letters. The first she wrote was to her aunt Greenow. That was easily enough written. To Mrs. Greenow it was not necessary that she should say anything about money. She simply stated her belief that her grandfather's last day was near at hand, and begged her aunt to come and pay a last visit to the old man. "It will be a great comfort to me in my distress," she said; "and it will be a satisfaction to you to have seen your father again." She knew that her aunt would come, and that task was soon done. But her letter to her brother was much more difficult. What should she tell him, and what should she not tell him? She began by describing her grandfather's state, and by saying to him, as she had done to Mrs. Greenow, that she believed the old man's hours were well-nigh come to a close. She told him that she had asked her aunt to come to her; "not," she said, "that I think her coming will be of material service, but I feel the loneliness of the house will be too much for me at such a time. I must leave it for you to decide," she said, "whether you had better be here. If anything should happen,"--people when writing such letters are always afraid to speak of death by its proper name,--"I will send you a message, and no doubt you would come at once." Then came the question of the will. Had it not occurred to her that her own interests were involved she would have said nothing on the subject; but she feared her brother,--feared even his misconstruction of her motives, even though she was willing to sacrifice so much on his behalf,--and therefore she resolved to tell him all that she knew. He might turn upon her hereafter if she did not do so, and accuse her of a silence which had been prejudicial to him. So she told it all, and the letter became long in the telling. "I write with a heavy heart," she said, "because I know it will be a great blow to you. He gave me to understand that in this will he left everything away from you. I cannot declare that he said so directly. Indeed I cannot remember his words; but that was the impression he left on me. The day before he had asked me what I should do if he gave me the estate; but of course I treated that as a joke. I have no idea what he put into his will. I have not even attempted to guess. But now I have told you all that I know." The letter was a very long one, and was not finished till late; but when it was completed she had the two taken out into the kitchen, as the boy was to start with them before daylight. Early on the next morning she crept silently into her grandfather's room, as was her habit; but he was apparently sleeping, and then she crept back again. The old servant told her that the Squire had been awake at four, and at five, and at six, and had called for her. Then he had seemed to go to sleep. Four or five times in the course of the morning Kate went into the room, but her grandfather did not notice her. At last she feared he might already have passed away, and she put her hand upon his shoulder, and down his arm. He then gently touched her hand with his, showing her plainly that he was not only alive, but conscious. She then offered him food,--the thin porridge,--which he was wont to take, and the medicine. She offered him some wine too, but he would take nothing. At twelve o'clock a letter was brought to her, which had come by the post. She saw that it was from Alice, and opening it found that it was very long. At that moment she could not read it, but she saw words in it that made her wish to know its contents as quickly as possible. But she could not leave her grandfather then. At two o'clock the doctor came to him, and remained there till the dusk of the evening had commenced. At eight o'clock the old man was dead.

In the meantime Kate Vavasor was living in Westmorland with her grandfather, and did not have a very pleasant life. George thought of the old man as being as strong as a tower, and full of life. But, in fact, the embers of the Squire's life were burning low. He was, indeed, very weak with age, and tottering with unsteady steps on the brink of his grave, though he would still creep about the garden and into the farmyard. He would still sit down to dinner, and drink his allotted portion of port wine. The doctor did not try to rob him of his last luxury; but he recommended certain changes in the taking of it. The old Squire indignantly rebelled, and scolded Kate when she attempted to enforce the doctor's orders. "What does it matter," the old man said one evening, "whether I am dead or alive? Unless George would turn you out of the house directly he gets it." "I was not thinking of anyone but you, sir," said Kate, with a tear in her eye. "You won't be troubled to think of me much longer," said the Squire; and he gulped down the rest of his wine. Kate was, in truth, very good to him. She was true and loyal to her friends, though she could be false on their behalf. She tended to the old man with good-humour, not contradicting him when he abused his grandson, but saying little things to mitigate his anger. "You'll learn his character some day," the Squire told her. "You'll live to be robbed by him, and turned out as naked as you were born." Then Kate fired up and declared that she fully trusted her brother. Whatever faults he might have, he had been true to her. So she said, and the old man sneered at her for saying so. One morning, when she brought his porridge up to his bedroom, he told her to sit down, and began to talk to her about the property. "I know you are a fool," he said, "about all matters of business." To this Kate acceded with a little smile. "I want to see Gogram," he said. "Write and tell him to come here today - and send it at once by Peter." Gogram was an attorney at Penrith, who was never summoned to Vavasor Hall unless the Squire had something to say about his will. "Don't you think you'd better put it off till you are a little stronger?" said Kate. The Squire fired such a volley of oaths at her that she sprang up and wrote at once to Mr. Gogram. She gave the note to Peter, and saw Peter depart on the pony to Penrith, before she dared to return to her grandfather's bedside. "What should you do with the estate if I left it you?" the Squire said to her. She could not answer instantly. She stood by his bedside thinking, and holding her grandfather's hand. "I think I should give it to my brother," she said. "Then I'm d-- if I'll leave it to you," said he. "If I were you, grandfather," she said softly, "I would not trust myself to alter family arrangements whilst I was ill. I'm sure you would advise anyone else against doing so." "And if I were to leave it to Alice, she'd give it to him too," he said. "What you see in him, I never could guess. He has never done anything to show himself a clever fellow. Kate, give me some of that medicine." Kate handed him his medicine, and then stood again by his bedside. "Where did he get the money to pay for his election?" the Squire asked. "I don't know," said Kate, lying. "He has not had yours, has he?" "He would not take it, sir." "And you offered it to him?" "Yes, sir. It was my own," said Kate stoutly. "You're the biggest idiot that ever I heard of. Go away now, and let me know when Gogram comes." She went away, and sat down alone in the dingy old dining-room, to think what had better be done. The carpet of the room was worn out, as were the chair-covers and the horsehair sofa by the wall. It was not a comfortable house. In the last twenty years no money had been spent on furniture, and for the last ten years there had been no painting, either inside or out. The Squire was not a miser. In some respects, he had behaved generously to Kate and others, and he had kept up the timber and fences on the property. But the house had become wretched in its dirty, sombre darkness. What ought she to do? She believed that her grandfather's last days were coming, and she knew that other relatives should be with him when he died. But for whom should she send? Her brother was the natural heir, and would be the head of the family. But George's presence at Vavasor Hall might do more harm than good to his own interests. It would make some unfavourable change in the old man's will more probable. George would not become soft and mild-spoken even by a death-bed side. She might send for her uncle John; but if she did so without telling George she would be treating George unfairly. Her aunt Greenow, she thought, would come to her, and her presence would not influence the Squire. So she made up her mind to ask her aunt to come to Vavasor, and to tell George all that she could, leaving him to come or stay as he thought best. Alice would, no doubt, learn the facts from him, and her uncle John would hear them from Alice. Then they could do as they pleased. As soon as Mr. Gogram had been there she would write her letters, and send them off the following morning. Mr. Gogram came to see the Squire, and the doctor also came. The doctor, shaking his head, told her that her grandfather was sinking lower every hour. He would probably live a week, possibly a fortnight - perhaps a month, if he would be obedient. Gogram went away without seeing Kate; and Kate did not know whether her grandfather had done anything with the will. But, in truth, the will had been made and signed, and witnessed by the parish clerk and one of the tenants. That evening at dusk the Squire came into the dining-room, after shuffling about the drive outside for a quarter of an hour. The day was cold and the wind bleak, but still he would go out, and Kate had wrapped him up carefully in mufflers and great-coats. Now he came in to dinner, and Kate sat down with him. He attempted to swallow a little soup, but failed; and had the decanter put before him. "I can't eat, so I will take my wine at once," he said. "But you should eat something, sir; will you have a bit of toast to sop in your wine?" The word "sop" was badly chosen, and made the old Squire angry. "Sopped toast! why spoil the only thing I can enjoy?" "But the wine would do you more good if you would take something with it." "Nothing will do me any good any more. What's the use of bothering me?" Then he filled his second glass, and paused before he put it to his lips. He never exceeded four glasses, but the four he was determined to have, as long as he could lift them to his mouth. Kate quickly finished her dinner. Then she poked the fire, and brushed up the hearth, and closed the old curtains, moving about silently. When she came past his chair, he put out his rough hand, and laid it upon one of hers with a tenderness that was unusual for him. "You are a good girl, Kate. I wish you had been a boy, that's all." "If I had, I shouldn't have been here to take care of you," she said, smiling. "No; you'd have been like your brother, no doubt. Though there could not have been two so bad as he is." "Oh, grandfather, if he has offended you, you should try to forgive him." "Forgive him! How often have I forgiven him? Why did he come down here the other day, and insult me? Why didn't he keep away, as I had told him?" "But you gave him leave to see you, sir." "I didn't give him leave to treat me like that. Never mind; he will find that, old as I am, I can punish an insult." "You haven't done anything, sir, to injure him?" said Kate. "I have made another will, that's all. If I left him the whole property it would be gone in two years' time. What's the use of doing it?" "But for his life, sir! You had promised him that he should have it for his life." "How dare you tell me that? I never promised him. As my heir, he would have had it all, if he had behaved with common decency. Even though I disliked him, he should have had it." "And you have taken it from him altogether?" "I shall answer no questions about it, Kate." Then a fit of coughing came upon him, and there was no further talk. During the evening Kate read a chapter of the Bible out loud. But the Squire was very impatient. "There isn't any good in so much of it, all at once." For many weeks Kate had begged her uncle to allow the clergyman of Vavasor to come to him; but he had declined. The vicar was a young man who had begun his career by giving instant offence to the Squire. He had established an afternoon service, and then rebuked the Squire for saying that it was trash and nonsense. Since then the Squire had never been inside the church, except on Christmas Day. Kate's task was, therefore, difficult. When the reading was finished, the old man dozed in his chair for half an hour, refusing to go up to bed yet. Sleep in his chair he would and did. Then he woke, and after a fit of coughing, was induced to go up to his room. Kate had never seen him so weak. He was hardly able, even with her help and that of the old servant, to get up the broad stairs. But once in his room, he berated Kate and the old woman loudly, because his slippers were not in the proper place. "Grandfather," said Kate, "would you like me to stay in the room with you tonight?" He berated her again for this, and then he was got into bed and left alone. Kate went to her own room and wrote her letters. The one to her aunt Greenow was easily written. Kate simply stated her belief that her grandfather's last day was near, and begged her aunt to come and pay him a visit. "It will be a great comfort to me in my distress," she said; "and it will be a satisfaction to you to have seen your father again." She knew that her aunt would come. But her letter to her brother was much more difficult. What should she tell him, and what should she not? She began by describing her grandfather's state. She told him that she had asked her aunt to come to her; "because," she said, "I feel the loneliness of the house will be too much for me at such a time. I must leave it for you to decide whether you had better be here. If anything should happen, I will send you a message, and no doubt you would come at once." Then came the question of the will. If she was silent, she feared her brother might misconstrue her motives, even though she was willing to sacrifice so much on his behalf; and therefore she resolved to tell him all that she knew. The letter became long in the telling. "I write with a heavy heart," she said, "because I know it will be a great blow to you. He gave me to understand that in this will he left everything away from you. I cannot declare that he said so directly; but that was the impression he gave. I have no idea what he put into his will. But now I have told you all that I know." The letter was not finished till late. Early the next morning she crept silently into her grandfather's room; but he was apparently sleeping. The old servant told her that the Squire had been awake at four, and had called for her, but then he had seemed to go to sleep. Four or five times during the morning Kate went into the room, but her grandfather did not notice her until she put her hand upon his shoulder. He then gently touched her hand with his. She offered him food and wine, but he would take nothing. At twelve o'clock a letter arrived for her. She saw that it was from Alice, and was very long. At that moment she could not read it, although she saw words in it that made her wish to know its contents as quickly as possible. But she could not leave her grandfather then. At two o'clock the doctor came, and remained till evening. At eight o'clock the old man was dead.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 53: The Last Will of the Old Squire

Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. Green turf is absolutely an essential. There should be trees, broken ground, small paths, thickets, and hidden recesses. There should, if possible, be rocks, old timber, moss, and brambles. There should certainly be hills and dales,--on a small scale; and above all, there should be running water. There should be no expanse. Jones should not be able to see all Greene's movements, nor should Augusta always have her eye upon her sister Jane. But the spot chosen for Mr. Cheesacre's picnic at Yarmouth had none of the virtues above described. It was on the seashore. Nothing was visible from the site but sand and sea. There were no trees there and nothing green;--neither was there any running water. But there was a long, dry, flat strand; there was an old boat half turned over, under which it was proposed to dine; and in addition to this, benches, boards, and some amount of canvas for shelter were provided by the liberality of Mr. Cheesacre. Therefore it was called Mr. Cheesacre's picnic. But it was to be a marine picnic, and therefore the essential attributes of other picnics were not required. The idea had come from some boating expeditions, in which mackerel had been caught, and during which food had been eaten, not altogether comfortably, in the boats. Then a thought had suggested itself to Captain Bellfield that they might land and eat their food, and his friend Mr. Cheesacre had promised his substantial aid. A lady had surmised that Ormesby sands would be the very place for dancing in the cool of the evening. They might "Dance on the sand," she said, "and yet no footing seen." And so the thing had progressed, and the picnic been inaugurated. It was Mr. Cheesacre's picnic undoubtedly. Mr. Cheesacre was to supply the boats, the wine, the cigars, the music, and the carpenter's work necessary for the turning of the old boat into a banqueting saloon. But Mrs. Greenow had promised to provide the eatables, and enjoyed as much of the _clat_ as the master of the festival. She had known Mr. Cheesacre now for ten days and was quite intimate with him. He was a stout, florid man, of about forty-five, a bachelor, apparently much attached to ladies' society, bearing no sign of age except that he was rather bald, and that grey hairs had mixed themselves with his whiskers, very fond of his farming, and yet somewhat ashamed of it when he found himself in what he considered to be polite circles. And he was, moreover, a little inclined to seek the honour which comes from a well-filled and liberally-opened purse. He liked to give a man a dinner and then to boast of the dinner he had given. He was very proud when he could talk of having mounted, for a day's hunting, any man who might be supposed to be of higher rank than himself. "I had Grimsby with me the other day,--the son of old Grimsby of Hatherwick, you know. Blessed if he didn't stake my bay mare. But what matters? I mounted him again the next day just the same." Some people thought he was soft, for it was very well known throughout Norfolk that young Grimsby would take a mount wherever he could get it. In these days Mrs. Greenow had become intimate with Mr. Cheesacre, and had already learned that he was the undoubted owner of his own acres. "It wouldn't do for me," she had said to him, "to be putting myself forward, as if I were giving a party myself, or anything of that sort;--would it now?" "Well, perhaps not. But you might come with us." "So I will, Mr. Cheesacre, for that dear girl's sake. I should never forgive myself if I debarred her from all the pleasures of youth, because of my sorrows. I need hardly say that at such a time as this nothing of that sort can give me any pleasure." "I suppose not," said Mr. Cheesacre, with solemn look. "Quite out of the question." And Mrs. Greenow wiped away her tears. "For though as regards age I might dance on the sands as merrily as the best of them--" "That I'm sure you could, Mrs. Greenow." "How's a woman to enjoy herself if her heart lies buried?" "But it won't be so always, Mrs. Greenow." Mrs. Greenow shook her head to show that she hardly knew how to answer such a question. Probably it would be so always;--but she did not wish to put a damper on the present occasion by making so sad a declaration. "But as I was saying," continued she--"if you and I do it between us won't that be the surest way of having it come off nicely?" Mr. Cheesacre thought that it would be the best way. "Exactly so;--I'll do the meat and pastry and fruit, and you shall do the boats and the wine." "And the music," said Cheesacre, "and the expenses at the place." He did not choose that any part of his outlay should go unnoticed. "I'll go halves in all that if you like," said Mrs. Greenow. But Mr. Cheesacre had declined this. He did not begrudge the expense, but only wished that it should be recognised. "And, Mr. Cheesacre," continued Mrs. Greenow. "I did mean to send the music; I did, indeed." "I couldn't hear of it, Mrs. Greenow." "But I mention it now, because I was thinking of getting Blowehard to come. That other man, Flutey, wouldn't do at all out in the open air." "It shall be Blowehard," said Mr. Cheesacre; and it was Blowehard. Mrs. Greenow liked to have her own way in these little things, though her heart did lie buried. On the morning of the picnic Mr. Cheesacre came down to Montpelier Parade with Captain Bellfield, whose linen on that occasion certainly gave no outward sign of any quarrel between him and his washerwoman. He was got up wonderfully, and was prepared at all points for the day's work. He had on a pseudo-sailor's jacket, very liberally ornamented with brass buttons, which displayed with great judgement the exquisite shapes of his pseudo-sailor's duck trousers. Beneath them there was a pair of very shiny patent-leather shoes, well adapted for dancing on the sand, presuming him to be anxious of doing so, as Venus offered to do, without leaving any footmarks. His waistcoat was of a delicate white fabric, ornamented with very many gilt buttons. He had bejewelled studs in his shirt, and yellow kid gloves on his hands; having, of course, another pair in his pocket for the necessities of the evening. His array was quite perfect, and had stricken dismay into the heart of his friend Cheesacre, when he joined that gentleman. He was a well-made man, nearly six feet high, with dark hair, dark whiskers, and dark moustache, nearly black, but of that suspicious hue which to the observant beholder seems always to tell a tale of the hairdresser's shop. He was handsome, too, with well-arranged features,--but carrying, perhaps, in his nose some first symptoms of the effects of midnight amusements. Upon the whole, however, he was a nice man to look at--for those who like to look on nice men of that kind. Cheesacre, too, had adopted something of a sailor's garb. He had on a jacket of a rougher sort, coming down much lower than that of the captain, being much looser, and perhaps somewhat more like a garment which a possible seaman might possibly wear. But he was disgusted with himself the moment that he saw Bellfield. His heart had been faint, and he had not dared to ornament himself boldly as his friend had done. "I say, Guss, you are a swell," he exclaimed. It may be explained that Captain Bellfield had been christened Gustavus. "I don't know much about that," said the captain; "my fellow sent me this toggery, and said that it was the sort of thing. I'll change with you if you like it." But Cheesacre could not have worn that jacket, and he walked on, hating himself. It will be remembered that Mrs. Greenow had spoken with considerable severity of Captain Bellfield's pretensions when discussing his character with her niece; but, nevertheless, on the present occasion she received him with most gracious smiles. It may be that her estimate of his character had been altered, or that she was making sacrifice of her own feelings in consideration of Mr. Cheesacre, who was known to be the captain's intimate friend. But she had smiles for both of them. She had a wondrous power of smiling; and could, upon occasion, give signs of peculiar favour to half a dozen different gentlemen in as many minutes. They found her in the midst of hampers which were not yet wholly packed, while Mrs. Jones, Jeannette, and the cook of the household moved around her, on the outside of the circle, ministering to her wants. She had in her hand an outspread clean napkin, and she wore fastened round her dress a huge coarse apron, that she might thus be protected from some possible ebullition of gravy, or escape of salad mixture, or cream; but in other respects she was clothed in the fullest honours of widowhood. She had not mitigated her weeds by half an inch. She had scorned to make any compromise between the world of pleasure and the world of woe. There she was, a widow, declared by herself to be of four months' standing, with a buried heart, making ready a dainty banquet with skill and liberality. She was ready on the instant to sit down upon the baskets in which the grouse pie had been just carefully inhumed, and talked about her sainted lamb with a deluge of tears. If anybody didn't like it, that person--might do the other thing. Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield thought that they did like it. "Oh, Mr. Cheesacre, if you haven't caught me before I've half done! Captain Bellfield, I hope you think my apron becoming." "Everything that you wear, Mrs. Greenow, is always becoming." "Don't talk in that way when you know--; but never mind--we will think of nothing sad to-day if we can help it. Will we, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Oh dear no; I should think not;--unless it should come on to rain." "It won't rain--we won't think of such a thing. But, by the by, Captain Bellfield, I and my niece do mean to send out a few things, just in a bag you know, so that we may tidy ourselves up a little after the sea. I don't want it mentioned, because if it gets about among the other ladies, they'd think we wanted to make a dressing of it;--and there wouldn't be room for them all; would there?" "No; there wouldn't," said Mr. Cheesacre, who had been out on the previous evening, inspecting, and perhaps limiting, the carpenters in their work. "That's just it," said Mrs. Greenow. "But there won't be any harm, will there, Mr. Cheesacre, in Jeanette's going out with our things? She'll ride in the cart, you know, with the eatables. I know Jeannette's a friend of yours." "We shall be delighted to have Jeanette," said Mr. Cheesacre. "Thank ye, sir," said Jeannette, with a curtsey. "Jeannette, don't you let Mr. Cheesacre turn your head; and mind you behave yourself and be useful. Well; let me see;--what else is there? Mrs. Jones, you might as well give me that ham now. Captain Bellfield, hand it over. Don't you put it into the basket, because you'd turn it the wrong side down. There now, if you haven't nearly made me upset the apricot pie." Then, in the transfer of the dishes between the captain and the widow, there occurred some little innocent by-play, which seemed to give offence to Mr. Cheesacre; so that that gentleman turned his back upon the hampers and took a step away towards the door. Mrs. Greenow saw the thing at a glance, and immediately applied herself to cure the wound. "What do you think, Mr. Cheesacre," said she, "Kate wouldn't come down because she didn't choose that you should see her with an apron on over her frock!" "I'm sure I don't know why Miss Vavasor should care about my seeing her." "Nor I either. That's just what I said. Do step up into the drawing-room; you'll find her there, and you can make her answer for herself." "She wouldn't come down for me," said Mr. Cheesacre. But he didn't stir. Perhaps he wasn't willing to leave his friend with the widow. At length the last of the dishes was packed and Mrs. Greenow went up-stairs with the two gentlemen. There they found Kate and two or three other ladies who had promised to embark under the protection of Mrs. Greenow's wings. There were the two Miss Fairstairs, whom Mrs. Greenow had especially patronized, and who repaid that lady for her kindness by an amount of outspoken eulogy which startled Kate by its audacity. "Your dear aunt!" Fanny Fairstairs had said on coming into the room. "I don't think I ever came across a woman with such genuine milk of human kindness!" "Nor with so much true wit," said her sister Charlotte,--who had been called Charlie on the sands of Yarmouth for the last twelve years. When the widow came into the room, they flew at her and devoured her with kisses, and swore that they had never seen her looking so well. But as the bright new gloves which both the girls wore had been presents from Mrs. Greenow, they certainly did owe her some affection. There are not many ladies who would venture to bestow such gifts upon their friends after so very short an acquaintance; but Mrs. Greenow had a power that was quite her own in such matters. She was already on a very confidential footing with the Miss Fairstairs, and had given them much useful advice as to their future prospects. And then was there a Mrs. Green, whose husband was first-lieutenant on board a man-of-war on the West Indian Station. Mrs. Green was a quiet, ladylike little woman, rather pretty, very silent, and, as one would have thought, hardly adapted for the special intimacy of Mrs. Greenow. But Mrs. Greenow had found out that she was alone, not very rich, and in want of the solace of society. Therefore she had, from sheer good-nature, forced herself upon Mrs. Green, and Mrs. Green, with much trepidation, had consented to be taken to the picnic. "I know your husband would like it," Mrs. Greenow had said, "and I hope I may live to tell him that I made you go." There came in also a brother of the Fairstairs girls, Joe Fairstairs, a lanky, useless, idle young man, younger than them, who was supposed to earn his bread in an attorney's office at Norwich, or rather to be preparing to earn it at some future time, and who was a heavy burden upon all his friends. "We told Joe to come to the house," said Fanny to the widow, apologetically, "because we thought he might be useful in carrying down the cloaks." Mrs. Greenow smiled graciously upon Joe, and assured him that she was charmed to see him, without any reference to such services as those mentioned. And then they started. When they got to the door both Cheesacre and the captain made an attempt to get possession of the widow's arm. But she had it all arranged. Captain Bellfield found himself constrained to attend to Mrs. Green, while Mr. Cheesacre walked down to the beach beside Kate Vavasor. "I'll take your arm, Mr. Joe," said the widow, "and the girls shall come with us." But when they got to the boats, round which the other comers to the picnic were already assembled, Mr. Cheesacre,--although both the boats were for the day his own,--found himself separated from the widow. He got into that which contained Kate Vavasor, and was shoved off from the beach while he saw Captain Bellfield arranging Mrs. Greenow's drapery. He had declared to himself that it should be otherwise; and that as he had to pay the piper, the piper should play as he liked it. But Mrs. Greenow with a word or two had settled it all, and Mr. Cheesacre had found himself to be powerless. "How absurd Bellfield looks in that jacket, doesn't he?" he said to Kate, as he took his seat in the boat. "Do you think so? I thought it was so very pretty and becoming for the occasion." Mr. Cheesacre hated Captain Bellfield, and regretted more than ever that he had not done something for his own personal adornment. He could not endure to think that his friend, who paid for nothing, should carry away the honours of the morning and defraud him of the delights which should justly belong to him, "It may be becoming," said Cheesacre; "but don't you think it's awfully extravagant?" "As to that I can't tell. You see I don't at all know what is the price of a jacket covered all over with little brass buttons." "And the waistcoat, Miss Vavasor!" said Cheesacre, almost solemnly. "The waistcoat I should think must have been expensive." "Oh, dreadful! and he's got nothing, Miss Vavasor; literally nothing. Do you know,"--and he reduced his voice to a whisper as he made this communication,--"I lent him twenty pounds the day before yesterday; I did indeed. You won't mention it again, of course. I tell you, because, as you are seeing a good deal of him just now, I think it right that you should know on what sort of a footing he stands." It's all fair, they say, in love and war, and this small breach of confidence was, we must presume, a love stratagem on the part of Mr. Cheesacre. He was at this time smitten with the charms both of the widow and of the niece, and he constantly found that the captain was interfering with him on whichever side he turned himself. On the present occasion he had desired to take the widow for his share, and was, upon the whole, inclined to think that the widow was the more worthy of his attentions. He had made certain little inquiries within the last day or two, the answers to which had been satisfactory. These he had by no means communicated to his friend, to whom, indeed, he had expressed an opinion that Mrs. Greenow was after all only a flash in the pan. "She does very well pour passer le temps," the captain had answered. Mr. Cheesacre had not quite understood the exact gist of the captain's meaning, but had felt certain that his friend was playing him false. "I don't want it to be mentioned again, Miss Vavasor," he continued. "Such things should not be mentioned at all," Kate replied, having been angered at the insinuation that the nature of Captain Bellfield's footing could be a matter of any moment to her. "No, they shouldn't; and therefore I know that I'm quite safe with you, Miss Vavasor. He's a very pleasant fellow, very; and has seen the world,--uncommon; but he's better for eating and drinking with than he is for buying and selling with, as we say in Norfolk. Do you like Norfolk, Miss Vavasor?" "I never was in it before, and now I've only seen Yarmouth." "A nice place, Yarmouth, very; but you should come up and see our lands. I suppose you don't know that we feed one-third of England during the winter months." "Dear me!" "We do, though; nobody knows what a county Norfolk is. Taking it altogether, including the game you know, and Lord Nelson, and its watering-places and the rest of it, I don't think there's a county in England to beat it. Fancy feeding one-third of all England and Wales!" "With bread and cheese, do you mean, and those sort of things?" "Beef!" said Mr. Cheesacre, and in his patriotic energy he repeated the word aloud. "Beef! Yes indeed; but if you were to tell them that in London they wouldn't believe you. Ah! you should certainly come down and see our lands. The 7.45 A.M. train would take you through Norwich to my door, as one may say, and you would be back by the 6.22 P.M." In this way he brought himself back again into good-humour, feeling, that in the absence of the widow, he could not do better than make progress with the niece. In the mean time Mrs. Greenow and the captain were getting on very comfortably in the other boat. "Take an oar, Captain," one of the men had said to him as soon as he had placed the ladies. "Not to-day, Jack," he had answered. "I'll content myself with being bo'san this morning." "The best thing as the bo'san does is to pipe all hands to grog," said the man. "I won't be behind in that either," said the captain; and so they all went on swimmingly. "What a fine generous fellow your friend, Mr. Cheesacre, is!" said the widow. "Yes, he is; he's a capital fellow in his way. Some of these Norfolk farmers are no end of good fellows." "And I suppose he's something more than a common farmer. He's visited by the people about where he lives, isn't he?" "Oh, yes, in a sort of a way. The county people, you know, keep themselves very much to themselves." "That's of course. But his house;--he has a good sort of place, hasn't he?" "Yes, yes;--a very good house;--a little too near to the horse-pond for my taste. But when a man gets his money out of the till, he mustn't be ashamed of the counter;--must he, Mrs. Greenow?" "But he could live like a gentleman if he let his own land, couldn't he?" "That depends upon how a gentleman wishes to live." Here the privacy of their conversation was interrupted by an exclamation from a young lady to the effect that Charlie Fairstairs was becoming sick. This Charlie stoutly denied, and proved the truth of her assertion by her behaviour. Soon after this they completed their marine adventures, and prepared to land close to the spot at which the banquet was prepared.

Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. There should be grass, trees, small paths, thickets, and hidden recesses. There should be hills and dales - on a small scale; and above all, there should be running water. But the spot chosen for Mr. Cheesacre's picnic had none of these virtues. It was on the seashore. Nothing was visible but sand and sea. There were no trees and nothing green; but there was a long, dry, flat beach; there was an old boat half turned over, under which it was proposed to dine; and benches, tables, and some canvas for shelter were provided by Mr. Cheesacre. Therefore it was called Mr. Cheesacre's picnic. It was to be a marine picnic; an idea taken from some boating expeditions, during which food had been eaten, not altogether comfortably, in the boats. Captain Bellfield had suggested that they might land and eat their food, and his friend Mr. Cheesacre had promised his aid. A lady had said that the sand would be the very place for dancing in the cool of the evening. And so the thing had progressed. Mr. Cheesacre was to supply the boats, the wine, the cigars, the music, and the carpenter's work necessary for turning the old boat into a banqueting saloon. But Mrs. Greenow had promised to provide the food. She had known Mr. Cheesacre now for ten days and was quite intimate with him. He was a stout, florid man of about forty-five, a bachelor, apparently much attached to ladies' society, rather bald, and very fond of his farming - and yet somewhat ashamed of it in what he considered to be polite circles. He was, moreover, inclined to seek the honour which comes from a well-filled and generous purse. He liked to give a man dinner and then to boast of the dinner he had given. Mrs. Greenow had already learned that he was the owner of his own acres. "It wouldn't do for me," she had said to him, "to be putting myself forward, as if I were giving a party myself." "Well, perhaps not. But you might come with us." "So I will, Mr. Cheesacre, for that dear girl's sake. I should never forgive myself if I prevented her pleasures, because of my sorrows. Just now nothing of that sort can give me any pleasure." "I suppose not," said Mr. Cheesacre solemnly. "Quite out of the question." Mrs. Greenow wiped away her tears. "For how is a woman to enjoy herself if her heart lies buried?" "But it won't be so always, Mrs. Greenow." Mrs. Greenow shook her head doubtfully. "But as I was saying, if you and I do it between us, won't that be best? I'll do the meat and pastry and fruit, and you shall do the boats and the wine." "And the music," said Cheesacre, "and the expenses." He did not choose that any part of his outlay should go unnoticed. "About the music - I was thinking of getting Blowhard to come." "It shall be Blowhard," said Mr. Cheesacre. On the morning of the picnic Mr. Cheesacre came to Montpelier Parade with Captain Bellfield, whose linen that day certainly gave no sign of any quarrel with his washerwoman. He was got up wonderfully, in a pseudo-sailor's jacket, liberally ornamented with brass buttons, a fine white waistcoat, and pseudo-sailor's trousers. He wore a pair of very shiny patent-leather shoes, well adapted for dancing on the sand. He had bejewelled studs in his shirt, and yellow kid gloves on his hands; and his appearance struck dismay into the heart of his friend Cheesacre. The captain was a tall, handsome, well-made man, whose hair and whiskers were nearly black, but of that suspicious hue which seems to tell of the hairdresser's shop. Cheesacre, too, had adopted a sailor's garb. He had on a rougher, looser jacket than the captain's, perhaps more like a real seaman's garment. But he was disgusted with himself the moment that he saw Bellfield. "I say, you are a swell," he exclaimed. "I don't know about that," said the captain. "I'll change with you if you like." But Cheesacre could not have worn that jacket, and he walked on, hating himself. It will be remembered that Mrs. Greenow had spoken severely of Captain Bellfield's pretensions when discussing him with her niece; nevertheless, on this occasion she received him with most gracious smiles. But she had smiles for Mr. Cheesacre too. She had a wondrous power of smiling; and could, at times, favour half a dozen different gentlemen in as many minutes. They found her in the midst of half-packed hampers, while Mrs. Jones, Jeannette, and the cook moved around her. She wore a huge apron, to protect her dress from any possible escape of cream or gravy; but otherwise she was clothed in full mourning. There she was, a widow of four months' standing, with a buried heart, skilfully making ready a dainty banquet. Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield were charmed. "Oh, Mr. Cheesacre, if you haven't caught me before I've half done! Captain Bellfield, I hope you think my apron becoming." "Everything that you wear, Mrs. Greenow, is always becoming." "Don't talk in that way when - but never mind; we will think of nothing sad today. Will we, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Oh dear no; unless it should happen to rain." "It won't rain. By the by, Captain Bellfield, I and my niece mean to send ahead a few things in a bag, so that we may tidy ourselves up a little after the sea. I don't want it mentioned, because if it gets about among the other ladies, they'd think we wanted to dress up; and there wouldn't be room for them all, would there?" "No," said Mr. Cheesacre. "But you don't mind Jeanette's going with our things? She'll ride in the cart, you know, with the food." "We shall be delighted to have Jeanette," said Mr. Cheesacre. "Thank ye, sir," said Jeannette, with a curtsey. "Jeannette, don't you let Mr. Cheesacre turn your head; and mind you behave yourself and be useful. Mrs. Jones, you might as well give me that ham now. Captain Bellfield, don't you put it into the basket upside down. There now, if you haven't nearly made me upset the apricot pie." Some innocent little by-play in the transfer of the dishes seemed to give offence to Mr. Cheesacre; he turned his back upon the hampers and stepped towards the door. Mrs. Greenow saw this at a glance, and immediately applied herself to cure the wound. "What do you think, Mr. Cheesacre," said she, "Kate wouldn't come down because she didn't want you to see her with an apron on!" "I'm sure I don't know why Miss Vavasor should care about that." "That's just what I said. Do step into the drawing-room; you'll find her there, and you can make her answer for herself." But Mr. Cheesacre didn't stir. Perhaps he wasn't willing to leave his friend with the widow. At length the food was packed and Mrs. Greenow went upstairs with the two gentlemen. There they found Kate and two or three other ladies who had promised to come: including the two Miss Fairstairs, whom Mrs. Greenow had patronized, and who repaid that lady for her kindness by an amount of outspoken praise which startled Kate. "Your dear aunt!" Fanny Fairstairs had said on arriving. "I don't think I ever came across a woman with such milk of human kindness!" "Or so much true wit," said her sister Charlotte - who had been called Charlie in Yarmouth for the last twelve years. When the widow came into the room, they devoured her with kisses, and swore that they had never seen her looking so well. But as the girls' bright new gloves had been presents from Mrs. Greenow, they certainly did owe her some affection. Not many ladies would bestow such gifts upon their friends after so very short an acquaintance. And then was there a Mrs. Green, whose husband was first-lieutenant on board a man-of-war in the West Indies. Mrs. Green was a quiet, ladylike little woman, very silent, and, one would have thought, hardly adapted to be a friend of Mrs. Greenow. But Mrs. Greenow had found out that she was alone, not very rich, and in need of society. Therefore she had good-naturedly forced Mrs. Green to come to the picnic. There came in also a younger brother of the Fairstairs girls, Joe Fairstairs, a lanky, useless, idle young man, who was supposed to earn his bread in an attorney's office at Norwich. "We told Joe to come to the house," said Fanny to the widow, apologetically, "because we thought he might be useful in carrying the cloaks." Mrs. Greenow smiled graciously upon Joe, and assured him that she was charmed to see him. They set off. Both Cheesacre and the captain tried to take the widow's arm; but she had it all arranged. "I'll take your arm, Mr. Joe," said she, and Captain Bellfield found himself obliged to attend to Mrs. Green, while Mr. Cheesacre walked to the beach beside Kate Vavasor. When they got to the boats, where the other picnickers were assembled, Mr. Cheesacre found himself separated from the widow. He got into the boat which contained Kate Vavasor, and was shoved off from the beach while he saw Captain Bellfield arranging Mrs. Greenow's cloak. "How absurd Bellfield looks in that jacket, doesn't he?" he said to Kate. "Do you think so? I thought it very becoming for the occasion." Mr. Cheesacre hated Captain Bellfield. He could not bear to think that his friend, who paid for nothing, should defraud him of the delights which should justly belong to him. "It may be becoming," said he; "but it's dreadfully extravagant! and he's got no money, Miss Vavasor; literally nothing. Do you know," and he reduced his voice to a whisper, "I lent him twenty pounds the other day. As you are seeing a good deal of him just now, I think it right that you should know." All's fair, they say, in love and war, and this small breach of confidence was a love stratagem. Mr. Cheesacre was smitten with the charms both of the widow and the niece, and he constantly found that the captain was interfering with him. On this occasion he had desired to take the widow for his share, and was, upon the whole, inclined to think she was the more worthy of his attentions. "You won't mention it, of course, Miss Vavasor," he continued. "Of course not." "Bellfield's a very pleasant fellow, and has seen the world; but he's better for eating and drinking with than he is for buying and selling with, as we say in Norfolk. Do you like Norfolk, Miss Vavasor?" "I never was here before, and I've only seen Yarmouth." "A nice place, Yarmouth; but you should come and see our lands. We feed one-third of England during the winter months." "Dear me!" "We do, though; altogether, I don't think there's a county in England to beat Norfolk. Ah! you should certainly come and see our lands. The 7.45 a.m. train would take you through Norwich to my door, as one may say, and you would be back by the 6.22 p.m." In this way he brought himself back into good-humour, feeling that in the absence of the widow, he made good progress with the niece. In the meantime Mrs. Greenow and the captain were getting on very comfortably in the other boat. "What a fine generous fellow your friend, Mr. Cheesacre, is!" said the widow. "Yes; he's a capital fellow in his way, for a farmer." "I suppose he's something more than a common farmer. He has a good sort of place, hasn't he?" "Yes, yes; a very good house; - a little too near to the horse-pond for my taste." Here they were interrupted by an exclamation from a young lady that Charlie Fairstairs was feeling sick; and they prepared to land close to the spot at which the banquet was prepared.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 8: Mr. Cheesacre

There had been a pretence of fishing, but no fish had been caught. It was soon found that such an amusement would interfere with the ladies' dresses, and the affairs had become too serious to allow of any trivial interruption. "I really think, Mr. Cheesacre," an anxious mother had said, "that you'd better give it up. The water off the nasty cord has got all over Maria's dress, already." Maria made a faint protest that it did not signify in the least; but the fishing was given up,--not without an inward feeling on the part of Mr. Cheesacre that if Maria chose to come out with him in his boat, having been invited especially to fish, she ought to have put up with the natural results. "There are people who like to take everything and never like to give anything," he said to Kate afterwards, as he was walking up with her to the picnic dinner. But he was unreasonable and unjust. The girls had graced his party with their best hats and freshest muslins, not that they might see him catch a mackerel, but that they might flirt and dance to the best advantage. "You can't suppose that any girl will like to be drenched with sea-water when she has taken so much trouble with her starch," said Kate. "Then she shouldn't come fishing," said Mr. Cheesacre. "I hate such airs." But when they arrived at the old boat, Mrs. Greenow shone forth pre-eminently as the mistress of the occasion, altogether overshadowing Mr. Cheesacre by the extent of her authority. There was a little contest for supremacy between them, invisible to the eyes of the multitude; but Mr. Cheesacre in such a matter had not a chance against Mrs. Greenow. I am disposed to think that she would have reigned even though she had not contributed to the eatables; but with that point in her favour, she was able to make herself supreme. Jeannette, too, was her servant, which was a great thing. Mr. Cheesacre soon gave way; and though he bustled about and was conspicuous, he bustled about in obedience to orders received, and became a head servant. Captain Bellfield also made himself useful, but he drove Mr. Cheesacre into paroxysms of suppressed anger by giving directions, and by having those directions obeyed. A man to whom he had lent twenty pounds the day before yesterday, and who had not contributed so much as a bottle of champagne! "We're to dine at four, and now it's half-past three," said Mrs. Greenow, addressing herself to the multitude. "And to begin to dance at six," said an eager young lady. "Maria, hold your tongue," said the young lady's mother. "Yes, we'll dine at four," said Mr. Cheesacre. "And as for the music, I've ordered it to be here punctual at half-past five. We're to have three horns, cymbals, triangle, and a drum." "How very nice; isn't it, Mrs. Greenow?" said Charlie Fairstairs. "And now suppose we begin to unpack," said Captain Bellfield. "Half the fun is in arranging the things." "Oh, dear, yes; more than half," said Fanny Fairstairs. "Bellfield, don't mind about the hampers," said Cheesacre. "Wine is a ticklish thing to handle, and there's my man there to manage it." "It's odd if I don't know more about wine than the boots from the hotel," said Bellfield. This allusion to the boots almost cowed Mr. Cheesacre, and made him turn away, leaving Bellfield with the widow. There was a great unpacking, during which Captain Bellfield and Mrs. Greenow constantly had their heads in the same hamper. I by no means intend to insinuate that there was anything wrong in this. People engaged together in unpacking pies and cold chickens must have their heads in the same hamper. But a great intimacy was thereby produced, and the widow seemed to have laid aside altogether that prejudice of hers with reference to the washerwoman. There was a long table placed on the sand, sheltered by the upturned boat from the land side, but open towards the sea, and over this, supported on poles, there was an awning. Upon the whole the arrangement was not an uncomfortable one for people who had selected so very uncomfortable a dining-room as the sand of the sea-shore. Much was certainly due to Mr. Cheesacre for the expenditure he had incurred,--and something perhaps to Captain Bellfield for his ingenuity in having suggested it. Now came the placing of the guests for dinner, and Mr. Cheesacre made another great effort. "I'll tell you what," he said, aloud, "Bellfield and I will take the two ends of the table, and Mrs. Greenow shall sit at my right hand." This was not only boldly done, but there was a propriety in it which at first sight seemed to be irresistible. Much as he had hated and did hate the captain, he had skilfully made the proposition in such a way as to flatter him, and it seemed for a few moments as though he were going to have it all his own way. But Captain Bellfield was not a man to submit to defeat in such a matter as this without an effort. "I don't think that will do," said he. "Mrs. Greenow gives the dinner, and Cheesacre gives the wine. We must have them at the two ends of the table. I am sure Mrs. Greenow won't refuse to allow me to hand her to the place which belongs to her. I will sit at her right hand and be her minister." Mrs. Greenow did not refuse,--and so the matter was adjusted. Mr. Cheesacre took his seat in despair. It was nothing to him that he had Kate Vavasor at his left hand. He liked talking to Kate very well, but he could not enjoy that pleasure while Captain Bellfield was in the very act of making progress with the widow. "One would think that he had given it himself; wouldn't you?" he said to Maria's mother, who sat at his right hand. The lady did not in the least understand him. "Given what?" said she. "Why, the music and the wine and all the rest of it. There are some people full of that kind of impudence. How they manage to carry it on without ever paying a shilling, I never could tell. I know I have to pay my way, and something over and beyond generally." Maria's mother said, "Yes, indeed." She had other daughters there besides Maria, and was looking down the table to see whether they were judiciously placed. Her beauty, her youngest one, Ophelia, was sitting next to that ne'er-do-well Joe Fairstairs, and this made her unhappy. "Ophelia, my dear, you are dreadfully in the draught; there's a seat up here, just opposite, where you'll be more comfortable." "There's no draught here, mamma," said Ophelia, without the slightest sign of moving. Perhaps Ophelia liked the society of that lanky, idle, useless young man. The mirth of the table certainly came from Mrs. Greenow's end. The widow had hardly taken her place before she got up again and changed with the captain. It was found that the captain could better carve the great grouse pie from the end than from the side. Cheesacre, when he saw this, absolutely threw down his knife and fork violently upon the table. "Is anything the matter?" said Maria's mother. "Matter!" said he. Then he shook his head in grief of heart and vexation of spirit, and resumed his knife and fork. Kate watched it all, and was greatly amused. "I never saw a man so nearly broken-hearted," she said, in her letter to Alice the next day. "Eleven, thirteen, eighteen, twenty-one," said Cheesacre to himself, reckoning up in his misery the number of pounds sterling which he would have to pay for being ill-treated in this way. "Ladies and gentlemen," said Captain Bellfield, as soon as the eating was over, "if I may be permitted to get upon my legs for two minutes, I am going to propose a toast to you." The real patron of the feast had actually not yet swallowed his last bit of cheese. The thing was indecent in the violence of its injustice. [Illustration: Captain Bellfield proposes a toast.] "If you please, Captain Bellfield," said the patron, indifferent to the cheese in his throat, "I'll propose the toast." "Nothing on earth could be better, my dear fellow," said the captain, "and I'm sure I should be the last man in the world to take the job out of the hands of one who would do it so much better than I can; but as it's your health that we're going to drink, I really don't see how you are to do it." Cheesacre grunted and sat down. He certainly could not propose his own health, nor did he complain of the honour that was to be done him. It was very proper that his health should be drunk, and he had now to think of the words in which he would return thanks. But the extent of his horror may be imagined when Bellfield got up and made a most brilliant speech in praise of Mrs. Greenow. For full five minutes he went on without mentioning the name of Cheesacre. Yarmouth, he said, had never in his days been so blessed as it had been this year by the presence of the lady who was now with them. She had come among them, he declared, forgetful of herself and of her great sorrows, with the sole desire of adding something to the happiness of others. Then Mrs. Greenow had taken out her pocket-handkerchief, sweeping back the broad ribbons of her cap over her shoulders. Altogether the scene was very affecting, and Cheesacre was driven to madness. They were the very words that he had intended to speak himself. "I hate all this kind of thing," he said to Kate. "It's so fulsome." "After-dinner speeches never mean anything," said Kate. At last, when Bellfield had come to an end of praising Mrs. Greenow, he told the guests that he wished to join his friend Mr. Cheesacre in the toast, the more so as it could hardly be hoped that Mrs. Greenow would herself rise to return thanks. There was no better fellow than his friend Cheesacre, whom he had known for he would not say how many years. He was quite sure they would all have the most sincere pleasure in joining the health of Mr. Cheesacre with that of Mrs. Greenow. Then there was a clattering of glasses and a murmuring of healths, and Mr. Cheesacre slowly got upon his legs. "I'm very much obliged to this company," said he, "and to my friend Bellfield, who really is,--but perhaps that doesn't signify now. I've had the greatest pleasure in getting up this little thing, and I'd made up my mind to propose Mrs. Greenow's health; but, h'm, ha, no doubt it has been in better hands. Perhaps, considering all things, Bellfield might have waited." "With such a subject on my hands, I couldn't wait a moment." "I didn't interrupt you, Captain Bellfield, and perhaps you'll let me go on without interrupting me. We've all drunk Mrs. Greenow's health, and I'm sure she's very much obliged. So am I for the honour you've done me. I have taken some trouble in getting up this little thing, and I hope you like it. I think somebody said something about liberality. I beg to assure you that I don't think of that for a moment. Somebody must pay for these sort of things, and I'm always very glad to take my turn. I dare say Bellfield will give us the next picnic, and if he'll appoint a day before the end of the month, I shall be happy to be one of the party." Then he sat down with some inward satisfaction, fully convinced that he had given his enemy a fatal blow. "Nothing on earth would give me so much pleasure," said Bellfield. After that he turned again to Mrs. Greenow and went on with his private conversation. There was no more speaking, nor was there much time for other after-dinner ceremonies. The three horns, the cymbals, the triangle, and the drum were soon heard tuning-up behind the banqueting-hall, and the ladies went to the further end of the old boat to make their preparations for the dance. Then it was that the thoughtful care of Mrs. Greenow, in having sent Jeannette with brushes, combs, clean handkerchiefs, and other little knick-knackeries, became so apparent. It was said that the widow herself actually changed her cap,--which was considered by some to be very unfair, as there had been an understanding that there should be no dressing. On such occasions ladies are generally willing to forego the advantage of dressing on the condition that other ladies shall forego the same advantage; but when this compact is broken by any special lady, the treason is thought to be very treacherous. It is as though a fencer should remove the button from the end of his foil. But Mrs. Greenow was so good-natured in tendering the services of Jeannette to all the young ladies, and was so willing to share with others those good things of the toilet which her care had provided, that her cap was forgiven her by the most of those present. When ladies have made up their minds to dance they will dance let the circumstances of the moment be ever so antagonistic to that exercise. A ploughed field in February would not be too wet, nor the side of a house too uneven. In honest truth the sands of the seashore are not adapted for the exercise. It was all very well for Venus to make the promise, but when making it she knew that Adonis would not keep her to her word. Let any lightest-limbed nymph try it, and she will find that she leaves most palpable footing. The sands in question were doubtless compact, firm, and sufficiently moist to make walking on them comfortable; but they ruffled themselves most uncomfortably under the unwonted pressure to which they were subjected. Nevertheless our friends did dance on the sands; finding, however, that quadrilles and Sir Roger de Coverley suited them better than polkas and waltzes. "No, my friend, no," Mrs. Greenow said to Mr. Cheesacre when that gentleman endeavoured to persuade her to stand up; "Kate will be delighted I am sure to join you,--but as for me, you must excuse me." But Mr. Cheesacre was not inclined at that moment to ask Kate Vavasor to dance with him. He was possessed by an undefined idea that Kate had snubbed him, and as Kate's fortune was, as he said, literally nothing, he was not at all disposed to court her favour at the expense of such suffering to himself. "I'm not quite sure that I'll dance myself," said he, seating himself in a corner of the tent by Mrs. Greenow's side. Captain Bellfield at that moment was seen leading Miss Vavasor away to a new place on the sands, whither he was followed by a score of dancers; and Mr. Cheesacre saw that now at last he might reap the reward for which he had laboured. He was alone with the widow, and having been made bold by wine, had an opportunity of fighting his battle, than which none better could ever be found. He was himself by no means a poor man, and he despised poverty in others. It was well that there should be poor gentry, in order that they might act as satellites to those who, like himself, had money. As to Mrs. Greenow's money, there was no doubt. He knew it all to a fraction. She had spread for herself, or some one else had spread for her, a report that her wealth was almost unlimited; but the forty thousand pounds was a fact, and any such innocent fault as that little fiction might well be forgiven to a woman endorsed with such substantial virtues. And she was handsome too. Mr. Cheesacre, as he regarded her matured charms, sometimes felt that he should have been smitten even without the forty thousand pounds. "By George! there's flesh and blood," he had once said to his friend Bellfield before he had begun to suspect that man's treachery. His admiration must then have been sincere, for at that time the forty thousand pounds was not an ascertained fact. Looking at the matter in all its bearings Mr. Cheesacre thought that he couldn't do better. His wooing should be fair, honest, and above board. He was a thriving man, and what might not they two do in Norfolk if they put their wealth together? "Oh, Mr. Cheesacre, you should join them," said Mrs. Greenow; "they'll not half enjoy themselves without you. Kate will think that you mean to neglect her." "I shan't dance, Mrs. Greenow, unless you like to stand up for a set." "No, my friend, no; I shall not do that. I fear you forget how recent has been my bereavement. Your asking me is the bitterest reproach to me for having ventured to join your festive board." "Upon my honour I didn't mean it, Mrs. Greenow. I didn't mean it, indeed." "I do not suspect you. It would have been unmanly." "And nobody can say that of me. There isn't a man or woman in Norfolk that wouldn't say I was manly." "I'm quite sure of that." "I have my faults, I'm aware." "And what are your faults, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Well; perhaps I'm extravagant. But it's only in these kind of things you know, when I spend a little money for the sake of making my friends happy. When I'm about, on the lands at home, I ain't extravagant, I can tell you." "Extravagance is a great vice." "Oh, I ain't extravagant in that sense;--not a bit in the world. But when a man's enamoured, and perhaps looking out for a wife, he does like to be a little free, you know." "And are you looking out for a wife, Mr. Cheesacre?" "If I told you I suppose you'd only laugh at me." "No; indeed I would not. I am not given to joking when any one that I regard speaks to me seriously." "Ain't you though? I'm so glad of that. When one has really got a serious thing to say, one doesn't like to have fun poked at one." "And, besides, how could I laugh at marriages, seeing how happy I have been in that condition?--so--very--happy," and Mrs. Greenow put up her handkerchief to her eyes. "So happy that you'll try it again some day; won't you?" "Never, Mr. Cheesacre; never. Is that the way you talk of serious things without joking? Anything like love--love of that sort--is over for me. It lies buried under the sod with my poor dear departed saint." "But, Mrs. Greenow,"--and Cheesacre, as he prepared to argue the question with her, got nearer to her in the corner behind the table,--"But, Mrs. Greenow, care killed a cat, you know." "And sometimes I think that care will kill me." "No, by George; not if I can prevent it." "You're very kind, Mr. Cheesacre; but there's no preventing such care as mine." "Isn't there though? I'll tell you what, Mrs. Greenow; I'm in earnest, I am indeed. If you'll inquire, you'll find there isn't a fellow in Norfolk pays his way better than I do, or is better able to do it. I don't pay a sixpence of rent, and I sit upon seven hundred acres of as good land as there is in the county. There's not an acre that won't do me a bullock and a half. Just put that and that together, and see what it comes to. And, mind you, some of these fellows that farm their own land are worse off than if they'd rent to pay. They've borrowed so much to carry on with, that the interest is more than rent. I don't owe a sixpence to ere a man or ere a company in the world. I can walk into every bank in Norwich without seeing my master. There ain't any of my paper flying about, Mrs. Greenow. I'm Samuel Cheesacre of Oileymead, and it's all my own." Mr. Cheesacre, as he thus spoke of his good fortunes and firm standing in the world, became impetuous in the energy of the moment, and brought down his fist powerfully on the slight table before them. The whole fabric rattled, and the boat resounded, but the noise he had made seemed to assist him. "It's all my own, Mrs. Greenow, and the half of it shall be yours if you'll please to take it;" then he stretched out his hand to her, not as though he intended to grasp hers in a grasp of love, but as if he expected some hand-pledge from her as a token that she accepted the bargain. "If you'd known Greenow, Mr. Cheesacre--" "I've no doubt he was a very good sort of man." "If you'd known him, you would not have addressed me in this way." "What difference would that make? My idea is that care killed a cat, as I said before. I never knew what was the good of being unhappy. If I find early mangels don't do on a bit of land, then I sow late turnips; and never cry after spilt milk. Greenow was the early mangels; I'll be the late turnips. Come then, say the word. There ain't a bedroom in my house,--not one of the front ones,--that isn't mahogany furnished!" "What's furniture to me?" said Mrs. Greenow, with her handkerchief to her eyes. Just at this moment Maria's mother stepped in under the canvas. It was most inopportune. Mr. Cheesacre felt that he was progressing well, and was conscious that he had got safely over those fences in the race which his bashfulness would naturally make difficult to him. He knew that he had done this under the influence of the champagne, and was aware that it might not be easy to procure again a combination of circumstances that would be so beneficial to him. But now he was interrupted just as he was expecting success. He was interrupted, and felt himself to be looking like a guilty creature under the eye of the strange lady. He had not a word to say; but drawing himself suddenly a foot and half away from the widow's side, sat there confessing his guilt in his face. Mrs. Greenow felt no guilt, and was afraid of no strange eyes. "Mr. Cheesacre and I are talking about farming," she said. "Oh; farming!" answered Maria's mother. "Mr. Cheesacre thinks that turnips are better than early mangels," said Mrs. Greenow. "Yes, I do," said Cheesacre, "I prefer the early mangels," said Mrs. Greenow. "I don't think nature ever intended those late crops. What do you say, Mrs. Walker?" "I daresay Mr. Cheesacre understands what he's about when he's at home," said the lady. "I know what a bit of land can do as well as any man in Norfolk," said the gentleman. "It may be very well in Norfolk," said Mrs. Greenow, rising from her seat; "but the practice isn't thought much of in the other counties with which I am better acquainted." "I'd just come in to say that I thought we might be getting to the boats," said Mrs. Walker. "My Ophelia is so delicate." At this moment the delicate Ophelia was to be seen, under the influence of the music, taking a distant range upon the sands with Joe Fairstairs' arm round her waist. The attitude was justified by the tune that was in progress, and there is no reason why a galop on the sands should have any special termination in distance, as it must have in a room. But, under such circumstances, Mrs. Walker's solicitude was not unreasonable. The erratic steps of the distant dancers were recalled and preparations were made for the return journey. Others had strayed besides the delicate Ophelia and the idle Joe, and some little time was taken up in collecting the party. The boats had to be drawn down, and the boatmen fetched from their cans and tobacco-pipes. "I hope they're sober," said Mrs. Walker, with a look of great dismay. "Sober as judges," said Bellfield, who had himself been looking after the remains of Mr. Cheesacre's hampers, while that gentleman had been so much better engaged in the tent. "Because," continued Mrs. Walker, "I know that they play all manner of tricks when they're--in liquor. They'd think nothing of taking us out to sea, Mrs. Greenow." "Oh, I do wish they would," said Ophelia. "Ophelia, mind you come in the boat with me," said her mother, and she looked very savage when she gave the order. It was Mrs. Walker's intention that that boat should not carry Joe Fairstairs. But Joe and her daughter together were too clever for her. When the boats went off she found herself to be in that one over which Mr. Cheesacre presided, while the sinning Ophelia with her good-for-nothing admirer were under the more mirthful protection of Captain Bellfield. "Mamma will be so angry," said Ophelia, "and it was all your fault. I did mean to go into the other boat. Don't, Mr. Fairstairs." Then they got settled down in their seats, to the satisfaction, let us hope, of them both. Mr. Cheesacre had vainly endeavoured to arrange that Mrs. Greenow should return with him. But not only was Captain Bellfield opposed to such a change in their positions, but so also was Mrs. Greenow. "I think we'd better go back as we came," she said, giving her hand to the Captain. "Oh, certainly," said Captain Bellfield. "Why should there be any change? Cheesacre, old fellow, mind you look after Mrs. Walker. Come along, my hearty." It really almost appeared that Captain Bellfield was addressing Mrs. Greenow as "his hearty," but it must be presumed that the term of genial endearment was intended for the whole boat's load. Mrs. Greenow took her place on the comfortable broad bench in the stern, and Bellfield seated himself beside her, with the tiller in his hand. "If you're going to steer, Captain Bellfield, I beg that you'll be careful." "Careful,--and with you on board!" said the Captain. "Don't you know that I would sooner perish beneath the waves than that a drop of water should touch you roughly?" "But you see, we might perish beneath the waves together." "Together! What a sweet word that is;--perish together! If it were not that there might be something better even than that, I would wish to perish in such company." "But I should not wish anything of the kind, Captain Bellfield, and therefore pray be careful." There was no perishing by water on that occasion. Mr. Cheesacre's boat reached the pier at Yarmouth first, and gave up its load without accident. Very shortly afterwards Captain Bellfield's crew reached the same place in the same state of preservation. "There," said he, as he handed out Mrs. Greenow. "I have brought you to no harm, at any rate as yet." "And, as I hope, will not do so hereafter." "May the heavens forbid it, Mrs. Greenow! Whatever may be our lots hereafter,--yours I mean and mine,--I trust that yours may be free from all disaster. Oh, that I might venture to hope that, at some future day, the privilege might be mine of protecting you from all danger!" "I can protect myself very well, I can assure you. Good night, Captain Bellfield. We won't take you and Mr. Cheesacre out of your way;--will we, Kate? We have had a most pleasant day." They were now upon the esplanade, and Mrs. Greenow's house was to the right, whereas the lodgings of both the gentlemen were to the left. Each of them fought hard for the privilege of accompanying the widow to her door; but Mrs. Greenow was self-willed, and upon this occasion would have neither of them. "Mr. Joe Fairstairs must pass the house," said she, "and he will see us home. Mr. Cheesacre, good night. Indeed you shall not;--not a step." There was that in her voice which induced Mr. Cheesacre to obey her, and which made Captain Bellfield aware that he would only injure his cause if he endeavoured to make further progress in it on the present occasion. "Well, Kate, what do you think of the day?" the aunt said when she was alone with her niece. "I never think much about such days, aunt. It was all very well, but I fear I have not the temperament fitted for enjoying the fun. I envied Ophelia Walker because she made herself thoroughly happy." "I do like to see girls enjoy themselves," said Mrs. Greenow, "I do, indeed;--and young men too. It seems so natural; why shouldn't young people flirt?" "Or old people either for the matter of that?" "Or old people either,--if they don't do any harm to anybody. I'll tell you what it is, Kate; people have become so very virtuous, that they're driven into all manner of abominable resources for amusement and occupation. If I had sons and daughters I should think a little flirting the very best thing for them as a safety valve. When people get to be old, there's a difficulty. They want to flirt with the young people and the young people don't want them. If the old people would be content to flirt together, I don't see why they should ever give it up;--till they're obliged to give up every thing, and go away." That was Mrs. Greenow's doctrine on the subject of flirtation.

There had been a pretence of fishing, but no fish had been caught. Water got over the ladies' dresses, and the fishing was given up, to Mr. Cheesacre's indignation. "Some people like to take everything and never give anything," he said to Kate afterwards, as he was walking with her to the picnic dinner. "You can't suppose that any girl will like to be drenched with sea-water when she has taken so much trouble with her dress," said Kate. "Then she shouldn't come fishing," said Mr. Cheesacre. "I hate such airs." When they arrived at the old boat, Mrs. Greenow was the mistress of the occasion, altogether overshadowing Mr. Cheesacre. There was a little contest for supremacy between them, invisible to most eyes; but Mr. Cheesacre had not a chance against Mrs. Greenow. He soon gave way; and though he bustled about, it was in obedience to her orders. Captain Bellfield also made himself useful, but he drove Mr. Cheesacre into paroxysms of suppressed anger by giving directions. A man to whom he had lent twenty pounds, and who had not contributed so much as a bottle of champagne! "We're to dine at four," said Mrs. Greenow. "And we begin to dance at six," said an eager young lady. "Maria, hold your tongue," said the young lady's mother. "Yes, we'll dine at four," said Mr. Cheesacre. "And as for the music, I've ordered it to be here punctual at half-past five. We're to have three horns, cymbals, triangle, and a drum." "How very nice; isn't it, Mrs. Greenow?" said Charlie Fairstairs. "And now suppose we unpack," said Captain Bellfield. "Bellfield, don't mind about the hampers," said Cheesacre. "Wine is a ticklish thing to handle, and there's my man there to manage it." "I know more about wine than the boot-man from the hotel," said Bellfield. This made Mr. Cheesacre turn away, leaving Bellfield with the widow. There was a great unpacking, during which Captain Bellfield and Mrs. Greenow constantly had their heads in the same hamper. There was nothing wrong in this. People engaged together in unpacking pies and cold chickens must have their heads in the same hamper. But the widow seemed to have laid aside her prejudice regarding the washerwoman. There was a long table placed on the sand, with an awning over it. On the whole it was a more comfortable arrangement than might be expected; and this owed much to Mr. Cheesacre's expenditure. With the placing of the guests for dinner, Mr. Cheesacre made another great effort. "Bellfield and I will take the two ends of the table," he announced, "and Mrs. Greenow shall sit at my right hand." "I don't think that will do," said Captain Bellfield. "Mrs. Greenow gives the dinner, and Cheesacre gives the wine. We must have them at the two ends of the table. I will sit at her right hand." Mrs. Greenow did not refuse, and so the matter was settled. Mr. Cheesacre took his seat in despair. It was nothing to him that he had Kate Vavasor beside him. He liked talking to Kate, but he could not enjoy himself while Captain Bellfield was talking to the widow. "One would think that he had given it himself; wouldn't you?" he said to Maria's mother, who sat on his right. "Given what?" said she. "Why, the music and the wine and all the rest of it. There are some people full of that kind of impudence, who never pay a shilling. I pay my way." Maria's mother said, "Yes, indeed." She had other daughters there besides Maria, and her youngest and prettiest one, Ophelia, was sitting next to that ne'er-do-well Joe Fairstairs. "Ophelia, my dear, you are dreadfully in the draught; there's a seat up here where you'll be more comfortable." "There's no draught here, mamma," said Ophelia, without moving. The mirth of the table certainly came from Mrs. Greenow's end. The widow got up and changed places with the captain, so that he could carve the great grouse pie. Cheesacre, when he saw this, absolutely threw down his knife and fork violently upon the table. "Is anything the matter?" said Maria's mother. "Matter!" said he. Then he shook his head in grief and vexation. Kate watched it all, and was greatly amused. "I never saw a man so nearly broken-hearted," she said, in her letter to Alice the next day. "Ladies and gentlemen," said Captain Bellfield, as soon as the eating was over, "I am going to propose a toast." Mr. Cheesacre had actually not yet swallowed his last bit of cheese. The thing was indecent in its injustice. "If you please, Captain Bellfield," said he, "I'll propose the toast." "Nothing on earth could be better, my dear fellow," said the captain, "but as it's your health that we're going to drink, I don't see how you are to do it." Cheesacre grunted and sat down. He certainly could not propose his own health, nor could he complain of the honour. He had now to think of the words in which he would return thanks. But the extent of his horror may be imagined when Bellfield got up and made a most brilliant speech in praise of Mrs. Greenow. For full five minutes he went on without mentioning Cheesacre. Yarmouth, he said, had never been so blessed as it had been this year by the presence of the lady who was now with them. She had come among them, he declared, forgetful of herself and of her great sorrows, with the sole desire of adding something to the happiness of others. Altogether the scene was very affecting, and Cheesacre was driven to madness. They were the very words that he had intended to speak himself. "I hate all this kind of thing," he said to Kate. "After-dinner speeches never mean anything," said Kate. At last, when Bellfield had finished praising Mrs. Greenow, he told the guests that he wished to join his friend Mr. Cheesacre in the toast. There was no better fellow than his friend Cheesacre, whom he had known for many years. There was a clattering of glasses and a murmuring of healths, and Mr. Cheesacre slowly got upon his legs. "I'm very much obliged to this company," said he, "and to my friend Bellfield. I've had the greatest pleasure in getting up this little thing, and I'd made up my mind to propose Mrs. Greenow's health; but, no doubt it has been in better hands. Perhaps Bellfield might have waited." "I couldn't wait a moment." "I didn't interrupt you, Captain Bellfield, and perhaps you'll let me go on without interrupting me. We've all drunk Mrs. Greenow's health, and I'm sure she's very much obliged. So am I for the honour you've done me. I have taken some trouble in getting up this little thing, and I hope you like it. I think somebody said something about liberality. I beg to assure you that I don't think of that for a moment. Somebody must pay for these sort of things, and I'm always very glad to take my turn. I dare say Bellfield will give us the next picnic, and if he'll appoint a day before the end of the month, I shall be happy to be one of the party." Then he sat down with some satisfaction, fully convinced that he had given his enemy a fatal blow. "Nothing on earth would give me so much pleasure," said Bellfield. He turned back to his conversation with Mrs. Greenow. There was no more speaking, for the three horns, the cymbals, the triangle, and the drum were soon heard tuning-up, and the ladies went to the further end of the old boat to get ready for the dance. Then the thoughtful care of Mrs. Greenow, in having sent Jeannette with brushes, combs, and so on, became apparent. The widow good-naturedly offered the services of Jeannette to all the young ladies, so that they forgave her for changing her own cap. When ladies have made up their minds to dance, they will dance no matter what. A ploughed field in February would not be too wet. In truth the Yarmouth sands were not adapted for the exercise; nevertheless our friends danced; finding, however, that sedate dances were easier than polkas and waltzes. "No, my friend," Mrs. Greenow said to Mr. Cheesacre when he asked her to dance. "I am sure Kate will be delighted to join you, but you must excuse me." However, Mr. Cheesacre had a vague idea that Kate had snubbed him, and had no intention of courting her favour. "I'm not sure that I'll dance myself," said he, seating himself by Mrs. Greenow's side under the canvas awning. Captain Bellfield led Miss Vavasor away to a new place on the sands, where he was followed by a score of dancers; and Mr. Cheesacre was alone with the widow at last. He was by no means a poor man, and he despised poverty in others. He knew Mrs. Greenow's money to a penny. And she was handsome too. Mr. Cheesacre felt that he should have been smitten even without the forty thousand pounds. All in all, he thought that he couldn't do better. He was a thriving man, and what might not they two do in Norfolk if they put their wealth together? "Oh, Mr. Cheesacre," said Mrs. Greenow, "they'll not enjoy themselves without you. Kate will think that you mean to neglect her." "I shan't dance, Mrs. Greenow, unless you like to stand up." "No, my friend. I fear you forget my recent bereavement. Your asking me is the bitterest reproach to me for having ventured to join your party." "Upon my honour I didn't mean it, Mrs. Greenow." "I do not suspect you. It would have been unmanly." "And nobody can say that of me. There isn't a man or woman in Norfolk that wouldn't say I was manly." "I'm quite sure of that." "I have my faults, I'm aware." "And what are your faults, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Well; perhaps I'm extravagant. But it's only in these kind of things you know, when I want to make my friends happy. When I'm at home, I ain't extravagant. But when a man's enamoured, and perhaps looking out for a wife, he does like to be a little free, you know." "And are you looking out for a wife, Mr. Cheesacre?" "If I told you, you'd only laugh at me." "No; indeed. How could I laugh at marriages, seeing how happy I have been in mine? " and Mrs. Greenow put her handkerchief to her eyes. "So happy that you'll try it again some day?" "Never, Mr. Cheesacre. Love is over for me, buried with my dear departed saint." "But, Mrs. Greenow," and Cheesacre came closer to her, "Mrs. Greenow, I'm in earnest, I am indeed. There isn't a fellow in Norfolk pays his way better than I do. I don't pay a sixpence of rent, and I have seven hundred acres of as good land as there is in the county. I'm Samuel Cheesacre of Oileymead, and it's all my own." Mr. Cheesacre brought down his fist powerfully on the slight table. "It's all my own, Mrs. Greenow, and the half of it shall be yours if you'll please to take it." He stretched out his hand to her, as if he expected her to shake it in acceptance of the bargain. "If you'd known Greenow, Mr. Cheesacre, you would not have addressed me in this way." "What difference would that make? I never knew what was the good of being unhappy, or crying over spilt milk. Come, say the word. There ain't a bedroom in my house - the front ones - that isn't mahogany furnished!" "What's furniture to me?" said Mrs. Greenow, with her handkerchief to her eyes. Just at this moment Maria's mother stepped in under the canvas. It was most inopportune. Mr. Cheesacre felt that he was progressing well. But now he was interrupted just as he was expecting success, and he drew suddenly away from the widow's side, and sat there confessing his guilt in his face. Mrs. Greenow felt no guilt, and was afraid of no strange eyes. "Mr. Cheesacre and I are talking about farming," she said, rising from her seat. "I'd just come in to say that I thought we might be getting to the boats," said Mrs. Walker. "My Ophelia is so delicate." At this moment the delicate Ophelia was to be seen distantly upon the sands with Joe Fairstairs' arm round her waist, so Mrs. Walker's solicitude was not unreasonable. The distant dancers were recalled and preparations were made for the return journey. Others had strayed besides the delicate Ophelia and the idle Joe, and it took some time to collect the party. "Ophelia, mind you come in the boat with me," said her mother. But Joe Fairstairs and her daughter were too clever for her. When the boats went off she found herself to be in Mr. Cheesacre's, while Ophelia and her admirer were under the protection of Captain Bellfield. Mr. Cheesacre had vainly tried to arrange that Mrs. Greenow should return with him. But the widow said, "I think we'd better go back as we came," and gave her hand to the Captain. "Certainly," said Captain Bellfield. "Cheesacre, old fellow, mind you look after Mrs. Walker. Come along, my hearty." Mrs. Greenow took her place in the stern, and Bellfield sat beside her, with the tiller in his hand. "If you're going to steer, Captain Bellfield, I beg that you'll be careful." "Careful!" said the Captain. "Don't you know that I would sooner perish beneath the waves than that a drop of water should touch you roughly?" "But you see, we might perish beneath the waves together." "Together! What a sweet word that is; perish together! Were it not that there might be something better even than that, I would wish to perish in such company." "But I should not wish anything of the kind, Captain Bellfield." There was no perishing by water on that occasion. Captain Bellfield's boat reached the pier at Yarmouth very shortly after Mr. Cheesacre's. "There," said the Captain, as he handed out Mrs. Greenow. "I have brought you to no harm." "And, I hope, will not do so hereafter." "Heavens forbid, Mrs. Greenow! I trust that your lot may be free from all disaster. Oh, that I might venture to hope that, at some future day, I might have the privilege of protecting you from all danger!" "I can protect myself very well, I can assure you. Good night, Captain Bellfield. We won't take you and Mr. Cheesacre out of your way, will we, Kate? We have had a most pleasant day." Each of the gentlemen fought for the privilege of accompanying the widow to her door; but Mrs. Greenow would have neither of them. "Mr. Joe Fairstairs will see us home. Mr. Cheesacre, good night. Indeed you shall not; -not a step." There was that in her voice which induced both men to obey. "Well, Kate, what do you think of the day?" the aunt said when she was alone with her niece. "It was all very well, aunt, but I fear I have not the temperament fitted for enjoying the fun. I envied Ophelia Walker because she made herself thoroughly happy." "I do like to see girls enjoy themselves," said Mrs. Greenow, "and young men too. It seems so natural; why shouldn't young people flirt?" "Or old people either for that matter?" "Or old people either, if they don't do any harm to anybody. If I had sons and daughters I should think a little flirting the very best thing for them as a safety valve. When people get to be old, if they want to flirt together, I don't see why they should give it up." This was Mrs. Greenow's doctrine on the subject of flirtation.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 9: The Rivals

I cannot say that the house in Queen Anne Street was a pleasant house. I am now speaking of the material house, made up of the walls and furniture, and not of any pleasantness or unpleasantness supplied by the inmates. It was a small house on the south side of the street, squeezed in between two large mansions which seemed to crush it, and by which its fair proportion of doorstep and area was in truth curtailed. The stairs were narrow; the dining-room was dark, and possessed none of those appearances of plenteous hospitality which a dining-room should have. But all this would have been as nothing if the drawing-room had been pretty as it is the bounden duty of all drawing-rooms to be. But Alice Vavasor's drawing-room was not pretty. Her father had had the care of furnishing the house, and he had intrusted the duty to a tradesman who had chosen green paper, a green carpet, green curtains, and green damask chairs. There was a green damask sofa, and two green arm-chairs opposite to each other at the two sides of the fireplace. The room was altogether green, and was not enticing. In shape it was nearly square, the very small back room on the same floor not having been, as is usual, added to it. This had been fitted up as a "study" for Mr. Vavasor, and was very rarely used for any purpose. Most of us know when we enter a drawing-room whether it is a pretty room or no; but how few of us know how to make a drawing-room pretty! There has come up in London in these latter days a form of room so monstrously ugly that I will venture to say that no other people on earth but Londoners would put up with it. Londoners, as a rule, take their houses as they can get them, looking only to situation, size, and price. What Grecian, what Roman, what Turk, what Italian would endure, or would ever have endured, to use a room with a monstrous cantle in the form of a parallelogram cut sheerly out of one corner of it? This is the shape of room we have now adopted,--or rather which the builders have adopted for us,--in order to throw the whole first floor into one apartment which may be presumed to have noble dimensions,--with such drawback from it as the necessities of the staircase may require. A sharp unadorned corner projects itself into these would-be noble dimensions, and as ugly a form of chamber is produced as any upon which the eye can look. I would say more on the subject if I dared to do so here, but I am bound now to confine myself to Miss Vavasor's room. The monstrous deformity of which I have spoken was not known when that house in Queen Anne Street was built. There is to be found no such abomination of shape in the buildings of our ancestors,--not even in the days of George the Second. But yet the drawing-room of which I speak was ugly, and Alice knew that it was so. She knew that it was ugly, and she would greatly have liked to banish the green sofa, to have re-papered the wall, and to have hung up curtains with a dash of pink through them. With the green carpet she would have been contented. But her father was an extravagant man; and from the day on which she had come of age she had determined that it was her special duty to avoid extravagance. "It's the ugliest room I ever saw in my life," her father once said to her. "It is not very pretty," Alice replied. "I'll go halves with you in the expense of redoing it," said Mr. Vavasor. "Wouldn't that be extravagant, papa? The things have not been here quite four years yet." Then Mr. Vavasor had shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more about it. It was little to him whether the drawing-room in Queen Anne Street was ugly or pretty. He was on the committee of his club, and he took care that the furniture there should be in all respects comfortable. It was now June; and that month Lady Macleod was in the habit of spending among her noble relatives in London when she had succeeded in making both ends so far overlap each other at Cheltenham as to give her the fifty pounds necessary for this purpose. For though she spent her month in London among her noble friends, it must not be supposed that her noble friends gave her bed or board. They sometimes gave her tea, such as it was, and once or twice in the month they gave the old lady a second-rate dinner. On these occasions she hired a little parlour and bedroom behind it in King Street, Saint James's, and lived a hot, uncomfortable life, going about at nights to gatherings of fashionable people of which she in her heart disapproved, seeking for smiles which seldom came to her, and which she excused herself for desiring because they were the smiles of her kith and her kin, telling herself always that she made this vain journey to the modern Babylon for the good of Alice Vavasor, and telling herself as often that she now made it for the last time. On the occasion of her preceding visit she had reminded herself that she was then seventy-five years old, and had sworn to herself that she would come to London no more; but here she was again in London, having justified the journey to herself on the plea that there were circumstances in Alice's engagement which made it desirable that she should for a while be near her niece. Her niece, as she thought, was hardly managing her own affairs discreetly. "Well, aunt," said Alice, as the old lady walked into the drawing-room one morning at eleven o'clock. Alice always called Lady Macleod her aunt, though, as has been before explained, there was no such close connexion between them. During Lady Macleod's sojourn in London these morning visits were made almost every day. Alice never denied herself, and even made a point of remaining at home to receive them unless she had previously explained that she would be out; but I am not prepared to say that they were, of their own nature, agreeable to her. "Would you mind shutting the window, my dear?" said Lady Macleod, seating herself stiffly on one of the small ugly green chairs. She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back. "Would you mind shutting the window? I'm so warm that I'm afraid of the draught." [Illustration: "Would you mind shutting the window?"] "You don't mean to say that you've walked from King Street," said Alice, doing as she was desired. "Indeed I do,--every step of the way. Cabs are so ruinous. It's a most unfortunate thing; they always say it's just over the two miles here. I don't believe a word of it, because I'm only a little more than the half-hour walking it; and those men will say anything. But how can I prove it, you know?" "I really think it's too far for you to walk when it's so warm." "But what can I do, my dear? I must come, when I've specially come up to London to see you. I shall have a cab back again, because it'll be hotter then, and dear Lady Midlothian has promised to send her carriage at three to take me to the concert. I do so wish you'd go, Alice." "It's out of the question, aunt. The idea of my going in that way at the last moment, without any invitation!" "It wouldn't be without an invitation, Alice. The marchioness has said to me over and over again how glad she would be to see you, if I would bring you." "Why doesn't she come and call if she is so anxious to know me?" "My dear, you've no right to expect it; you haven't indeed. She never calls even on me." "I know I've no right, and I don't expect it, and I don't want it. But neither has she a right to suppose that, under such circumstances, I shall go to her house. You might as well give it up, aunt. Cart ropes wouldn't drag me there." "I think you are very wrong,--particularly under your present circumstances. A young woman that is going to be married, as you are--" "As I am,--perhaps." "That's nonsense, Alice. Of course you are; and for his sake you are bound to cultivate any advantages that naturally belong to you. As to Lady Midlothian or the marchioness coming to call on you here in your father's house, after all that has passed, you really have no right to look for it." "And I don't look for it." "That sort of people are not expected to call. If you'll think of it, how could they do it with all the demands they have on their time?" "My dear aunt, I wouldn't interfere with their time for worlds." "Nobody can say of me, I'm sure, that I run after great people or rich people. It does happen that some of the nearest relations I have,--indeed I may say the nearest relations,--are people of high rank; and I do not see that I'm bound to turn away from my own flesh and blood because of that, particularly when they are always so anxious to keep up the connexion." "I was only speaking of myself, aunt. It is very different with you. You have known them all your life." "And how are you to know them if you won't begin? Lady Midlothian said to me only yesterday that she was glad to hear that you were going to be married so respectably, and then--" "Upon my word I'm very much obliged to her ladyship. I wonder whether she considered that she married respectably when she took Lord Midlothian?" Now Lady Midlothian had been unfortunate in her marriage, having united herself to a man of bad character, who had used her ill, and from whom she had now been for some years separated. Alice might have spared her allusion to this misfortune when speaking of the countess to the cousin who was so fond of her, but she was angered by the application of that odious word respectable to her own prospects; and perhaps the more angered as she was somewhat inclined to feel that the epithet did suit her own position. Her engagement, she had sometimes told herself, was very respectable, and had as often told herself that it lacked other attractions which it should have possessed. She was not quite pleased with herself in having accepted John Grey,--or rather perhaps was not satisfied with herself in having loved him. In her many thoughts on the subject, she always admitted to herself that she had accepted him simply because she loved him;--that she had given her quick assent to his quick proposal simply because he had won her heart. But she was sometimes almost angry with herself that she had permitted her heart to be thus easily taken from her, and had rebuked herself for her girlish facility. But the marriage would be at any rate respectable. Mr. Grey was a man of high character, of good though moderate means; he was, too, well educated, of good birth, a gentleman, and a man of talent. No one could deny that the marriage would be highly respectable, and her father had been more than satisfied. Why Miss Vavasor herself was not quite satisfied will, I hope, in time make itself appear. In the meanwhile it can be understood that Lady Midlothian's praise would gall her. "Alice, don't be uncharitable," said Lady Macleod severely. "Whatever may have been Lady Midlothian's misfortunes no one can say they have resulted from her own fault." "Yes they can, aunt, if she married a man whom she knew to be a scapegrace because he was very rich and an earl." "She was the daughter of a nobleman herself, and only married in her own degree. But I don't want to discuss that. She meant to be good-natured when she mentioned your marriage, and you should take it as it was meant. After all she was only your mother's second cousin--" "Dear aunt, I make no claim on her cousinship." "But she admits the claim, and is quite anxious that you should know her. She has been at the trouble to find out everything about Mr. Grey, and told me that nothing could be more satisfactory." "Upon my word I am very much obliged to her." Lady Macleod was a woman of much patience, and possessed also of considerable perseverance. For another half-hour she went on expatiating on the advantages which would accrue to Alice as a married woman from an acquaintance with her noble relatives, and endeavouring to persuade her that no better opportunity than the present would present itself. There would be a place in Lady Midlothian's carriage, as none other of the daughters were going but Lady Jane. Lady Midlothian would take it quite as a compliment, and a concert was not like a ball or any customary party. An unmarried girl might very properly go to a concert under such circumstances as now existed without any special invitation. Lady Macleod ought to have known her adopted niece better. Alice was immoveable. As a matter of course she was immoveable. Lady Macleod had seldom been able to persuade her to anything, and ought to have been well sure that, of all things, she could not have persuaded her to this. Then, at last, they came to another subject, as to which Lady Macleod declared that she had specially come on this special morning, forgetting, probably, that she had already made the same assertion with reference to the concert. But in truth the last assertion was the correct one, and on that other subject she had been hurried on to say more than she meant by the eagerness of the moment. All the morning she had been full of the matter on which she was now about to speak. She had discussed it quite at length with Lady Midlothian;--though she was by no means prepared to tell Alice Vavasor that any such discussion had taken place. From the concert, and the effect which Lady Midlothian's countenance might have upon Mr. Grey's future welfare, she got herself by degrees round to a projected Swiss tour which Alice was about to make. Of this Swiss tour she had heard before, but had not heard who were to be Miss Vavasor's companions until Lady Midlothian had told her. How it had come to pass that Lady Midlothian had interested herself so much in the concerns of a person whom she did not know, and on whom she in her greatness could not be expected to call, I cannot say; but from some quarter she had learned who were the proposed companions of Alice Vavasor's tour, and she had told Lady Macleod that she did not at all approve of the arrangement. "And when do you go, Alice?" said Lady Macleod. "Early in July, I believe. It will be very hot, but Kate must be back by the middle of August." Kate Vavasor was Alice's first cousin. "Oh! Kate is to go with you?" "Of course she is. I could not go alone, or with no one but George. Indeed it was Kate who made up the party." "Of course you could not go alone with George," said Lady Macleod, very grimly. Now George Vavasor was Kate's brother, and was therefore also first cousin to Alice. He was heir to the old squire down in Westmoreland, with whom Kate lived, their father being dead. Nothing, it would seem, could be more rational than that Alice should go to Switzerland with her cousins; but Lady Macleod was clearly not of this opinion; she looked very grim as she made this allusion to cousin George, and seemed to be preparing herself for a fight. "That is exactly what I say," answered Alice. "But, indeed, he is simply going as an escort to me and Kate, as we don't like the rle of unprotected females. It is very good-natured of him, seeing how much his time is taken up." "I thought he never did anything." "That's because you don't know him, aunt." "No; certainly I don't know him." She did not add that she had no wish to know Mr. George Vavasor, but she looked it. "And has your father been told that he is going?" "Of course he has." "And does--" Lady Macleod hesitated a little before she went on, and then finished her question with a little spasmodic assumption of courage. "And does Mr. Grey know that he is going?" Alice remained silent for a full minute before she answered this question, during which Lady Macleod sat watching her grimly, with her eyes very intent upon her niece's face. If she supposed such silence to have been in any degree produced by shame in answering the question, she was much mistaken. But it may be doubted whether she understood the character of the girl whom she thought she knew so well, and it is probable that she did make such mistake. "I might tell you simply that he does," said Alice at last, "seeing that I wrote to him yesterday, letting him know that such were our arrangements; but I feel that I should not thus answer the question you mean to ask. You want to know whether Mr. Grey will approve of it. As I only wrote yesterday of course I have not heard, and therefore cannot say. But I can say this, aunt, that much as I might regret his disapproval, it would make no change in my plans." "Would it not? Then I must tell you, you are very wrong. It ought to make a change. What! the disapproval of the man you are going to marry make no change in your plans?" "Not in that matter. Come, aunt, if we must discuss this matter let us do it at any rate fairly. In an ordinary way, if Mr. Grey had asked me to give up for any reason my trip altogether, I should have given it up certainly, as I would give up any other indifferent project at the request of so dear a friend,--a friend with whom I am so--so--so closely connected. But if he asked me not to travel with my cousin George, I should refuse him absolutely, without a word of parley on the subject, simply because of the nature and closeness of my connection with him. I suppose you understand what I mean, aunt?" "I suppose I do. You mean that you would refuse to obey him on the very subject on which he has a right to claim your obedience." "He has no right to claim my obedience on any subject," said Alice; and as she spoke Aunt Macleod jumped up with a little start at the vehemence of the words, and of the tone in which they were expressed. She had heard that tone before, and might have been used to it; but, nevertheless, the little jump was involuntary. "At present he has no right to my obedience on any subject, but least of all on that," said Alice. "His advice he may give me, but I am quite sure he will not ask for obedience." "And if he advises you you will slight his advice." "If he tells me that I had better not travel with my cousin George I shall certainly not take his advice. Moreover, I should be careful to let him know how much I was offended by any such counsel from him. It would show a littleness on his part, and a suspicion of which I cannot suppose him to be capable." Alice, as she said this, got up from her seat and walked about the room. When she had finished she stood at one of the windows with her back to her visitor. There was silence between them for a minute or two, during which Lady Macleod was deeply considering how best she might speak the terrible words, which, as Alice's nearest female relative, she felt herself bound to utter. At last she collected her thoughts and her courage, and spoke out. "My dear Alice, I need hardly say that if you had a mother living, or any person with you filling the place of a mother, I should not interfere in this matter." "Of course, Aunt Macleod, if you think I am wrong you have quite a right to say so." "I do think you are wrong,--very wrong, indeed; and if you persist in this I am afraid I must say that I shall think you wicked. Of course Mr. Grey cannot like you to travel with George Vavasor." "And why not, aunt?" Alice, as she asked this question, turned round and confronted Lady Macleod boldly. She spoke with a steady voice, and fixed her eyes upon the old lady's face, as though determined to show that she had no fear of what might be said to her. "Why not, Alice? Surely you do not wish me to say why not." "But I do wish you to say why not. How can I defend myself till the accusation is made?" "You are now engaged to marry Mr. Grey, with the consent and approbation of all your friends. Two years ago you had--had--" "Had what, aunt? If you mean to say that two years ago I was engaged to my cousin George you are mistaken. Three years ago I told him that under certain conditions I would become engaged to him. But my conditions did not suit him, nor his me, and no engagement was ever made. Mr. Grey knows the history of the whole thing. As far as it was possible I have told him everything that took place." "The fact was, Alice, that George Vavasor's mode of life was such that an engagement with him would have been absolute madness." "Dear aunt, you must excuse me if I say that I cannot discuss George Vavasor's mode of life. If I were thinking of becoming his wife you would have a perfect right to discuss it, because of your constant kindness to me. But as matters are he is simply a cousin; and as I like him and you do not, we had better say nothing about him." "I must say this--that after what has passed, and at the present crisis of your life--" "Dear aunt, I'm not in any crisis." "Yes you are, Alice; in the most special crisis of a girl's life. You are still a girl, but you are the promised wife of a very worthy man, who will look to you for all his domestic happiness. George Vavasor has the name, at least, of being very wild." "The worthy man and the wild man must fight it out between them. If I were going away with George by himself, there might be something in what you say." "That would be monstrous." "Monstrous or not, it isn't what I'm about to do. Kate and I have put our purses together, and are going to have an outing for our special fun and gratification. As we should be poor travellers alone, George has promised to go with his sister. Papa knows all about it, and never thought of making any objection." Lady Macleod shook her head. She did not like to say anything against Mr. Vavasor before his daughter; but the shaking of her head was intended to signify that Mr. Vavasor's assent in such a matter was worth nothing. "I can only say again," said Lady Macleod, "that I think Mr. Grey will be displeased,--and that he will have very great cause for displeasure. And I think, moreover, that his approbation ought to be your chief study. I believe, my dear, I'll ask you to let Jane get me a cab. I shan't have a bit too much time to dress for the concert." Alice simply rang the bell, and said no further word on the subject which they had been discussing. When Lady Macleod got up to go away, Alice kissed her, as was customary with them, and the old lady as she went uttered her customary valediction. "God bless you, my dear. Good-bye! I'll come to-morrow if I can." There was therefore no quarrel between them. But both of them felt that words had been spoken which must probably lead to some diminution of their past intimacy. When Lady Macleod had gone Alice sat alone for an hour thinking of what had passed between them,--thinking rather of those two men, the worthy man and the wild man, whose names had been mentioned in close connection with herself. John Grey was a worthy man, a man worthy at all points, as far as she knew him. She told herself it was so. And she told herself, also, that her cousin George was wild,--very wild. And yet her thoughts were, I fear, on the whole more kindly towards her cousin than towards her lover. She had declared to her aunt that John Grey would be incapable of such suspicion as would be shown by any objection on his part to the arrangements made for the tour. She had said so, and had so believed; and yet she continued to brood over the position which her affairs would take, if he did make the objection which Lady Macleod anticipated. She told herself over and over again, that under such circumstances she would not give way an inch. "He is free to go," she said to herself. "If he does not trust me he is quite free to go." It may almost be said that she came at last to anticipate from her lover that very answer to her own letter which she had declared him to be incapable of making.

I cannot say that the house in Queen Anne Street was a pleasant one. It was a small house squeezed in between two large mansions which seemed to crush it. The stairs were narrow; the dining-room was dark and unwelcoming. This would not have mattered if the drawing-room had been pretty. But Alice Vavasor's drawing-room was not pretty. Her father had had the task of furnishing the house, and he had entrusted the duty to a tradesman who had chosen green paper, a green carpet, green curtains, and green damask chairs. There was a green damask sofa, and two green arm-chairs, one at either side of the fireplace. Alice knew that her drawing-room was ugly, and she would greatly have liked to banish the green sofa, to re-paper the wall, and to hang up curtains with a dash of pink in them. But her father was an extravagant man; and she was determined to avoid extravagance. "It's the ugliest room I ever saw in my life," her father once said to her. "It is not very pretty," Alice replied. "I'll go halves with you in the expense of redoing it," said Mr. Vavasor. "Wouldn't that be extravagant, papa?" Mr. Vavasor had shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more about it. It was now June; in that month Lady Macleod usually visited her noble relatives in London, when she had succeeded in saving up the fifty pounds necessary for this purpose. For although she spent her month in London among her noble friends, it must not be supposed that they gave her bed or board. They sometimes gave her tea, and once or twice a second-rate dinner. On these occasions she hired a little parlour and bedroom in King Street, Saint James's, and lived a hot, uncomfortable life, going about at nights to gatherings of fashionable people of which she in her heart disapproved, seeking for smiles which seldom came to her, and telling herself that she made this journey for the good of Alice Vavasor. On her previous visit she had reminded herself that she was seventy-five years old, and had sworn that she would come to London no more; but here she was again, because of the circumstances of Alice's engagement. Her niece, she thought, was not managing her affairs discreetly. "Well, aunt," said Alice, as the old lady walked into the drawing-room one morning. Alice always called Lady Macleod her aunt, and made a point of staying at home to receive her almost daily visits, although she did not enjoy them. "Would you mind shutting the window, my dear?" said Lady Macleod, seating herself stiffly on one of the small ugly green chairs. She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back. "I'm so warm that I'm afraid of the draught." "You don't mean to say that you've walked from King Street?" said Alice. "Indeed I do. Cabs are so expensive." "I really think it's too far for you to walk when it's so warm." "But what can I do, my dear? I shall have a cab home again, because it'll be hotter then, and dear Lady Midlothian has promised to send her carriage at three to take me to the concert. I do so wish you'd go, Alice." "It's out of the question, aunt. The idea of my going at the last moment, without any invitation!" "It wouldn't be without an invitation, Alice. The marchioness has said to me over and over again how glad she would be to see you." "Then why doesn't she come and call one me?" "My dear, you've no right to expect it. She never calls even on me." "I know I've no right, and I don't expect it, or want it. But neither has she a right to suppose that I shall go to her house. You might as well give it up, aunt." "I think you are very wrong, Alice. A young woman that is going to be married, as you are-" "As I am, perhaps." "That's nonsense, Alice. Of course you are; and for his sake you are bound to cultivate any advantages you may have. Nobody can say that I run after great people or rich people. It just happens that some of my nearest relations are people of high rank; and they are anxious to keep up the connexion." "I was only speaking of myself, aunt. It is very different with you. You have known them all your life." "And how are you to know them if you won't begin? Lady Midlothian said to me only yesterday that she was glad to hear that you were going to be married so respectably-" "Upon my word I'm very much obliged to her ladyship. I wonder if she considered that she married respectably when she took Lord Midlothian?" Now Lady Midlothian had been unfortunate in her marriage, having united herself to a man of bad character, who had mistreated her, and from whom she had now been separated for some years. Alice was angered by that odious word respectable; and perhaps the more angered as she felt that her engagement was indeed very respectable, although it lacked other attractions which it should have possessed. She was not quite pleased with herself in having accepted John Grey - or rather, perhaps, was not satisfied with herself in having loved him. She admitted to herself that she had accepted him simply because he had won her heart. But she was sometimes almost angry that she had permitted her heart to be so easily and quickly taken from her. But the marriage would be respectable. Mr. Grey was a man of high character, and good though moderate means; he was well educated, of good birth, a gentleman, and a man of talent. Her father had been more than satisfied. Why Miss Vavasor herself was not quite satisfied will, I hope, in time appear. In the meanwhile, Lady Midlothian's praise galled her. "Alice, don't be uncharitable," said Lady Macleod severely. "No one can say that Lady Midlothian's misfortunes were her own fault." "Yes, they can, aunt, if she married a man whom she knew to be a rascal, just because he was a rich earl." "She was the daughter of a nobleman herself, and only married at her own level. But I don't want to discuss that. She meant to be good-natured when she mentioned your marriage. After all she was your mother's second cousin-" "Dear aunt, I make no claim on her cousinship." "But she does. She has taken the trouble to find out everything about Mr. Grey, and told me that nothing could be more satisfactory." "Upon my word I am very much obliged to her." Lady Macleod was a patient and persevering woman. For another half-hour she detailed the advantages which Alice would gain from knowing these noble relatives, and tried to persuade her to take the opportunity. There would be a place in Lady Midlothian's carriage. Lady Midlothian would take it as a compliment, and an unmarried girl might very properly go to a concert without any special invitation. Lady Macleod ought to have known her adopted niece better. Alice was immoveable. Lady Macleod had seldom been able to persuade her to anything, and ought to have predicted this. At last they came to another subject, which Lady Macleod had had in mind all along. She had discussed it at length with Lady Midlothian; though she was not going to tell Alice that. It was a proposed Swiss tour which Alice was about to make. She had heard about this Swiss tour before, but had not heard who Miss Vavasor's companions were to be until Lady Midlothian had told her. How Lady Midlothian knew this, I cannot say; but she did not approve of the arrangement. "When do you go, Alice?" said Lady Macleod. "Early in July, I believe. It will be very hot, but Kate must be back by the middle of August." Kate Vavasor was Alice's first cousin. "Oh! Kate is to go with you?" "Of course she is. I could not go alone, or with no one but George." "Of course you could not go alone with George," said Lady Macleod, very grimly. Now George Vavasor was Kate's brother, and therefore cousin to Alice. He was heir to the old squire down in Westmorland, the grandfather with whom Kate lived, their father being dead. Nothing could be more rational than that Alice should go to Switzerland with her cousins; but Lady Macleod was clearly not of this opinion. She looked very grim, and seemed to be preparing for a fight. "That is exactly what I say," answered Alice. "But he is simply going as an escort to me and Kate, as we don't like the rle of unprotected females. It is very good-natured of him, seeing how much his time is taken up." "I thought he never did anything." "That's because you don't know him, aunt." "No; certainly I don't know him." She did not add that she had no wish to know Mr. George Vavasor, but she looked it. "And has your father been told that he is going?" "Of course he has." "And does-" Lady Macleod hesitated before she went on. "And does Mr. Grey know that he is going?" Alice remained silent for a full minute before she answered, while Lady Macleod watched her grimly and intently. If she supposed Alice to be ashamed, she was much mistaken. She did not understand the character of the girl whom she thought she knew so well. "I might tell you simply that he does," said Alice at last, "seeing that I wrote to him yesterday, letting him know the arrangements; but you want to know whether Mr. Grey will approve of it. Of course I have not heard yet, and therefore cannot say. But I can say, aunt, that I if he did disapprove, it would make no change in my plans." "Would it not? Then I must tell you, you are very wrong. It ought to make a change. What! the disapproval of the man you are going to marry would make no change in your plans?" "Not in that matter. Come, aunt, let us be fair. If Mr. Grey asked me to give up my trip altogether for any reason, I should certainly do so. But if he asked me not to travel with my cousin George, I should refuse, simply because of the nature and closeness of my connection with him. I suppose you understand what I mean, aunt?" "I suppose I do. You mean that you would refuse to obey Mr. Grey on the very subject on which he has a right to claim your obedience." "He has no right to claim my obedience on any subject," said Alice, so vehemently that Aunt Macleod gave a little involuntary start. "His advice he may give me, but I am quite sure he will not ask for obedience." "And if he advises you, you will ignore his advice." "If he tells me that I had better not travel with my cousin George I shall certainly not take his advice. Moreover, I should let him know I was offended by such advice. It would show a littleness on his part, and a suspicion of which I cannot suppose him to be capable." Alice, as she said this, got up from her seat and walked about the room, pausing at a window with her back to her visitor. There was silence for a minute or two, while Lady Macleod considered how best she might speak the terrible words which she felt herself bound to utter. At last she collected her courage, and spoke out. "My dear Alice, I need hardly say that if you had a mother living, I should not interfere in this matter." "Of course, Aunt Macleod, if you think I am wrong you have a perfect right to say so." "I do think you are wrong, very wrong indeed; and if you persist in this I am afraid I shall think you wicked. Of course Mr. Grey cannot like you to travel with George Vavasor." "And why not, aunt?" Alice turned round and confronted Lady Macleod boldly. She spoke with a steady voice, and fixed her eyes upon the old lady's face. "Surely you do not wish me to say." "But I do wish you to say why not. How can I defend myself till the accusation is made?" "You are now engaged to marry Mr. Grey, with the approval of all your friends. Two years ago you had - had -" "Had what, aunt? If you mean to say that two years ago I was engaged to my cousin George, you are mistaken. Three years ago I told him that under certain conditions I would become engaged to him. But my conditions did not suit him, nor his me, and no engagement was ever made. Mr. Grey knows the whole history. As far as it was possible I have told him everything that took place." "Alice, George Vavasor's way of life was such that an engagement with him would have been absolute madness." "Dear aunt, I cannot discuss George Vavasor's mode of life. If I were thinking of becoming his wife you would have a perfect right to discuss it. But he is simply a cousin; and as I like him and you do not, we had better say nothing about him." "I must say this - that after what has passed, and at the present crisis of your life-" "Dear aunt, I'm not in any crisis." "Yes, you are, Alice; in the most special crisis of a girl's life. You are the promised wife of a worthy man. George Vavasor has the reputation of being very wild." "The worthy man and the wild man must fight it out between them. If I were going away with George by himself, there might be something in what you say." "That would be monstrous." "Monstrous or not, it isn't what I'm about to do. Kate and I have put our purses together, and are going to have an outing for our own pleasure. As we should be poor travellers alone, George has promised to go with his sister. Papa knows all about it, and never objected." Lady Macleod shook her head, meaning that Mr. Vavasor's assent in such a matter was worth nothing. "I think Mr. Grey will be displeased, and with good cause. And I think, moreover, that his approval should be your chief concern. My dear, ask Jane to get me a cab. I need to dress for the concert." Alice rang the bell. When Lady Macleod was leaving, Alice kissed her, as usual, and the old lady uttered her customary farewell. "God bless you, my dear. Good-bye! I'll come tomorrow if I can." There was therefore no quarrel between them. But both felt that words had been spoken which must lessen their intimacy. When Lady Macleod had gone Alice sat alone for an hour thinking of those two men, the worthy man and the wild man. John Grey was a worthy man, she told herself. And she told herself, also, that her cousin George was very wild. And yet her thoughts were, I fear, more kindly towards her cousin than towards her lover. She had declared to her aunt that John Grey would be incapable of suspicion over the arrangements made for the tour. She believed it; and yet she continued to brood over what would happen if he did object. She told herself over and over again, that under such circumstances she would not give way an inch. She said to herself, "If he does not trust me he is quite free to go." And she came at last to anticipate from her lover that very answer to her own letter which she had declared him to be incapable of making.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 2: Lady Macleod

Lady Monk's house in Gloucester Square was admirably well adapted for the giving of parties. It was a large house, and seemed to the eyes of guests to be much larger than it was. The hall was spacious, and the stairs went up in the centre, facing you as you entered the inner hall. Round the top of the stairs there was a broad gallery, with an ornamented railing, and from this opened the doors into the three reception-rooms. There were two on the right, the larger of which looked out backwards, and these two were connected by an archway, as though made for folding-doors; but the doors, I believe, never were there. Fronting the top of the staircase there was a smaller room, looking out backwards, very prettily furnished, and much used by Lady Monk when alone. It was here that Burgo had held that conference with his aunt of which mention has been made. Below stairs there was the great dining-room, on which, on these occasions, a huge buffet was erected for refreshments,--what I may call a masculine buffet, as it was attended by butlers and men in livery,--and there was a smaller room looking out into the square, in which there was a feminine battery for the dispensing of tea and such like smaller good things, and from which female aid could be attained for the arrangement or mending of dresses in a further sanctum within it. For such purposes as that now on foot the house was most commodious. Lady Monk, on these occasions, was moved by a noble ambition to do something different from that done by her neighbours in similar circumstances, and therefore she never came forward to receive her guests. She ensconced herself, early in the evening, in that room at the head of the stairs, and there they who chose to see her made their way up to her, and spoke their little speeches. They who thought her to be a great woman,--and many people did think her to be great,--were wont to declare that she never forgot those who did come, or those who did not. And even they who desired to describe her as little,--for even Lady Monk had enemies,--would hint that though she never came out of the room, she would rise from her chair and make a step towards the door whenever any name very high in fashionable life greeted her ears. So that a mighty Cabinet Minister, or a duchess in great repute, or any special wonder of the season, could not fail of entering her precincts and being seen there for a few moments. It would, of course, happen that the doorway of her chamber would become blocked; but there were precautions taken to avoid this inconvenience as far as possible, and one man in livery was employed to go backwards and forwards between his mistress and the outer world, so as to keep the thread of a passage open. But though Lady Monk was in this way enabled to rest herself during her labours, there was much in her night's work which was not altogether exhilarating. Ladies would come into her small room and sit there by the hour, with whom she had not the slightest wish to hold conversation. The Duchess of St. Bungay would always be there,--so that there was a special seat in one corner of the room which was called the Duchess' stool. "I shouldn't care a straw about her," Lady Monk had been heard to complain, "if she would talk to anybody. But nobody will talk to her, and then she listens to everything." There had been another word or two between Burgo Fitzgerald and his aunt before the evening came, a word or two in the speaking of which she had found some difficulty. She was prepared with the money,--with that two hundred pounds for which he had asked,--obtained with what wiles, and lies, and baseness of subterfuge I need not stop here to describe. But she was by no means willing to give this over into her nephew's hands without security. She was willing to advance him this money; she had been willing even to go through unusual dirt to get it for him; but she was desirous that he should have it only for a certain purpose. How could she bind him down to spend it as she would have it spent? Could she undertake to hand it to him as soon as Lady Glencora should be in his power? Even though she could have brought herself to say as much,--and I think she might also have done so after what she had said,--she could not have carried out such a plan. In that case the want would be instant, and the action must be rapid. She therefore had no alternative but to entrust him with the bank-notes at once. "Burgo," she said, "if I find that you deceive me now, I will never trust you again." "All right," said Burgo, as he barely counted the money before he thrust it into his breast-pocket. "It is lent to you for a certain purpose, should you happen to want it," she said, solemnly. "I do happen to want it very much," he answered. She did not dare to say more; but as her nephew turned away from her with a step that was quite light in its gaiety, she almost felt that she was already cozened. Let Burgo's troubles be as heavy as they might be, there was something to him ecstatic in the touch of ready money which always cured them for the moment. [Illustration: "All right," said Burgo, as he thrust the money into his breast-pocket.] On the morning of Lady Monk's party a few very uncomfortable words passed between Mr. Palliser and his wife. "Your cousin is not going, then?" said he. "Alice is not going." "Then you can give Mrs. Marsham a seat in your carriage?" "Impossible, Plantagenet. I thought I had told you that I had promised my cousin Jane." "But you can take three." "Indeed I can't,--unless you would like me to sit out with the coachman." There was something in this,--a tone of loudness, a touch of what he called to himself vulgarity,--which made him very angry. So he turned away from her, and looked as black as a thundercloud. "You must know, Plantagenet," she went on, "that it is impossible for three women dressed to go out in one carriage. I am sure you wouldn't like to see me afterwards if I had been one of them." "You need not have said anything to Lady Jane when Miss Vavasor refused. I had asked you before that." "And I had told you that I liked going with young women, and not with old ones. That's the long and the short of it." "Glencora, I wish you would not use such expressions." "What! not the long and the short? It's good English. Quite as good as Mr. Bott's, when he said in the House the other night that the Government kept their accounts in a higgledy-piggledy way. You see, I have been studying the debates, and you shouldn't be angry with me." "I am not angry with you. You speak like a child to say so. Then, I suppose, the carriage must go for Mrs. Marsham after it has taken you?" "It shall go before. Jane will not be in a hurry, and I am sure I shall not." "She will think you very uncivil; that is all. I told her that she could go with you when I heard that Miss Vavasor was not to be there." "Then, Plantagenet, you shouldn't have told her so, and that's the long--; but I mustn't say that. The truth is this, if you give me any orders I'll obey them,--as far as I can. If I can't I'll say so. But if I'm left to go by my own judgement, it's not fair that I should be scolded afterwards." "I have never scolded you." "Yes, you have. You have told me that I was uncivil." "I said that she would think you so." "Then, if it's only what she thinks, I don't care two straws about it. She may have the carriage to herself if she likes, but she shan't have me in it,--not unless I'm ordered to go. I don't like her, and I won't pretend to like her. My belief is that she follows me about to tell you if she thinks that I do wrong." "Glencora!" "And that odious baboon with the red bristles does the same thing,--only he goes to her because he doesn't dare to go to you." Plantagenet Palliser was struck wild with dismay. He understood well who it was whom his wife intended to describe; but that she should have spoken of any man as a baboon with red bristles, was terrible to his mind! He was beginning to think that he hardly knew how to manage his wife. And the picture she had drawn was very distressing to him. She had no mother; neither had he; and he had wished that Mrs. Marsham should give to her some of that matronly assistance and guidance which a mother does give to her young married daughter. It was true, too, as he knew, that a word or two as to some socially domestic matters had filtered through to him from Mr. Bott, down at Matching Priory, but only in such a way as to enable him to see what counsel it was needful that he should give. As for espionage over his wife,--no man could despise it more than he did! No man would be less willing to resort to it! And now his wife was accusing him of keeping spies, both male and female. "Glencora!" he said again; and then he stopped, not knowing what to say to her. "Well, my dear, it's better you should know at once what I feel about it. I don't suppose I'm very good; indeed I dare say I'm bad enough, but these people about me won't make me any better. The duennas don't make the Spanish ladies worth much." "Duennas!" After that, Lady Glencora sat herself down, and Mr. Palliser stood for some moments looking at her. It ended in his making her a long speech, in which he said a good deal of his own justice and forbearance, and something also of her frivolity and childishness. He told her that his only complaint of her was that she was too young, and, as he did so, she made a little grimace,--not to him, but to herself, as though saying to herself that that was all he knew about it. He did not notice it, or, if he did, his notice did not stop his eloquence. He assured her that he was far from keeping any watch over her, and declared that she had altogether mistaken Mrs. Marsham's character. Then there was another little grimace. "There's somebody has mistaken it worse than I have," the grimace said. Of the bristly baboon he condescended to say nothing, and he wound up by giving her a cold kiss, and saying that he would meet her at Lady Monk's. When the evening came,--or rather the night,--the carriage went first for Mrs. Marsham, and having deposited her at Lady Monk's, went back to Park Lane for Lady Glencora. Then she had herself driven to St. James's Square, to pick up Lady Jane, so that altogether the coachman and horses did not have a good time of it. "I wish he'd keep a separate carriage for her," Lady Glencora said to her cousin Jane,--having perceived that her servants were not in a good humour. "That would be expensive," said Lady Jane. "Yes, it would be expensive," said Lady Glencora. She would not condescend to make any remark as to the non-importance of such expense to a man so wealthy as her husband, knowing that his wealth was, in fact, hers. Never to him or to any other,--not even to herself,--had she hinted that much was due to her because she had been magnificent as an heiress. There were many things about this woman that were not altogether what a husband might wish. She was not softly delicate in all her ways; but in disposition and temper she was altogether generous. I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it she would have been a thorough gentleman. Mrs. Marsham was by no means satisfied with the way in which she was treated. She would not have cared to go at all to Lady Monk's party had she supposed that she would have to make her entry there alone. With Lady Glencora she would have seemed to receive some of that homage which would certainly have been paid to her companion. The carriage called, moreover, before she was fully ready, and the footman, as he stood at the door to hand her in, had been very sulky. She understood it all. She knew that Lady Glencora had positively declined her companionship; and if she resolved to be revenged, such resolution on her part was only natural. When she reached Lady Monk's house, she had to make her way up stairs all alone. The servants called her Mrs. Marsh, and under that name she got passed on into the front drawing-room. There she sat down, not having seen Lady Monk, and meditated over her injuries. It was past eleven before Lady Glencora arrived, and Burgo Fitzgerald had begun to think that his evil stars intended that he should never see her again. He had been wickedly baulked at Monkshade, by what influence he had never yet ascertained; and now he thought that the same influence must be at work to keep her again away from his aunt's house. He had settled in his mind no accurate plan of a campaign; he had in his thoughts no fixed arrangement by which he might do the thing which he meditated. He had attempted to make some such plan; but, as is the case with all men to whom thinking is an unusual operation, concluded at last that he had better leave it to the course of events. It was, however, obviously necessary that he should see Lady Glencora before the course of events could be made to do anything for him. He had written to her, making his proposition in bold terms, and he felt that if she were utterly decided against him, her anger at his suggestion, or at least her refusal, would have been made known to him in some way. Silence did not absolutely give consent, but it seemed to show that consent was not impossible. From ten o'clock to past eleven he stood about on the staircase of his aunt's house, waiting for the name which he was desirous of hearing, and which he almost feared to hear. Men spoke to him, and women also, but he hardly answered. His aunt once called him into her room, and with a cautionary frown on her brow, bade him go dance. "Don't look so dreadfully preoccupied," she said to him in a whisper. But he shook his head at her, almost savagely, and went away, and did not dance. Dance! How was he to dance with such an enterprise as that upon his mind? Even to Burgo Fitzgerald the task of running away with another man's wife had in it something which prevented dancing. Lady Monk was older, and was able to regulate her feelings with more exactness. But Burgo, though he could not dance, went down into the dining-room and drank. He took a large beer-glass full of champagne and soon after that another. The drink did not flush his cheeks or make his forehead red, or bring out the sweat-drops on his brow, as it does with some men; but it added a peculiar brightness to his blue eyes. It was by the light of his eyes that men knew when Burgo had been drinking. At last, while he was still in the supper room, he heard Lady Glencora's name announced. He had already seen Mr. Palliser come in and make his way up-stairs some quarter of an hour before; but as to that he was indifferent. He had known that the husband was to be there. When the long-expected name reached his ears, his heart seemed to jump within him. What, on the spur of the moment, should he do? As he had resolved that he would be doing,--that something should be done, let it be what it might,--he hurried to the dining-room door, and was just in time to see and be seen as Lady Glencora was passing up the stairs. She was just above him as he got himself out into the hall, so that he could not absolutely greet her with his hand; but he looked up at her, and caught her eye. He looked up, and moved his hand to her in token of salutation. She looked down at him, and the expression of her face altered visibly as her glance met his. She barely bowed to him,--with her eyes rather than with her head, but he flattered himself that there was, at any rate, no anger in her countenance. How beautiful he was as he gazed up at her, leaning against the wall as he stood, and watching her as she made her slow way up the stairs! She felt that his eyes were on her, and where the stairs turned she could not restrain herself from one other glance. As her eyes fell on his again, his mouth opened, and she fancied that she could hear the faint sigh that he uttered. It was a glorious mouth, such as the old sculptors gave to their marble gods! And Burgo, if it was so that he had not heart enough to love truly, could look as though he loved. It was not in him deceit,--or what men call acting. The expression came to him naturally, though it expressed so much more than there was within; as strong words come to some men who have no knowledge that they are speaking strongly. At this moment Burgo Fitzgerald looked as though it were possible that he might die of love. Lady Glencora was met at the top of the stairs by Lady Monk, who came out to her, almost into the gallery, with her sweetest smile,--so that the newly-arrived guest, of course, entered into the small room. There sat the Duchess of St. Bungay on her stool in the corner, and there, next to the Duchess, but at the moment engaged in no conversation, stood Mr. Bott. There was another lady there, who stood very high in the world, and whom Lady Monk was very glad to welcome--the young Marchioness of Hartletop. She was in slight mourning; for her father-in-law, the late Marquis, had died no t yet quite six months since. Very beautiful she was, and one whose presence at their houses ladies and gentlemen prized alike. She never said silly things, like the Duchess, never was troublesome as to people's conduct to her, was always gracious, yet was never led away into intimacies, was without peer the best-dressed woman in London, and yet gave herself no airs;--and then she was so exquisitely beautiful. Her smile was loveliness itself. There were, indeed, people who said that it meant nothing; but then, what should the smile of a young married woman mean? She had not been born in the purple, like Lady Glencora, her father being a country clergyman who had never reached a higher grade than that of an archdeacon; but she knew the ways of high life, and what an exigeant husband would demand of her, much better than poor Glencora. She would have spoken of no man as a baboon with a bristly beard. She never talked of the long and the short of it. She did not wander out o' nights in winter among the ruins. She made no fast friendship with ladies whom her lord did not like. She had once, indeed, been approached by a lover since she had been married,--Mr. Palliser himself having been the offender,--but she had turned the affair to infinite credit and profit, had gained her husband's closest confidence by telling him of it all, had yet not brought on any hostile collision, and had even dismissed her lover without annoying him. But then Lady Hartletop was a miracle of a woman! Lady Glencora was no miracle. Though born in the purple, she was made of ordinary flesh and blood, and as she entered Lady Monk's little room, hardly knew how to recover herself sufficiently for the purposes of ordinary conversation. "Dear Lady Glencora, do come in for a moment to my den. We were so sorry not to have you at Monkshade. We heard such terrible things about your health." Lady Glencora said that it was only a cold,--a bad cold. "Oh, yes; we heard,--something about moonlight and ruins. So like you, you know. I love that sort of thing, above all people; but it doesn't do; does it? Circumstances are so exacting. I think you know Lady Hartletop;--and there's the Duchess of St. Bungay. Mr. Palliser was here five minutes since." Then Lady Monk was obliged to get to her door again and Lady Glencora found herself standing close to Lady Hartletop. "We saw Mr. Palliser just pass through," said Lady Hartletop, who was able to meet and speak of the man who had dared to approach her with his love, without the slightest nervousness. "Yes; he said he should be here," said Lady Glencora. "There's a great crowd," said Lady Hartletop. "I didn't think London was so full." "Very great." said Lady Glencora, and then they had said to each other all that society required. Lady Glencora, as we know, could talk with imprudent vehemence by the hour together if she liked her companion; but the other lady seldom committed herself by more words than she had uttered now,--unless it was to her tirewoman. "How very well you are looking," said the Duchess. "And I heard you had been so ill." Of that midnight escapade among the ruins it was fated that Lady Glencora should never hear the last. "How d'ye do, Lady Glencowrer?" sounded in her ear, and there was a great red paw stuck out for her to take. But after what had passed between Lady Glencora and her husband to-day about Mr. Bott, she was determined that she would not take Mr. Bott's hand. "How are you, Mr. Bott?" she said. "I think I'll look for Mr. Palliser in the back room." "Dear Lady Glencora," whispered the Duchess, in an ecstasy of agony. Lady Glencora turned and bowed her head to her stout friend. "Do let me go away with you. There's that woman, Mrs. Conway Sparkes, coming, and you know how I hate her." She had nothing to do but to take the Duchess under her wing, and they passed into the large room together. It is, I think, more than probable that Mrs. Conway Sparkes had been brought in by Lady Monk as the only way of removing the Duchess from her stool. Just within the dancing-room Lady Glencora found her husband, standing in a corner, looking as though he were making calculations. "I'm going away," said he, coming up to her. "I only just came because I said I would. Shall you be late?" "Oh, no; I suppose not." "Shall you dance?" "Perhaps once,--just to show that I'm not an old woman." "Don't heat yourself. Good-bye." Then he went, and in the crush of the doorway he passed Burgo Fitzgerald, whose eye was intently fixed upon his wife. He looked at Burgo, and some thought of that young man's former hopes flashed across his mind,--some remembrance, too, of a caution that had been whispered to him; but for no moment did a suspicion come to him that he ought to stop and watch by his wife.

Lady Monk's house in Gloucester Square was admirably well adapted for parties. The hall was spacious, with the stairs going up the centre; round the top of the stairs there was a broad gallery, with an ornamented railing, and from this opened the doors into the three reception-rooms. The two on the right were connected by an archway; and there was a smaller room, very prettily furnished, which Lady Monk used when alone. Downstairs was the great dining-room, on which a huge buffet was erected for refreshments, attended by butlers and men in livery; and there was a smaller room looking out into the square, where maids could dispense tea and other good things. Lady Monk, on these occasions, never came forward to receive her guests. She stayed in that room at the head of the stairs, and they who wished to see her made their way up and spoke their little speeches. She would rise from her chair and take a step towards the door to greet anyone very high in fashionable life, like a Cabinet Minister or a duchess. Of course the doorway of her chamber would become blocked; but a man in livery was employed to go backwards and forwards between his mistress and the outer world. But ladies would also come into her small room and sit there by the hour, with whom Lady Monk had not the slightest wish to hold conversation. The Duchess of St. Bungay would always be there. "I shouldn't care a straw about her," Lady Monk had been heard to complain, "if she would talk to anybody. But nobody will talk to her, and she listens to everything." There had been another word or two between Burgo Fitzgerald and his aunt, which she had spoken with some difficulty. She had the two hundred pounds for which he had asked - obtained with what wiles and lies I need not here describe. But she was not willing to give this to her nephew without security. How could she bind him to spend it as she wanted it spent? Could she hand it to him as soon as Lady Glencora was in his power? That was not possible; she had no alternative but to entrust him with the bank-notes at once. "Burgo," she said, "if you deceive me now, I will never trust you again." "All right," said Burgo, thrusting the money into his breast-pocket. "It is lent to you for a certain purpose, should you happen to want it," she said, solemnly. "I do happen to want it very much," he answered. She did not dare to say more; but as her nephew turned away from her with a light step, she almost felt that she was already tricked. There was always something ecstatic to Burgo in the touch of ready money which cured his troubles for the moment. On the morning of Lady Monk's party a few very uncomfortable words passed between Mr. Palliser and his wife. "Your cousin Alice is not going, then?" said he. "No." "Then you can give Mrs. Marsham a seat in your carriage?" "Impossible, Plantagenet. I thought I had told you that I had promised my cousin Jane." "But you can take three." "Indeed I can't - unless you would like me to sit with the coachman." There was a touch of what he called vulgarity in this which made him very angry. So he turned away from her, and looked as black as a thundercloud. "You must know, Plantagenet," she went on, "that it is impossible for three women in evening dress to fit in one carriage." "You need not have asked Lady Jane when Miss Vavasor refused." "And I had told you that I liked going with young women, and not with old ones. That's the long and the short of it." "Glencora, I wish you would not use such expressions." "What! the long and the short? It's good English. Quite as good as Mr. Bott's, when he said in the House the other night that the Government kept their accounts in a higgledy-piggledy way. You see, I have been studying the debates, and you shouldn't be angry with me." "I am not angry with you. You speak like a child to say so. Then, I suppose, the carriage must go for Mrs. Marsham after it has taken you?" "It shall go before. Jane will not be in a hurry, and I am sure I shall not." "She will think you very uncivil; that is all. I told her that she could go with you when I heard that Miss Vavasor was not to be there." "Then, Plantagenet, you shouldn't have told her so. If you give me any orders I'll obey them - as far as I can. If I can't I'll say so. But if I'm left to go by my own judgement, it's not fair that I should be scolded afterwards." "I have never scolded you." "Yes, you have. You have told me that I was uncivil." "I said that she would think you so." "Then, if it's only what she thinks, I don't care two straws about it. I don't like her. My belief is that she follows me about to tell you if she thinks that I do wrong." "Glencora!" "And that odious baboon with the red bristles does the same thing - only he goes to her because he doesn't dare to go to you." Plantagenet Palliser was struck wild with dismay. He understood well whom his wife meant; but that she should have spoken of any man as a baboon with red bristles, was terrible! He was beginning to think that he hardly knew how to manage his wife. It was true that a word or two about domestic matters had filtered through to him from Mr. Bott, down at Matching Priory, but only in such a way as to enable him to see what advice he should give. As for spying on his wife - no man could despise it more than he did! And now his wife was accusing him of keeping spies. "Glencora!" he said again; and then he stopped, not knowing what to say to her. "Well, my dear, it's better you should know at once what I feel about it. I dare say I'm bad enough, but these people about me won't make me any better. The duennas don't make the Spanish ladies worth much." "Duennas!" Lady Glencora sat down, and Mr. Palliser stood for some moments looking at her. It ended in his making her a long speech, in which he said a good deal of his own justice and forbearance, and something also of her frivolity and childishness. He told her that his only complaint of her was that she was too young, and, as he did so, she made a little grimace to herself, as if to say it was more than that. He did not notice it, or, if he did, it did not stop his eloquence. He assured her that he was far from keeping any watch over her, and declared that she had altogether mistaken Mrs. Marsham's character. At that, there was another little grimace. He ended by giving her a cold kiss, and saying that he would meet her at Lady Monk's. When the evening came, the carriage went first for Mrs. Marsham, and having deposited her at Lady Monk's, went back to Park Lane for Lady Glencora. Then she had herself driven to St. James's Square, to pick up Lady Jane, so that altogether the coachman and horses did not have a good time of it. "I wish he'd keep a separate carriage for her," Lady Glencora said to her cousin Jane. "That would be expensive," said Lady Jane. "Yes, it would," said Lady Glencora, not deigning to remark that her husband's wealth was, in fact, hers. She put on no airs because she was an heiress. She was not softly delicate in all her ways; but she was altogether generous. I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it, she would have been a thorough gentleman. Mrs. Marsham was by no means satisfied with the way she was treated. She would not have cared to go to Lady Monk's party if she had known that she would have to make her entry there alone, without a share of the homage which would certainly have been paid to Lady Glencora. If she resolved to be revenged, such resolution was only natural. When she reached Lady Monk's house, she had to make her way upstairs all alone. She sat down in the front drawing room, and meditated on her injuries. It was past eleven before Lady Glencora arrived, and Burgo Fitzgerald had begun to think that his evil stars intended that he should never see her again. He had no definite plan in mind. He had attempted to make a plan; but, like all men to whom thinking is unusual, concluded at last that he had better leave it to the course of events. It was, however, necessary that he should see Lady Glencora before the course of events could do anything for him. He had written to her boldly, and he felt that her silence seemed to show that consent was not impossible. From ten o'clock to past eleven he stood about on the staircase, waiting for the name which he desired yet almost feared to hear. His aunt once called him into her room, and with a frown told him to go and dance. But he shook his head almost savagely, and went away. Dance! How was he to dance? Even to Burgo Fitzgerald the task of running away with another man's wife had in it something which prevented dancing. Instead he went down into the dining-room and drank. He took a large beer-glass full of champagne and then another. The drink did not flush his cheeks, but it added a peculiar brightness to his blue eyes. It was by the light of his eyes that men knew when Burgo had been drinking. At last, while he was in the supper room, he heard Lady Glencora's name announced. He had already seen Mr. Palliser come in and make his way upstairs a quarter of an hour before. When the long-expected name now reached his ears, his heart seemed to jump. What should he do? He hurried to the dining-room door, just in time to see and be seen as Lady Glencora was passing up the stairs. He looked up at her, and caught her eye, and moved his hand in salutation. She looked down at him, and her expression altered visibly as her glance met his. She barely bowed to him, but he thought there was, at any rate, no anger in her face. How beautiful he was as he gazed up at her, leaning against the wall and watching her as she made her slow way up the stairs! She felt that his eyes were on her, and where the stairs turned she could not restrain herself from one other glance. As her eyes fell on his again, his mouth opened, and she fancied that she could hear a faint sigh. It was a glorious mouth, such as the old sculptors gave to their marble gods! Burgo, though he had not heart enough to love truly, could look as though he loved. At this moment he looked as though he might die of love. Lady Glencora was met at the top of the stairs by Lady Monk, who came out to her with her sweetest smile. Lady Glencora entered the small room, where sat the Duchess of St. Bungay, with Mr. Bott standing next to her. There was another lady there, who stood very high in the world, and whom Lady Monk was very glad to welcome - the young Marchioness of Hartletop. Very beautiful she was, and never said silly things, was always gracious, yet was never led away into intimacies, was the best-dressed woman in London, and yet gave herself no airs - and she was exquisitely beautiful. Her smile was loveliness itself. There were, indeed, people who said that it meant nothing; but then, what should the smile of a young married woman mean? Her father had been a country clergyman; but she knew the ways of high life much better than poor Glencora. She would have spoken of no man as a baboon with a bristly beard. She did not wander out on winter nights among the ruins. She had once, indeed, been approached by a lover after she had been married - Mr. Palliser himself having been the offender - but she had turned the affair to credit, had gained her husband's closest confidence by telling him of it all, and had even dismissed her lover without annoying him. But then Lady Hartletop was a miracle of a woman! Lady Glencora was no miracle. She was made of ordinary flesh and blood, and as she entered Lady Monk's little room, hardly knew how to recover herself enough to make ordinary conversation. "Dear Lady Glencora, we were so sorry not to have you at Monkshade. We heard such terrible things about your health." Lady Glencora said that it was only a cold. "Oh, yes; we heard something about moonlight and ruins. So like you. I think you know Lady Hartletop; and the Duchess of St. Bungay." Then Lady Monk was obliged to go to her door again and Lady Glencora found herself standing close to Lady Hartletop. "We saw Mr. Palliser just pass through," said Lady Hartletop, who was able to speak of the man who had dared to approach her with his love, without the slightest nervousness. "Yes," said Lady Glencora. "There's a great crowd," said Lady Hartletop. "I didn't think London was so full." "Very great." said Lady Glencora, and then they had said to each other all that society required. "How very well you are looking," said the Duchess. "And I heard you had been so ill." "How d'ye do, Lady Glencowrer?" sounded in her ear, and there was a great red paw stuck out for her to take. But she was determined that she would not take Mr. Bott's hand. "How are you, Mr. Bott?" she said. "I think I'll look for Mr. Palliser in the back room." "Dear Lady Glencora," whispered the Duchess, in an ecstasy of agony. Lady Glencora turned to her. "Do let me go away with you. There's that woman, Mrs. Conway Sparkes, coming, and you know how I hate her." She had to take the Duchess under her wing, and they passed into the large room together. It is, I think, probable that Mrs. Conway Sparkes had been brought in by Lady Monk as the only way of removing the Duchess. In the dancing-room Lady Glencora found her husband standing in a corner, looking as though he were making calculations. "I'm going," said he, coming up to her. "I only came because I said I would. Will you be late?" "Oh, no; I suppose not." "Shall you dance?" "Perhaps once, just to show that I'm not an old woman." "Don't heat yourself. Good-bye." Then he went, and in the crush of the doorway he passed Burgo Fitzgerald, whose eye was intently fixed upon his wife. He looked at Burgo, and some thought of that young man's former hopes flashed across his mind - some remembrance, too, of a caution that had been whispered to him; but for no moment did he suspect that he ought to stay and guard his wife.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 49: How Lady Glencora Went to Lady Monk's Party

Burgo Fitzgerald remained for a minute or two leaning where we last saw him,--against the dining-room wall at the bottom of the staircase; and as he did so some thoughts that were almost solemn passed across his mind, This thing that he was about to do, or to attempt,--was it in itself a good thing, and would it be good for her whom he pretended to love? What would be her future if she consented now to go with him, and to divide herself from her husband? Of his own future he thought not at all. He had never done so. Even when he had first found himself attracted by the reputation of her wealth, he cannot be said to have looked forward in any prudential way to coming years. His desire to put himself in possession of so magnificent a fortune had simply prompted him, as he might have been prompted to play for a high stake at a gaming-table. But now, during these moments, he did think a little of her. Would she be happy, simply because he loved her, when all women should cease to acknowledge her; when men would regard her as one degraded and dishonoured; when society should be closed against her; when she would be driven to live loudly because the softness and graces of quiet life would be denied to her? Burgo knew well what must be the nature of such a woman's life in such circumstances. Would Glencora be happy with him while living such a life simply because he loved her? And, under such circumstances, was it likely that he would continue to love her? Did he not know himself to be the most inconstant of men, and the least trustworthy? Leaning thus against the wall at the bottom of the stairs he did ask himself all these questions with something of true feeling about his heart, and almost persuaded himself that he had better take his hat and wander forth anywhere into the streets. It mattered little what might become of himself. If he could drink himself out of the world, it might be an end of things that would be not altogether undesirable. But then the remembrance of his aunt's two hundred pounds came upon him, which money he even now had about him on his person, and a certain idea of honour told him that he was bound to do that for which the money had been given to him. As to telling his aunt that he had changed his mind, and, therefore, refunding the money--no such thought as that was possible to him! To give back two hundred pounds entire,--two hundred pounds which were already within his clutches, was not within the compass of Burgo's generosity. Remembering the cash, he told himself that hesitation was no longer possible to him. So he gathered himself up, stretched his hands over his head, uttered a sigh that was audible to all around him, and took himself up-stairs. He looked in at his aunt's room, and then he saw her and was seen by her. "Well, Burgo," she said, with her sweetest smile, "have you been dancing?" He turned away from her without answering her, muttering something between his teeth about a cold-blooded Jezebel,--which, if she had heard it, would have made her think him the most ungrateful of men. But she did not hear him, and smiled still as he went away, saying something to Mrs. Conway Sparkes as to the great change for the better which had taken place in her nephew's conduct. "There's no knowing who may not reform," said Mrs. Sparkes, with an emphasis which seemed to Lady Monk to be almost uncourteous. Burgo made his way first into the front room and then into the larger room where the dancing was in progress, and there he saw Lady Glencora standing up in a quadrille with the Marquis of Hartletop. Lord Hartletop was a man not much more given to conversation than his wife, and Lady Glencora seemed to go through her work with very little gratification either in the dancing or in the society of her partner. She was simply standing up to dance, because, as she had told Mr. Palliser, ladies of her age generally do stand up on such occasions. Burgo watched her as she crossed and re-crossed the room, and at last she was aware of his presence. It made no change in her, except that she became even somewhat less animated than she had been before. She would not seem to see him, nor would she allow herself to be driven into a pretence of a conversation with her partner because he was there. "I will go up to her at once, and ask her to waltz," Burgo said to himself, as soon as the last figure of the quadrille was in action. "Why should I not ask her as well as any other woman?" Then the music ceased, and after a minute's interval Lord Hartletop took away his partner on his arm into another room. Burgo, who had been standing near the door, followed them at once. The crowd was great, so that he could not get near them or even keep them in sight, but he was aware of the way in which they were going. It was five minutes after this when he again saw her, and then she was seated on a cane bench in the gallery, and an old woman was standing close to her, talking to her. It was Mrs. Marsham cautioning her against some petty imprudence, and Lady Glencora was telling that lady that she needed no such advice, in words almost as curt as those I have used. Lord Hartletop had left her, feeling that, as far as that was concerned, he had done his duty for the night. Burgo knew nothing of Mrs. Marsham,--had never seen her before, and was quite unaware that she had any special connection with Mr. Palliser. It was impossible, he thought, to find Lady Glencora in a better position for his purpose, so he made his way up to her through the crowd, and muttering some slight inaudible word, offered her his hand. "That will do very well thank you, Mrs. Marsham," Lady Glencora said at this moment. "Pray, do not trouble yourself," and then she gave her hand to Fitzgerald. Mrs. Marsham, though unknown to him, knew with quite sufficient accuracy who he was, and all his history, as far as it concerned her friend's wife. She had learned the whole story of the loves of Burgo and Lady Glencora. Though Mr. Palliser had never mentioned that man's name to her, she was well aware that her duty as a duenna would make it expedient that she should keep a doubly wary eye upon him should he come near the sheepfold. And there he was, close to them, almost leaning over them, with the hand of his late lady love,--the hand of Mr. Palliser's wife,--within his own! How Lady Glencora might have carried herself at this moment had Mrs. Marsham not been there, it is bootless now to surmise; but it may be well understood that under Mrs. Marsham's immediate eye all her resolution would be in Burgo's favour. She looked at him softly and kindly, and though she uttered no articulate word, her countenance seemed to show that the meeting was not unpleasant to her. "Will you waltz?" said Burgo,--asking it not at all as though it were a special favour,--asking it exactly as he might have done had they been in the habit of dancing with each other every other night for the last three months. "I don't think Lady Glencora will waltz to-night," said Mrs. Marsham, very stiffly. She certainly did not know her business as a duenna, or else the enormity of Burgo's proposition had struck her so forcibly as to take away from her all her presence of mind. Otherwise, she must have been aware that such an answer from her would surely drive her friend's wife into open hostility. "And why not, Mrs. Marsham?" said Lady Glencora rising from her seat. "Why shouldn't I waltz to-night? I rather think I shall, the more especially as Mr. Fitzgerald waltzes very well." Thereupon she put her hand upon Burgo's arm. Mrs. Marsham made still a little effort,--a little effort that was probably involuntary. She put out her hand, and laid it on Lady Glencora's left shoulder, looking into her face as she did so with all the severity of caution of which she was mistress. Lady Glencora shook her duenna off angrily. Whether she would put her fate into the hands of this man who was now touching her, or whether she would not, she had not as yet decided; but of this she was very sure, that nothing said or done by Mrs. Marsham should have any effect in restraining her. What could Mrs. Marsham do? Mr. Palliser was gone. Some rumour of that proposed visit to Monkshade, and the way in which it had been prevented, had reached her ear. Some whispers had come to her that Fitzgerald still dared to love, as married, the woman whom he had loved before she was married. There was a rumour about that he still had some hope. Mrs. Marsham had never believed that Mr. Palliser's wife would really be false to her vows. It was not in fear of any such catastrophe as a positive elopement that she had taken upon herself the duty of duenna. Lady Glencora would, no doubt, require to be pressed down into that decent mould which it would become the wife of a Mr. Palliser to assume as her form; and this pressing down, and this moulding, Mrs. Marsham thought that she could accomplish. It had not hitherto occurred to her that she might be required to guard Mr. Palliser from positive dishonour; but now--now she hardly knew what to think about it. What should she do? To whom should she go? And then she saw Mr. Bott looming large before her on the top of the staircase. [Illustration: Mr. Bott on the watch.] In the meantime Lady Glencora went off towards the dancers, leaning on Burgo's arm. "Who is that woman?" said Burgo. They were the first words he spoke to her, though since he had last seen her he had written to her that letter which even now she carried about her. His voice in her ears sounded as it used to sound when their intimacy had been close, and questions such as that he had asked were common between them. And her answer was of the same nature. "Oh, such an odious woman!" she said. "Her name is Mrs. Marsham; she is my bte noire." And then they were actually dancing, whirling round the room together, before a word had been said of that which was Burgo's settled purpose, and which at some moments was her settled purpose also. Burgo waltzed excellently, and in old days, before her marriage, Lady Glencora had been passionately fond of dancing. She seemed to give herself up to it now as though the old days had come back to her. Lady Monk, creeping to the intermediate door between her den and the dancing-room, looked in on them, and then crept back again. Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott standing together just inside the other door, near to the staircase, looked on also--in horror. "He shouldn't have gone away and left her," said Mr. Bott, almost hoarsely. "But who could have thought it?" said Mrs. Marsham. "I'm sure I didn't." "I suppose you'd better tell him?" said Mr. Bott. "But I don't know where to find him," said Mrs. Marsham. "I didn't mean now at once," said Mr. Bott;--and then he added, "Do you think it is as bad as that?" "I don't know what to think," said Mrs. Marsham. The waltzers went on till they were stopped by want of breath. "I am so much out of practice," said Lady Glencora; "I didn't think--I should have been able--to dance at all." Then she put up her face, and slightly opened her mouth, and stretched her nostrils,--as ladies do as well as horses when the running has been severe and they want air. "You'll take another turn," said he. "Presently," said she, beginning to have some thought in her mind as to whether Mrs. Marsham was watching her. Then there was a little pause, after which he spoke in an altered voice. "Does it put you in mind of old days?" said he. It was, of course, necessary for him that he should bring her to some thought of the truth. It was all very sweet, that dancing with her, as they used to dance, without any question as to the reason why it was so; that sudden falling into the old habits, as though everything between this night and the former nights had been a dream; but this would not further his views. The opportunity had come to him which he must use, if he intended ever to use such opportunity. There was the two hundred pounds in his pocket, which he did not intend to give back. "Does it put you in mind of 'old days?'" he said. The words roused her from her sleep at once, and dissipated her dream. The facts all rushed upon her in an instant; the letter in her pocket; the request which she had made to Alice, that Alice might be induced to guard her from this danger; the words which her husband had spoken to her in the morning, and her anger against him in that he had subjected her to the eyes of a Mrs. Marsham; her own unsettled mind--quite unsettled whether it would be best for her to go or to stay! It all came upon her now at the first word of tenderness which Burgo spoke to her. It has often been said of woman that she who doubts is lost,--so often that they who say it now, say it simply because others have said it before them, never thinking whether or no there be any truth in the proverb. But they who have said so, thinking of their words as they were uttered, have known but little of women. Women doubt every day, who solve their doubts at last on the right side, driven to do so, some by fear, more by conscience, but most of them by that half-prudential, half-unconscious knowledge of what is fitting, useful, and best under the cirumstances, which rarely deserts either men or women till they have brought themselves to the Burgo Fitzgerald state of recklessness. Men when they have fallen even to that, will still keep up some outward show towards the world; but women in this condition defy the world, and declare themselves to be children of perdition. Lady Glencora was doubting sorely; but, though doubting, she was not as yet lost. "Does it put you in mind of old days?" said Burgo. She was driven to answer, and she knew that much would be decided by the way in which she might now speak. "You must not talk of that," she said, very softly. "May I not?" And now his tongue was unloosed, so that he began to speak quickly. "May I not? And why not? They were happy days,--so happy! Were not you happy when you thought--? Ah, dear! I suppose it is best not even to think of them?" "Much the best." "Only it is impossible. I wish I knew the inside of your heart, Cora, so that I could see what it is that you really wish." In the old days he had always called her Cora, and now the name came from his lips upon her ears as a thing of custom, causing no surprise. They were standing back, behind the circle, almost in a corner, and Burgo knew well how to speak at such moments so that his words should be audible to none but her whom he addressed. "You should not have come to me at all," she said. "And why not? Who has a better right to come to you? Who has ever loved you as I have done? Cora, did you get my letter?" "Come and dance," she said; "I see a pair of eyes looking at us." The pair of eyes which Lady Glencora saw were in the possession of Mr. Bott, who was standing alone, leaning against the side of the doorway, every now and then raising his heels from the ground, so that he might look down upon the sinners as from a vantage ground. He was quite alone. Mrs. Marsham had left him, and had gotten herself away in Lady Glencora's own carriage to Park Lane, in order that she might find Mr. Palliser there, if by chance he should be at home. "Won't it be making mischief?" Mrs. Marsham had said when Mr. Bott had suggested this line of conduct. "There'll be worse mischief if you don't," Mr. Bott had answered. "He can come back, and then he can do as he likes. I'll keep my eyes upon them." And so he did keep his eyes upon them. Again they went round the room,--or that small portion of the room which the invading crowd had left to the dancers,--as though they were enjoying themselves thoroughly, and in all innocence. But there were others besides Mr. Bott who looked on and wondered. The Duchess of St. Bungay saw it, and shook her head sorrowing,--for the Duchess was good at heart. Mrs. Conway Sparkes saw it, and drank it down with keen appetite,--as a thirsty man with a longing for wine will drink champagne,--for Mrs. Conway Sparkes was not good at heart. Lady Hartletop saw it, and just raised her eyebrows. It was nothing to her. She liked to know what was going on, as such knowledge was sometimes useful; but, as for heart,--what she had was, in such a matter, neither good nor bad. Her blood circulated with its ordinary precision, and, in that respect, no woman ever had a better heart. Lady Monk saw it, and a frown gathered on her brow. "The fool!" she said to herself. She knew that Burgo would not help his success by drawing down the eyes of all her guests upon his attempt. In the meantime Mr. Bott stood there, mounting still higher on his toes, straightening his back against the wall. "Did you get my letter?" Burgo said again, as soon as a moment's pause gave him breath to speak. She did not answer him. Perhaps her breath did not return to her as rapidly as his. But, of course, he knew that she had received it. She would have quickly signified to him that no letter from him had come to her hands had it not reached her. "Let us go out upon the stairs," he said, "for I must speak to you. Oh, if you could know what I suffered when you did not come to Monkshade! Why did you not come?" "I wish I had not come here," she said. "Because you have seen me? That, at any rate, is not kind of you." They were now making their way slowly down the stairs, in the crowd, towards the supper-room. All the world was now intent on food and drink, and they were only doing as others did. Lady Glencora was not thinking where she went, but, glancing upwards, as she stood for a moment wedged upon the stairs, her eyes met those of Mr. Bott. "A man that can treat me like that deserves that I should leave him." That was the thought that crossed her mind at the moment. "I'll get you some champagne with water in it," said Burgo. "I know that is what you like." "Do not get me anything," she said. They had now got into the room, and had therefore escaped Mr. Bott's eyes for the moment. "Mr. Fitzgerald,"--and now her words had become a whisper in his ear,--"do what I ask you. For the sake of the old days of which you spoke, the dear old days which can never come again--" "By G----! they can," said he. "They can come back, and they shall." "Never. But you can still do me a kindness. Go away, and leave me. Go to the sideboard, and then do not come back. You are doing me an injury while you remain with me." "Cora," he said, But she had now recovered her presence of mind, and understood what was going on. She was no longer in a dream, but words and things bore to her again their proper meaning. "I will not have it, Mr. Fitzgerald," she answered, speaking almost passionately. "I will not have it. Do as I bid you. Go and leave me, and do not return. I tell you that we are watched." This was still true, for Mr. Bott had now again got his eyes on them, round the supper-room door. Whatever was the reward for which he was working, private secretaryship or what else, it must be owned that he worked hard for it. But there are labours which are labours of love. "Who is watching us?" said Burgo; "and what does it matter? If you are minded to do as I have asked you--" "But I am not so minded. Do you not know that you insult me by proposing it?" "Yes;--it is an insult, Cora,--unless such an offer be a joy to you. If you wish to be my wife instead of his, it is no insult." "How can I be that?" Her face was not turned to him, and her words were half-pronounced, and in the lowest whisper, but, nevertheless, he heard them. "Come with me,--abroad, and you shall yet be my wife. You got my letter? Do what I asked you, then. Come with me--to-night." The pressing instance of the suggestion, the fixing of a present hour, startled her back to her propriety. "Mr. Fitzgerald," she said, "I asked you to go and leave me. If you do not do so, I must get up and leave you. It will be much more difficult." "And is that to be all?" "All;--at any rate, now." Oh, Glencora! how could you be so weak? Why did you add that word, "now"? In truth, she added it then, at that moment, simply feeling that she could thus best secure an immediate compliance with her request. "I will not go," he said, looking at her sternly, and leaning before her, with earnest face, with utter indifference as to the eyes of any that might see them. "I will not go till you tell me that you will see me again." "I will," she said in that low, all-but-unuttered whisper. "When,--when,--when?" he asked. Looking up again towards the doorway, in fear of Mr. Bott's eyes, she saw the face of Mr. Palliser as he entered the room. Mr. Bott had also seen him, and had tried to clutch him by the arm; but Mr. Palliser had shaken him off, apparently with indifference,--had got rid of him, as it were, without noticing him. Lady Glencora, when she saw her husband, immediately recovered her courage. She would not cower before him, or show herself ashamed of what she had done. For the matter of that, if he pressed her on the subject, she could bring herself to tell him that she loved Burgo Fitzgerald much more easily than she could whisper such a word to Burgo himself. Mr. Bott's eyes were odious to her as they watched her; but her husband's glance she could meet without quailing before it. "Here is Mr. Palliser," said she, speaking again in her ordinary clear-toned voice. Burgo immediately rose from his seat with a start, and turned quickly towards the door; but Lady Glencora kept her chair. Mr. Palliser made his way as best he could through the crowd up to his wife. He, too, kept his countenance without betraying his secret. There was neither anger nor dismay in his face, nor was there any untoward hurry in his movement. Burgo stood aside as he came up, and Lady Glencora was the first to speak. "I thought you were gone home hours ago," she said. "I did go home," he answered, "but I thought I might as well come back for you." "What a model of a husband! Well; I am ready. Only, what shall we do about Jane? Mr. Fitzgerald, I left a scarf in your aunt's room,--a little black and yellow scarf,--would you mind getting it for me?" "I will fetch it," said Mr. Palliser; "and I will tell your cousin that the carriage shall come back for her." "If you will allow me--" said Burgo. "I will do it," said Mr. Palliser; and away he went, making his slow progress up through the crowd, ordering his carriage as he passed through the hall, and leaving Mr. Bott still watching at the door. Lady Glencora resolved that she would say nothing to Burgo while her husband was gone. There was a touch of chivalry in his leaving them again together, which so far conquered her. He might have bade her leave the scarf, and come at once. She had seen, moreover, that he had not spoken to Mr. Bott, and was thankful to him also for that. Burgo also seemed to have become aware that his chance for that time was over. "I will say good-night," he said. "Good-night, Mr. Fitzgerald," she answered, giving him her hand. He pressed it for a moment, and then turned and went. When Mr. Palliser came back he was no more to be seen. Lady Glencora was at the dining-room door when her husband returned, standing close to Mr. Bott. Mr. Bott had spoken to her, but she made no reply. He spoke again, but her face remained as immovable as though she had been deaf. "And what shall we do about Mrs. Marsham?" she said, quite out loud, as soon as she put her hand on her husband's arm. "I had forgotten her." "Mrs. Marsham has gone home," he replied. "Have you seen her?" "Yes." "When did you see her?" "She came to Park Lane." "What made her do that?" These questions were asked and answered as he was putting her into the carriage. She got in just as she asked the last, and he, as he took his seat, did not find it necessary to answer it. But that would not serve her turn. "What made Mrs. Marsham go to you at Park Lane after she left Lady Monk's?" she asked again. Mr. Palliser sat silent, not having made up his mind what he would say on the subject. "I suppose she went," continued Lady Glencora, "to tell you that I was dancing with Mr. Fitzgerald. Was that it?" "I think, Glencora, we had better not discuss it now." "I don't mean to discuss it now, or ever. If you did not wish me to see Mr. Fitzgerald you should not have sent me to Lady Monk's. But, Plantagenet, I hope you will forgive me if I say that no consideration shall induce me to receive again as a guest, in my own house, either Mrs. Marsham or Mr. Bott." Mr. Palliser absolutely declined to say anything on the subject on that occasion, and the evening of Lady Monk's party in this way came to an end.

Burgo Fitzgerald remained for a minute or two leaning against the wall at the bottom of the staircase; and some thoughts that were almost solemn passed across his mind. This thing that he was about to attempt - was it good, and would it be good for Glencora? What would her future be if she consented to go with him, and to leave her husband? Of his own future he thought not at all. He had never done so. Even when he had first found himself attracted by her wealth, it simply prompted him, as he might have been prompted to play for a high stake at a gaming-table. But now he did think a little of her. Would she be happy, simply because he loved her, when all regarded her as degraded and dishonoured; when society should be closed against her? And, under such circumstances, would he continue to love her? Did he not know himself to be the most inconstant and untrustworthy of men? He asked himself these questions with something of true feeling, and almost persuaded himself that he had better wander forth into the streets. If he could drink himself out of the world, it might be an end of things. But then he remembered his aunt's two hundred pounds, and a certain idea of honour told him that he was bound to do that for which the money had been given. As to telling his aunt that he had changed his mind, and refunding the money - that was impossible! He could not give back two hundred pounds. So he gathered himself up, stretched his hands over his head, uttered a deep sigh, and took himself upstairs. He looked in at his aunt's room. "Well, Burgo," she said, with her sweetest smile, "have you been dancing?" He turned away, muttering something about a cold-blooded Jezebel. But she did not hear, and smiled as he went. Burgo made his way first into the front room and then into the larger room where the dancing was, and there he saw Lady Glencora standing up in a quadrille with the Marquis of Hartletop. Lady Glencora seemed to enjoy neither the dancing nor the society of her partner. She was simply standing up to dance because it was the correct thing to do. Burgo watched her, and at last she became aware of his presence. It made no change in her, except that she became even less animated than before. She would not seem to see him. "I will go up to her at once, and ask her to waltz," Burgo said to himself. Then the music ceased, and Lord Hartletop took away his partner on his arm into another room. Burgo followed them. The crowd was so great that he could not get near them, but he knew which way they were going. Five minutes later he again saw her, seated on a cane bench in the gallery, with an old woman standing close to her, talking to her. It was Mrs. Marsham, cautioning her against some petty imprudence, and Lady Glencora was curtly telling that lady that she needed no such advice. Lord Hartletop had left her, feeling that he had done his duty for the night. Burgo knew nothing of Mrs. Marsham, and was quite unaware that she had any connection with Mr. Palliser. So he made his way up to Lady Glencora through the crowd, and muttering some inaudible word, offered her his hand. "That will do very well, thank you, Mrs. Marsham," Lady Glencora said. "Pray, do not trouble yourself," and then she gave her hand to Fitzgerald. Mrs. Marsham knew who he was, and all his history. Though Mr. Palliser had never mentioned his name to her, she was well aware that her duty as a duenna meant that she should keep a doubly wary eye upon him. And there he was, leaning over them, taking the hand of Mr. Palliser's wife! How Lady Glencora might have behaved at this moment if Mrs. Marsham not been there, it is pointless to guess; but under Mrs. Marsham's eye, all her resolution was in Burgo's favour. She looked at him softly and kindly, and though she said nothing, her face seemed to show pleasure. "Will you waltz?" said Burgo, asking as though it were a commonplace event. "I don't think Lady Glencora will waltz tonight," said Mrs. Marsham, very stiffly. She certainly did not know her business as a duenna, or else she would have been aware that this answer would drive her friend's wife into open hostility. "And why not, Mrs. Marsham?" said Lady Glencora, rising from her seat. "Why shouldn't I waltz tonight? I rather think I shall, especially as Mr. Fitzgerald waltzes very well." She put her hand upon Burgo's arm. Mrs. Marsham laid a hand on Lady Glencora's left shoulder, looking into her face with all the severity of caution of which she was capable. Lady Glencora shook her off angrily. Whether she would put her fate into Burgo's hands, she had not yet decided; but she was very sure that Mrs. Marsham should not restrain her. What could Mrs. Marsham do? Mr. Palliser was gone home. Some whispers had come to her that Fitzgerald still dared to love Lady Glencora. Mrs. Marsham had never believed that Mr. Palliser's wife would really be false to her vows. It was not in fear of any such catastrophe that she had taken on the duty of duenna: it was merely to mould her into a form appropriate for the wife of Mr. Palliser. It had not occurred to her that she might need to guard Mr. Palliser from positive dishonour; but now she hardly knew what to think. What should she do? To whom should she go? And then she saw Mr. Bott at the top of the staircase. In the meantime Lady Glencora went off towards the dancers, leaning on Burgo's arm. "Who is that woman?" said Burgo. His voice in her ears sounded as it used to sound when their intimacy had been close. "Oh, such an odious woman!" she said. "Her name is Mrs. Marsham; she is my bte noire." And then they were actually dancing, whirling round the room together, before a word had been said about Burgo's purpose. Burgo waltzed excellently, and before her marriage, Lady Glencora had been passionately fond of dancing. She seemed to give herself up to it now as though the old days had come back to her. Lady Monk, creeping from her den to the dancing-room, looked in on them, and then crept back again. Mrs. Marsham and Mr. Bott, standing together just inside the other door, looked on also - in horror. "He shouldn't have gone away and left her," said Mr. Bott, almost hoarsely. "But who could have thought it?" said Mrs. Marsham. "I'm sure I didn't." "I suppose you'd better tell him?" said Mr. Bott. "But I don't know where to find him," said Mrs. Marsham. "I didn't mean now, at once," said Mr. Bott. "Do you think it is as bad as that?" "I don't know what to think," said Mrs. Marsham. The waltzers went on till they were stopped by want of breath. "I am so much out of practice," said Lady Glencora; "I didn't think I should have been able - to dance at all." Then she put up her face, and slightly opened her mouth, and breathed deep. "You'll take another turn," said he. "Presently," said she, beginning to wonder whether Mrs. Marsham was watching her. Then there was a little pause, after which he spoke in an altered voice, knowing that he must use this opportunity. "Does it remind you of old days?" The words roused her from her sleep at once, and dissipated her dream. The facts all rushed upon her in an instant; the letter in her pocket; the request which she had made to Alice so that she might be guarded from this danger; the words which her husband had spoken to her in the morning, and her anger about Mrs. Marsham! It all came upon her now at the first word of tenderness which Burgo spoke. It has often been said of woman that she who doubts is lost. But they who have said so have known little of women. Women doubt every day, and many solve their doubts at last on the right side, driven to do so by fear, or conscience, but mostly by that half-unconscious knowledge of what is fitting, useful, and best under the circumstances. Lady Glencora was doubting sorely; but, though doubting, she was not as yet lost. "Does it remind you of old days?" said Burgo. "You must not talk of that," she said, very softly. "May I not?" And now his tongue was unloosed, so that he began to speak quickly. "May I not? Why not? They were happy days - so happy! Were not you happy when you thought Ah, dear! I suppose it is best not even to think of them?" "Much the best." "Only it is impossible. I wish I knew the inside of your heart, Cora, so that I could see what it is that you really wish." In the old days he had always called her Cora, and now the name came as no surprise. They were standing back, almost in a corner, and Burgo knew his words were audible to none but her whom he addressed. "You should not have come to me at all," she said. "And why not? Who has a better right to come to you? Who has ever loved you as I have done? Cora, did you get my letter?" "Come and dance," she said; "I see a pair of eyes looking at us." The pair of eyes which she saw were Mr. Bott's. He was standing alone in the doorway, every now and then raising his heels from the ground, so that he might look down upon the sinners from above. Mrs. Marsham had left him, and had gone in Lady Glencora's own carriage to Park Lane, in order to look there for Mr. Palliser. "Won't it be making mischief?" Mrs. Marsham had said when Mr. Bott had suggested this. "There'll be worse mischief if you don't," Mr. Bott had answered. "He can come back, and then do as he likes. I'll keep my eyes upon them." And so he did. Again they went round the room as though they were enjoying themselves thoroughly, and in all innocence. But there were others besides Mr. Bott who looked on and wondered. The Duchess of St. Bungay saw it, and shook her head sorrowing, for the Duchess was good at heart. Mrs. Conway Sparkes saw it, and drank it down with keen appetite; for Mrs. Conway Sparkes was not good at heart. Lady Hartletop saw it, and just raised her eyebrows. It was nothing to her. She liked to know what was going on; but, as for her heart, what she had was neither good nor bad. Lady Monk saw it, and a frown gathered on her brow. "The fool!" she said to herself. She knew that Burgo would not help his success by drawing the eyes of all her guests. "Did you get my letter?" Burgo said again. Glencora did not answer. But, of course, he knew that she had received it. "Let us go out upon the stairs," he said, "for I must speak to you. Oh, if you could know what I suffered when you did not come to Monkshade!" "I wish I had not come here," she said. "Because you have seen me? That is not kind of you." They were now making their way slowly down the stairs, in the crowd, towards the supper-room; for all the world was now intent on food and drink. Lady Glencora glanced upwards, as she stood for a moment wedged upon the stairs, and her eyes met those of Mr. Bott. "A man that can treat me like that deserves that I should leave him." That was the thought that crossed her mind. "I'll get you some champagne with water in it," said Burgo. "I know that is what you like." "Do not get me anything," she said. They had now got into the supper-room, and had escaped Mr. Bott's eyes for the moment. "Mr. Fitzgerald," - and now she whispered - "do what I ask you. For the sake of the old days which can never come again-" "By G--! they can," said he. "Never. But you can still do me a kindness. Go away, and leave me. Go to the sideboard, and then do not come back. You are doing me an injury while you remain with me." "Cora," he said. But she had now recovered her presence of mind, and understood what was going on. She was no longer in a dream. "I will not have it, Mr. Fitzgerald," she answered, speaking almost passionately. "I will not have it. Do as I bid you. Go and leave me, and do not return. I tell you that we are watched." This was still true, for Mr. Bott had now again got his eyes on them, round the supper-room door. "Who is watching us?" said Burgo; "and what does it matter? If you are minded to do as I have asked you-" "But I am not so minded. Do you not know that you insult me by proposing it?" "If you wish to be my wife instead of his, it is no insult." "How can I be that?" Her face was not turned to him, and her words were in the lowest whisper, but, nevertheless, he heard them. "Come with me, abroad, and you shall be my wife. You got my letter? Do what I asked you, then. Come with me - tonight." "Mr. Fitzgerald," she said, "I asked you to go and leave me. If you do not do so, I must get up and leave you. It will be much more difficult." "And is that to be all?" "All; at any rate, now." Oh, Glencora! how could you be so weak? Why did you add that word, "now"? In truth, she added it simply feeling that it was the best way to make him obey. "I will not go," he said, looking at her sternly and earnestly, utterly indifferent to any watching eyes. "I will not go till you tell me that you will see me again." "I will," she said in that low whisper. "When - when?" Looking up again towards the doorway, in fear of Mr. Bott's eyes, she saw the face of Mr. Palliser as he entered the room. Mr. Bott had tried to clutch his arm; but Mr. Palliser had shaken him off, apparently without noticing him. Lady Glencora, when she saw her husband, immediately recovered her courage. She would not cower before him, or show herself ashamed of what she had done. For that matter, if he pressed her on the subject, she could bring herself to tell him that she loved Burgo Fitzgerald much more easily than she could whisper it to Burgo himself. Mr. Bott's eyes were odious to her; but her husband's glance she could meet without quailing. "Here is Mr. Palliser," said she, speaking in her ordinary clear-toned voice. Burgo immediately rose from his seat with a start, and turned quickly towards the door; but Lady Glencora kept her chair. Mr. Palliser made his way through the crowd up to his wife. He, too, kept his countenance without betraying his secret. There was neither anger nor dismay in his face, nor untoward hurry in his movement. Burgo stood aside as he came up. Lady Glencora said, "I thought you were gone home hours ago." "I did go home," he answered, "but I thought I might as well come back for you." "What a model of a husband! Well; I am ready. Only what shall we do about Jane? Mr. Fitzgerald, I left a scarf in your aunt's room - a little black and yellow scarf - would you mind getting it for me?" "I will fetch it," said Mr. Palliser; "and I will tell your cousin that the carriage shall come back for her." "If you will allow me-" said Burgo. "I will do it," said Mr. Palliser; and away he went, making his slow progress through the crowd, leaving Mr. Bott still watching at the door. Lady Glencora resolved that she would say nothing to Burgo while her husband was gone. There was a touch of chivalry in his leaving them together. He might have ordered her to leave the scarf behind, and come at once. She had seen, moreover, that he had not spoken to Mr. Bott, and was thankful to him also for that. Burgo also seemed to have become aware that his chance was over, for the moment. "I will say good-night," he said. "Good-night, Mr. Fitzgerald," she answered, giving him her hand. He pressed it, and then turned and went. When Mr. Palliser came back he was no more to be seen. Lady Glencora was at the dining-room door, near Mr. Bott, when her husband returned. Mr. Bott had spoken to her, but she made no reply "And what shall we do about Mrs. Marsham?" she said, out loud, as she put her hand on her husband's arm. "I had forgotten her." "Mrs. Marsham has gone home," he replied. "Have you seen her?" "Yes." "When did you see her?" "She came to Park Lane." "What made her do that?" These questions were asked and answered as he was putting her into the carriage. She got in just as she asked the last, and he, as he took his seat, did not answer. But she repeated, "What made Mrs. Marsham go to you at Park Lane?" Mr. Palliser sat silent, not having made up his mind what he would say on the subject. "I suppose she went," continued Lady Glencora, "to tell you that I was dancing with Mr. Fitzgerald. Was that it?" "I think, Glencora, we had better not discuss it now." "I don't mean to discuss it now, or ever. If you did not wish me to see Mr. Fitzgerald you should not have sent me to Lady Monk's. But, Plantagenet, I hope you will forgive me if I say that no consideration shall induce me to receive again as a guest, in my own house, either Mrs. Marsham or Mr. Bott." Mr. Palliser did not reply. Thus the evening of Lady Monk's party came to an end.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 50: How Lady Glencora Came Back from Lady Monk's Party

Alice Vavasor returned to London with her father, leaving Kate at Vavasor Hall with her grandfather. The journey was not a pleasant one. Mr. Vavasor knew that it was his duty to do something,--to take some steps with the view of preventing the marriage which his daughter meditated; but he did not know what that something should be, and he did know that, whatever it might be, the doing of it would be thoroughly disagreeable. When they started from Vavasor he had as yet hardly spoken to her a word upon the subject. "I cannot congratulate you," he had simply said. "I hope the time may come, papa, when you will," Alice had answered; and that had been all. The squire had promised that he would consent to a reconciliation with his grandson, if Alice's father would express himself satisfied with the proposed marriage. John Vavasor had certainly expressed nothing of the kind. "I think so badly of him," he had said, speaking to the old man of George, "that I would rather know that almost any other calamity was to befall her, than that she should be united to him." Then the squire, with his usual obstinacy, had taken up the cudgels on behalf of his grandson; and had tried to prove that the match after all would not be so bad in its results as his son seemed to expect. "It would do very well for the property," he said. "I would settle the estate on their eldest son, so that he could not touch it; and I don't see why he shouldn't reform as well as another." John Vavasor had then declared that George was thoroughly bad, that he was an adventurer; that he believed him to be a ruined man, and that he would never reform. The squire upon this had waxed angry, and in this way George obtained aid and assistance down at the old house, which he certainly had no right to expect. When Alice wished her grandfather good-bye the old man gave her a message to his grandson. "You may tell him," said he, "that I will never see him again unless he begs my pardon for his personal bad conduct to me, but that if he marries you, I will take care that the property is properly settled upon his child and yours. I shall always be glad to see you, my dear; and for your sake, I will see him if he will humble himself to me." There was no word spoken then about her father's consent; and Alice, when she left Vavasor, felt that the squire was rather her friend than her enemy in regard to this thing which she contemplated. That her father was and would be an uncompromising enemy to her,--uncompromising though probably not energetical,--she was well aware; and, therefore, the journey up to London was not comfortable. Alice had resolved, with great pain to herself, that in this matter she owed her father no obedience. "There cannot be obedience on one side," she said to herself, "without protection and support on the other." Now it was quite true that John Vavasor had done little in the way of supporting or protecting his daughter. Early in life, before she had resided under the same roof with him in London, he had, as it were, washed his hands of all solicitude regarding her; and having no other ties of family, had fallen into habits of life which made it almost impossible for him to live with her as any other father would live with his child. Then, when there first sprang up between them that manner of sharing the same house without any joining together of their habits of life, he had excused himself to himself by saying that Alice was unlike other girls, and that she required no protection. Her fortune was her own, and at her own disposal. Her character was such that she showed no inclination to throw the burden of such disposal on her father's shoulders. She was steady, too, and given to no pursuits which made it necessary that he should watch closely over her. She was a girl, he thought, who could do as well without surveillance as with it,--as well, or perhaps better. So it had come to pass that Alice had been the free mistress of her own actions, and had been left to make the most she could of her own hours. It cannot be supposed that she had eaten her lonely dinners in Queen Anne Street night after night, week after week, month after month, without telling herself that her father was neglecting her. She could not perceive that he spent every evening in society, but never an evening in her society, without feeling that the tie between her and him was not the strong bond which usually binds a father to his child. She was well aware that she had been ill-used in being thus left desolate in her home. She had uttered no word of complaint; but she had learned, without being aware that she was doing so, to entertain a firm resolve that her father should not guide her in her path through life. In that affair of John Grey they had both for a time thought alike, and Mr. Vavasor had believed that his theory with reference to Alice had been quite correct. She had been left to herself, and was going to dispose of herself in a way than which nothing could be more eligible. But evil days were now coming, and Mr. Vavasor, as he travelled up to London, with his daughter seated opposite to him in the railway carriage, felt that now, at last, he must interfere. In part of the journey they had the carriage to themselves, and Mr. Vavasor thought that he would begin what he had to say; but he put it off till others joined them, and then there was no further opportunity for such conversation as that which would be necessary between them. They reached home about eight in the evening, having dined on the road. "She will be tired to-night," he said to himself, as he went off to his club, "and I will speak to her to-morrow." Alice specially felt his going on this evening. When two persons had together the tedium of such a journey as that from Westmoreland up to London, there should be some feeling between them to bind them together while enjoying the comfort of the evening. Had he stayed and sat with her at her tea-table, Alice would at any rate have endeavoured to be soft with him in any discussion that might have been raised; but he went away from her at once, leaving her to think alone over the perils of the life before her. "I want to speak to you after breakfast to-morrow," he said as he went out. Alice answered that she should be there,--as a matter of course. She scorned to tell him that she was always there,--always alone at home. She had never uttered a word of complaint, and she would not begin now. The discussion after breakfast the next day was commenced with formal and almost ceremonial preparation. The father and daughter breakfasted together, with the knowledge that the discussion was coming. It did not give to either of them a good appetite, and very little was said at table. "Will you come up-stairs?" said Alice, when she perceived that her father had finished his tea. "Perhaps that will be best," said he. Then he followed her into the drawing-room in which the fire had just been lit. "Alice," said he, "I must speak to you about this engagement of yours." "Won't you sit down, papa? It does look so dreadful, your standing up over one in that way." He had placed himself on the rug with his back to the incipient fire, but now, at her request, he sat himself down opposite to her. "I was greatly grieved when I heard of this at Vavasor." "I am sorry that you should be grieved, papa." "I was grieved. I must confess that I never could understand why you treated Mr. Grey as you have done." "Oh, papa, that's done and past. Pray let that be among the bygones." "Does he know yet of your engagement with your cousin?" "He will know it by this time to-morrow." "Then I beg of you, as a great favour, to postpone your letter to him." To this Alice made no answer. "I have not troubled you with many such requests, Alice. Will you tell me that this one shall be granted?" "I think that I owe it to him as an imperative duty to let him know the truth." "But you may change your mind again." Alice found that this was hard to bear and hard to answer; but there was a certain amount of truth in the grievous reproach conveyed in her father's words, which made her bow her neck to it. "I have no right to say that it is impossible," she replied, in words that were barely audible. "No;--exactly so," said her father. "And therefore it will be better that you should postpone any such communication." "For how long do you mean?" "Till you and I shall have agreed together that he should be told." "No, papa; I will not consent to that. I consider myself bound to let him know the truth without delay. I have done him a great injury, and I must put an end to that as soon as possible." "You have done him an injury certainly, my dear;--a very great injury," said Mr. Vavasor, going away from his object about the proposed letter; "and I believe he will feel it as such to the last day of his life, if this goes on." "I hope not. I believe that it will not be so. I feel sure that it will not be so." "But of course what I am thinking of now is your welfare,--not his. When you simply told me that you intended to--." Alice winced, for she feared to hear from her father that odious word which her grandfather had used to her; and indeed the word had been on her father's lips, but he had refrained and spared her--"that you intended to break your engagement with Mr. Grey," he continued, "I said little or nothing to you. I would not ask you to marry any man, even though you had yourself promised to marry him. But when you tell me that you are engaged to your cousin George, the matter is very different. I do not think well of your cousin. Indeed I think anything but well of him. It is my duty to tell you that the world speaks very ill of him." He paused, but Alice remained silent. "When you were about to travel with him," he continued, "I ought perhaps to have told you the same. But I did not wish to pain you or his sister; and, moreover, I have heard worse of him since then,--much worse than I had heard before." "As you did not tell me before, I think you might spare me now," said Alice. "No, my dear; I cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself without telling you that you are doing so. If it were not for your money he would never think of marrying you." "Of that I am well aware," said Alice. "He has told me so himself very plainly." "And yet you will marry him?" "Certainly I will. It seems to me, papa, that there is a great deal of false feeling about this matter of money in marriage,--or rather, perhaps, a great deal of pretended feeling. Why should I be angry with a man for wishing to get that for which every man is struggling? At this point of George's career the use of money is essential to him. He could not marry without it." "You had better then give him your money without yourself," said her father, speaking in irony. "That is just what I mean to do, papa," said Alice. "What!" said Mr. Vavasor, jumping up from his seat. "You mean to give him your money before you marry him?" "Certainly I do;--if he should want it;--or, I should rather say, as much as he may want of it." "Heavens and earth!" exclaimed Mr. Vavasor. "Alice, you must be mad." "To part with my money to my friend?" said she. "It is a kind of madness of which I need not at any rate be ashamed." "Tell me this, Alice; has he got any of it as yet?" "Not a shilling. Papa, pray do not look at me like that. If I had no thought of marrying him you would not call me mad because I lent to my cousin what money he might need." "I should only say that so much of your fortune was thrown away, and if it were not much that would be an end of it. I would sooner see you surrender to him the half of all you have, without any engagement to marry him, than know that he had received a shilling from you under such a promise." "You are prejudiced against him, sir." "Was it prejudice that made you reject him once before? Did you condemn him then through prejudice? Had you not ascertained that he was altogether unworthy of you?" "We were both younger, then," said Alice, speaking very softly, but very seriously. "We were both much younger then, and looked at life with other eyes than those which we now use. For myself I expected much then, which I now seem hardly to regard at all; and as for him, he was then attached to pleasures to which I believe he has now learned to be indifferent." "Psha!" ejaculated the father. "I can only speak as I believe," continued Alice. "And I think I may perhaps know more of his manner of life than you do, papa. But I am prepared to run risks now which I feared before. Even though he were all that you think him to be, I would still endeavour to do my duty to him, and to bring him to other things." "What is it you expect to get by marrying him?" asked Mr. Vavasor. "A husband whose mode of thinking is congenial to my own," answered Alice. "A husband who proposes to himself a career in life with which I can sympathize. I think that I may perhaps help my cousin in the career which he has chosen, and that alone is a great reason why I should attempt to do so." "With your money?" said Mr. Vavasor with a sneer. "Partly with my money," said Alice, disdaining to answer the sneer. "Though it were only with my money, even that would be something." "Well, Alice, as your father, I can only implore you to pause before you commit yourself to his hands. If he demands money from you, and you are minded to give it to him, let him have it in moderation. Anything will be better than marrying him. I know that I cannot hinder you; you are as much your own mistress as I am my own master,--or rather a great deal more, as my income depends on my going to that horrid place in Chancery Lane. But yet I suppose you must think something of your father's wishes and your father's opinion. It will not be pleasant for you to stand at the altar without my being there near you." To this Alice made no answer; but she told herself that it had not been pleasant to her to have stood at so many places during the last four years,--and to have found herself so often alone,--without her father being near to her. That had been his fault, and it was not now in her power to remedy the ill-effects of it. "Has any day been fixed between you and him?" he asked. "No, papa." "Nothing has been said about that?" "Yes; something has been said. I have told him that it cannot be for a year yet. It is because I told him that, that I told him also that he should have my money when he wanted it." "Not all of it?" said Mr. Vavasor. "I don't suppose he will need it all. He intends to stand again for Chelsea, and it is the great expense of the election which makes him want money. You are not to suppose that he has asked me for it. When I made him understand that I did not wish to marry quite yet, I offered him the use of that which would be ultimately his own." "And he has accepted it?" "He answered me just as I had intended,--that when the need came he would take me at my word." "Then, Alice, I will tell you what is my belief. He will drain you of every shilling of your money, and when that is gone, there will be no more heard of the marriage. We must take a small house in some cheap part of the town and live on my income as best we may. I shall go and insure my life, so that you may not absolutely starve when I die." Having said this, Mr. Vavasor went away, not immediately to the insurance office, as his words seemed to imply, but to his club where he sat alone, reading the newspaper, very gloomily, till the time came for his afternoon rubber of whist, and the club dinner bill for the day was brought under his eye. Alice had no such consolations in her solitude. She had fought her battle with her father tolerably well, but she was now called upon to fight a battle with herself, which was one much more difficult to win. Was her cousin, her betrothed as she now must regard him, the worthless, heartless, mercenary rascal which her father painted him? There had certainly been a time, and that not very long distant, in which Alice herself had been almost constrained so to regard him. Since that any change for the better in her opinion of him had been grounded on evidence given either by himself or by his sister Kate. He had done nothing to inspire her with any confidence, unless his reckless daring in coming forward to contest a seat in Parliament could be regarded as a doing of something. And he had owned himself to be a man almost penniless; he had spoken of himself as being utterly reckless,--as being one whose standing in the world was and must continue to be a perch on the edge of a precipice, from which any accident might knock him headlong. Alice believed in her heart that this last profession or trade to which he had applied himself, was becoming as nothing to him,--that he received from it no certain income;--no income that a man could make to appear respectable to fathers or guardians when seeking a girl in marriage. Her father declared that all men spoke badly of him. Alice knew her father to be an idle man, a man given to pleasure, to be one who thought by far too much of the good things of the world; but she had never found him to be either false or malicious. His unwonted energy in this matter was in itself evidence that he believed himself to be right in what he said. To tell the truth, Alice was frightened at what she had done, and almost repented of it already. Her acceptance of her cousin's offer had not come of love;--nor had it, in truth, come chiefly of ambition. She had not so much asked herself why she should do this thing, as why she should not do it,--seeing that it was required of her by her friend. What after all did it matter? That was her argument with herself. It cannot be supposed that she looked back on the past events of her life with any self-satisfaction. There was no self-satisfaction, but in truth there was more self-reproach than she deserved. As a girl she had loved her cousin George passionately, and that love had failed her. She did not tell herself that she had been wrong when she gave him up, but she thought herself to have been most unfortunate in the one necessity. After such an experience as that, would it not have been better for her to have remained without further thought of marriage? Then came that terrible episode in her life for which she never could forgive herself. She had accepted Mr. Grey because she liked him and honoured him. "And I did love him," she said to herself, now on this morning. Poor, wretched, heart-wrung woman! As she sat there thinking of it all in her solitude she was to be pitied at any rate, if not to be forgiven. Now, as she thought of Nethercoats, with its quiet life, its gardens, its books, and the peaceful affectionate ascendancy of him who would have been her lord and master, her feelings were very different from those which had induced her to resolve that she would not stoop to put her neck beneath that yoke. Would it not have been well for her to have a master who by his wisdom and strength could save her from such wretched doubtings as these? But she had refused to bend, and then she had found herself desolate and alone in the world. "If I can do him good why should I not marry him?" In that feeling had been the chief argument which had induced her to return such an answer as she had sent to her cousin. "For myself, what does it matter? As to this life of mine and all that belongs to it, why should I regard it otherwise than to make it of some service to some one who is dear to me?" He had been ever dear to her from her earliest years. She believed in his intellect, even if she could not believe in his conduct. Kate, her friend, longed for this thing. As for that dream of love, it meant nothing; and as for those arguments of prudence,--that cold calculation about her money, which all people seemed to expect from her,--she would throw it to the winds. What if she were ruined! There was always the other chance. She might save him from ruin, and help him to honour and fortune. But then, when the word was once past her lips, there returned to her that true woman's feeling which made her plead for a long day,--which made her feel that that long day would be all too short,--which made her already dread the coming of the end of the year. She had said that she would become George Vavasor's wife, but she wished that the saying so might be the end of it. When he came to her to embrace her how should she receive him? The memory of John Grey's last kiss still lingered on her lips. She had told herself that she scorned the delights of love; if it were so, was she not bound to keep herself far from them; if it were so,--would not her cousin's kiss pollute her? "It may be as my father says," she thought. "It may be that he wants my money only; if so, let him have it. Surely when the year is over I shall know." Then a plan formed itself in her head, which she did not make willingly, with any voluntary action of her mind,--but which came upon her as plans do come,--and recommended itself to her in despite of herself. He should have her money as he might call for it,--all of it excepting some small portion of her income, which might suffice to keep her from burdening her father. Then, if he were contented, he should go free, without reproach, and there should be an end of all question of marriage for her. As she thought of this, and matured it in her mind, the door opened, and the servant announced her cousin George.

Alice Vavasor returned to London with her father, leaving Kate at Vavasor Hall. The journey was not a pleasant one. Mr. Vavasor knew that he ought to do something to prevent his daughter marrying George Vavasor; but he did not know what that something should be, although he did know that doing it would be thoroughly disagreeable. The squire had promised that he would consent to a reconciliation with his grandson, if Alice's father would say he was satisfied with the marriage. But John Vavasor had said nothing of the kind. "I think so badly of George," he had said, "that I would rather almost any other calamity happened to her, than that she should marry him." Then the squire, with his usual obstinacy, had argued on his grandson's side. "It would do very well for the property," he said. "I would settle the estate on their eldest son, so that he could not touch it; and I don't see why he shouldn't reform." John Vavasor had declared that George was thoroughly bad, and would never reform. The squire had grown angry. When Alice wished him goodbye, the old man gave her a message to his grandson. "You may tell him," said he, "that I will never see him again unless he begs my pardon for his bad conduct to me, but that if he marries you, I will take care that the property is properly settled upon your child. I shall always be glad to see you, my dear." Alice felt that the squire was her friend rather than her enemy in the matter. However she was well aware that her father was an uncompromising enemy, so the journey up to London was not comfortable. She had resolved, with great pain to herself, that in this matter she owed her father no obedience. "There cannot be obedience on one side," she said to herself, "without protection and support on the other." It was quite true that John Vavasor had done little to support or protect his daughter. Early in life, before she had come to live with him, he had, as it were, washed his hands of her upbringing. Then, when they first shared the same house, he did not attempt to change his bachelor ways, telling himself that Alice was unlike other girls, and that she required no protection. She was steady and independently minded, and he thought she needed no surveillance. So Alice had been left to make the most she could of her own hours. She had eaten her lonely dinners in Queen Anne Street night after night, week after week, month after month; and when he spent every evening in society, but never an evening in her society, she could not help feeling that she lacked the strong bond which usually binds a father to his child. She had uttered no word of complaint; but she had learned to resolve that her father should not guide her in her path through life. In that affair of John Grey they had both for a time thought alike, and Mr. Vavasor had been content to leave her alone. But now, as he sat opposite his daughter in the railway carriage, he felt that he must interfere. However, he put off speaking, and then others joined them in the carriage, and he could not say what he felt necessary. They reached home about eight in the evening, having dined on the road. "She will be tired tonight," he said to himself, as he went off to his club, "and I will speak to her tomorrow." Alice specially felt his going out on this evening. If he had stayed and sat with her at the tea-table, she would have endeavoured to be soft with him in any discussion; but he went at once. "I want to speak to you after breakfast tomorrow," he said as he went out. Alice answered that she should be there. She scorned to tell him that she was always there, always alone at home. She had never complained, and she would not begin now. The discussion the next day began with formal and almost ceremonial preparation. "Will you come upstairs?" said Alice. "Perhaps that will be best," said he, and followed her into the drawing-room. "Alice, I must speak to you about this engagement." "Won't you sit down, papa? It does look so dreadful, your standing up over one in that way." He had stood with his back to the fire, but now he sat down. "I was greatly grieved when I heard of this." "I am sorry that you should be grieved, papa." "Does Mr. Grey know yet of your engagement with your cousin?" "He will know it by this time tomorrow." "Then I beg of you to postpone your letter to him." "I think it is my duty to let him know the truth." "But you may change your mind again." Alice found that this was hard to bear; but there was a certain amount of truth in it which made her bow her head. "I have no right to say that it is impossible," she replied, in words that were barely audible. "Exactly so," said her father. "Therefore it will be better that you should postpone your letter." "For how long?" "Till you and I shall have agreed together that he should be told." "No, papa; I will not consent to that. I consider myself bound to let him know the truth without delay. I have done him a great injury, and I must put an end to that as soon as possible." "You have done him a very great injury certainly, my dear," said Mr. Vavasor; "and I believe he will feel it to the last day of his life." "I hope not. I believe not." "But of course I am thinking now of your welfare, not his. When you simply told me that you intended to break your engagement, I said little or nothing. I would not ask you to marry any man. But when you tell me that you are engaged to your cousin George, the matter is very different. I do not think well of your cousin. Indeed I must tell you that the world speaks very ill of him." He paused, but Alice remained silent. "When you were about to travel with him," he continued, "I ought perhaps to have told you. But I did not wish to pain you or his sister; and since then, I have heard much worse of him than I had heard before. If it were not for your money he would never think of marrying you." "Of that I am well aware," said Alice. "He has told me so very plainly." "And yet you will marry him?" "Certainly. Why should I be angry with a man for wishing to get the money for which every man is struggling? At this point of George's career money is essential to him. He could not marry without it." "Then you had better give him your money without yourself," said her father, speaking in irony. "That is just what I mean to do, papa," said Alice. "What!" said Mr. Vavasor, jumping up. "You mean to give him your money before you marry him?" "Certainly I do, if he wants it - or some of it." "Heavens and earth!" exclaimed Mr. Vavasor. "Alice, you must be mad." "To give money to my friend?" said she. "It is a kind of madness of which I need not be ashamed." "Tell me this, Alice; has he got any of it as yet?" "Not a shilling. Papa, pray do not look at me like that. If I had no thought of marrying him you would not call me mad because I lent money to my cousin." "I should say that so much of your fortune was thrown away. When you rejected him before, did you not see that he was altogether unworthy of you?" "We were both younger then," said Alice, speaking softly, but very seriously. "We looked at life with different eyes. I expected much then, which I now seem hardly to regard at all; and he was attached to pleasures to which he has now learned to be indifferent." "Psha!" ejaculated the father. "I can only say what I believe," continued Alice. "And I think I know more of his way of life than you do, papa. But I am prepared to run risks now which I feared before. Even if he were all that you think, I would still try to do my duty to him, and to bring him to other things." "What is it you expect to get by marrying him?" "A husband whose mode of thinking is congenial to my own," answered Alice. "A husband who proposes to build a career with which I can sympathize, and perhaps help." "With your money?" said Mr. Vavasor with a sneer. "Partly with my money." "Well, Alice, I can only implore you to pause before you commit yourself to his hands. If he demands money from you, give it to him in moderation. Anything will be better than marrying him. I know that I cannot stop you; you are your own mistress. But I suppose you must think something of your father's opinion. It will not be pleasant for you to stand at the altar without me." To this Alice made no answer; but she told herself that it had not been pleasant to have stood at so many places during the last four years alone, without her father. "Has any day been fixed?" he asked. "No, papa. I have told him that it cannot be for a year yet, although I told him also that he should have my money when he wanted it." "Not all of it?" said Mr. Vavasor. "I don't suppose he will need it all. He intends to stand again for Chelsea, and it is the expense of the election which makes him need money. He has not asked me for it. I offered him the use of it." "And he has accepted?" "He answered that when the need came he would take me at my word." "Then, Alice, I will tell you what I believe. He will drain you of every shilling, and when that is gone, there will be no more heard of the marriage. We must take a small house in some cheap part of the town and live on my income as best we may. I shall go and insure my life, so that you may not starve when I die." Having said this, Mr. Vavasor went away, not to the insurance office, but to his club where he sat reading the newspaper, very gloomily, till the time came for whist and dinner. Alice had no such consolations in her solitude. She had fought her battle with her father, but she now had to fight a battle with herself. Was her cousin - her betrothed - the worthless, heartless, mercenary rascal which her father painted him? There had certainly been a time when Alice herself had almost felt so. Any change for the better in her opinion of him had been grounded on evidence given either by himself or by his sister Kate. He had done nothing to inspire her with any confidence. He had admitted that he was almost penniless; he had spoken of himself as being utterly reckless. Her father declared that all men spoke badly of him. Alice knew her father to be an idle man, but she had never found him to be false or malicious. He believed in what he said. To tell the truth, Alice was frightened at what she had done, and almost repented of it already. Her acceptance of her cousin's offer had not come of love; nor even of ambition. She had not so much asked herself why she should do this thing, as why should she not do it? Her friend wished it, and after all what did it matter? That was her argument with herself. It cannot be supposed that she looked back on her past life with any self-satisfaction. In truth she felt more self-reproach than she deserved. As a girl she had loved her cousin George passionately, and that love had failed. After that, would it not have been better for her to have remained without further thought of marriage? Then came that terrible episode in her life for which she never could forgive herself. She had accepted Mr. Grey because she liked him and honoured him. "And I did love him," she said to herself now. Poor heart-wrung woman! As she thought of Nethercoats, with its quiet life, its gardens, its books, and the peaceful affectionate ascendancy of its master, her feelings were very different from those which had made her resolve not to put her neck beneath that yoke. Would it not have been well for her to have a master whose wisdom and strength could save her from such wretched doubts as these? But she had refused to bend, and had found herself desolate and alone in the world. "If I can do him good why should I not marry him?" That had been the chief argument which had induced her to accept George Vavasor. "For myself, what does it matter? At least I can make my life of some use to someone who is dear to me." He had always been dear to her from her earliest years. She believed in his intellect, even if she could not believe in his conduct. As for that dream of love, it meant nothing. And what if she were ruined! She might save him from ruin, and help him to honour and fortune. But she already dreaded the coming of the end of the year. She had said that she would become George Vavasor's wife, but she wished that saying so might be the end of it. When he came to embrace her how should she receive him? The memory of John Grey's last kiss still lingered on her lips. "It may be as my father says," she thought. "It may be that he wants my money only; if so, let him have it. Surely when the year is over I shall know." Then a plan formed itself in her head. He should have her money as he might call for it - all of it except some small portion of her income, which might keep her from burdening her father. Then, if he were contented, he should go free, without reproach, and there should be an end of all question of marriage for her. As she thought of this, the door opened, and the servant announced her cousin George.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 34: Mr. Vavasor Speaks to His Daughter

On the following morning everybody was stirring by times at Mr. Palliser's house in Park Lane, and the master of that house yawned no more. There is some life in starting for a long journey, and the life is the stronger and the fuller if the things and people to be carried are numerous and troublesome. Lady Glencora was a little troublesome, and would not come down to breakfast in time. When rebuked on account of this manifest breach of engagement, she asserted that the next train would do just as well; and when Mr. Palliser proved to her, with much trouble, that the next train could not enable them to reach Paris on that day, she declared that it would be much more comfortable to take a week in going than to hurry over the ground in one day. There was nothing she wanted so much as to see Folkestone. "If that is the case, why did not you tell me so before?" said Mr. Palliser, in his gravest voice. "Richard and the carriage went down yesterday, and are already on board the packet." "If Richard and the carriage are already on board the packet," said Lady Glencora, "of course we must follow them, and we must put off the glories of Folkestone till we come back. Alice, haven't you observed that, in travelling, you are always driven on by some Richard or some carriage, till you feel that you are a slave?" All this was trying to Mr. Palliser; but I think that he enjoyed it, nevertheless, and that he was happy when he found that he did get his freight off from the Pimlico Station in the proper train. Of course Lady Glencora and Alice were very ill crossing the Channel; of course the two maids were worse than their mistresses; of course the men kept out of their master's way when they were wanted, and drank brandy-and-water with the steward down-stairs; and of course Lady Glencora declared that she would not allow herself to be carried beyond Boulogne that day;--but, nevertheless, they did get on to Paris. Had Mr. Palliser become Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he had once hoped, he could hardly have worked harder than he did work. It was he who found out which carriage had been taken for them, and who put, with his own hands, the ladies' dressing-cases and cloaks on to the seats,--who laid out the novels, which, of course, were not read by the road,--and made preparations as though this stage of their journey was to take them a week, instead of five hours and a half. "Oh, dear! how I have slept!" said Lady Glencora, as they came near to Paris. "I think you've been tolerably comfortable," said Mr. Palliser, joyfully. "Since we got out of that horrid boat I have done pretty well. Why do they make the boats so nasty? I'm sure they do it on purpose." "It would be difficult to make them nice, I suppose?" said Alice. "It is the sea that makes them uncomfortable," said Mr. Palliser. "Never mind; we shan't have any more of it for twelve months, at any rate. We can get to the Kurds, Alice, without getting into a packet again. That, to my way of thinking, is the great comfort of the Continent. One can go everywhere without being seasick." Mr. Palliser said nothing, but he sighed as he thought of being absent for a whole year. He had said that such was his intention, and would not at once go back from what he himself had said. But how was he to live for twelve months out of the House of Commons? What was he to do with himself, with his intellect and his energy, during all these coming dreary days? And then,--he might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer! He might even now, at this very moment, have been upon his legs, making a financial statement of six hours' duration, to the delight of one-half of the House, and bewilderment of the other, instead of dragging cloaks across that dingy, dull, dirty waiting-room at the Paris Station, in which British subjects are kept in prison while their boxes are being tumbled out of the carriages. "But we are not to stop here;--are we?" said Lady Glencora, mournfully. "No, dear;--I have given the keys to Richard. We will go on at once." "But can't we have our things?" "In about half an hour," pleaded Mr. Palliser. "I suppose we must bear it, Alice?" said Lady Glencora as she got into the carriage that was waiting for her. Alice thought of the last time in which she had been in that room,--when George and Kate had been with her,--and the two girls had been quite content to wait patiently while their trunks were being examined. But Alice was now travelling with great people,--with people who never spoke of their wealth, or seemed ever to think of it, but who showed their consciousness of it at every turn of their lives. "After all," Alice had said to herself more than once, "I doubt whether the burden is not greater than the pleasure." They stayed in Paris for a week, and during that time Alice found that she became very intimate with Mr. Palliser. At Matching she had, in truth, seen but little of him, and had known nothing. Now she began to understand his character, and learned how to talk to him, She allowed him to tell her of things in which Lady Glencora resolutely persisted in taking no interest. She delighted him by writing down in a little pocket-book the number of eggs that were consumed in Paris every day, whereas Glencora protested that the information was worth nothing unless her husband could tell her how many of the eggs were good, and how many bad. And Alice was glad to find that a hundred and fifty thousand female operatives were employed in Paris, while Lady Glencora said it was a great shame, and that they ought all to have husbands. When Mr. Palliser explained that that was impossible, because of the redundancy of the female population, she angered him very much by asserting that she saw a great many men walking about who, she was quite sure, had not wives of their own. "I do so wish you had married him!" Glencora said to Alice that evening. "You would always have had a pocket-book ready to write down the figures, and you would have pretended to care about the eggs, and the bottles of wine, and the rest of it. As for me, I can't do it. If I see an hungry woman, I can give her my money; or if she be a sick woman, I can nurse her; or if I hear of a very wicked man, I can hate him;--but I cannot take up poverty and crime in the lump. I never believe it all. My mind isn't big enough." They went into no society at Paris, and at the end of a week were all glad to leave it. "I don't know that Baden will be any better," Lady Glencora said; "but, you know, we can leave that again after a bit,--and so we shall go on getting nearer to the Kurds." To this, Mr. Palliser demurred. "I think we had better make up our mind to stay a month at Baden." "But why should we make up our minds at all?" his wife pleaded. "I like to have a plan," said Mr. Palliser. "And so do I," said his wife,--"if only for the sake of not keeping it." "There's nothing I hate so much as not carrying out my intentions," said Mr. Palliser. Upon this, Lady Glencora shrugged her shoulders, and made a mock grimace to her cousin. All this her husband bore for a while meekly, and it must be acknowledged that he behaved very well. But, then, he had his own way in everything. Lady Glencora did not behave very well,--contradicting her husband, and not considering, as, perhaps, she ought to have done, the sacrifice he was making on her behalf. But, then, she had her own way in nothing. She had her own way in almost nothing; but on one point she did conquer her husband. He was minded to go from Paris back to Cologne, and so down the Rhine to Baden. Lady Glencora declared that she hated the Rhine,--that, of all rivers, it was the most distasteful to her; that, of all scenery, the scenery of the Rhine was the most over-praised; and that she would be wretched all the time if she were carried that way. Upon this, Mr. Palliser referred the matter to Alice; and she, who had last been upon the Rhine with her cousins Kate and George Vavasor, voted for going to Baden by way of Strasbourg. "We will go by Strasbourg, then," said Mr. Palliser, gallantly. "Not that I want to see that horrid church again," said Glencora. "Everything is alike horrid to you, I think," said her husband. "You are determined not to be contented, so that it matters very little which way we go." "That's the truth," said his wife. "It does matter very little." They got on to Baden,--with very little delay at Strasbourg, and found half an hotel prepared for their reception. Here the carriage was brought into use for the first time, and the mistress of the carriage talked of sending home for Dandy and Flirt. Mr. Palliser, when he heard the proposition, calmly assured his wife that the horses would not bear the journey. "They would be so out of condition," he said, "as not to be worth anything for two or three months." "I only meant to ask for them if they could come in a balloon," said Lady Glencora. This angered Mr. Palliser, who had really, for a few minutes, thought of pacifying his wife by sending for the horses. "Alice," she asked, one morning, "how many eggs are eaten in Baden every morning before ten o'clock?" Mr. Palliser, who at the moment was in the act of eating one, threw down his spoon, and pushed his plate from him. "What's the matter, Plantagenet?" she asked. "The matter!" he said. "But never mind; I am a fool to care for it." "I declare I didn't know that I had done anything wrong," said Lady Glencora. "Alice, do you understand what it is?" Alice said that she did understand very well. "Of course she understands," said Mr. Palliser. "How can she help it? And, indeed, Miss Vavasor, I am more unhappy than I can express myself, to think that your comfort should be disturbed in this way." "Upon my word I think Alice is doing very well," said Lady Glencora. "What is there to hurt her comfort? Nobody scolds her. Nobody tells her that she is a fool. She never jokes, or does anything wicked, and, of course, she isn't punished." Mr. Palliser, as he wandered that day alone through the gambling-rooms at the great Assembly House, thought that, after all, it might have been better for him to have remained in London, to have become Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to have run all risks. "I wonder whether it would be any harm if I were to put a few pieces of money on the table, just once?" Lady Glencora said to her cousin, on the evening of the same day, in one of those gambling salons. There had been some music on that evening in one side of the building, and the Pallisers had gone to the rooms. But as neither of the two ladies would dance, they had strayed away into the other apartments. "The greatest harm in the world!" said Alice; "and what on earth could you gain by it? You don't really want any of those horrid people's money?" "I'll tell you what I want,--something to live for,--some excitement. Is it not a shame that I see around me so many people getting amusement, and that I can get none? I'd go and sit out there, and drink beer and hear the music, only Plantagenet wouldn't let me. I think I'll throw one piece on to the table to see what becomes of it." "I shall leave you if you do," said Alice. "You are such a prude! It seems to me as if it must have been my special fate,--my good fate, I mean,--that has thrown me so much with you. You look after me quite as carefully as Mr. Bott and Mrs. Marsham ever did; but as I chose you myself, I can't very well complain, and I can't very well get rid of you." "Do you want to get rid of me, Cora?" "Sometimes. Do you know, there are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil,--when I think it is the best thing to be done. It's a hard thing for a woman to do, because she has to undergo so much obloquy before she gets used to it. A man can take to drinking, and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit. The domestic old fogies give him lectures if they can catch him, but he isn't fool enough for that. All he wants is money, and he goes away and has his fling. Now I have plenty of money,--or, at any rate, I had,--and I never got my fling yet. I do feel so tempted to rebel, and go ahead, and care for nothing." "Throwing one piece on to the table wouldn't satisfy that longing." "You think I should be like the wild beast that has tasted blood, and can't be controlled. Look at all these people here. There are husbands gambling, and their wives don't know it; and wives gambling, and their husbands don't know it. I wonder whether Plantagenet ever has a fling? What a joke it would be to come and catch him!" "I don't think you need be afraid." "Afraid! I should like him all the better for it. If he came to me, some morning, and told me that he had lost a hundred thousand pounds, I should be so much more at my ease with him." "You have no chance in that direction, I'm quite sure." "None the least. He'd make a calculation that the chances were nine to seven against him, and then the speculation would seem to him to be madness." "I don't suppose he'd wish to try, even though he were sure of winning." "Of course not. It would be a very vulgar kind of thing then. Look,--there's an opening there. I'll just put on one napoleon." "You shall not. If you do, I'll leave you at once. Look at the women who are playing. Is there one there whom it would not disgrace you to touch? Look what they are. Look at their cheeks, and their eyes, and their hands. Those men who rake about the money are bad enough, but the women look like fiends." "You're not going to frighten me in that hobgoblin sort of way, you know. I don't see anything the matter with any of the people." "What do you think of that young woman who has just got a handful of money from the man next to her?" "I think she is very happy. I never get money given to me by handfuls, and the man to whom I belong gives me no encouragement when I want to amuse myself." They were now standing near to one end of the table, and suddenly there came to be an opening through the crowd up to the table itself. Lady Glencora, leaving Alice's side, at once stepped up and deposited a piece of gold on one of the marked compartments. As soon as she placed it she retreated again with flushed face, and took hold of Alice's arm. "There," she said, "I have done it." Alice, in her dismay, did not know what step to take. She could not scold her friend now, as the eyes of many were turned upon them, nor could she, of course, leave her, as she had threatened. Lady Glencora laughed with her peculiar little low laughter, and stood her ground. "I was determined you shouldn't frighten me out of it," she said. [Illustration: Lady Glencora at Baden.] One of the ministers at the table had in the meantime gone on with the cards, and had called the game; and another minister had gently pushed three or four more pieces of gold up to that which Lady Glencora had flung down, and had then cunningly caught her eye, and, with all the courtesy of which he was master, had pushed them further on towards her. She had supposed herself to be unknown there in the salon, but no doubt all the croupiers and half the company knew well enough who was the new customer at the table. There was still the space open, near to which she stood, and then someone motioned to her to come and take up the money which she had won. She hesitated, and then the croupier asked her, in that low, indifferent voice which these men always use, whether she desired that her money should remain. She nodded her head to him, and he at once drew the money back again to the spot on which she had placed the first napoleon. Again the cards were turned up softly, again the game was called, and again she won. The money was dealt out to her,--on this occasion with a full hand. There were lying there between twenty and thirty napoleons, of which she was the mistress. Her face had flushed before, but now it became very red. She caught hold of Alice, who was literally trembling beside her, and tried to laugh again. But there was that in her eye which told Alice that she was really frightened. Some one then placed a chair for her at the table, and in her confusion, not knowing what she was to do, she seated herself. "Come away," said Alice, taking hold of her, and disregarding everything but her own purpose, in the agony of the moment. "You must come away! You shall not sit there!" "I must get rid of that money," said Glencora, trying to whisper her words, "and then I will come away." The croupier again asked her if the money was to remain, and she again nodded her head. Everybody at the table was now looking at her. The women especially were staring at her,--those horrid women with vermilion cheeks, and loud bonnets half off their heads, and hard, shameless eyes, and white gloves, which, when taken off in the ardour of the game, disclosed dirty hands. They stared at her with that fixed stare which such women have, and Alice saw it all, and trembled. Again she won. "Leave it," said Alice, "and come away." "I can't leave it," said Glencora. "If I do, there'll be a fuss. I'll go the next time." What she said was, of course, in English, and was probably understood by no one near her; but it was easy to be seen that she was troubled, and, of course, those around her looked at her the more because of her trouble. Again that little question and answer went on between her and the croupier, and on this occasion the money was piled up on the compartment--a heap of gold which made envious the hearts of many who stood around there. Alice had now both her hands on the back of the chair, needing support. If the devil should persist, and increase that stock of gold again, she must go and seek for Mr. Palliser. She knew not what else to do. She understood nothing of the table, or of its laws; but she supposed all those ministers of the game to be thieves, and believed that all villainous contrivances were within their capacity. She thought that they might go on adding to that heap so long as Lady Glencora would sit there, presuming that they might thus get her into their clutches. Of course, she did not sift her suspicions. Who does at such moments? "Come away at once, and leave it," she said, "or I shall go." At that moment the croupier raked it all up, and carried it all away; but Alice did not see that this had been done. A hand had been placed on her shoulder, and as she turned round her face her eyes met those of Mr. Palliser. "It is all gone," said Glencora, laughing. And now she, turning round, also saw her husband. "I am so glad that you are come," said Alice. "Why did you bring her here?" said Mr. Palliser. There was anger in his tone, and anger in his eye. He took his wife's arm upon his own, and walked away quickly, while Alice followed them alone. He went off at once, down the front steps of the building, towards the hotel. What he said to his wife, Alice did not hear; but her heart was swelling with the ill-usage to which she herself was subjected. Though she might have to go back alone to England, she would tell him that he was ill-treating her. She followed him on, up into their drawing-room, and there he stood with the door open in his hand for her, while Lady Glencora threw herself upon a sofa, and burst out into affected laughter. "Here's a piece of work," she said, "about a little accident." "An accident!" said Mr. Palliser. "Yes, an accident. You don't suppose that I sat down there meaning to win all that money?" Whereupon he looked at her with scorn. "Mr. Palliser," said Alice, "you have treated me this evening in a manner I did not expect from you. It is clear that you blame me." "I have not said a word, Miss Vavasor." "No; you have not said a word. You know well how to show your anger without speaking. As I do not choose to undergo your displeasure, I will return to England by myself." "Alice! Alice!" said Glencora, jumping up, "that is nonsense! What is all this trumpery thing about? Leave me, because he chooses to be angry about nothing?" "Is it nothing that I find my wife playing at a common gambling-table, surrounded by all that is wretched and vile,--established there, seated, with heaps of gold before her?" "You wrong me, Plantagenet," said Glencora. "There was only one heap, and that did not remain long. Did it, Alice?" "It is impossible to make you ashamed of anything," he said. "I certainly don't like being ashamed," she answered; "and don't feel any necessity on this occasion." "If you don't object, Mr. Palliser," said Alice, "I will go to bed. You can think over all this at night,--and so can I. Good night, Glencora." Then Alice took her candle, and marched off to her own room, with all the dignity of which she was mistress.

On the following morning Mr. Palliser yawned no more. There is some life in starting a long journey, and the life is the stronger and fuller if the things and people to be carried are numerous and troublesome. Lady Glencora was a little troublesome, and would not come down to breakfast in time. When rebuked, she asserted that the next train would do just as well; and when Mr. Palliser proved to her, with much trouble, that the next train could not enable them to reach Paris on that day, she declared that it would be much more comfortable to take a week in going than to hurry. There was nothing she wanted so much as to see Folkestone. "If that is the case, why did not you tell me so before?" said Mr. Palliser, in his gravest voice. "Richard and the carriage went down yesterday, and are already on board the packet." "If Richard and the carriage are already on board the packet," said Lady Glencora, "of course we must follow them. Alice, haven't you observed that, in travelling, you are always driven on by some Richard or some carriage, till you feel that you are a slave?" All this was trying to Mr. Palliser; but I think that he enjoyed it, nevertheless, and was happy when he did get his freight off from Pimlico Station in the proper train. Of course Lady Glencora and Alice were very ill crossing the Channel; of course the two maids were worse than their mistresses; of course the men-servants drank brandy-and-water with the steward downstairs; and of course Lady Glencora declared that she would not go beyond Boulogne that day; but, nevertheless, they did get on to Paris. Had Mr. Palliser become Chancellor of the Exchequer, he could hardly have worked harder. It was he who found out which carriage had been reserved for them, and who put the ladies' dressing-cases and cloaks on to the seats, who laid out the novels, and made preparations as though this stage of their journey was to take them a week, instead of five hours and a half. "Oh, dear! how I have slept!" said Lady Glencora, as they approached Paris. "I think you've been tolerably comfortable," said Mr. Palliser joyfully. "Since we got out of that horrid boat I have done pretty well. Why do they make the boats so nasty? I'm sure they do it on purpose." "It is the sea that makes them uncomfortable," said Mr. Palliser. "Never mind; we shan't have any more of it for twelve months, at any rate. We can get to the Kurds, Alice, without getting into a boat again. That is the great comfort of the Continent. One can go everywhere without being seasick." Mr. Palliser said nothing, but he sighed as he thought of being absent for a whole year. He had said that such was his intention. But how was he to live for twelve months out of the House of Commons? What was he to do with himself, with his intellect and his energy, during all these coming dreary days? And he might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer! He might at this very moment have been upon his feet, making a financial statement of six hours' duration, to the delight of one-half of the House, and the bewilderment of the other half, instead of dragging cloaks across that dingy, dirty waiting-room at the Paris Station. Alice thought of the last time in which she had been in that waiting-room, when George and Kate had been with her. But she was now travelling with great people, who never spoke of their wealth, but who showed their consciousness of it at every turn of their lives. "After all," she said to herself, "I wonder whether the burden is not greater than the pleasure." They stayed in Paris for a week, and during that time Alice got to know Mr. Palliser well. At Matching she had seen little of him. Now she began to understand his character, and learned how to talk to him. She allowed him to tell her things in which Lady Glencora resolutely took no interest. She delighted him by writing down in a little pocket-book the number of eggs that were consumed in Paris every day, whereas Glencora protested that the information was worthless unless her husband could tell her how many of the eggs were good, and how many bad. And Alice was glad to find that a hundred and fifty thousand female operatives were employed in Paris, while Lady Glencora said it was a great shame, and that they ought to have husbands. "I do so wish you had married him!" Glencora said to Alice that evening. "You would always have had a pocket-book ready to write down the figures, and you would have pretended to care about the eggs, and the rest of it. I can't do it. If I see a hungry woman, I can give her my money; or if she is a sick woman, I can nurse her; but I cannot take up poverty and crime in the lump. I never believe it all. My mind isn't big enough." They went into no society at Paris, and at the end of a week were glad to leave. "I don't know that Baden will be any better," Lady Glencora said; "but we can leave again after a bit - and get nearer to the Kurds." Mr. Palliser demurred. "I think we had better stay a month at Baden. I like to have a plan." "And so do I," said his wife, "if only for the sake of not keeping it." "There's nothing I hate so much as not carrying out my intentions," said Mr. Palliser. Upon this, Lady Glencora shrugged her shoulders, and made a mock grimace to her cousin. All this her husband bore meekly for a while; he behaved very well. But, then, he had his own way in everything. Lady Glencora did not behave very well - contradicting her husband, and not considering the sacrifice he was making on her behalf. But, then, she had her own way in nothing. On one point she did conquer her husband. He intended to go from Paris back to Cologne, and down the Rhine to Baden. Lady Glencora declared that she hated the Rhine, and that she would be wretched if she were taken that way. Mr. Palliser referred the matter to Alice; and she, who had last been upon the Rhine with Kate and George Vavasor, voted for going to Baden by way of Strasbourg. "We will go by Strasbourg, then," said Mr. Palliser gallantly. "Not that I want to see that horrid church again," said Glencora. "Everything is horrid to you, I think," said her husband. "You are determined not to be contented, so that it matters very little which way we go." "That's the truth," said his wife. "It does matter very little." They got to Baden, and found half a hotel prepared for their reception. Here the carriage was brought into use for the first time, and Glencora talked of sending home for Dandy and Flirt. Mr. Palliser calmly assured his wife that the horses would not bear the journey. "They would be so out of condition," he said, "as not to be worth anything for two or three months." "I only meant to ask for them if they could come in a balloon," said Lady Glencora. This angered Mr. Palliser, who had really thought of pacifying his wife by sending for the horses. "Alice," she asked, one morning, "how many eggs are eaten in Baden every day before ten o'clock?" Mr. Palliser, who at the moment was eating one, threw down his spoon, and pushed his plate from him. "What's the matter, Plantagenet?" she asked. "The matter!" he said. "But never mind; I am a fool to care about it." "I declare I didn't know that I had done anything wrong," said Lady Glencora. "Alice, do you understand what it is?" Alice said that she understood very well. "Of course she understands," said Mr. Palliser. "How can she help it? And, indeed, Miss Vavasor, I am more unhappy than I can express, to think that your comfort should be disturbed in this way." "I think Alice is doing very well," said Lady Glencora. "What is there to hurt her comfort? Nobody scolds her. Nobody tells her that she is a fool. She never jokes, or does anything wicked, and, of course, she isn't punished." Mr. Palliser, as he wandered that day alone through the gambling-rooms at the great Assembly House, thought that, after all, it might have been better for him to have remained in London, to have become Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to have run all risks. "I wonder whether it would be any harm if I were to put a few pieces of money on the table, just once?" Lady Glencora said to her cousin that evening, in one of those gambling salons. There had been some music in one side of the building, and afterwards the ladies had strayed away into the other apartments. "The greatest harm in the world!" said Alice; "and what on earth could you gain by it?" "Something to live for - some excitement. Is it not a shame that I see around me so many people getting amusement, and that I can get none? I'd go and sit out there, and drink beer and hear the music, only Plantagenet wouldn't let me. I think I'll throw one piece on to the table to see what becomes of it." "I shall leave you if you do," said Alice. "You are such a prude! You look after me quite as carefully as Mr. Bott and Mrs. Marsham ever did; but as I chose you myself, I can't very well complain, and I can't very well get rid of you." "Do you want to get rid of me, Cora?" "Sometimes. Do you know, there are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil - when I think it is the best thing to be done. It's a hard thing for a woman to do, because she gets so despised. A man can take to drinking, and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit. All he needs is money, and he goes away and has his fling. Now I have plenty of money, and I never got my fling yet. I do feel so tempted to rebel, and go ahead, and care for nothing." "Throwing one piece on to the table wouldn't satisfy that longing." "You think I should be like the wild beast that has tasted blood, and can't be controlled? Look at all these people here. There are husbands gambling, and their wives don't know it; and wives gambling, and their husbands don't know it. I wonder whether Plantagenet ever has a fling? What a joke it would be to come and catch him!" "I don't think you need be afraid of that." "Afraid! I should like him all the better for it. If he came to me some morning, and told me that he had lost a hundred thousand pounds, I should be so much more at my ease with him." "No chance of that, I'm quite sure." "None the least. He'd make a calculation that the chances were nine to seven against him, and then the speculation would seem madness." "I don't suppose he'd wish to try, even if he were sure of winning." "Of course not. Look - there's an opening there. I'll just put on one napoleon." "You shall not. If you do, I'll leave you at once. Look at the women who are playing. Those men are bad enough, but the women look like fiends." "You're not going to frighten me in that hobgoblin way, you know. I don't see anything the matter with any of the people." "What do you think of that young woman who has just got a handful of money from the man next to her?" "I think she is very happy. I never get money given to me by handfuls, and the man to whom I belong gives me no encouragement when I want to amuse myself." They were now standing near one end of the table, and suddenly there came to be an opening through the crowd. Lady Glencora at once stepped up and placed a piece of gold on one of the marked compartments. She retreated again with flushed face, and took hold of Alice's arm. "There," she said, "I have done it." Alice, in her dismay, did not know what to do. She could not scold her friend, as many eyes were turned upon them, nor could she, of course, leave her, as she had threatened. Lady Glencora laughed with her peculiar little low laughter. "I was determined you shouldn't frighten me out of it," she said. One of the croupiers at the table had in the meantime called the game; and another had gently pushed three or four more pieces of gold up to that which Lady Glencora had flung down, and had then cunningly caught her eye, and had pushed them further towards her. She had supposed herself to be unknown in the salon, but no doubt all the croupiers and half the company knew well enough who she was. Someone motioned to her to come and take up the money which she had won. She hesitated, and then the croupier asked her, in a low, indifferent voice, whether she desired that her money should remain. She nodded and he drew the money back to the spot on which she had placed the first napoleon. Again the cards were turned up softly, again the game was called, and again she won. The money was dealt out to her - between twenty and thirty napoleons. Her face had flushed before, but now it became very red. She caught hold of Alice, who was literally trembling beside her, and tried to laugh again. But there was that in her eye which told Alice that she was really frightened. Someone placed a chair for her at the table, and in her confusion, not knowing what to do, she seated herself. "Come away," said Alice. "You must come away!" "I must get rid of that money," said Glencora, trying to whisper, "and then I will come away." The croupier again asked her if the money was to remain, and she again nodded. Everybody at the table was now looking at her. The women especially were staring at her with hard, shameless eyes; their white gloves had been removed to show dirty hands. Alice saw it all, and trembled. Again she won. "Leave it," said Alice, "and come away." "I can't leave it," said Glencora. "If I do, there'll be a fuss. I'll go the next time." What she said was, of course, in English, but it was easy to see that she was troubled, and, of course, those around her looked at her more because of her trouble. Again that little question and answer went on between her and the croupier, and the money was piled up on the compartment - a heap of gold. Alice had now both her hands on the back of the chair, needing support. If the devil should persist, and increase that stock of gold again, she must go and seek for Mr. Palliser. She knew not what else to do. "Come away at once, and leave it," she said, "or I shall go." At that moment the croupier raked it all up, and carried it all away; but Alice did not see this. A hand had been placed on her shoulder, and as she turned round her face her eyes met those of Mr. Palliser. "It is all gone," said Glencora, laughing. And now she, turning round, also saw her husband. "I am so glad that you are come," said Alice. "Why did you bring her here?" said Mr. Palliser. There was anger in his tone, and in his eye. He took his wife's arm, and walked away quickly, while Alice followed them alone. He went down the front steps of the building, towards the hotel. What he said to his wife, Alice did not hear; but her heart was swelling. Though she might have to go back alone to England, she would tell him that he was ill-treating her. She followed him on, up into their drawing-room, and there he stood with the door open, while Lady Glencora threw herself upon a sofa, and burst out into affected laughter. "Here's a piece of work," she said, "about a little accident." "An accident!" said Mr. Palliser. "Yes, an accident. You don't suppose that I sat down there meaning to win all that money?" Whereupon he looked at her with scorn. "Mr. Palliser," said Alice, "you have treated me this evening in a manner I did not expect from you. It is clear that you blame me." "I have not said a word, Miss Vavasor." "No; you know well how to show your anger without speaking. As I do not choose to undergo your displeasure, I will return to England by myself." "Alice! Alice!" said Glencora, jumping up, "that is nonsense! What is all this trumpery thing about? Leave me, because he chooses to be angry about nothing?" "Is it nothing that I find my wife seated and playing at a common gambling-table, surrounded by all that is wretched and vile?" "You wrong me, Plantagenet," said Glencora. "There was only one heap, and that did not remain long. Did it, Alice?" "It is impossible to make you ashamed of anything," he said. "I certainly don't like being ashamed," she answered; "and don't feel any necessity on this occasion." "If you don't object, Mr. Palliser," said Alice, "I will go to bed. Good night, Glencora." Then she took her candle, and marched off to her own room, with all the dignity of which she was capable.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 68: From London to Baden

George when he left the room in which he had insulted the lawyer, went immediately across to the parlour in which his aunt and sister were sitting. "Kate," said he, "put on your hat and come and walk with me. That business is over." Kate's hat and shawl were in the room, and they were out of the house together within a minute. They walked down the carriage-road, through the desolate, untenanted grounds, to the gate, before either of them spoke a word. Kate was waiting for George to tell her of the will, but did not dare to ask any question. George intended to tell her of the will, but was not disposed to do so without some preparation. It was a thing not to be spoken of open-mouthed, as a piece of ordinary news. "Which way shall we go?" said Kate, as soon as they had passed through the old rickety gate, which swung at the entrance of the place. "Up across the fell," said George; "the day is fine, and I want to get away from my uncle for a time." She turned round, therefore, outside the hill of firs, and led the way back to the beacon wood through which she and Alice had walked across to Haweswater upon a memorable occasion. They had reached the top of the beacon hill, and were out upon the Fell, before George had begun his story. Kate was half beside herself with curiosity, but still she was afraid to ask. "Well," said George, when they paused a moment as they stepped over a plank that crossed the boundary ditch of the wood: "don't you want to know what that dear old man has done for you?" Then he looked into her face very steadfastly. "But perhaps you know already," he added. He had come out determined not to quarrel with his sister. He had resolved, in that moment of thought which had been allowed to him, that his best hope for the present required that he should keep himself on good terms with her, at any rate till he had settled what line of conduct he would pursue. But he was, in truth, so sore with anger and disappointment,--he had become so nearly mad with that continued, unappeased wrath in which he now indulged against all the world, that he could not refrain himself from bitter words. He was as one driven by the Furies, and was no longer able to control them in their driving of him. "I know nothing of it," said Kate. "Had I known I should have told you. Your question is unjust to me." "I am beginning to doubt," said he, "whether a man can be safe in trusting any one. My grandfather has done his best to rob me of the property altogether." "I told you that I feared he would do so." "And he has made you his heir." "Me?" "Yes; you." "He told me distinctly that he would not do that." "But he has, I tell you." "Then, George, I shall do that which I told him I should do in the event of his making such a will; for he asked me the question. I told him I should restore the estate to you, and upon that he swore that he would not leave it to me." "And what a fool you were," said he, stopping her in the pathway. "What an ass! Why did you tell him that? You knew that he would not, on that account, do justice to me." "He asked me, George." "Psha! now you have ruined me, and you might have saved me." "But I will save you still, if he has left the estate to me. I do not desire to take it from you. As God in heaven sees me, I have never ceased to endeavour to protect your interests here at Vavasor. I will sign anything necessary to make over my right in the property to you." Then they walked on over the Fell for some minutes without speaking. They were still on the same path,--that path which Kate and Alice had taken in the winter,--and now poor Kate could not but think of all that she had said that day on George's behalf;--how had she mingled truth and falsehood in her efforts to raise her brother's character in her cousin's eyes! It had all been done in vain. At this very moment of her own trouble Kate thought of John Grey, and repented of what she had done. Her hopes in that direction were altogether blasted. She knew that her brother had ill-treated Alice, and that she must tell him so if Alice's name were mentioned between them. She could no longer worship her brother, and hold herself at his command in all things. But, as regarded the property to which he was naturally the heir, if any act of hers could give it to him, that act would be done. "If the will is as you say, George, I will make over my right to you." "You can make over nothing," he answered. "The old robber has been too cunning for that; he has left it all in the hands of my uncle John. D---- him. D---- them both." "George! George! he is dead now." "Dead; of course he is dead. What of that? I wish he had been dead ten years ago,--or twenty. Do you suppose I am to forgive him because he is dead? I'll heap his grave with curses, if that can be of avail to punish him." "You can only punish the living that way." "And I will punish them;--but not by cursing them. My uncle John shall have such a life of it for the next year or two that he shall bitterly regret the hour in which he has stepped between me and my rights." "I do not believe that he has done so." "Not done so! What was he down here for at Christmas? Do you pretend to think that that make-believe will was concocted without his knowledge?" "I'm sure that he knew nothing of it. I don't think my grandfather's mind was made up a week before he died." "You'll have to swear that, remember, in a court. I'm not going to let the matter rest, I can tell you. You'll have to prove that. How long is it since he asked you what you would do with the estate if he left it to you?" Kate thought for a moment before she answered. "It was only two days before he died, if I remember rightly." "But you must remember rightly. You'll have to swear to it. And now tell me this honestly; do you believe, in your heart, that he was in a condition fit for making a will?" "I advised him not to make it." "Why? why? What reason did you give?" "I told him that I thought no man should alter family arrangements when he was so ill." "Exactly. You told him that. And what did he say?" "He was very angry, and made me send for Mr. Gogram." "Now, Kate, think a little before you answer me again. If ever you are to do me a good turn, you must do it now. And remember this, I don't at all want to take anything away from you. Whatever you think is fair you shall have." He was a fool not to have known her better than that. "I want nothing," she said, stopping, and stamping with her foot upon the crushed heather. "George, you don't understand what it is to be honest." He smiled,--with a slight provoking smile that passed very rapidly from his face. The meaning of the smile was to be read, had Kate been calm enough to read it. "I can't say that I do." That was the meaning of the smile. "Well, never mind about that," said he; "you advised my grandfather not to make his will,--thinking, no doubt, that his mind was not clear enough?" She paused a moment again before she answered him. "His mind was clear," she said; "but I thought that he should not trust his judgement while he was so weak." "Look here, Kate; I do believe that you at any rate have no mind to assist in this robbery. That it is a robbery you can't have any doubt. I said he had left the estate to you. That is not what he has done. He has left the estate to my uncle John." "Why tell me, then, what was untrue?" "Are you disappointed?" "Of course I am; uncle John won't give it you. George, I don't understand you; I don't, indeed." "Never mind about that, but listen to me. The estate is left in the hands of John Vavasor; but he has left you five hundred a year out of it till somebody is twenty-five years old who is not yet born, and probably never will be born. The will itself shows the old fool to have been mad." "He was no more mad than you are, George." "Listen to me, I tell you. I don't mean that he was a raging maniac. Now, you had advised him not to make any new will because you thought he was not in a fit condition?" "Yes; I did." "You can swear to that?" "I hope I may not be called on to do so. I hope there may be no swearing about it. But if I am asked the question I must swear it." "Exactly. Now listen till you understand what it is I mean. That will, if it stands, gives all the power over the estate to John Vavasor. It renders you quite powerless as regards any help or assistance that you might be disposed to give to me. But, nevertheless, your interest under the will is greater than his,--or than that of any one else,--for your son would inherit if I have none. Do you understand?" "Yes; I think so." "And your testimony as to the invalidity of the will would be conclusive against all the world." "I would say in a court what I have told you, if that will do any good." "It will not be enough. Look here, Kate; you must be steadfast here; everything depends on you. How often have you told me that you will stick to me throughout life? Now you will be tried." Kate felt that her repugnance towards him,--towards all that he was doing and wished her to do,--was growing stronger within her at every word he spoke. She was becoming gradually aware that he desired from her something which she could not and would not do, and she was aware also that in refusing him she would have to encounter him in all his wrath. She set her teeth firmly together, and clenched her little fist. If a fight was necessary, she would fight with him. As he looked at her closely with his sinister eyes, her love towards him was almost turned to hatred. "But that was what you meant when you advised him not to make the will because you thought his intellect was impaired!" "No; not so." "Stop, Kate, stop. If you will think of it, It was so. What is the meaning of his judgement being weak?" "I didn't say his judgement was weak." "But that was what you meant when you advised him not to trust it!" "Look here, George; I think I know now what you mean. If anybody asks me if his mind was gone, or his intellect deranged, I cannot say that there was anything of the kind." "You will not?" "Certainly not. It would be untrue." "Then you are determined to throw me over and claim the property for yourself." Again he turned towards and looked at her as though he were resolved to frighten her. "And I am to count you also among my enemies? You had better take care, Kate." They were now upon the fell side, more than three miles away from the Hall; and Kate, as she looked round, saw that they were all alone. Not a cottage,--not a sign of humanity was within sight. Kate saw that it was so, and was aware that the fact pressed itself upon her as being of importance. Then she thought again of her resolution to fight with him, if any fight were necessary; to tell him, in so many words, that she would separate herself from him and defy him. She would not fear him, let his words and face be ever so terrible! Surely her own brother would do her no bodily harm. And even though he should do so,--though he should take her roughly by the arm as he had done to Alice,--though he should do worse than that, still she would fight him. Her blood was the same as his, and he should know that her courage was, at any rate, as high. And, indeed, when she looked at him, she had cause to fear. He intended that she should fear. He intended that she should dread what he might do to her at that moment. As to what he would do he had no resolve made. Neither had he resolved on anything when he had gone to Alice and had shaken her rudely as she sat beside him. He had been guided by no fixed intent when he had attacked John Grey, or when he insulted the attorney; but a Fury was driving him, and he was conscious of being so driven. He almost wished to be driven to some act of frenzy. Everything in the world had gone against him, and he desired to expend his rage on some one. "Kate," said he, stopping her, "we will have this out here, if you please. So much, at any rate, shall be settled to-day. You have made many promises to me, and I have believed them. You can now keep them all, by simply saying what you know to be the truth,--that that old man was a drivelling idiot when he made this will. Are you prepared to do me that justice? Think before you answer me, for, by G----, if I cannot have justice among you, I will have revenge." And he put his hand upon her breast up near to her throat. "Take your hand down, George," said she. "I'm not such a fool that you can frighten me in that way." "Answer me!" he said, and shook her, having some part of her raiment within his clutch. "Oh, George, that I should live to be so ashamed of my brother!" "Answer me," he said again; and again he shook her. "I have answered you. I will say nothing of the kind that you want me to say. My grandfather, up to the latest moment that I saw him, knew what he was about. He was not an idiot. He was, I believe, only carrying out a purpose fixed long before. You will not make me change what I say by looking at me like that, nor get it by shaking me. You don't know me, George, if you think you can frighten me like a child." He heard her to the last word, still keeping his hand upon her, and holding her by the cloak she wore; but the violence of his grasp had relaxed itself, and he let her finish her words, as though his object had simply been to make her speak out to him what she had to say. "Oh," said he, when she had done, "That's to be it; is it? That's your idea of honesty. The very name of the money being your own has been too much for you. I wonder whether you and my uncle had contrived it all between you beforehand?" "You will not dare to ask him, because he is a man," said Kate, her eyes brimming with tears, not through fear, but in very vexation at the nature of the charge he had brought against her. "Shall I not? You will see what I dare do. As for you, with all your promises--. Kate, you know that I keep my word. Say that you will do as I desire you, or I will be the death of you." "Do you mean that you will murder me?" said she. "Murder you! yes; why not? Treated as I have been among you, do you suppose that I shall stick at anything? Why should I not murder you--you and Alice, too, seeing how you have betrayed me?" "Poor Alice!" As she spoke the words she looked straight into his eyes, as though defying him, as far as she herself were concerned. "Poor Alice, indeed! D---- hypocrite! There's a pair of you; cursed, whining, false, intriguing hypocrites. There; go down and tell your uncle and that old woman there that I threatened to murder you. Tell the judge so, when you're brought into court to swear me out of my property. You false liar!" Then he pushed her from him with great violence, so that she fell heavily upon the stony ground. He did not stop to help her up, or even to look at her as she lay, but walked away across the heath, neither taking the track on towards Haweswater, nor returning by the path which had brought them thither. He went away northwards across the wild fell; and Kate, having risen up and seated herself on a small cairn of stones which stood there, watched him as he descended the slope of the hill till he was out of sight. He did not run, but he seemed to move rapidly, and he never once turned round to look at her. He went away, down the hill northwards, and presently the curving of the ground hid him from her view. When she first seated herself her thoughts had been altogether of him. She had feared no personal injury, even when she had asked him whether he would murder her. Her blood had been hot within her veins, and her heart had been full of defiance. Even yet she feared nothing, but continued to think of him and his misery, and his disgrace. That he was gone for ever, utterly and irretrievably ruined, thrown out, as it were, beyond the pale of men, was now certain to her. And this was the brother in whom she had believed; for whom she had not only been willing to sacrifice herself, but for whose purposes she had striven to sacrifice her cousin! What would he do now? As he passed from out of her sight down the hill, it seemed to her as though he were rushing straight into some hell from which there could be no escape. [Illustration: Kate.] She knew that her arm had been hurt in the fall, but for a while she would not move it or feel it, being resolved to take no account of what might have happened to herself. But when he had been gone some ten minutes, she rose to her feet, and finding that the movement pained her greatly, and that her right arm was powerless, she put up her left hand and became aware that the bone of her arm was broken below the elbow. Her first thought was given to the telling him of this, or the not telling, when she should meet him below at the house. How should she mention the accident to him? Should she lie, and say that she had fallen as she came down the hill alone? Of course he would not believe her, but still some such excuse as that might make the matter easier for them all. It did not occur to her that she might not see him again at all that day; and that, as far as he was concerned, there might be need for no lie. She started off to walk down home, holding her right arm steadily against her body with her left hand. Of course she must give some account of herself when she got to the house; but it was of the account to be given to him that she thought. As to the others she cared little for them. "Here I am; my arm is broken; and you had better send for a doctor." That would be sufficient for them. When she got into the wood the path was very dark. The heavens were overcast with clouds, and a few drops began to fall. Then the rain fell faster and faster, and before she had gone a quarter of a mile down the beacon hill, the clouds had opened themselves, and the shower had become a storm of water. Suffering as she was she stood up for a few moments under a large tree, taking the excuse of the rain for some minutes of delay, that she might make up her mind as to what she would say. Then it occurred to her that she might possibly meet him again before she reached the house; and, as she thought of it, she began for the first time to fear him. Would he come out upon her from the trees and really kill her? Had he made his way round, when he got out of her sight, that he might fall upon her suddenly and do as he had threatened? As the idea came upon her, she made a little attempt to run, but she found that running was impracticable from the pain the movement caused her. Then she walked on through the hard rain, steadily holding her arm against her side, but still looking every moment through the trees on the side from which George might be expected to reach her. But no one came near her on her way homewards. Had she been calm enough to think of the nature of the ground, she might have known that he could not have returned upon her so quickly. He must have come back up the steep hill-side which she had seen him descend. No;--he had gone away altogether, across the fells towards Bampton, and was at this moment vainly buttoning his coat across his breast, in his unconscious attempt to keep out the wet. The Fury was driving him on, and he himself was not aware whither he was driven. Dinner at the Hall had been ordered at five, the old hour; or rather that had been assumed to be the hour for dinner without any ordering. It was just five when Kate reached the front door. This she opened with her left hand, and turning at once into the dining-room, found her uncle and her aunt standing before the fire. "Dinner is ready," said John Vavasor; "where is George?" "You are wet, Kate," said aunt Greenow. "Yes, I am very wet," said Kate. "I must go up-stairs. Perhaps you'll come with me, aunt?" "Come with you,--of course I will." Aunt Greenow had seen at once that something was amiss. "Where's George?" said John Vavasor. "Has he come back with you, or are we to wait for him?" Kate seated herself in her chair. "I don't quite know where he is," she said. In the meantime her aunt had hastened up to her side just in time to catch her as she was falling from her chair. "My arm," said Kate, very gently; "my arm!" Then she slipped down against her aunt, and had fainted. "He has done her a mischief," said Mrs. Greenow, looking up at her brother. "This is his doing." John Vavasor stood confounded, wishing himself back in Queen Anne Street.

When George had left the room in which he had insulted the lawyer, he went immediately to the parlour where his aunt and sister were sitting. "Kate," said he, "put on your hat and come and walk with me. That business is over." They were out of the house together within a minute. They walked down the carriage-road, through the desolate grounds to the gate, before either of them spoke a word. Kate did not dare to ask about the will. George intended to tell her, but not without some preparation. "Which way shall we go?" said Kate, as soon as they had passed through the old rickety gate. "Up across the fell," said George; "the day is fine, and I want to get away from my uncle for a while." So she led the way to the wood through which she and Alice had walked across to Haweswater. They had reached the top of the beacon hill, and were out upon the Fell, before George began his story. "Well," he said as they paused a moment at the boundary of the wood: "don't you want to know what that dear old man has done for you?" Then he looked into her face very steadfastly. "But perhaps you know already." He had come out determined not to quarrel with his sister. He had resolved that his best hope for the present was to keep on good terms with her, at any rate till he had decided what to do. But he was, in truth, so sore with anger and disappointment that he could not refrain himself from bitter words. He was as one driven by the Furies, and was no longer able to control them. "I know nothing of it," said Kate. "If I had known I should have told you. Your question is unjust." "I am beginning to doubt," said he, "whether a man can be safe in trusting anyone. My grandfather has done his best to rob me of the property altogether." "I told you that I feared he would do so." "And he has made you his heir." "Me?" "Yes; you." "He told me distinctly that he would not do that." "But he has, I tell you." "Then, George, I shall do what I told him I should do if he made such a will; for he asked me the question. I told him I should restore the estate to you, and upon that he swore that he would not leave it to me." "And what a fool you were," said he, stopping her in the path. "What an ass! Why did you tell him that? You knew that meant he would not do justice to me." "He asked me, George." "Psha! now you have ruined me, and you might have saved me." "But I will save you still, if he has left the estate to me. I do not desire to take it from you. As God in heaven sees me, I have never ceased to protect your interests here at Vavasor. I will sign anything necessary to make over my right in the property to you." Then they walked on over the Fell for some minutes without speaking. They were on the same path which Kate and Alice had taken in the winter, and now poor Kate could not avoid thinking of all that she had said that day on George's behalf. It had all been in vain. At this very moment of her own trouble Kate thought of John Grey, and repented of what she had done. She could no longer worship her brother. But, as regarded the property, if she could give it to him, she would. "If the will is as you say, George, I will make over my right to you." "You can make over nothing," he answered. "The old robber has been too cunning for that; he has left it all in the hands of my uncle John. D-- them both." "George! he is dead now." "I wish he had been dead ten years ago. Do you suppose I am to forgive him because he is dead? I'll heap his grave with curses. And my uncle John shall have such a life of it for the next year or two that he shall bitterly regret the hour in which he has stepped between me and my rights." "I do not believe that he has done so." "Not done so! Why was he down here at Christmas? Do you pretend to think that that make-believe will was concocted without his knowledge?" "I'm sure that he knew nothing of it. I don't think my grandfather's mind was made up a week before he died." "You'll have to swear that, remember, in a court. I'm not going to let the matter rest, I can tell you. How long is it since he asked you what you would do with the estate if he left it to you?" Kate thought for a moment before she answered. "It was two days before he died, if I remember rightly." "But you must remember rightly. You'll have to swear to it. And now tell me this honestly; do you believe, in your heart, that he was in a condition fit for making a will?" "I advised him not to make it." "Why? What reason did you give?" "I told him that I thought no man should alter family arrangements when he was so ill." "Exactly. And what did he say?" "He was very angry, and made me send for Mr. Gogram." "Now, Kate, think a little before you answer me again. If ever you are to do me a good turn, you must do it now. And remember this, I don't at all want to take anything away from you. Whatever you think is fair you shall have." He was a fool not to have known her better than that. "I want nothing," she said, stopping. "George, you don't understand what it is to be honest." He smiled, with a slight provoking smile that passed rapidly from his face. The meaning of the smile was to be read, had Kate been calm enough to read it: "I can't say that I do," was what it meant. "Never mind about that," said he; "you advised my grandfather not to make his will, thinking, no doubt, that his mind was not clear enough?" She paused a moment again before she answered him. "His mind was clear," she said; "but I thought that he should not trust his judgement while he was so weak." "Look here, Kate; I believe that you have no wish to assist in this robbery. That it is a robbery you can't doubt. He has left the estate to my uncle John." "Why tell me, then, what was untrue?" "Are you disappointed?" "Of course I am; uncle John won't give it you. George, I don't understand you." "Listen to me. The estate is left in the hands of John Vavasor; but he has left you five hundred a year out of it till somebody is twenty-five years old who is not yet born, and probably never will be born. The will itself shows the old fool to have been mad." "He was no more mad than you are, George." "Listen to me, I tell you. I don't mean that he was a raging maniac. Now, you had advised him not to make any new will because you thought he was not in a fit condition?" "Yes; I did." "You can swear to that?" "I hope I may not be called on to do so. But if I am asked the question I must swear it." "Exactly. Now listen till you understand what it is I mean. That will, if it stands, gives all the power over the estate to John Vavasor. It renders you quite powerless to give me any assistance. But, nevertheless, your interest under the will is greater than his, for your son would inherit if I have no son. Do you understand?" "Yes; I think so." "And your testimony about the invalidity of the will would be conclusive against all the world." "I would say in a court what I have told you, if that will do any good." "It will not be enough. Look here, Kate; you must be steadfast here; everything depends on you. How often have you told me that you will stick to me throughout life? Now you will be tried." Kate felt that her repugnance towards him was growing stronger at every word he spoke. She was becoming gradually aware that he desired her to do something which she could not and would not do, and she was aware also that in refusing him she would incur all his anger. She set her teeth firmly together, and clenched her little fist. If a fight was necessary, she would fight him. Her love for him was almost turned to hatred. "You advised him not to make the will because you thought his intellect was impaired!" "No; not so." "Stop, Kate, stop. If you will think of it, it was so. What is the meaning of his judgement being weak?" "I didn't say his judgement was weak." "But that was what you meant when you advised him not to trust it!" "Look here, George; if anybody asks me if his mind was gone, or his intellect deranged, I cannot say that there was anything of the kind." "You will not?" "Certainly not. It would be untrue." "Then you are determined to throw me over and claim the property for yourself." Again he turned towards and looked at her threateningly. "And I am to count you also among my enemies? You had better take care, Kate." They were now more than three miles away from the Hall; and Kate, as she looked round, saw that they were all alone. Not a cottage - not a sign of humanity was within sight. She thought again of her resolution to fight him, if any fight were necessary; to tell him that she would separate herself from him and defy him. She would not fear him, let his words and face be ever so terrible! Surely her own brother would do her no bodily harm. And even if he did, still she would fight him. Her blood was the same as his, and he should know that her courage was, at any rate, as high. And, indeed, when she looked at him, she had cause to fear. He intended her to fear. He intended her to dread what he might do to her. He had not decided what he would do; but a Fury was driving him, and he almost wished to be driven to some act of frenzy. Everything in the world had gone against him, and he desired to expend his rage on some one. "Kate," said he, "we will have this out here, if you please. You have made many promises to me, and I have believed them. You can now keep them all, by simply saying what you know to be the truth - that that old man was a drivelling idiot when he made this will. Are you prepared to do me that justice? Think before you answer me, for, by G---, if I cannot have justice, I will have revenge." And he put his hand upon her chest near to her throat. "Take your hand down, George," said she. "I'm not such a fool that you can frighten me in that way." "Answer me!" he said, and shook her. "Oh, George, that I should live to be so ashamed of my brother!" "Answer me," he said again; and again he shook her. "I have answered you. I will say nothing of the kind that you want me to say. My grandfather, up to the latest moment that I saw him, knew what he was doing. He was not an idiot. He was, I believe, only carrying out a purpose fixed long before. You will not make me change what I say by looking at me like that, nor by shaking me. You don't know me, George, if you think you can frighten me like a child." He still kept his hand upon her, and held her by her cloak; but the violence of his grasp had relaxed. "Oh," said he, when she had done, "That's it; is it? That's your idea of honesty. The idea of the money being your own has been too much for you. I wonder whether you and my uncle had contrived it all between you beforehand?" "You will not dare to ask him, because he is a man," said Kate, her eyes brimming with tears, not through fear, but in very vexation at the charge. "Shall I not? You will see what I dare do. As for you, with all your promises - Kate, say that you will do as I wish, or I will be the death of you." "Do you mean that you will murder me?" said she. "Murder you! yes; why not? Why should I not murder you - and Alice, too, seeing how you have betrayed me?" "Poor Alice!" As she spoke she looked straight into his eyes. "Poor Alice, indeed! D-- hypocrite! A pair of cursed, whining, false, intriguing hypocrites. There; go and tell your uncle and that old woman there that I threatened to murder you. Tell the judge so, when you're brought into court to swear me out of my property. You false liar!" Then he pushed her from him with great violence, so that she fell heavily on the stony ground. He did not stop to help her up, or even to look at her as she lay, but walked away across the heath, neither taking the track on towards Haweswater, nor returning by the path to the Hall. He went away northwards across the wild fell; and Kate, having sat up, watched him as he descended the slope till he was out of sight. He did not run, but he moved rapidly, and he never once turned round to look at her. He went away down the hill, and presently the curve of the ground hid him from her view. Her thoughts were all of him. She had feared no personal injury, even when she had asked whether he would murder her. Her heart had been full of defiance; but now she thought of his misery, and his disgrace. That he was gone for ever, utterly ruined, was now certain to her. And this was the brother in whom she had believed; for whom she had not only been willing to sacrifice herself, but also her cousin! What would he do now? As he passed out of her sight, it seemed to her as though he were rushing straight into some hell from which there could be no escape. She knew that her arm had been hurt in the fall, but for a while she would not move it, being resolved to take no account of what might have happened to herself. But after some ten minutes, she rose to her feet, and finding that her right arm was powerless, she put up her left hand and became aware that the bone was broken below the elbow. Her first thought was whether to tell him of this, when she should meet him at the house. How should she mention the accident to him? Should she lie, and say that she had fallen as she came down the hill alone? Of course he would not believe her, but still some such excuse as that might make the matter easier. It did not occur to her that she might not see him again at all that day; and that, as far as he was concerned, there might be no need for a lie. She started to walk home, holding her right arm steadily against her body with her left hand. Of course she must give some account of herself when she got to the house; but she thought chiefly of the account to be given to him. As to the others, "Here I am; my arm is broken; you had better send for a doctor" - that would be enough. When she got into the wood the path was very dark. The heavens were overcast, and a few drops began to fall. Then the rain fell faster and faster, and before she had gone a quarter of a mile, the shower had become a storm of water. Suffering as she was, she stood up for a few moments under a large tree, taking the excuse to make up her mind what she would say. Then it occurred to her that she might meet him again before she reached the house; and she began for the first time to fear him. Would he come out from the trees and really kill her? Had he made his way round, when he got out of her sight, in order to attack her suddenly? As the idea came upon her, she made a little attempt to run, but she found that running was impossible with the pain the movement caused her. Then she walked on through the hard rain, steadily holding her arm against her side, but still looking every moment through the trees for George. But no one came near her. George had gone away altogether, across the fells towards Bampton, and was at this moment vainly buttoning his coat against the wet. The Fury was driving him on, and he himself was not aware whither he was driven. Dinner at the Hall had been ordered at five. It was just five when Kate reached the front door. She opened it with her left hand, and turning into the dining-room, found her uncle and her aunt standing before the fire. "Dinner is ready," said John Vavasor; "where is George?" "You are wet, Kate," said Aunt Greenow. "Yes, I am very wet," said Kate. "I must go upstairs. Perhaps you'll come with me, aunt?" "Of course I will." Aunt Greenow had seen at once that something was amiss. "Where's George?" said John Vavasor. "Has he come back with you, or are we to wait for him?" Kate sat down in a chair. "I don't quite know where he is," she said. Her aunt hastened to her side just in time to catch her as she was falling from her chair. "My arm," said Kate, very gently; "my arm!" Then she slipped down against her aunt, and fainted. "He has done her a mischief," said Mrs. Greenow, looking at her brother. John Vavasor stood confounded, wishing himself back in Queen Anne Street.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 56: Another Walk on the Fells

A week or ten days after this, Alice, when she came down to the breakfast-parlour one morning, found herself alone with Mr. Bott. It was the fashion at Matching Priory for people to assemble rather late in the day. The nominal hour for breakfast was ten, and none of the ladies of the party were ever seen before that. Some of the gentlemen would breakfast earlier, especially on hunting mornings; and on some occasions the ladies, when they came together, would find themselves altogether deserted by their husbands and brothers. On this day it was fated that Mr. Bott alone should represent the sterner sex, and when Alice entered the room he was standing on the rug with his back to the fire, waiting till the appearance of some other guest should give him the sanction necessary for the commencement of his morning meal. Alice, when she saw him, would have retreated had it been possible, for she had learned to dislike him greatly, and was, indeed, almost afraid of him; but she could not do so without making her flight too conspicuous. "Do you intend to prolong your stay here, Miss Vavasor?" said Mr. Bott, taking advantage of the first moment at which she looked up from a letter which she was reading. "For a few more days, I think," said Alice. "Ah--I'm glad of that. Mr. Palliser has pressed me so much to remain till he goes to the Duke's, that I cannot get away sooner. As I am an unmarried man myself, I can employ my time as well in one place as in another;--at this time of the year at least." "You must find that very convenient," said Alice. "Yes, it is convenient. You see in my position,--Parliamentary position, I mean,--I am obliged, as a public man, to act in concert with others. A public man can be of no service unless he is prepared to do that. We must give and take, you know, Miss Vavasor." As Miss Vavasor made no remark in answer to this, Mr. Bott continued--"I always say to the men of my party,--of course I regard myself as belonging to the extreme Radicals." "Oh, indeed!" said Alice. "Yes. I came into Parliament on that understanding; and I have never seen any occasion as yet to change any political opinion that I have expressed. But I always say to the gentlemen with whom I act, that nothing can be done if we don't give and take. I don't mind saying to you, Miss Vavasor, that I look upon our friend, Mr. Palliser, as the most rising public man in the country. I do, indeed." "I am happy to hear you say so," said his victim, who found herself driven to make some remark. "And I, as an extreme Radical, do not think I can serve my party better than by keeping in the same boat with him, as long as it will hold the two. 'He'll make a Government hack of you,' a friend of mine said to me the other day. 'And I'll make a Manchester school Prime Minister of him,' I replied. I rather think I know what I'm about, Miss Vavasor." "No doubt," said Alice. "And so does he;--and so does he. Mr. Palliser is not the man to be led by the nose by any one. But it's a fair system of give and take. You can't get on in politics without it. What a charming woman is your relative, Lady Glencowrer! I remember well what you said to me the other evening." "Do you?" said Alice. "And I quite agree with you that confidential intercourse regarding dear friends should not be lightly made." "Certainly not," said Alice. "But there are occasions, Miss Vavasor; there are occasions when the ordinary laws by which we govern our social conduct must be made somewhat elastic." "I don't think this one of them, Mr. Bott." "Is it not? Just listen to me for one moment, Miss Vavasor. Our friend, Mr. Palliser, I am proud to say, relies much upon my humble friendship. Our first connection has, of course, been political; but it has extended beyond that, and has become pleasantly social;--I may say, very pleasantly social." "What a taste Mr. Palliser must have!" Alice thought to herself. "But I need not tell you that Lady Glencowrer is--very young; we may say, very young indeed." "Mr. Bott, I will not talk to you about Lady Glencora Palliser." This Alice said in a determined voice, and with all the power of resistance at her command. She frowned too, and looked savagely at Mr. Bott. But he was a man of considerable courage, and knew how to bear such opposition without flinching. "When I tell you, Miss Vavasor, that I speak solely with a view to her domestic happiness!" "I don't think that she wishes to have any such guardian of her happiness." "But if he wishes it, Miss Vavasor! Now I have the means of knowing that he has the greatest reliance on your judgement." Hereupon Alice got up with the intention of leaving the room, but she was met at the door by Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "Are you running from your breakfast, Miss Vavasor?" said she. "No, Mrs. Sparkes; I am running from Mr. Bott," said Alice, who was almost beside herself with anger. "Mr. Bott, what is this?" said Mrs. Sparkes. "Ha, ha, ha," laughed Mr. Bott. Alice returned to the room, and Mrs. Sparkes immediately saw that she had in truth been running from Mr. Bott. "I hope I shall be able to keep the peace," said she. "I trust his offence was not one that requires special punishment." "Ha, ha, ha," again laughed Mr. Bott, who rather liked his position. Alice was very angry with herself, feeling that she had told more of the truth to Mrs. Sparkes than she should have done, unless she was prepared to tell the whole. As it was, she wanted to say something, and did not know what to say; but her confusion was at once stopped by the entrance of Lady Glencora. "Mrs. Sparkes, good morning," said Lady Glencora. "I hope nobody has waited breakfast. Good morning, Mr. Bott. Oh, Alice!" "What is the matter?" said Alice, going up to her. "Oh, Alice, such a blow!" But Alice could see that her cousin was not quite in earnest;--that the new trouble, though it might be vexatious, was no great calamity. "Come here," said Lady Glencora; and they both went into an embrasure of the window. "Now I shall have to put your confidence in me to the test. This letter is from,--whom do you think?" "How can I guess?" "From Lady Midlothian! and she's coming here on Monday, on her road to London. Unless you tell me that you are quite sure this is as unexpected by me as by you, I will never speak to you again." "I am quite sure of that." "Ah! then we can consult. But first we'll go and have some breakfast." Then more ladies swarmed into the room,--the Duchess and her daughter, and the two Miss Pallisers, and others; and Mr. Bott had his hands full in attending,--or rather in offering to attend, to their little wants. The morning was nearly gone before Alice and her cousin had any further opportunity of discussing in private the approach of Lady Midlothian; but Mr. Palliser had come in among them, and had been told of the good thing which was in store for him. "We shall be delighted to see Lady Midlothian," said Mr. Palliser. "But there is somebody here who will not be at all delighted to see her," said Lady Glencora to her husband. "Is there, indeed?" said he. "Who is that?" "Her most undutiful cousin, Alice Vavasor. But, Alice, Mr. Palliser knows nothing about it, and it is too long to explain." "I am extremely sorry--" began Mr. Palliser. "I can assure you it does not signify in the least," said Alice. "It will only be taking me away three days earlier." Upon hearing this Mr. Palliser looked very serious. What quarrel could Miss Vavasor have had with Lady Midlothian which should make it impossible for them to be visitors at the same house? "It will do no such thing," said Lady Glencora. "Do you mean to say that you are coward enough to run away from her?" "I'm afraid, Miss Vavasor, that we can hardly bid her not come," said Mr. Palliser. In answer to this, Alice protested that she would not for worlds have been the means of keeping Lady Midlothian away from Matching. "I should tell you, Mr. Palliser, that I have never seen Lady Midlothian, though she is my far-away cousin. Nor have I ever quarrelled with her. But she has given me advice by letter, and I did not answer her because I thought she had no business to interfere. I shall go away, not because I am afraid of her, but because, after what has passed, our meeting would be unpleasant to her." "You could tell her that Miss Vavasor is here," said Mr. Palliser. "And then she need not come unless she pleased." The matter was so managed at last that Alice found herself unable to leave Matching without making more of Lady Midlothian's coming than it was worth. It would undoubtedly be very disagreeable,--this unexpected meeting with her relative; but, as Lady Glencora said, Lady Midlothian would not eat her. In truth, she felt ashamed of herself in that she was afraid of her relative. No doubt she was afraid of her. So much she was forced to admit to herself. But she resolved at last that she would not let her drive her out of the house. "Is Mr. Bott an admirer of your cousin?" Mrs. Sparkes said that evening to Lady Glencora. "A very distant one I should think," said Lady Glencora. "Goodness gracious!" exclaimed an old lady who had been rather awed by Alice's intimacy and cousinship with Lady Glencora; "it's the very last thing I should have dreamt of." "But I didn't dream it, first or last," said Mrs. Sparkes. "Why do you ask?" said Lady Glencora. "Don't suppose that I am asking whether Miss Vavasor is an admirer of his," said Mrs. Sparkes. "I have no suspicion of that nature. I rather think that when he plays Bacchus she plays Ariadne, with full intention of flying from him in earnest." "Is Mr. Bott inclined to play Bacchus?" asked Lady Glencora. "I rather thought he was this morning. If you observe, he has something of a godlike and triumphant air about him." "I don't think his godship will triumph there," said Lady Glencora. "I really think she would be throwing herself very much away," said the old lady. "Miss Vavasor is not at all disposed to do that," said Mrs. Sparkes. Then that conversation was allowed to drop. On the following Monday, Lady Midlothian arrived. The carriage was sent to meet her at the station about three o'clock in the afternoon, and Alice had to choose whether she would undergo her first introduction immediately on her relative's arrival, or whether she would keep herself out of the way till she should meet her in the drawing-room before dinner. "I shall receive her when she comes," said Lady Glencora, "and of course will tell her that you are here." "Yes, that will be best; and--; dear me, I declare I don't know how to manage it." "I'll bring her to you in my room if you like it." "No; that would be too solemn," said Alice. "That would make her understand that I thought a great deal about her." "Then we'll let things take their chance, and you shall come across her just as you would any other stranger." It was settled at last that this would be the better course, but that Lady Midlothian was to be informed of Alice's presence at the Priory as soon as she should arrive. Alice was in her own room when the carriage in which sat the unwelcome old lady was driven up to the hall-door. She heard the wheels plainly, and knew well that her enemy was within the house. She had striven hard all the morning to make herself feel indifferent to this arrival, but had not succeeded; and was angry with herself at finding that she sat up-stairs with an anxious heart, because she knew that her cousin was in the room down-stairs. What was Lady Midlothian to her that she should be afraid of her? And yet she was very much afraid of Lady Midlothian. She questioned herself on the subject over and over again, and found herself bound to admit that such was the fact. At last, about five o'clock, having reasoned much with herself, and rebuked herself for her own timidity, she descended into the drawing-room,--Lady Glencora having promised that she would at that hour be there,--and on opening the door became immediately conscious that she was in the presence of her august relative. There sat Lady Midlothian in a great chair opposite the fire, and Lady Glencora sat near to her on a stool. One of the Miss Pallisers was reading in a further part of the room, and there was no one else present in the chamber. The Countess of Midlothian was a very little woman, between sixty and seventy years of age, who must have been very pretty in her youth. At present she made no pretension either to youth or beauty,--as some ladies above sixty will still do,--but sat confessedly an old woman in all her external relations. She wore a round bonnet which came much over her face,--being accustomed to continue the use of her bonnet till dinner time when once she had been forced by circumstances to put it on. She wore a short cloak which fitted close to her person, and, though she occupied a great arm-chair, sat perfectly upright, looking at the fire. Very small she was, but she carried in her grey eyes and sharp-cut features a certain look of importance which saved her from being considered as small in importance. Alice, as soon as she saw her, knew that she was a lady over whom no easy victory could be obtained. "Here is Alice," said Lady Glencora, rising as her cousin entered the room. "Alice, let me introduce you to Lady Midlothian." Alice, as she came forward, was able to assume an easy demeanour, even though her heart within was failing her. She put out her hand, leaving it to the elder lady to speak the first words of greeting. "I am glad at last to be able to make your acquaintance, my dear," said Lady Midlothian; "very glad." But still Alice did not speak. "Your aunt, Lady Macleod, is one of my oldest friends, and I have heard her speak of you very often." "And Lady Macleod has often spoken to me of your ladyship," said Alice. "Then we know each other's names," said the Countess; "and it will be well that we should be acquainted with each other's persons. I am becoming an old woman, and if I did not learn to know you now, or very shortly, I might never do so." Alice could not help thinking that even under those circumstances neither might have had, so far as that was concerned, much cause of sorrow, but she did not say so. She was thinking altogether of Lady Midlothian's letter to her, and trying to calculate whether or no it would be well for her to rush away at once to the subject. That Lady Midlothian would mention the letter, Alice felt well assured; and when could it be better mentioned than now, in Glencora's presence,--when no other person was near them to listen to her? "You are very kind," said Alice. "I would wish to be so," said Lady Midlothian. "Blood is thicker than water, my dear; and I know no earthly ties that can bind people together if those of family connection will not do so. Your mother, when she and I were young, was my dearest friend." "I never knew my mother," said Alice,--feeling, however, as she spoke, that the strength of her resistance to the old woman was beginning to give way. "No, my dear, you never did; and that is to my thinking another reason why they who loved her should love you. But Lady Macleod is your nearest relative,--on your mother's side, I mean,--and she has done her duty by you well." "Indeed she has, Lady Midlothian." "She has, and others, therefore, have been the less called upon to interfere. I only say this, my dear, in my own vindication,--feeling, perhaps, that my conduct needs some excuse." "I'm sure Alice does not think that," said Lady Glencora. "It is what I think rather than what Alice thinks that concerns my own shortcomings," said Lady Midlothian, with a smile which was intended to be pleasant. "But I have wished to make up for former lost opportunities." Alice knew that she was about to refer to her letter, and trembled. "I am very anxious now to be reckoned one of Alice Vavasor's friends, if she will allow me to become so." "I can only be too proud,--if--" "If what, my dear?" said the old lady. I believe that she meant to be gracious, but there was something in her manner, or, perhaps, rather in her voice, so repellant, that Alice felt that they could hardly become true friends. "If what, my dear?" "Alice means--" began Lady Glencora. "Let Alice say what she means herself," said Lady Midlothian. "I hardly know how to say what I do mean," said Alice, whose spirit within her was rising higher as the occasion for using it came upon her. "I am assured that you and I, Lady Midlothian, differ very much as to a certain matter; and as it is one in which I must be guided by my own opinion, and not that of any other person, perhaps--" "You mean about Mr. Grey?" "Yes," said Alice; "I mean about Mr. Grey." "I think so much about that matter, and your happiness as therein concerned, that when I heard that you were here I was determined to take Matching in my way to London, so that I might have an opportunity of speaking to you." "Then you knew that Alice was here," said Lady Glencora. "Of course I did. I suppose you have heard all the history, Glencora?" Lady Glencora was forced to acknowledge that she had heard the history,--"the history" being poor Alice's treatment of Mr. Grey. "And what do you think of it?" Both Alice and her hostess looked round to the further end of the room in which Miss Palliser was reading, intending thus to indicate that the lady knew as yet none of the circumstances, and that there could be no good reason why she should be instructed in them at this moment. "Perhaps another time and another place may be better," said Lady Midlothian; "but I must go the day after to-morrow,--indeed, I thought of going to-morrow." "Oh, Lady Midlothian!" exclaimed Lady Glencora. "You must regard this as merely a passing visit, made upon business. But, as I was saying, when shall I get an opportunity of speaking to Alice where we need not be interrupted?" Lady Glencora suggested her room up-stairs, and offered the use of it then, or on that night when the world should be about to go to bed. But the idea of this premeditated lecture was terrible to Alice, and she determined that she would not endure it. "Lady Midlothian, it would really be of no use." "Of no use, my dear!" "No, indeed. I did get your letter, you know." "And as you have not answered it, I have come all this way to see you." "I shall be so sorry if I give offence, but it is a subject which I cannot bring myself to discuss"--she was going to say with a stranger, but she was able to check herself before the offensive word was uttered,--"which I cannot bring myself to discuss with any one." "But you don't mean to say that you won't see me?" "I will not talk upon that matter," said Alice. "I will not do it even with Lady Macleod." "No," said Lady Midlothian, and her sharp grey eyes now began to kindle with anger; "and therefore it is so very necessary that other friends should interfere." "But I will endure no interference," said Alice, "either from persons who are friends or who are not friends." And as she spoke she rose from her chair. "You must forgive me, Lady Midlothian, if I say that I can have no conversation with you on this matter." Then she walked out of the room, leaving the Countess and Lady Glencora together. As she went Miss Palliser lifted her eyes from her book, and knew that there had been a quarrel, but I doubt if she had heard any of the words which had been spoken. "The most self-willed young woman I ever met in my life," said Lady Midlothian, as soon as Alice was gone. [Illustration: "The most self-willed young woman I ever met in my life."] "I knew very well how it would be," said Lady Glencora. "But it is quite frightful, my dear. She has been engaged, with the consent of all her friends, to this young man." "I know all about it." "But you must think she is very wrong." "I don't quite understand her, but I suppose she fears they would not be happy together." "Understand her! I should think not; nobody can understand her. A young woman to become engaged to a gentleman in that way,--before all the world, as one may say;--to go to his house, as I am told, and talk to the servants, and give orders about the furniture and then turn round and simply say that she has changed her mind! She hasn't given the slightest reason to my knowledge." And Lady Midlothian, as she insisted on the absolute iniquity of Alice's proceedings, almost startled Lady Glencora by the eagerness of her countenance. Lady Midlothian had been one of those who, even now not quite two years ago, had assisted in obtaining the submission of Lady Glencora herself. Lady Midlothian seemed on the present occasion to remember nothing of this, but Lady Glencora remembered it very exactly. "I shall not give it up," continued Lady Midlothian. "I have the greatest possible objection to her father, who contrived to connect himself with our family in a most shameful manner, without the slightest encouragement. I don't think I have spoken to him since, but I shall see him now and tell him my opinion." Alice held her ground, and avoided all further conversation with Lady Midlothian. A message came to her through Lady Glencora imploring her to give way, but she was quite firm. "Good-bye to you," Lady Midlothian said to her as she went. "Even yet I hope that things may go right, and if so you will find that I can forget and forgive." "If perseverance merits success," said Lady Glencora to Alice, "she ought to succeed." "But she won't succeed," said Alice.

A week after this, Alice, when she came down to breakfast one morning, found herself alone with Mr. Bott. When she entered the room he was standing with his back to the fire, waiting till the appearance of some other guest should give him the sanction necessary to start his morning meal. Alice would have retreated if possible, for she had learned to dislike him greatly, and was, indeed, almost afraid of him; but she could not do so without making her flight conspicuous. "Do you intend to prolong your stay here, Miss Vavasor?" said Mr. Bott, taking advantage of the first moment at which she looked up from a letter she was reading. "For a few more days, I think," said Alice. "Ah - I'm glad of that. Mr. Palliser has pressed me so much to remain till he goes to the Duke's, that I cannot get away sooner. As I am an unmarried man, I can employ my time as well in one place as in another." "You must find that very convenient," said Alice. "Yes. You see, with my position in Parliament I am obliged to act in concert with others. We must give and take, you know, Miss Vavasor." As Miss Vavasor made no answer. Mr. Bott continued, "Of course I regard myself as belonging to the extreme Radicals." "Oh, indeed!" said Alice. "Yes. But nothing can be done if we don't give and take. I look upon our friend Mr. Palliser as the most rising public man in the country." "I am happy to hear you say so," said his victim. "And I do not think I can serve my party better than by keeping in the same boat with him. 'He'll make a Government hack of you,' a friend of mine said to me the other day. 'And I'll make a Manchester school Prime Minister of him,' I replied. I know what I'm about, Miss Vavasor." "No doubt," said Alice. "And so does he; Mr. Palliser is not the man to be led by the nose by anyone. What a charming woman is your relative, Lady Glencowrer! I remember what you said to me the other evening." "Do you?" said Alice. "And I quite agree with you that confidential discussion of dear friends should not be lightly made." "Certainly not." "But there are occasions, Miss Vavasor, when the ordinary laws of social conduct must be made somewhat elastic." "I don't think this is one of them, Mr. Bott." "Is it not? Just listen to me for one moment, Miss Vavasor. Our friend, Mr. Palliser, I am proud to say, relies much upon my humble friendship. But I need not tell you that Lady Glencowrer is very young; we may say, very young indeed." "Mr. Bott, I will not talk to you about Lady Glencora Palliser." This Alice said in a determined voice. She frowned too, and looked savagely at Mr. Bott. But he was a man of courage, and knew how to bear such opposition without flinching. "Miss Vavasor, I speak solely with a view to her domestic happiness!" "I don't think that she wishes to have any such guardian of her happiness." "But if he wishes it, Miss Vavasor! Now I know he has the greatest reliance on your judgement." Hereupon Alice got up with the intention of leaving the room, but she was met at the door by Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "Are you running from your breakfast, Miss Vavasor?" said she. "No, Mrs. Sparkes; I am running from Mr. Bott," said Alice, who was almost beside herself with anger. "Mr. Bott, what is this?" said Mrs. Sparkes. "Ha, ha, ha," laughed Mr. Bott. "I hope I shall be able to keep the peace," said Mrs. Sparkes as Alice turned back into the room. "Ha, ha, ha," again laughed Mr. Bott, who rather liked his position. Alice was very angry with herself for saying only part of the truth to Mrs. Sparkes. She wanted to say something, and did not know what to say; but her confusion was stopped by the entrance of Lady Glencora. "Mrs. Sparkes, good morning," said Lady Glencora. "Good morning, Mr. Bott. Oh, Alice!" "What is the matter?" said Alice, going up to her. "Oh, Alice, such a blow!" But Alice could see that her cousin was not quite in earnest;-that the new trouble was no calamity. "Come here," said Lady Glencora; and they both went to the window. "This letter is from - whom do you think? Lady Midlothian! She's coming here on Monday. I assure you I did not expect this." "I am quite sure of that." "Ah! then we can consult. But first we'll have some breakfast." Then more ladies swarmed into the room; and Mr. Bott had his hands full in attending to their little wants. The morning was nearly gone before Alice and her cousin had any chance of a private talk. Meanwhile Mr. Palliser was told of the visit. "We shall be delighted to see Lady Midlothian," said Mr. Palliser. "But Alice will not be at all delighted, for reasons too long to explain," said Lady Glencora. "I am extremely sorry-" began Mr. Palliser. "It does not signify in the least," said Alice. "It will only be taking me away three days earlier." Upon hearing this Mr. Palliser looked very serious. What quarrel could make it impossible for Alice and Lady Midlothian to be visitors at the same house? "Do you mean to say that you are coward enough to run away from her?" said Lady Glencora. "I'm afraid, Miss Vavasor, that we can hardly ask her not to come," said Mr. Palliser. Alice protested that she would not wish it. "I should tell you, Mr. Palliser, that I have never met Lady Midlothian, though she is my distant cousin. But she has given me advice by letter, and I did not answer her because I thought she had no business to interfere. I shall go away because our meeting would be unpleasant to her." "You could tell her that Miss Vavasor is here," said Mr. Palliser to his wife. "And then she need not come unless she pleased." The matter was so managed at last that Alice found herself unable to leave Matching without making more of Lady Midlothian's coming than it was worth. It would undoubtedly be very disagreeable; but, as Lady Glencora said, Lady Midlothian would not eat her. In truth, she felt ashamed to be so afraid of her relative. On the following Monday, Lady Midlothian arrived. The carriage was sent to meet her at the station. "I shall receive her when she comes," said Lady Glencora, "and of course will tell her that you are here." "Yes, that will be best; but I don't know how to manage our first meeting." "I'll bring her to you in my room if you like." "No; we'll let things take their chance." However, it was decided that Lady Midlothian was to be informed of Alice's presence as soon as she arrived. Alice was in her own room when she heard the carriage-wheels, and knew that her enemy had come. She had striven to feel indifferent, but had not succeeded; and was angry with herself for feeling anxious. Why should she be afraid of Lady Midlothian? And yet she was. At about five o'clock, having rebuked herself for her timidity, she descended into the drawing-room. Lady Glencora had promised that she would be there at that hour. When Alice entered, Lady Midlothian sat in a great chair opposite the fire, with Lady Glencora near her on a stool. One of the Miss Pallisers was reading further away, and there was no one else in the room. The Countess of Midlothian was a very little woman of between sixty and seventy, who must have been very pretty in her youth. She wore a round bonnet and a short cloak, and sat perfectly upright, looking at the fire. Very small she was, but she carried in her grey eyes and sharp-cut features a certain look of importance. Alice at once saw that she was a lady over whom no easy victory could be obtained. "Here is Alice," said Lady Glencora, rising. "Alice, let me introduce you to Lady Midlothian." Alice, as she came forward, was able to assume an easy demeanour, even though her heart was failing her. She put out her hand. "I am glad at last to be able to make your acquaintance, my dear," said Lady Midlothian; "Your aunt, Lady Macleod, is one of my oldest friends, and I have heard her speak of you very often." "And Lady Macleod has often spoken to me of your ladyship," said Alice. "Then it is as well that we should be acquainted with each other," said the Countess. "I am becoming an old woman, and if I do not get to know you soon, I might never do so." Alice could not help thinking that in that case neither might feel much sorrow; but she did not say so. She was wondering whether to speak of Lady Midlothian's letter to her. She was sure that Lady Midlothian would mention the letter; and it would be better now, in Glencora's presence. "You are very kind," she said. "Blood is thicker than water, my dear," said Lady Midlothian, "and no earthly ties are as strong as those of family. Your mother was my dearest friend." "I never knew my mother," said Alice - feeling, however, that her resistance to the old woman was beginning to give way. "No, my dear, you never did; but Lady Macleod is your nearest relative on your mother's side, and she has done her duty by you well." "Indeed she has, Lady Midlothian." "She has, and others, therefore, have been less called upon to interfere. I only say this, my dear, in my own vindication - feeling, perhaps, that my conduct needs some excuse." "I'm sure Alice does not think that," said Lady Glencora. "But I have wished to make up for lost opportunities," said Lady Midlothian. Alice knew that she was about to refer to her letter, and trembled. "I am very anxious now to be Alice Vavasor's friend, if she will allow me to become so." "I would be glad - if-" "If what, my dear?" said the old lady. Although she meant to be gracious, there was something repellent in her manner. "I hardly know how to say what I mean," said Alice, her spirit rising higher. "I am sure that you and I, Lady Midlothian, differ very much about a certain matter, in which I must be guided by my own opinion-" "You mean about Mr. Grey?" "Yes." "I think so much about that matter, and your happiness, that when I heard that you were here I was determined to visit Matching so that I might have an opportunity of speaking to you." "Then you knew that Alice was here?" said Lady Glencora. "Of course I did. I suppose you have heard all the history, Glencora?" Lady Glencora was forced to acknowledge that she had heard the "history" of poor Alice's treatment of Mr. Grey. "And what do you think of it?" Both Alice and Lady Glencora looked towards the end of the room where Miss Palliser was reading, to indicate that the lady knew nothing of it. "Perhaps another time and place may be better," said Lady Midlothian; "but I must go the day after tomorrow; indeed, I thought of going tomorrow. This is merely a brief visit. When shall I get an opportunity of speaking to Alice where we need not be interrupted?" Lady Glencora suggested her room upstairs, and offered the use of it then, or in the evening. But the idea of being lectured was terrible to Alice, and she was determined not to endure it. "Lady Midlothian, it would really be of no use. I did get your letter, you know." "And as you have not answered it, I have come all this way to see you." "I shall be so sorry to give offence, but it is a subject which I cannot bring myself to discuss." "But you don't mean to say that you won't see me?" "I will not talk upon that matter," said Alice. "I will not do it even with Lady Macleod." "No," said Lady Midlothian, and her sharp grey eyes now began to kindle with anger; "and therefore it is so very necessary that other friends should interfere." "But I will endure no interference," said Alice, "either from persons who are friends or who are not friends." And as she spoke she rose from her chair. "You must forgive me, Lady Midlothian, if I say that I can have no conversation with you on this matter." Then she walked out of the room, leaving the Countess and Lady Glencora together. "The most self-willed young woman I ever met in my life," said Lady Midlothian, as soon as Alice was gone. "I knew very well how it would be," said Lady Glencora. "But it is quite frightful, my dear. She has been engaged, with the consent of all her friends, to this young man." "I know all about it. I don't quite understand her, but I suppose she fears they would not be happy together." "Understand her! I should think nobody can understand her. A young woman to become engaged to a gentleman in that way, and then turn round and simply say that she has changed her mind! She hasn't given the slightest reason." Lady Midlothian almost startled Lady Glencora by her eagerness. Lady Midlothian had been one of those who, not quite two years before, had assisted in obtaining the submission of Lady Glencora herself. "I shall not give up," she continued. "I have the greatest objection to her father, who contrived to connect himself with our family in a most shameful manner, without the slightest encouragement. I don't think I have spoken to him since, but I shall see him now and tell him my opinion." Alice held her ground, and avoided all further conversation with Lady Midlothian during her stay. "Good-bye to you," Lady Midlothian said to her as she went. "Even yet I hope that things may go right, and if so you will find that I can forget and forgive." "If perseverance merits success," said Lady Glencora to Alice, "she ought to succeed." "But she won't succeed," said Alice.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 26: Lady Midlothian

At the end of ten days Alice found herself quite comfortable at Matching Priory. She had now promised to remain there till the second week of December, at which time she was to go to Vavasor Hall,--there to meet her father and Kate. The Pallisers were to pass their Christmas with the Duke of Omnium in Barsetshire. "We always are to do that," said Glencora. "It is the state occasion at Gatherum Castle, but it only lasts for one week. Then we go somewhere else. Oh dear!" "Why do you say 'oh dear'?" "Because--; I don't think I mean to tell you." "Then I'm sure I won't ask." "That's so like you, Alice. But I can be as firm as you, and I'm sure I won't tell you unless you do ask." But Alice did not ask, and it was not long before Lady Glencora's firmness gave way. But, as I have said, Alice had become quite comfortable at Matching Priory. Perhaps she was already growing upwards towards the light. At any rate she could listen with pleasure to the few words the Duke would say to her. She could even chat a little to the Duchess,--so that her Grace had observed to Lady Glencora that "her cousin was a very nice person,--a very nice person indeed. What a pity it was that she had been so ill-treated by that gentleman in Oxfordshire!" Lady Glencora had to explain that the gentleman lived in Cambridgeshire, and that he, at any rate, had not treated anybody ill. "Do you mean that she--jilted him?" said the Duchess, almost whistling, and opening her eyes very wide. "Dear me, I'm sorry for that. I shouldn't have thought it." And when she next spoke to Alice she assumed rather a severe tone of emphasis;--but this was soon abandoned when Alice listened to her with complacency. Alice also had learned to ride,--or rather had resumed her riding, which for years had been abandoned. Jeffrey Palliser had been her squire, and she had become intimate with him so as to learn to quarrel with him and to like him,--to such an extent that Lady Glencora had laughingly told her that she was going to do more. "I rather think not," said Alice. "But what has thinking to do with it? Who ever thinks about it?" "I don't just at present,--at any rate." "Upon my word it would be very nice;--and then perhaps some day you'd be the Duchess." "Glencora, don't talk such nonsense." "Those are the speculations which people make. Only I should spite you by killing myself, so that he might marry again." "How can you say such horrid things?" "I think I shall,--some day. What right have I to stand in his way? He spoke to me the other day about Jeffrey's altered position, and I knew what he meant;--or rather what he didn't mean to say, but what he thought. But I shan't kill myself." "I should think not." "I only know one other way," said Lady Glencora. "You are thinking of things which should never be in your thoughts," said Alice vehemently. "Have you no trust in God's providence? Cannot you accept what has been done for you?" Mr. Bott had gone away, much to Lady Glencora's delight, but had unfortunately come back again. On his return Alice heard more of the feud between the Duchess and Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "I did not tell you," said Lady Glencora to her friend;--"I did not tell you before he went that I was right about his tale-bearing." "And did he bear tales?" "Yes; I did get the scolding, and I know very well that it came through him, though Mr. Palliser did not say so. But he told me that the Duchess had felt herself hurt by that other woman's way of talking." "But it was not your fault." "No; that's what I said. It was he who desired me to ask Mrs. Conway Sparkes to come here. I didn't want her. She goes everywhere, and it is thought a catch to get her; but if she had been drowned in the Red Sea I shouldn't have minded. When I told him that, he said it was nonsense,--which of course it was; and then he said I ought to make her hold her tongue. Of course I said I couldn't. Mrs. Conway Sparkes wouldn't care for me. If she quizzed me, myself, I told him that I could take care of myself, though she were ten times Mrs. Conway Sparkes, and had written finer poetry than Tennyson." "It is fine;--some of it," said Alice. "Oh, I dare say! I know a great deal of it by heart, only I wouldn't give her the pleasure of supposing that I had ever thought so much about her poetry. And then I told him that I couldn't take care of the Duchess,--and he told me that I was a child." "He only meant that in love." "I am a child; I know that. Why didn't he marry some strong-minded, ferocious woman that could keep his house in order, and frown Mrs. Sparkes out of her impudence? It wasn't my fault." "You didn't tell him that." "But I did. Then he kissed me, and said it was all right, and told me that I should grow older. 'And Mrs. Sparkes will grow more impudent,' I said, 'and the Duchess more silly.' And after that I went away. Now this horrid Mr. Bott has come back again, and only that it would be mean in me to condescend so far, I would punish him. He grins and smiles at me, and rubs his big hands more than ever, because he feels that he has behaved badly. Is it not horrid to have to live in the house with such people?" "I don't think you need mind him much." "Yes; but I am the mistress here, and am told that I am to entertain the people. Fancy entertaining the Duchess of St. Bungay and Mr. Bott!" Alice had now become so intimate with Lady Glencora that she did not scruple to read her wise lectures,--telling her that she allowed herself to think too much of little things,--and too much also of some big things. "As regards Mr. Bott," said Alice, "I think you should bear it as though there were no such person." "But that would be pretence,--especially to you." "No; it would not be pretence; it would be the reticence which all women should practise,--and you, in your position, more almost than any other woman." Then Lady Glencora pouted, told Alice that it was a pity she had not married Mr. Palliser, and left her. That evening,--the evening of Mr. Bott's return to Matching, that gentleman found a place near to Alice in the drawing-room. He had often come up to her, rubbing his hands together, and saying little words, as though there was some reason from their positions that they two should be friends. Alice had perceived this, and had endeavoured with all her force to shake him off; but he was a man, who if he understood a hint, never took it. A cold shoulder was nothing to him, if he wanted to gain the person who showed it him. His code of perseverance taught him that it was a virtue to overcome cold shoulders. The man or woman who received his first overtures with grace would probably be one on whom it would be better that he should look down and waste no further time; whereas he or she who could afford to treat him with disdain would no doubt be worth gaining. Such men as Mr. Bott are ever gracious to cold shoulders. The colder the shoulders, the more gracious are the Mr. Botts. "What a delightful person is our dear friend, Lady Glencora!" said Mr. Bott, having caught Alice in a position from which she could not readily escape. Alice had half a mind to differ, or to make any remark that might rid her from Mr. Bott. But she did not dare to say a word that might seem to have been said playfully. "Yes, indeed," she replied. "How very cold it is to-night!" She was angry with herself for her own stupidity as soon as the phrase was out of her mouth, and then she almost laughed as she thought of the Duchess and the hot-water pipes at Longroyston. "Yes, it is cold. You and her ladyship are great friends, I believe, Miss Vavasor." "She is my cousin," said Alice. "Ah! yes; that is so pleasant. I have reason to know that Mr. Palliser is very much gratified that you should be so much with her." This was unbearable. Alice could not quite assume sufficient courage to get up from her chair and walk away from him, and yet she felt that she must escape further conversation. "I don't know that I am very much with her, and if I were I can't think it would make any difference to Mr. Palliser." But Mr. Bott was not a man to be put down when he had a purpose in hand. "I can assure you that those are his sentiments. Of course we all know that dear Lady Glencora is young. She is very young." "Mr. Bott, I really would rather not talk about my cousin." "But, dear Miss Vavasor;--when we both have her welfare in view--?" "I haven't her welfare in view, Mr. Bott; not in the least. There is no reason why I should. You must excuse me if I say I cannot talk about her welfare with a perfect stranger." Then she did get up, and went away from the Member of Parliament, leaving him rather astonished at her audacity. But he was a constant man, and his inner resolve was simply to the effect that he would try it again. I wonder whether Jeffrey Palliser did think much of the difference between his present position and that which would have been his had Lady Glencora been the happy possessor of a cradle up-stairs with a boy in it. I suppose he must have done so. It is hardly possible that any man should not be alive to the importance of such a chance. His own present position was one of the most unfortunate which can fall to the lot of a man. His father, the Duke's youngest brother, had left him about six hundred a year, and had left him also a taste for living with people of six thousand. The propriety of earning his bread had never been put before him. His father had been in Parliament, and had been the most favoured son of the old Duke, who for some years before his death had never spoken to him who now reigned over the house of the Pallisers. Jeffrey's father had been brought up at Matching Priory as scions of ducal houses are brought up, and on the old man's death had been possessed of means sufficient to go on in the same path, though with difficulty. His brother had done something for him, and at various times he had held some place near the throne. But on his death, when the property left behind him was divided between his son and three daughters, Jeffrey Palliser became possessed of the income above stated. Of course he could live on it,--and as during the winter months of the year a home was found for him free of cost, he could keep hunters, and live as rich men live. But he was a poor, embarrassed man, without prospects,--until this fine ducal prospect became opened to him by the want of that cradle at Matching Priory. But the prospect was no doubt very distant. Lady Glencora might yet have as many sons as Hecuba. Or she might die, and some other more fortunate lady might become the mother of his cousin's heir. Or the Duke might marry and have a son. And, moreover, his cousin was only one year older than himself, and the great prize, if it came his way, might not come for forty years as yet. Nevertheless his hand might now be acceptable in quarters where it would certainly be rejected had Lady Glencora possessed that cradle up-stairs. We cannot but suppose that he must have made some calculations of this nature. "It is a pity you should do nothing all your life," his cousin Plantagenet said to him one morning just at this time. Jeffrey had sought the interview in his cousin's room, and I fear had done so with some slight request for ready money. "What am I to do?" said Jeffrey. "At any rate you might marry." "Oh, yes;--I could marry. There's no man so poor but what he can do that. The question would be how I might like the subsequent starvation." "I don't see that you need starve. Though your own fortune is small, it is something,--and many girls have fortunes of their own." Jeffrey thought of Lady Glencora, but he made no allusion to her in speech. "I don't think I'm very good at that kind of thing," he said. "When the father and mother came to ask of my house and my home I should break down. I don't say it as praising myself;--indeed, quite the reverse; but I fear I have not a mercenary tendency." "That's nonsense." "Oh, yes; quite so. I admit that." "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bread. The man who ploughs that he may live does so because he, luckily, has a mercenary tendency." "Just so. But you see I am less lucky than the ploughman." "There is no vulgar error so vulgar,--that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray." This the future Chancellor of the Exchequer said with much of that air and tone of wisdom which a Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to possess. "But I haven't got any such tendencies," said Jeffrey. "Would you like to occupy a farm in Scotland?" said Plantagenet Palliser. "And pay rent?" "You would have to pay rent of course." "Thank you, no. It would be dishonest, as I know I should never pay it." "You are too old, I fear, for the public service." "You mean a desk in the Treasury,--with a hundred a year. Yes; I think I am too old." "But have you no plan of your own?" "Not much of one. Sometimes I have thought I would go to New Zealand." "You would have to be a farmer there." "No;--I shouldn't do that. I should get up an opposition to the Government and that sort of thing, and then they would buy me off and give me a place." "That does very well here, Jeffrey, if a man can get into Parliament and has capital enough to wait; but I don't think it would do out there. Would you like to go into Parliament?" "What; here? Of course I should. Only I should be sure to get terribly into debt. I don't owe very much, now,--not to speak of,--except what I owe you." "You owe nothing to me," said Plantagenet, with some little touch of magniloquence in his tone. "No; don't speak of it. I have no brother, and between you and me it means nothing. You see, Jeffrey, it may be that I shall have to look to you as my--my--my heir, in short." Hereupon Jeffrey muttered something as to the small probability of such necessity, and as to the great remoteness of any result even if it were so. "That's all true," said the elder heir of the Pallisers, "but still--. In short, I wish you would do something. Do you think about it; and then some day speak to me again." Jeffrey, as he left his cousin with a cheque for 500 in his waist-coat pocket, thought that the interview which had at one time taken important dimensions, had not been concluded altogether satisfactorily. A seat in Parliament! Yes, indeed! If his cousin would so far use his political, monetary, or ducal interest as to do that for him;--as to give him something of the status properly belonging to the younger son of the House, then indeed life would have some charms for him! But as for the farm in Scotland, or a desk at an office in London,--his own New Zealand plan would be better than those. And then as he went along of course he bethought himself that it might be his lot yet to die, and at least to be buried, in the purple, as a Duke of Omnium. If so, certainly it would be his duty to prepare another heir, and leave a duke behind him,--if it were possible. "Are you going to ride with us after lunch?" said Lady Glencora to him as he strolled into the drawing-room. "No," said Jeffrey; "I'm going to study." "To do what?" said Lady Glencora. "To study;--or rather I shall spend to-day in sitting down and considering what I will study. My cousin has just been telling me that I ought to do something." "So you ought," said Iphigenia energetically from her writing-desk. "But he didn't seem to have any clear opinion what it ought to be. You see there can't be two Chancellors of the Exchequer at the same time. Mrs. Sparkes, what ought a young man like me to set about doing?" "Go into Parliament, I should say," said Mrs. Sparkes. "Ah, yes; exactly. He had some notion of that kind, too, but he didn't name any particular place. I think I'll try the City of London. They've four there, and of course the chance of getting in would thereby be doubled." "I thought that commercial men were generally preferred in the City," said the Duchess, taking a strong and good-natured interest in the matter. "Mr. Palliser means to make a fortune in trade as a preliminary," said Mrs. Sparkes. "I don't think he meant anything of the kind," said the Duchess. "At any rate I have got to do something, so I can't go and ride," said Jeffrey. "And you ought to do something," said Iphigenia from her desk. Twice during this little conversation Lady Glencora had looked up, catching Alice's eye, and Alice had well known what she had meant. "You see," the glance had said, "Plantagenet is beginning to take an interest in his cousin, and you know why. The man who is to be the father of the future dukes must not be allowed to fritter away his time in obscurity. Had I that cradle up-stairs Jeffrey might be as idle as he pleased." Alice understood it well. Of course Jeffrey did join the riding party. "What is a man like me to do who wants to do something?" he said to Alice. Alice was quite aware that Lady Glencora had contrived some little scheme that Mr. Palliser should be riding next to her. She liked Mr. Palliser, and therefore had no objection; but she declared to herself that her cousin was a goose for her pains. "Mrs. Sparkes says you ought to go into Parliament." "Yes;--and the dear Duchess would perhaps suggest a house in Belgrave Square. I want to hear your advice now." "I can only say ditto to Miss Palliser." "What! Iphy? About procrastination? But you see the more of my time he steals the better it is for me." "That's the evil you have got to cure." "My cousin Plantagenet suggested--marriage." "A very good thing too, I'm sure," said Alice; "only it depends something on the sort of wife you get." "You mean, of course, how much money she has." "Not altogether." "Looking at it from my cousin's point of view, I suppose that it is the only important point. Who are there coming up this year,--in the way of heiresses?" "Upon my word I don't know. In the first place, how much money makes an heiress?" "For such a fellow as me, I suppose ten thousand pounds ought to do." "That's not much," said Alice, who had exactly that amount of her own. "No--; perhaps that's too moderate. But the lower one went in the money speculation, the greater would be the number to choose from, and the better the chance of getting something decent in the woman herself. I have something of my own,--not much you know; so with the lady's ten thousand pounds we might be able to live,--in some second-rate French town perhaps." "But I don't see what you would gain by that." "My people here would have got rid of me. That seems to be the great thing. If you hear of any girl with about that sum, moderately good-looking, not too young so that she might know something of the world, decently born, and able to read and write, perhaps you will bear me in mind." "Yes, I will," said Alice, who was quite aware that he had made an accurate picture of her own position. "When I meet such a one, I will send for you at once." "You know no such person now?" "Well, no; not just at present." "I declare I don't think he could do anything better," her cousin said to her that night. Lady Glencora was now in the habit of having Alice with her in what she called her dressing-room every evening, and then they would sit till the small hours came upon them. Mr. Palliser always burnt the midnight oil and came to bed with the owls. They would often talk of him and his prospects till Alice had perhaps inspired his wife with more of interest in him and them than she had before felt. And Alice had managed generally to drive her friend away from those topics which were so dangerous,--those allusions to her childlessness, and those hints that Burgo Fitzgerald was still in her thoughts. And sometimes, of course, they had spoken of Alice's own prospects, till she got into a way of telling her cousin freely all that she felt. On such occasions Lady Glencora would always tell her that she had been right,--if she did not love the man. "Though your finger were put out for the ring," said Lady Glencora on one such occasion, "you should go back, if you did not love him." "But I did love him," said Alice. "Then I don't understand it," said Lady Glencora; and, in truth, close as was their intimacy, they did not perfectly understand each other. But on this occasion they were speaking of Jeffrey Palliser. "I declare I don't think he could do any better," said Lady Glencora. "If you talk such nonsense, I will not stay," said Alice. "But why should it be nonsense? You would be very comfortable with your joint incomes. He is one of the best fellows in the world. It is clear that he likes you; and then we should be so near to each other. I am sure Mr. Palliser would do something for him if he married,--and especially if I asked him." "I only know of two things against it." "And what are they?" "That he would not take me for his wife, and that I would not take him for my husband." "Why not? What do you dislike in him?" "I don't dislike him at all. I like him very much indeed. But one can't marry all the people one likes." "But what reason is there why you shouldn't marry him?" "This chiefly," said Alice, after a pause; "that I have just separated myself from a man whom I certainly did love truly, and that I cannot transfer my affections quite so quickly as that." As soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew that they should not have been spoken. It was exactly what Glencora had done. She had loved a man and had separated herself from him and had married another all within a month or two. Lady Glencora first became red as fire over her whole face and shoulders, and Alice afterwards did the same as she looked up, as though searching in her cousin's eyes for pardon. "It is an unmaidenly thing to do, certainly," said Lady Glencora very slowly, and in her lowest voice. "Nay, it is unwomanly; but one may be driven. One may be so driven that all gentleness of womanhood is driven out of one." "Oh, Glencora!" "I did not propose that you should do it as a sudden thing." "Glencora!" "I did do it suddenly. I know it. I did it like a beast that is driven as its owner chooses. I know it. I was a beast. Oh, Alice, if you know how I hate myself!" "But I love you with all my heart," said Alice. "Glencora, I have learned to love you so dearly!" "Then you are the only being that does. He can't love me. How is it possible? You,--and perhaps another." "There are many who love you. He loves you. Mr. Palliser loves you." "It is impossible. I have never said a word to him that could make him love me. I have never done a thing for him that can make him love me. The mother of his child he might have loved, because of that. Why should he love me? We were told to marry each other and did it. When could he have learned to love me? But, Alice, he requires no loving, either to take it or to give it. I wish it were so with me." Alice said what she could to comfort her, but her words were but of little avail as regarded those marriage sorrows. "Forgive you!" at last Glencora said. "What have I to forgive? You don't suppose I do not know it all, and think of it all without the chance of some stray word like that! Forgive you! I am so grateful that you love me! Some one's love I must have found,--or I could not have remained here."

After ten days Alice felt quite comfortable at Matching Priory. She had promised to remain there till the second week of December, when she was to go to Vavasor Hall to meet her father and Kate. The Pallisers were to pass their Christmas with the Duke of Omnium in Barsetshire. "It is the state occasion at Gatherum Castle," said Glencora, "but it only lasts for one week. Then we go somewhere else. Oh dear!" "Why 'oh dear'?" "Because - I don't think I mean to tell you." "Then I won't ask." "That's so like you, Alice. But I won't tell you unless you do ask." Alice did not ask; but it was not long before Lady Glencora gave way. Perhaps Alice was already growing upwards towards the light. At any rate she could listen with pleasure to the few words the Duke would say to her. She could even chat a little to the Duchess - so that her Grace had observed to Lady Glencora that "her cousin was a very nice person indeed. What a pity that she had been so ill-treated by that gentleman in Oxfordshire!" Lady Glencora had to explain that the gentleman lived in Cambridgeshire, and that he had not treated anybody ill. "Do you mean that she jilted him?" said the Duchess, almost whistling, and opening her eyes very wide. "Dear me, I'm sorry for that. I shouldn't have thought it." And when she next spoke to Alice she assumed rather a severe tone - until Alice listened to her pleasantly. Alice had also begun riding, with Jeffrey Palliser as her squire. She had become friendly enough with him to quarrel, and to like him - so much, that Lady Glencora laughingly told her that she was going to do more. "I rather think not," said Alice. "It would be very nice; and then perhaps some day you'd be the Duchess." "Glencora, don't talk such nonsense." "Those are the speculations which people make. Only I should spite you by killing myself, so that he might marry again." "How can you say such horrid things?" "I think I shall, some day. What right have I to stand in his way? He spoke to me the other day about Jeffrey's altered position, and I knew what he meant; or rather what he thought. But I shan't kill myself." "I should think not." "I only know one other way," said Lady Glencora. "You are thinking of things which should never be in your thoughts," said Alice vehemently. "Have you no trust in God's providence? Cannot you accept what has been done for you?" Mr. Bott had gone away, much to Lady Glencora's delight, but had unfortunately come back again. On his return Alice heard more of the feud between the Duchess and Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "I was right about his tale-telling," said Lady Glencora to her friend. "Did he tell tales?" "Yes; I got a scolding, and I know it came through him, though Mr. Palliser did not say so. But he told me that the Duchess had felt herself hurt by that other woman's way of talking." "But it was not your fault." "No; that's what I said. It was he who wanted me to ask Mrs. Conway Sparkes here. I didn't want her, although she goes everywhere. When I told him that, he said it was nonsense, and I ought to make her hold her tongue. Of course I said I couldn't. Mrs. Conway Sparkes wouldn't care about me. And then I told him that I couldn't take care of the Duchess - and he told me that I was a child." "He only meant that in love." "I am a child; I know that. Why didn't he marry some strong-minded, ferocious woman that could keep his house in order, and frown Mrs. Sparkes out of her impudence? It wasn't my fault." "You didn't tell him that." "But I did. Then he kissed me, and said it was all right, and that I should grow older. 'And Mrs. Sparkes will grow more impudent,' I said, 'and the Duchess more silly.' And then I went away. Now this horrid Mr. Bott has come back again, and I wish I could punish him. He grins and smiles at me, and rubs his big hands. Is it not horrid to have to live in the house with such people?" "I don't think you need mind him much." "Yes; but I am the mistress here, and am told to entertain the people. Fancy entertaining the Duchess of St. Bungay and Mr. Bott!" "As regards Mr. Bott," said Alice, "I think you should bear it as though there were no such person." "But that would be pretence." "No; it would be the reticence which all women should practise - and you, in your position, almost more than any other woman." Then Lady Glencora pouted, told Alice that it was a pity she had not married Mr. Palliser, and left her. That evening, Mr. Bott found a place near to Alice in the drawing-room. He had often come up to her, rubbing his hands together, and speaking as though there was some reason that they should be friends. Alice had perceived this, and had tried to shake him off; but if he understood a hint, he never took it. A cold shoulder was nothing to him. It simply made him persevere. "What a delightful person is our dear friend, Lady Glencora!" said Mr. Bott, having caught Alice in a position from which she could not easily escape. Alice had half a mind to argue to get rid of him. But she did not dare. "Yes, indeed," she replied. "How very cold it is tonight!" "Yes, it is cold. You and her ladyship are great friends, I believe, Miss Vavasor." "She is my cousin," said Alice. "Ah! yes; that is so pleasant. I have reason to know that Mr. Palliser is very much gratified that you should be so much with her." This was unbearable. Alice could not quite assume enough courage to get up from her chair and walk away from him, and yet she felt that she must escape further conversation. "I don't know that I am very much with her, and if I were I can't think it would make any difference to Mr. Palliser." But Mr. Bott was not a man to be put down when he had a purpose in hand. "I can assure you that those are his sentiments. Of course we all know that dear Lady Glencora is very young." "Mr. Bott, I really would rather not talk about my cousin." "But, dear Miss Vavasor; when we both have her welfare in view?" "I haven't her welfare in view, Mr. Bott. There is no reason why I should. You must excuse me if I say I cannot talk about her welfare with a perfect stranger." Then she did get up, and walked away, leaving him rather astonished. But it simply made him resolve that he would try again. I wonder whether Jeffrey Palliser did think much of the change in his position if Lady Glencora had a son. He must have been aware of its importance to him. His present position was unfortunate. His father, the Duke's youngest brother, had left him about six hundred a year, and with expensive tastes. The propriety of earning his bread had never been put before him. Of course he could live on six hundred a year; but he was a poor man, without prospects - until this fine ducal prospect became opened to him by the lack of an occupied cradle at Matching Priory. But the prospect was very distant. Lady Glencora might yet have many sons. Or she might die, and some other more fortunate lady might bear sons in her place. Or the Duke might yet marry and have a son. Moreover, Jeffrey's cousin was only one year older than himself, and the great prize might not come for forty years. Nevertheless his hand might now be acceptable, where it would certainly be rejected if Lady Glencora had filled that cradle. He must have made some calculations of this nature. "It is a pity you should do nothing all your life," his cousin Plantagenet said to him one morning at this time. Jeffrey had sought the interview, I fear with a request for ready money. "What am I to do?" said Jeffrey. "At any rate you might marry." "Oh, yes; I could marry. The question would be how I might like the subsequent starvation." "I don't see that you need starve. Though your own fortune is small, it is something, and many girls have fortunes of their own." "I don't think I'm very good at that kind of thing," said Jeffrey. "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency." "That's nonsense. Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not eat. It is a common error to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray." This the future Chancellor of the Exchequer said with an appropriate air of wisdom. "But I haven't got any such tendencies," said Jeffrey. "You are too old, I fear, for the civil service." "You mean a desk in the Treasury, with a hundred a year. Yes; I think I am too old." "But have you no plan of your own?" "Not much of one. Sometimes I have thought I would go to New Zealand." "Would you like to go into Parliament?" "Of course I should. Only I should be sure to get terribly into debt. I don't owe very much, now - except what I owe you." "You owe nothing to me," said Plantagenet. "No; don't speak of it. I have no brother, and between you and me it means nothing. You see, Jeffrey, it may be that I shall have to look to you as my - my heir, in short." Jeffrey muttered something as to the small probability of such necessity. "That's true," said the elder Palliser, "but still... In short, I wish you would do something. Think about it, and we will speak again." Jeffrey left with a cheque for 500 in his pocket, but not altogether satisfied. A seat in Parliament! Yes, indeed! If his cousin would do that for him - give him something of the status properly belonging to the younger son of the House, then indeed life would have some charms for him! Then he began to think that if he were destined to inherit, it might be his duty to prepare another heir, and leave a duke behind him. "Are you going to ride with us after lunch?" said Lady Glencora to him. "No," said Jeffrey; "I'm going to study. Or rather, I shall sit down and consider what I should study. My cousin has just been telling me that I ought to do something." "So you ought," said Iphigenia energetically from her writing-desk. "But he didn't have any clear idea what. Mrs. Sparkes, what ought a young man like me to set about doing?" "Go into Parliament, I should say," said Mrs. Sparkes. "Ah, yes; exactly. He had some notion of that kind, too. At any rate I have got to do something, so I can't go and ride," said Jeffrey. During this little conversation Lady Glencora had caught Alice's eye, and Alice had known what she had meant. "You see," the glance had said, "Plantagenet is beginning to take an interest in his cousin, and you know why. The man who is to be a duke must not be allowed to fritter away his time in obscurity. If I had a baby, Jeffrey might be as idle as he pleased." Alice understood it well. Of course Jeffrey did join the riding party. "What is a man like me to do?" he said to Alice. Lady Glencora had contrived that he should be riding next to her. She liked Mr. Palliser, and had no objection; but she thought her cousin was a goose. "Mrs. Sparkes says you ought to go into Parliament." "My cousin Plantagenet suggested - marriage." "A very good thing too, I'm sure," said Alice; "only it depends on the sort of wife you get." "You mean how much money she has." "Not altogether." "From my cousin's point of view, that it is the only important point. Who is coming up this year, in the way of heiresses?" "I don't know. How much money makes an heiress?" "For such a fellow as me, I suppose ten thousand pounds ought to do." "That's not much," said Alice, who had exactly that amount of her own. "No. But the more moderate my demands, the greater would be the number to choose from, and the better the chance of getting something decent in the woman herself. I have something of my own, so with the lady's ten thousand pounds we might be able to live - in some second-rate French town perhaps. If you hear of any girl with about that sum, moderately good-looking, not too young and ignorant, decently born, and able to read and write, perhaps you will bear me in mind." "Yes, I will," said Alice, well aware that he had described her own position. "When I meet such a one, I will send for you at once." "You know no such person now?" "Not just at present." "I don't think he could do any better," her cousin said to her that night. Lady Glencora was now in the habit of having Alice with her in her dressing-room every evening, when they would sit till the small hours. They would often talk of Mr. Palliser and his prospects, and Alice inspired his wife with more interest in him than she had felt before. And Alice managed generally to drive her friend away from the dangerous topics of her childlessness, and Burgo Fitzgerald. Sometimes, of course, they spoke of Alice's own prospects, till she was telling her cousin freely all that she felt. On this occasion they were speaking of Jeffrey Palliser. "I don't think he could do any better," said Lady Glencora. "If you talk such nonsense, I will not stay," said Alice. "But why should it be nonsense? You would be very comfortable with your joint incomes. He is one of the best fellows in the world. It is clear that he likes you; and then we should be near each other. I am sure Mr. Palliser would do something for him if he married." "I only know two things against it." "And what are they?" "That he would not take me for his wife, and that I would not take him for my husband." "Do you dislike him?" "Not at all. I like him very much. But one can't marry all the people one likes." "But why shouldn't you marry him?" "Because," said Alice, after a pause, "I have just separated myself from a man whom I certainly did love truly, and I cannot transfer my affections quite so quickly as that." As soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew that they should not have been spoken. It was exactly what Glencora had done. She had loved a man and had separated from him and had married another all within a month or two. Lady Glencora blushed as red as fire. Alice did the same as she looked up, searching in her cousin's eyes for pardon. "It is an unmaidenly thing to do, certainly," said Lady Glencora in her lowest voice. "Oh, Glencora!" "I did not propose that you should do it suddenly. I did it suddenly, I know. I did it like a beast that is driven as its owner chooses. Oh, Alice, if you knew how I hate myself!" "But I love you with all my heart," said Alice. "Glencora, I have learned to love you so dearly!" "Then you are the only being that does. He can't love me. How is it possible? You - and perhaps another." "There are many who love you. Mr. Palliser loves you." "It is impossible. I have never said a word to him, or done anything for him, that could make him love me. The mother of his child he might have loved. Why should he love me? We were told to marry each other and did it. When could he have learned to love me? But, Alice, he requires no loving, either to take or to give. I wish it were the same with me." Alice said what she could to comfort her, but her words were of little avail. At last Glencora said, "I am so grateful that you love me! Someone's love I must have found - or I could not have remained here."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 25: In Which Much of the History of the Pallisers Is Told

Alice insisted on being left up in the churchyard, urging that she wanted to "think about it all," but, in truth, fearing that she might not be able to carry herself well, if she were to walk down with her lover to the hotel. To this he made no objection, and, on reaching the inn, met Mr. Palliser in the hall. Mr. Palliser was already inspecting the arrangement of certain large trunks which had been brought down-stairs, and was preparing for their departure. He was going about the house, with a nervous solicitude to do something, and was flattering himself that he was of use. As he could not be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as, by the nature of his disposition, some employment was necessary to him, he was looking to the cording of the boxes. "Good morning! good morning!" he said to Grey, hardly looking at him, as though time were too precious with him to allow of his turning his eyes upon his friend. "I am going up to the station to see after a carriage for to-morrow. Perhaps you'll come with me." To this proposition Mr. Grey assented. "Sometimes, you know," continued Mr. Palliser, "the springs of the carriages are so very rough." Then, in a very few words, Mr. Grey told him what had been his own morning's work. He hated secrets and secrecy, and as the Pallisers knew well what had brought him upon their track, it was, he thought, well that they should know that he had been successful. Mr. Palliser congratulated him very cordially, and then, running up-stairs for his gloves or his stick, or, more probably, that he might give his wife one other caution as to her care of herself, he told her also that Alice had yielded at last. "Of course she has," said Lady Glencora. "I really didn't think she would," said he. "That's because you don't understand things of that sort," said his wife. Then the caution was repeated, the mother of the future duke was kissed, and Mr. Palliser went off on his mission about the carriage, its cushions, and its springs. In the course of their walk Mr. Palliser suggested that, as things were settled so pleasantly, Mr. Grey might as well return with them to England, and to this suggestion Mr. Grey assented. Alice remained alone for nearly an hour, looking out upon the rough sides and gloomy top of Mount Pilate. No one disturbed her in the churchyard,--no steps were heard along the tombstones,--no voice sounded through the cloisters. She was left in perfect solitude to think of the past, and form her plans of the future. Was she happy, now that the manner of her life to come was thus settled for her; that all further question as to the disposal of herself was taken out of her hands, and that her marriage with a man she loved was so firmly arranged that no further folly of her own could disarrange it? She was happy, though she was slow to confess her happiness to herself. She was happy, and she was resolute in this,--that she would now do all she could to make him happy also. And there must now, she acknowledged, be an end to her pride,--to that pride which had hitherto taught her to think that she could more wisely follow her own guidance than that of any other who might claim to guide her. She knew now that she must follow his guidance. She had found her master, as we sometimes say, and laughed to herself with a little inward laughter as she confessed that it was so. She was from henceforth altogether in his hands. If he chose to tell her that they were to be married at Michaelmas, or at Christmas, or on Lady Day, they would, of course, be married accordingly. She had taken her fling at having her own will, and she and all her friends had seen what had come of it. She had assumed the command of the ship, and had thrown it upon the rocks, and she felt that she never ought to take the captain's place again. It was well for her that he who was to be captain was one whom she respected as thoroughly as she loved him. She would write to her father at once,--to her father and Lady Macleod,--and would confess everything. She felt that she owed it to them that they should be told by herself that they had been right and that she had been wrong. Hitherto she had not mentioned to either of them the fact that Mr. Grey was with them in Switzerland. And, then, what must she do as to Lady Midlothian? As to Lady Midlothian, she would do nothing. Lady Midlothian, of course, would triumph;--would jump upon her, as Lady Glencora had once expressed it, with very triumphant heels,--would try to patronize her, or, which would be almost worse, would make a parade of her forgiveness. But she would have nothing to do with Lady Midlothian, unless, indeed, Mr. Grey should order it. Then she laughed at herself again with that inward laughter, and, rising from her seat, proceeded to walk down the hill to the hotel. "Vanquished at last!" said Lady Glencora, as Alice entered the room. "Yes, vanquished; if you like to call it so," said Alice. "It is not what I call it, but what you feel it," said the other. "Do you think that I don't know you well enough to be sure that you regard yourself now as an unfortunate prisoner,--as a captive taken in war, to be led away in triumph, without any hope of a ransom? I know that it is quite a misery to you that you should be made a happy woman of at last. I understand it all, my dear, and my heart bleeds for you." "Of course; I knew that was the way you would treat me." "In what way would you have me treat you? If I were to hug you with joy, and tell you how good he is, and how fortunate you are,--if I were to praise him, and bid you triumph in your success, as might be expected on such an occasion,--you would put on a long face at once, and tell me that though the thing is to be, it would be much better that the thing shouldn't be. Don't I know you, Alice?" "I shouldn't have said that;--not now." "I believe in my heart you would;--that, or something like it. But I do wish you joy all the same, and you may say what you please. He has got you in his power now, and I don't think even you can go back." "No; I shall not go back again." "I would join with Lady Midlothian in putting you into a madhouse, if you did. But I am so glad; I am, indeed. I was afraid to the last,--terribly afraid; you are so hard and so proud. I don't mean hard to me, dear. You have never been half hard enough to me. But you are hard to yourself, and, upon my word, you have been hard to him. What a deal you will have to make up to him!" "I feel that I ought to stand before him always as a penitent,--in a white sheet." "He will like it better, I dare say, if you will sit upon his knee. Some penitents do, you know. And how happy you will be! He'll never explain the sugar-duties to you, and there'll be no Mr. Bott at Nethercoats." They sat together the whole morning,--while Mr. Palliser was seeing to the springs and cushions,--and by degrees Alice began to enjoy her happiness. As she did so her friend enjoyed it with her, and at last they had something of the comfort and excitement which such an occasion should give. "I'll tell you what, Alice; you shall come and be married at Matching, in August, or perhaps September. That's the only way in which I can be present; and if we can bespeak some sun, we'll have the breakfast out in the ruins." On the following morning they all started together, a first-class compartment having been taken for the Palliser family, and a second-class compartment close to them for the Palliser servants. Mr. Palliser, as he slowly handed his wife in, was a triumphant man; as was also Mr. Grey, as he handed in his lady-love, though, in a manner, much less manifest. We may say that both the gentlemen had been very fortunate while at Lucerne. Mr. Palliser had come abroad with a feeling that all the world had been cut from under his feet. A great change was needed for his wife, and he had acknowledged at once that everything must be made to yield to that necessity. He certainly had his reward,--now in his triumphant return. Terrible troubles had afflicted him as he went, which seemed now to have dissipated themselves altogether. When he thought of Burgo Fitzgerald he remembered him only as a poor, unfortunate fellow, for whom he should be glad to do something, if the doing of anything were only in his power; and he had in his pocket a letter which he had that morning received from the Duke of St. Bungay, marked private and confidential, which was in its nature very private and confidential, and in which he was told that Lord Brock and Mr. Finespun were totally at variance about French wines. Mr. Finespun wanted to do something, now in the recess,--to send some political agent over to France,--to which Lord Brock would not agree; and no one knew what would be the consequence of this disagreement. Here might be another chance,--if only Mr. Palliser could give up his winter in Italy! Mr. Palliser, as he took his place opposite his wife, was very triumphant. And Mr. Grey was triumphant, as he placed himself gently in his seat opposite to Alice. He seemed to assume no right, as he took that position apparently because it was the one which came naturally to his lot. No one would have been made aware that Alice was his own simply by seeing his arrangements for her comfort. He made no loud assertion as to his property and his rights, as some men do. He was quiet and subdued in his joy, but not the less was he triumphant. From the day on which Alice had accepted his first offer,--nay, from an earlier day than that; from the day on which he had first resolved to make it, down to the present hour, he had never been stirred from his purpose. By every word that he had said, and by every act that he had done, he had shown himself to be unmoved by that episode in their joint lives, which Alice's other friends had regarded as so fatal. When she first rejected him, he would not take his rejection. When she told him that she intended to marry her cousin, he silently declined to believe that such marriage would ever take place. He had never given her up for a day, and now the event proved that he had been right. Alice was happy, very happy; but she was still disposed to regard her lover as Fate, and her happiness as an enforced necessity. They stopped a night at Basle, and again she stood upon the balcony. He was close to her as she stood there,--so close that, putting out her hand for his, she was able to take it and press it closely. "You are thinking of something, Alice," he said. "What is it?" "It was here," she said--"here, on this very balcony, that I first rebelled against you, and now you have brought me here that I should confess and submit on the same spot. I do confess. How am I to thank you for forgiving me?" [Illustration: "How am I to thank you for forgiving me?"] On the following morning they went on to Baden-Baden, and there they stopped for a couple of days. Lady Glencora had positively refused to stop a day at Basle, making so many objections to the place that her husband had at last yielded. "I could go from Vienna to London without feeling it," she said, with indignation; "and to tell me that I can't do two easy days' journey running!" Mr. Palliser had been afraid to be imperious, and therefore, immediately on his arrival at one of the stations in Basle, he had posted across the town, in the heat and the dust, to look after the cushions and the springs at the other. "I've a particular favour to ask of you," Lady Glencora said to her husband, as soon as they were alone together in their rooms at Baden. Mr. Palliser declared that he would grant her any particular favour,--only premising that he was not to be supposed to have thereby committed himself to any engagement under which his wife should have authority to take any exertion upon herself. "I wish I were a milkmaid," said Lady Glencora. "But you are not a milkmaid, my dear. You haven't been brought up like a milkmaid." But what was the favour? If she would only ask for jewels,--though they were the Grand Duchess's diamond eardrops, he would endeavour to get them for her. If she would have quaffed molten pearls, like Cleopatra, he would have procured the beverage,--having first fortified himself with a medical opinion as to the fitness of the drink for a lady in her condition. There was no expenditure that he would not willingly incur for her, nothing costly that he would grudge. But when she asked for a favour, he was always afraid of an imprudence. Very possibly she might want to drink beer in an open garden. And her request was, at last, of this nature: "I want you to take me up to the gambling-rooms!" said she. "The gambling-rooms!" said Mr. Palliser in dismay. "Yes, Plantagenet; the gambling-rooms. If you had been with me before, I should not have made a fool of myself by putting my piece of money on the table. I want to see the place; but then I saw nothing, because I was so frightened when I found that I was winning." Mr. Palliser was aware that all the world of Baden,--or rather the world of the strangers at Baden,--assembles itself in those salons. It may be also that he himself was curious to see how men looked when they lost their own money, or won that of others. He knew how a Minister looked when he lost or gained a tax. He was familiar with millions and tens of millions in a committee of the whole House. He knew the excitement of a near division upon the estimates. But he had never yet seen a poor man stake his last napoleon, and rake back from off the table a small hatful of gold. A little exercise after an early dinner was, he had been told, good for his wife; and he agreed therefore that, on their second evening at Baden, they would all walk up and see the play. "Perhaps I shall get back my napoleon," said Glencora to Alice. "And perhaps I shall be forgiven when somebody sees how difficult it is to manage you," said Alice, looking at Mr. Palliser. "She isn't in earnest," said Mr. Palliser, almost fearing the result of the experiment. "I don't know that," said Lady Glencora. They started together, Mr. Palliser with his wife, and Mr. Grey with Alice on his arm, and found all the tables at work. They at first walked through the different rooms, whispering to each other their comments on the people that they saw, and listening to the quick, low, monotonous words of the croupiers as they arranged and presided over the games. Each table was closely surrounded by its own crowd, made up of players, embryo players, and simple lookers-on, so that they could not see much as they walked. But this was not enough for Lady Glencora. She was anxious to know what these men and women were doing,--to see whether the croupiers wore horns on their heads and were devils indeed,--to behold the faces of those who were wretched and of those who were triumphant,--to know how the thing was done, and to learn something of that lesson in life. "Let us stand here a moment," she said to her husband, arresting him at one corner of the table which had the greatest crowd. "We shall be able to see in a few minutes." So he stood with her there, giving way to Alice, who went in front with his wife; and in a minute or two an aperture was made, so that they could all see the marked cloth, and the money lying about, and the rakes on the table, and the croupier skilfully dealing his cards, and,--more interesting than all the rest, the faces of those who were playing. Grey looked on, over Alice's shoulder, very attentively,--as did Palliser also,--but both of them kept their eyes upon the ministers of the work. Alice and Glencora did the same at first, but as they gained courage they glanced round upon the gamblers. It was a long table, having, of course, four corners, and at the corner appropriated by them they were partly opposite to the man who dealt the cards. The corner answering to theirs at the other end was the part of the table most removed from their sight, and that on which their eyes fell last. As Lady Glencora stood she could hardly see,--indeed, at first she could not see,--one or two who were congregated at this spot. Mr. Palliser, who was behind her, could not see them at all. But to Alice,--and to Mr. Grey, had he cared about it,--every face at the table was visible except the faces of those who were immediately close to them. Before long Alice's attention was riveted on the action and countenance of one young man who sat at that other corner. He was leaning, at first listlessly, over the table, dressed in a velveteen jacket, and with his round-topped hat brought far over his eyes, so that she could not fully see his face. But she had hardly begun to observe him before he threw back his hat, and taking some pieces of gold from under his left hand, which lay upon the table, pushed three or four of them on to one of the divisions marked on the cloth. He seemed to show no care, as others did, as to the special spot which they should occupy. Many were very particular in this respect, placing their ventures on the lines, so as to share the fortunes of two compartments, or sometimes of four; or they divided their coins, taking three or four numbers, selecting the numbers with almost grotesque attention to some imagined rule of their own. But this man let his gold go all together, and left it where his half-stretched rake deposited it by chance. Alice could not but look at his face. His eyes she could see were bloodshot, and his hair, when he pushed back his hat, was rough and dishevelled; but still there was that in his face which no woman could see and not regard. It was a face which at once prepossessed her in his favour,--as it had always prepossessed all others. On this occasion he had won his money, and Alice saw him drag it in as lazily as he had pushed it out. "Do you see that little Frenchman?" said Lady Glencora. "He has just made half a napoleon, and has walked off with it. Isn't it interesting? I could stay here all the night." Then she turned round to whisper something to her husband, and Alice's eyes again fell on the face of the man at the other end of the table. After he had won his money, he had allowed the game to go on for a turn without any action on his part. The gold again went under his hand, and he lounged forward with his hat over his eyes. One of the croupiers had said a word, as though calling his attention to the game, but he had merely shaken his head. But when the fate of the next turn had been decided, he again roused himself, and on this occasion, as far as Alice could see, pushed his whole stock forward with the rake. There was a little mass of gold, and, from his manner of placing it, all might see that he left its position to chance. One piece had got beyond its boundary, and the croupier pushed it back with some half-expressed inquiry as to his correctness. "All right," said a voice in English. Then Lady Glencora started and clutched Alice's arm with her hand. Mr. Palliser was explaining to Mr. Grey, behind them, something about German finance as connected with gambling-tables, and did not hear the voice, or see his wife's motion. I need hardly tell the reader that the gambler was Burgo Fitzgerald. But Lady Glencora said not a word,--not as yet. She looked forward very gently, but still with eager eyes, till she could just see the face she knew so well. His hat was now pushed back, and his countenance had lost its listlessness. He watched narrowly the face of the man as he told out the amount of the cards as they were dealt. He did not try to hide his anxiety, and when, after the telling of some six or seven cards, he heard a certain number named, and a certain colour called, he made some exclamation which even Glencora could not hear. And then another croupier put down, close to Burgo's money, certain rolls of gold done up in paper, and also certain loose napoleons. "Why doesn't he take it?" said Lady Glencora. "He is taking it," said Alice, not at all knowing the cause of her cousin's anxiety. Burgo had paused a moment, and then prepared to rake the money to him; but as he did so, he changed his mind, and pushed it all back again,--now, on this occasion, being very careful to place it on its former spot. Both Alice and Glencora could see that a man at his elbow was dissuading him,--had even attempted to stop the arm which held the rake. But Burgo shook him off, speaking to him some word roughly, and then again he steadied the rolls upon their appointed place. The croupier who had paused for a moment now went on quickly with his cards, and in two minutes the fate of Burgo's wealth was decided. It was all drawn back by the croupier's unimpassioned rake, and the rolls of gold were restored to the tray from whence they had been taken. Burgo looked up and smiled at them all round the table. By this time most of those who stood around were looking at him. He was a man who gathered eyes upon him wherever he might be, or whatever he was doing; and it had been clear that he was very intent upon his fortune, and on the last occasion the amount staked had been considerable. He knew that men and women were looking at him, and therefore he smiled faintly as he turned his eyes round the table. Then he got up, and, putting his hands in his trousers pockets, whistled as he walked away. His companion followed him, and laid a hand upon his shoulder; but Burgo shook him off, and would not turn round. He shook him off, and walked on whistling, the length of the whole salon. "Alice," said Lady Glencora, "it is Burgo Fitzgerald." Mr. Palliser had gone so deep into that question of German finance that he had not at all noticed the gambler. "Alice, what can we do for him? It is Burgo," said Lady Glencora. Many eyes were now watching him. Used as he was to the world and to misfortune, he was not successful in his attempt to bear his loss with a show of indifference. The motion of his head, the position of his hands, the tone of his whistling, all told the tale. Even the unimpassioned croupiers furtively cast an eye after him, and a very big Guard, in a cocked hat, and uniform, and sword, who hitherto had hardly been awake, seemed evidently to be interested by his movements. If there is to be a tragedy at these places,--and tragedies will sometimes occur,--it is always as well that the tragic scene should be as far removed as possible from the salons, in order that the public eye should not suffer. Lady Glencora and Alice had left their places, and had shrunk back, almost behind a pillar. "Is it he, in truth?" Alice asked. "In very truth," said Glencora. "What can I do? Can I do anything? Look at him, Alice. If he were to destroy himself, what should I do then?" Burgo, conscious that he was the regarded of all eyes, turned round upon his heel and again walked the length of the salon. He knew well that he had not a franc left in his possession, but still he laughed and still he whistled. His companion, whoever he might be, had slunk away from him, not caring to share the notoriety which now attended him. "What shall I do, Alice?" said Lady Glencora, with her eyes still fixed on him who had been her lover. "Tell Mr. Palliser," whispered Alice. Lady Glencora immediately ran up to her husband, and took him away from Mr. Grey. Rapidly she told her story,--with such rapidity that Mr. Palliser could hardly get in a word. "Do something for him;--do, do. Unless I know that something is done, I shall die. You needn't be afraid." "I'm not afraid," said Mr. Palliser. Lady Glencora, as she went on quickly, got hold of her husband's hand, and caressed it. "You are so good," said she. "Don't let him out of your sight. There; he is going. I will go home with Mr. Grey. I will be ever so good; I will, indeed. You know what he'll want, and for my sake you'll let him have it. But don't let him gamble. If you could only get him home to England, and then do something. You owe him something, Plantagenet; do you not?" "If money can do anything, he shall have it." "God bless you, dearest! I shall never see him again; but if you could save him! There;--he is going now. Go;--go." She pushed him forward, and then retreating, put her arm within Mr. Grey's, still keeping her eye upon her husband. Burgo, when he first got to the door leading out of the salon, had paused a moment, and, turning round, had encountered the big gendarme close to him. "Well, old Buffer, what do you want?" said he, accosting the man in English. The big gendarme simply walked on through the door, and said nothing. Then Burgo also passed out, and Mr. Palliser quickly went after him. They were now in the large front salon, from whence the chief door of the building opened out upon the steps. Through this door Burgo went without pausing, and Mr. Palliser went after him. They both walked to the end of the row of buildings, and then Burgo, leaving the broad way, turned into a little path which led up through the trees to the hills. That hillside among the trees is a popular resort at Baden, during the day; but now, at nine in the evening, it was deserted. Palliser did not press on the other man, but followed him, and did not accost Burgo till he had thrown himself on the grass beneath a tree. "You are in trouble, I fear, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Mr. Palliser, as soon as he was close at Burgo's feet. "We will go home. Mr. Palliser has something to do," said Lady Glencora to Mr. Grey, as soon as the two men had disappeared from her sight. "Is that a friend of Mr. Palliser?" said Mr. Grey. "Yes;--that is, he knows him, and is interested about him. Alice, shall we go home? Oh! Mr. Grey, you must not ask any questions. He,--Mr. Palliser, will tell you everything when he sees you,--that is, if there is anything to be told." Then they all went home, and soon separated for the night. "Of course I shall sit up for him," said Lady Glencora to Alice, "but I will do it in my own room. You can tell Mr. Grey, if you like." But Alice told nothing to Mr. Grey, nor did Mr. Grey ask any questions.

Alice insisted on being left up in the churchyard, urging that she wanted to "think about it all," but, in truth, fearing that she might not be able to carry herself well, if she were to walk with her lover to the hotel. To this he made no objection. On reaching the inn, he met Mr. Palliser in the hall, inspecting some large trunks which had been brought downstairs. Mr. Palliser had a nervous need to be busy, so he was checking the cording of the trunks. "Good morning! good morning!" he said to Grey. "I am going up to the station to see about a carriage for tomorrow. Perhaps you'll come with me." Mr. Grey agreed to this. Then, in a few words, he told him about his own morning's work. He hated secrets, and as the Pallisers knew well what had brought him here, he thought they should know that he had been successful. Mr. Palliser congratulated him very cordially, and then, running upstairs for his gloves, he told his wife that Alice had yielded at last. "Of course she has," said Lady Glencora. "I really didn't think she would," said he. "That's because you don't understand things of that sort," said his wife. Then Mr. Palliser cautioned her to be careful, kissed her, and went off on his mission about the carriage. In the course of their walk Mr. Palliser suggested that, as things were settled so pleasantly, Mr. Grey might as well return with them to England, and Mr. Grey agreed. Alice remained alone for nearly an hour, looking out upon Mount Pilate. No one disturbed her in the churchyard. She was left in perfect solitude to think of the past, and form her plans of the future. She was happy, though she was slow to confess her happiness to herself. She was resolute that she would now do all she could to make him happy also. And there must now, she acknowledged, be an end to her pride: to that pride which had made her think that she could more wisely follow her own guidance than that of any others. Now she must follow his guidance. She had found her master, and she laughed to herself a little as she confessed that it was so. She had taken her fling at having her own will, and see what had come of it! She had assumed the command of the ship, and had thrown it upon the rocks, and she felt that she never ought to take the captain's place again. It was well for her that her captain was one whom she respected as thoroughly as she loved him. She would write to her father at once, and to Lady Macleod, and would confess everything. As to Lady Midlothian, she would do nothing - unless, indeed, Mr. Grey should order it. Then she again laughed at herself inwardly, and rising from her seat, walked down the hill to the hotel. "Vanquished at last!" said Lady Glencora, as Alice entered the room. "Yes, vanquished; if you like to call it so," said Alice. "It is not what I call it, but what you feel it," said the other. "I know you well enough to be sure that you regard yourself now as an unfortunate prisoner - a captive taken in war. I know that it is quite a misery to you that you should be made a happy woman of at last. I understand it all, my dear, and my heart bleeds for you." "Of course; I knew that was the way you would treat me." "In what way would you have me treat you? If I were to hug you with joy, and tell you how good he is, and how fortunate you are, you would put on a long face, and tell me that it would be much better that the thing shouldn't be. But I do wish you joy all the same, and you may say what you please. He has got you in his power now, and I don't think even you can go back." "No; I shall not go back again." "I am so glad. I was afraid to the last - you are so hard and so proud. I don't mean hard to me, dear. But you are hard to yourself, and, upon my word, you have been hard to him. What a deal you will have to make up to him!" "I feel that I ought to stand before him as a penitent, in a white sheet." "He will like it better, I dare say, if you sit upon his knee. And how happy you will be!" They sat together the whole morning, and by degrees Alice began to enjoy her happiness. "I'll tell you what, Alice," said her friend; "you shall come and be married at Matching, in August, or perhaps September. That's the only way in which I can be present; and if we can arrange some sun, we'll have the wedding breakfast out in the ruins." On the following morning they all started together, a first-class compartment having been taken for the Palliser family, and a second-class compartment for the servants. Mr. Palliser, as he handed his wife in, was a triumphant man; as was also Mr. Grey, as he handed in his lady-love. We may say that both the gentlemen had been very fortunate while at Lucerne. Mr. Palliser had come abroad feeling that all the world had been cut from under his feet. A change was needed for his wife, and he had yielded everything to that necessity. He certainly had his reward now. The terrible troubles which had afflicted him seemed to have disappeared. When he thought of Burgo Fitzgerald he remembered him only as a poor, unfortunate fellow; and he had in his pocket a letter which he had that morning received from the Duke of St. Bungay, marked private and confidential, in which he was told that Lord Brock and Mr. Finespun were totally at variance, and that no one knew what the consequence would be. Here might be another chance! Mr. Palliser, as he took his place opposite his wife, was very triumphant. And Mr. Grey was triumphant, as he placed himself opposite Alice. He was quiet and subdued in his joy, but not the less triumphant. From the day on which he had first resolved to make his offer to Alice, he had never been stirred from his purpose. When she told him that she intended to marry her cousin, he silently declined to believe that the marriage would ever take place. He had never given her up for a day, and he had been proved right. They stopped a night at Basle, and again Alice stood upon the balcony. Mr. Grey was close to her - so close that she was able to take his hand and press it. "You are thinking of something, Alice," he said. "What is it?" "It was here," she said, "on this very balcony, that I first rebelled against you, and now that you have brought me here I confess and submit. How am I to thank you for forgiving me?" On the following morning they went on to Baden-Baden, and there they stopped for a couple of days. "I've a particular favour to ask of you," Lady Glencora said to her husband, as soon as they were alone together in their rooms at Baden. Mr. Palliser declared that he would grant her any favour, provided that it did not involve his wife exerting herself. "I wish I were a milkmaid," said Lady Glencora. "But you are not a milkmaid, my dear." But what was the favour? If she would only ask for jewels, he would get them for her. There was no expenditure that he would not willingly incur for her. But when she asked for a favour, he was always afraid of an imprudence. Very possibly she might want to drink beer in an open garden. And her request was, at last, this: "I want you to take me up to the gambling-rooms!" said she. "The gambling-rooms!" said Mr. Palliser in dismay. "Yes, Plantagenet; the gambling-rooms. If you had been with me before, I should not have made a fool of myself by putting my money on the table. I want to see the place; but then I saw nothing, because I was so frightened when I found that I was winning." Mr. Palliser was aware that all the world of Baden assembles itself in those salons. Maybe he himself was curious to see how men looked when they lost their own money, or won that of others. He knew how a Minister looked when he lost or gained a tax. He was familiar with tens of millions in a committee of the House. But he had never seen a poor man stake his last napoleon, and rake from off the table a small hatful of gold. He agreed therefore that, on their second evening at Baden, they would all walk up and see the play. "Perhaps I shall get back my napoleon," said Glencora to Alice. "And perhaps I shall be forgiven when somebody sees how difficult it is to manage you," said Alice. "She doesn't mean it," said Mr. Palliser. "I don't know that," said Lady Glencora. They went in together, Mr. Palliser with his wife, and Mr. Grey with Alice on his arm, and walked through the different rooms, whispering to each other their comments on the people that they saw, and listening to the quick, low words of the croupiers as they presided over the games. Each table was closely surrounded by its own crowd. "Let us stand here a moment," said Lady Glencora to her husband, halting at a corner of the table which had the greatest crowd. "We shall be able to see in a few minutes." So they stood there, and in a minute or two an opening was made in the crowd, so that they could all see money lying about, and the rakes on the table, and the croupier skilfully dealing his cards, and - more interesting than all the rest - the faces of those who were playing. Grey and Palliser watched the croupiers; but Alice and Glencora glanced round upon the gamblers. It was a long table, and at the opposite and furthest corner to them sat a young man who riveted Alice's attention. He was leaning, at first listlessly, over the table, with his hat far over his eyes, so that she could not fully see his face. But then he threw back his hat, and taking some pieces of gold which lay upon the table, pushed three or four of them on to one of the divisions marked on the cloth. He seemed not to care which spot they should occupy. Alice could see that his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair was rough and dishevelled; but his face was still one which no woman could see and not admire. On this occasion he won, and Alice saw him drag his money in as lazily as he had pushed it out. "Do you see that little Frenchman?" said Lady Glencora. "He has just made half a napoleon, and walked off with it. Isn't it interesting?" Then she turned round to whisper something to her husband, and Alice's eyes again fell on the face of the man at the other end of the table. After he had won his money, he had allowed the game to go on for a turn without taking part. But then he roused himself, and as far as Alice could see, pushed his whole stock forward with the rake - again leaving its position to chance. One piece had got beyond its boundary, and the croupier made some inquiry about it. "All right," said a voice in English. Then Lady Glencora started and clutched Alice's arm. Mr. Palliser was explaining something about German finance to Mr. Grey, behind them, and did not hear the voice, or see his wife's reaction. I need hardly tell the reader that the gambler was Burgo Fitzgerald. But Lady Glencora said not a word. She looked forward very gently, but eagerly, till she could just see his face. He was watching the croupier anxiously as he dealt the cards. After a certain number and a certain colour was called, he made an exclamation. And then another croupier put down by him rolls of gold done up in paper, and also some loose napoleons. "Why doesn't he take it?" said Lady Glencora. "He is taking it," said Alice, not knowing the cause of her cousin's anxiety. Burgo had paused a moment, and then prepared to rake the money to him; but he changed his mind, and pushed it all back again, this time being very careful to place it on its former spot. Both Alice and Glencora could see that a man at his elbow was trying to dissuade him. But Burgo shook him off roughly. The croupier went on quickly with his cards, and in two minutes the fate of Burgo's wealth was decided. It was all drawn back by the croupier's unimpassioned rake. Burgo looked up and smiled round the table. By this time most of those who stood around were looking at him, and he knew it. Therefore he smiled faintly before getting up, and, putting his hands in his trouser pockets, whistled as he walked away. His companion followed him, and laid a hand upon his shoulder; but Burgo shook him off, and walked on, whistling, the whole length of the salon. "Alice," said Lady Glencora, "it is Burgo Fitzgerald." Mr. Palliser had noticed nothing. "Alice, what can we do for him? It is Burgo." Many eyes were now watching him. He was not successful in his attempt to show indifference to his loss. His gait and his whistling told the tale. Even the unemotional croupiers furtively cast an eye after him, and a very big Guard seemed to be interested by his movements. If there is to be a tragedy at these places, it is always as well that the tragic scene should be as far removed as possible from the salons, away from the public eye. Lady Glencora and Alice had shrunk back behind a pillar. "What can I do?" said Glencora. "Look at him, Alice. If he were to destroy himself, what should I do then?" Burgo, conscious of all eyes, turned round upon his heel and again walked the length of the salon, still whistling. His companion had slunk away from him. "What shall I do, Alice?" said Lady Glencora, her eyes still fixed on him. "Tell Mr. Palliser," whispered Alice. Lady Glencora ran up to her husband, and took him away from Mr. Grey. She told her story so rapidly that Mr. Palliser could hardly get in a word. "Do something for him; do, do. Unless I know that something is done, I shall die. You needn't be afraid." "I'm not afraid," said Mr. Palliser. Lady Glencora took her husband's hand, and caressed it. "You are so good," said she. "Don't let him out of your sight. There; he is going. I will go home with Mr. Grey. I will be ever so good; I will, indeed. You know what he'll want, and for my sake you'll let him have it. But don't let him gamble. If you could only get him home to England. You owe him something, Plantagenet; do you not?" "If money can do anything, he shall have it." "God bless you, dearest! I shall never see him again; but if you could save him! There - he is going now." She pushed him forward, and then retreating, put her arm within Mr. Grey's. Burgo, at the door leading out of the salon, had paused a moment, and had encountered the big Guard close to him. "Well, old Buffer, what do you want?" said he. The Guard simply walked on through the door, and said nothing. Then Burgo also walked out, and Mr. Palliser quickly went after him. They were now in the large front salon, from where the main door of the building opened out upon the steps. Through this door Burgo went, and Mr. Palliser followed. They both walked to the end of the street, and then Burgo turned into a little path which led up through the trees to the hills. That hillside among the trees is a popular resort at Baden, but now, at nine in the evening, it was deserted. Palliser followed Burgo till he threw himself on the grass beneath a tree. "You are in trouble, I fear, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Mr. Palliser, as soon as he drew close. "We will go home. Mr. Palliser has something to do," said Lady Glencora to Mr. Grey, after the two men had disappeared from her sight. "Is that a friend of Mr. Palliser?" said Mr. Grey. "Yes; that is, he knows him. Alice, shall we go home? Oh! Mr. Grey, you must not ask any questions. Mr. Palliser will tell you everything when he sees you - if there is anything to tell." Then they all went home, and soon separated for the night. "Of course I shall sit up for him," said Lady Glencora to Alice, "but in my own room. You can tell Mr. Grey, if you like." But Alice told nothing to Mr. Grey, nor did Mr. Grey ask any questions.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 75: Rouge et Noir

Alice found herself seated near to Lady Glencora's end of the table, and, in spite of her resolution to like Mr. Palliser, she was not sorry that such an arrangement had been made. Mr. Palliser had taken the Duchess out to dinner, and Alice wished to be as far removed as possible from her Grace. She found herself seated between her bespoken friend Jeffrey Palliser and the Duke, and as soon as she was seated Lady Glencora introduced her to her second neighbour. "My cousin, Duke," Lady Glencora said, "and a terrible Radical." "Oh, indeed; I'm glad of that. We're sadly in want of a few leading Radicals, and perhaps I may be able to gain one now." Alice thought of her cousin George, and wished that he, instead of herself, was sitting next to the Duke of St. Bungay. "But I'm afraid I never shall be a leading Radical," she said. "You shall lead me at any rate, if you will," said he. "As the little dogs lead the blind men," said Lady Glencora. "No, Lady Glencora, not so. But as the pretty women lead the men who have eyes in their head. There is nothing I want so much, Miss Vavasor, as to become a Radical;--if I only knew how." "I think it's very easy to know how," said Alice. "Do you? I don't. I've voted for every liberal measure that has come seriously before Parliament since I had a seat in either House, and I've not been able to get beyond Whiggery yet." "Have you voted for the ballot?" asked Alice, almost trembling at her own audacity as she put the question. "Well; no, I've not. And I suppose that is the crux. But the ballot has never been seriously brought before any House in which I have sat. I hate it with so keen a private hatred, that I doubt whether I could vote for it." "But the Radicals love it," said Alice. "Palliser," said the Duke, speaking loudly from his end of the table, "I'm told you can never be entitled to call yourself a Radical till you've voted for the ballot." "I don't want to be called a Radical," said Mr. Palliser,--"or to be called anything at all." "Except Chancellor of the Exchequer," said Lady Glencora in a low voice. "And that's about the finest ambition by which a man can be moved," said the Duke. "The man who can manage the purse-strings of this country can manage anything." Then that conversation dropped and the Duke ate his dinner. "I was especially commissioned to amuse you," said Mr. Jeffrey Palliser to Alice. "But when I undertook the task I had no conception that you would be calling Cabinet Ministers over the coals about their politics." "I did nothing of the kind, surely, Mr. Palliser. I suppose all Radicals do vote for the ballot, and that's why I said it." "Your definition was perfectly just, I dare say, only--" "Only what?" "Lady Glencora need not have been so anxious to provide specially for your amusement. Not but what I'm very much obliged to her,--of course. But Miss Vavasor, unfortunately I'm not a politician. I haven't a chance of a seat in the House, and so I despise politics." "Women are not allowed to be politicians in this country." "Thank God, they can't do much in that way;--not directly, I mean. Only think where we should be if we had a feminine House of Commons, with feminine debates, carried on, of course, with feminine courtesy. My cousins Iphy and Phemy there would of course be members. You don't know them yet?" "No; not yet. Are they politicians?" "Not especially. They have their tendencies, which are decidedly liberal. There has never been a Tory Palliser known, you know. But they are too clever to give themselves up to anything in which they can do nothing. Being women they live a depressed life, devoting themselves to literature, fine arts, social economy, and the abstract sciences. They write wonderful letters; but I believe their correspondence lists are quite full, so that you have no chance at present of getting on either of them." "I haven't the slightest pretension to ask for such an honour." "Oh! if you mean because you don't know them, that has nothing to do with it." "But I have no claim either private or public." "That has nothing to do with it either. They don't at all seek people of note as their correspondents. Free communication with all the world is their motto, and Rowland Hill is the god they worship. Only they have been forced to guard themselves against too great an accession of paper and ink. Are you fond of writing letters, Miss Vavasor?" "Yes, to my friends; but I like getting them better." "I shrewdly suspect they don't read half what they get. Is it possible any one should go through two sheets of paper filled by our friend the Duchess there? No; their delight is in writing. They sit each at her desk after breakfast, and go on till lunch. There is a little rivalry between them, not expressed to each other, but visible to their friends. Iphy certainly does get off the greater number, and I'm told crosses quite as often as Phemy, but then she has the advantage of a bolder and larger hand." "Do they write to you?" "Oh, dear no. I don't think they ever write to any relative. They don't discuss family affairs and such topics as that. Architecture goes a long way with them, and whether women ought to be clerks in public offices. Iphy has certain American correspondents that take up much of her time, but she acknowledges she does not read their letters." "Then I certainly shall not write to her." "But you are not American, I hope. I do hate the Americans. It's the only strong political feeling I have. I went there once, and found I couldn't live with them on any terms." "But they please themselves. I don't see they are to be hated because they don't live after our fashion." "Oh; it's jealousy of course. I know that. I didn't come across a cab-driver who wasn't a much better educated man than I am. And as for their women, they know everything. But I hated them, and I intend to hate them. You haven't been there?" "Oh no." "Then I will make bold to say that any English lady who spent a month with them and didn't hate them would have very singular tastes. I begin to think they'll eat each other up, and then there'll come an entirely new set of people of a different sort. I always regarded the States as a Sodom and Gomorrah, prospering in wickedness, on which fire and brimstone were sure to fall sooner or later." "I think that's wicked." "I am wicked, as Topsy used to say. Do you hunt?" "No." "Do you shoot?" "Shoot! What; with a gun?" "Yes. I was staying in a house last week with a lady who shot a good deal." "No; I don't shoot." "Do you ride?" "No; I wish I did. I have never ridden because I've no one to ride with me." "Do you drive?" "No; I don't drive either." "Then what do you do?" "I sit at home, and--" "Mend your stockings?" "No; I don't do that, because it's disagreeable; but I do work a good deal. Sometimes I have amused myself by reading." "Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way. I don't believe in libraries. Nobody ever goes into a library to read, any more than you would into a larder to eat. But there is this difference;--the food you consume does come out of the larders, but the books you read never come out of the libraries." "Except Mudie's," said Alice. "Ah, yes; he is the great librarian. And you mean to read all the time you are here, Miss Vavasor?" "I mean to walk about the priory ruins sometimes." "Then you must go by moonlight, and I'll go with you. Only isn't it rather late in the year for that?" "I should think it is,--for you, Mr. Palliser." Then the Duke spoke to her again, and she found that she got on very well during dinner. But she could not but feel angry with herself in that she had any fear on the subject;--and yet she could not divest herself of that fear. She acknowledged to herself that she was conscious of a certain inferiority to Lady Glencora and to Mr. Jeffrey Palliser, which almost made her unhappy. As regarded the Duke on the other side of her, she had no such feeling. He was old enough to be her father, and was a Cabinet Minister; therefore he was entitled to her reverence. But how was it that she could not help accepting the other people round her as being indeed superior to herself? Was she really learning to believe that she could grow upwards by their sunlight? "Jeffrey is a pleasant fellow, is he not?" said Lady Glencora to her as they passed back through the billiard-room to the drawing-room. "Very pleasant;--a little sarcastic, perhaps." "I should think you would soon find yourself able to get the better of that if he tries it upon you," said Lady Glencora; and then the ladies were all in the drawing-room together. "It is quite deliciously warm, coming from one room to another," said the Duchess, putting her emphasis on the "one" and the "other." "Then we had better keep continually moving," said a certain Mrs. Conway Sparkes, a literary lady, who had been very handsome, who was still very clever, who was not perhaps very good-natured, and of whom the Duchess of St. Bungay was rather afraid. "I hope we may be warm here too," said Lady Glencora. "But not deliciously warm," said Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "It makes me tremble in every limb when Mrs. Sparkes attacks her," Lady Glencora said to Alice in Alice's own room that night, "for I know she'll tell the Duke; and he'll tell that tall man with red hair whom you see standing about, and the tall man with red hair will tell Mr. Palliser, and then I shall catch it." "And who is the tall man with red hair?" "He's a political link between the Duke and Mr. Palliser. His name is Bott, and he's a Member of Parliament." "But why should he interfere?" "I suppose it's his business. I don't quite understand all the ins and outs of it. I believe he's to be one of Mr. Palliser's private secretaries if he becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer. Perhaps he doesn't tell;--only I think he does all the same. He always calls me Lady Glen-cowrer. He comes out of Lancashire, and made calico as long as he could get any cotton." But this happened in the bedroom, and we must go back for a while to the drawing-room. The Duchess had made no answer to Mrs. Sparkes, and so nothing further was said about the warmth. Nor, indeed, was there any conversation that was comfortably general. The number of ladies in the room was too great for that, and ladies do not divide themselves nicely into small parties, as men and women do when they are mixed. Lady Glencora behaved pretty by telling the Duchess all about her pet pheasants; Mrs. Conway Sparkes told ill-natured tales of some one to Miss Euphemia Palliser; one of the Duchess's daughters walked off to a distant piano with an admiring friend and touched a few notes; while Iphigenia Palliser boldly took up a book, and placed herself at a table. Alice, who was sitting opposite to Lady Glencora, began to speculate whether she might do the same; but her courage failed her, and she sat on, telling herself that she was out of her element. "Alice Vavasor," said Lady Glencora after a while, suddenly, and in a somewhat loud voice, "can you play billiards?" "No," said Alice, rather startled. "Then you shall learn to-night, and if nobody else will teach you, you shall be my pupil." Whereupon Lady Glencora rang the bell and ordered that the billiard-table might be got ready. "You'll play, Duchess, of course," said Lady Glencora. "It is so nice and warm, that I think I will," said the Duchess; but as she spoke she looked suspiciously to that part of the room where Mrs. Conway Sparkes was sitting. "Let us all play," said Mrs. Conway Sparkes, "and then it will be nicer,--and perhaps warmer, too." The gentlemen joined them just as they were settling themselves round the table, and as many of them stayed there, the billiard-room became full. Alice had first a cue put into her hand, and making nothing of that was permitted to play with a mace. The duty of instructing her devolved on Jeffrey Palliser, and the next hour passed pleasantly;--not so pleasantly, she thought afterwards, as did some of those hours in Switzerland when her cousins were with her. After all, she could get more out of her life with such associates as them, than she could with any of these people at Matching. She felt quite sure of that;--though Jeffrey Palliser did take great trouble to teach her the game, and once or twice made her laugh heartily by quizzing the Duchess's attitude as she stood up to make her stroke. "I wish I could play billiards," said Mrs. Sparkes, on one of these occasions; "I do indeed." "I thought you said you were coming to play," said the Duchess, almost majestically, and with a tone of triumph evidently produced by her own successes. "Only to see your Grace," said Mrs. Sparkes. "I don't know that there is anything more to see in me than in anybody else," said the Duchess. "Mr. Palliser, that was a cannon. Will you mark that for our side?" [Illustration: "Mr. Palliser, that was a cannon."] "Oh no, Duchess, you hit the same ball twice." "Very well;--then I suppose Miss Vavasor plays now. That was a miss. Will you mark that, if you please?" This latter demand was made with great stress, as though she had been defrauded in the matter of the cannon, and was obeyed. Before long, the Duchess, with her partner, Lady Glencora, won the game,--which fact, however, was, I think, owing rather to Alice's ignorance than to her Grace's skill. The Duchess, however, was very triumphant, and made her way back into the drawing-room with a step which seemed to declare loudly that she had trumped Mrs. Sparkes at last. Not long after this the ladies went up-stairs on their way to bed. Many of them, perhaps, did not go to their pillows at once, as it was as yet not eleven o'clock, and it was past ten when they all came down to breakfast. At any rate, Alice, who had been up at seven, did not go to bed then, nor for the next two hours. "I'll come into your room just for one minute," Lady Glencora said as she passed on from the door to her own room; and in about five minutes she was back with her cousin. "Would you mind going into my room--it's just there, and sitting with Ellen for a minute?" This Lady Glencora said in the sweetest possible tone to the girl who was waiting on Alice; and then, when they were alone together, she got into a little chair by the fireside and prepared herself for conversation. "I must keep you up for a quarter of an hour while I tell you something. But first of all, how do you like the people? Will you be able to be comfortable with them?" Alice of course said that she thought she would; and then there came that little discussion in which the duties of Mr. Bott, the man with the red hair, were described. "But I've got something to tell you," said Lady Glencora, when they had already been there some twenty minutes. "Sit down opposite to me, and look at the fire while I look at you." "Is it anything terrible?" "It's nothing wrong." "Oh, Lady Glencora, if it's--" "I won't have you call me Lady Glencora. Don't I call you Alice? Why are you so unkind to me? I have not come to you now asking you to do for me anything that you ought not to do." "But you are going to tell me something." Alice felt sure that the thing to be told would have some reference to Mr. Fitzgerald, and she did not wish to hear Mr. Fitzgerald's name from her cousin's lips. "Tell you something;--of course I am. I'm going to tell you that,--that in writing to you the other day I wrote a fib. But it wasn't that I wished to deceive you;--only I couldn't say it all in a letter." "Say all what?" "You know I confessed that I had been very bad in not coming to you in London last year." "I never thought of it for a moment." "You did not care whether I came or not: was that it? But never mind. Why should you have cared? But I cared. I told you in my letter that I didn't come because I had so many things on hand. Of course that was a fib." "Everybody makes excuses of that kind," said Alice. "But they don't make them to the very people of all others whom they want to know and love. I was longing to come to you every day. But I feared I could not come without speaking of him;--and I had determined never to speak of him again." This she said in that peculiar low voice which she assumed at times. "Then why do it now, Lady Glencora?" "I won't be called Lady Glencora. Call me Cora. I had a sister once, older than I, and she used to call me Cora. If she had lived--. But never mind that now. She didn't live. I'll tell you why I do it now. Because I cannot help it. Besides, I've met him. I've been in the same room with him, and have spoken to him. What's the good of any such resolution now?" "And you have met him?" "Yes; he--Mr. Palliser--knew all about it. When he talked of taking me to the house, I whispered to him that I thought Burgo would be there." "Do not call him by his Christian name," said Alice, almost with a shudder. "Why not?--why not his Christian name? I did when I told my husband. Or perhaps I said Burgo Fitzgerald." "Well." "And he bade me go. He said it didn't signify, and that I had better learn to bear it. Bear it, indeed! If I am to meet him, and speak to him, and look at him, surely I may mention his name." And then she paused for an answer. "May I not?" "What am I to say?" exclaimed Alice. "Anything you please, that's not a falsehood. But I've got you here because I don't think you will tell a falsehood. Oh, Alice, I do so want to go right, and it is so hard!" Hard, indeed, poor creature, for one so weighted as she had been, and sent out into the world with so small advantages of previous training or of present friendship! Alice began to feel now that she had been enticed to Matching Priory because her cousin wanted a friend, and of course she could not refuse to give the friendship that was asked from her. She got up from her chair, and kneeling down at the other's feet put up her face and kissed her. "I knew you would be good to me," said Lady Glencora. "I knew you would. And you may say whatever you like. But I could not bear that you should not know the real reason why I neither came to you nor sent for you after we went to London. You'll come to me now; won't you, dear?" "Yes;--and you'll come to me," said Alice, making in her mind a sort of bargain that she was not to be received into Mr. Palliser's house after the fashion in which Lady Midlothian had proposed to receive her. But it struck her at once that this was unworthy of her, and ungenerous. "But I'll come to you," she added, "whether you come to me or not." "I will go to you," said Lady Glencora, "of course,--why shouldn't I? But you know what I mean. We shall have dinners and parties and lots of people." "And we shall have none," said Alice, smiling. "And therefore there is so much more excuse for your coming to me;--or rather I mean so much more reason, for I don't want excuses. Well, dear, I'm so glad I've told you. I was afraid to see you in London. I should hardly have known how to look at you then. But I've got over that now." Then she smiled and returned the kiss which Alice had given her. It was singular to see her standing on the bedroom rug with all her magnificence of dress, but with her hair pushed back behind her ears, and her eyes red with tears,--as though the burden of the magnificence remained to her after its purpose was over. "I declare it's ever so much past twelve. Good night, now, dear. I wonder whether he's come up. But I should have heard his step if he had. He never treads lightly. He seldom gives over work till after one, and sometimes goes on till three. It's the only thing he likes, I believe. God bless you! good night. I've such a deal more to say to you; and Alice, you must tell me something about yourself, too; won't you, dear?" Then without waiting for an answer Lady Glencora went, leaving Alice in a maze of bewilderment. She could hardly believe that all she had heard, and all she had done, had happened since she left Queen Anne Street that morning.

Alice found herself seated near Lady Glencora's end of the table, between Jeffrey Palliser and the Duke of St. Bungay, to whom Lady Glencora introduced her. "My cousin, Duke," Lady Glencora said, "and a terrible Radical." "Oh, indeed; I'm glad of that. We're sadly in want of a few leading Radicals." Alice thought of her cousin George, and wished that he was sitting in her place. "But I'm afraid I never shall be a leading Radical," she said. "You may lead me at any rate," said he. "As little dogs lead blind men," said Lady Glencora. "No, Lady Glencora, as the pretty women lead the men who have eyes in their head. There is nothing I want so much, Miss Vavasor, as to become a Radical; if I only knew how." "I think it's very easy to know how," said Alice. "Do you? I don't. I've voted for every serious liberal measure that has come before Parliament since I had a seat in either House, and I've not been able to get beyond Whiggery yet." "Have you voted for the secret ballot?" asked Alice, almost trembling at her own audacity. "Well; no, I've not. And I suppose that is the crux. But I hate it with so keen a private hatred, that I doubt whether I could vote for it." "But the Radicals love it," said Alice. "Palliser," said the Duke, speaking loudly down the table, "I'm told you can never call yourself a Radical till you've voted for the ballot." "I don't want to be called a Radical," said Mr. Palliser, "or to be called anything at all." "Except Chancellor of the Exchequer," said Lady Glencora in a low voice. "And that's about the finest ambition a man can have," said the Duke. "The man who can manage the purse-strings of this country can manage anything." Then the Duke ate his dinner. "When I undertook to amuse you," said Mr. Jeffrey Palliser to Alice, "I had no idea that you would be hauling Cabinet Ministers over the coals about their politics." "I did nothing of the kind, surely, Mr. Palliser. I suppose all Radicals do vote for the ballot, and that's why I said it." "You are quite right. But unfortunately I'm not a politician. I haven't a chance of a seat in the House, and so I despise politics." "Women are not allowed to be politicians in this country." "Thank God; only think where we should be if we had a feminine House of Commons, with feminine debates, carried on with feminine courtesy. My cousins Iphy and Phemy there would of course be members. You don't know them yet?" "No; not yet." "They have decidedly liberal tendencies. There has never been a Tory Palliser, you know. But they are too clever to give themselves up to anything in which they can do nothing. Being women they live a depressed life, devoting themselves to literature, fine arts, social economy, and the abstract sciences. They write wonderful letters; but I believe their correspondence lists are quite full, so that you have no chance of getting on either of them." "I haven't the slightest pretension to ask for such an honour." "Oh! You don't need to know them. Free communication with all the world is their motto. Are you fond of writing letters, Miss Vavasor?" "Yes, to my friends; but I like getting letters better." "I suspect they don't read half what they get. Could anyone get through two sheets of paper filled by our friend the Duchess there? No; their delight is in writing, every morning. There is a little rivalry between them. Iphy certainly does send off more." "Do they write to you?" "Oh, dear no. I don't think they ever write to any relative. They don't discuss family affairs and such topics as that. Iphy has certain American correspondents, but she acknowledges she does not read their letters." "Then I certainly shall not write to her." "But you are not American, I hope. I do hate the Americans. It's the only strong political feeling I have. I went there once, and found I couldn't live with them." "I don't see they are to be hated because they don't live after our fashion." "Oh; it's jealousy of course. I know that. I didn't come across a cab-driver there who wasn't better educated than I am. And as for their women, they know everything. But I intend to hate them. You haven't been there?" "Oh no." "Then I will make bold to say that any English lady who spent a month with them and didn't hate them would have very singular tastes. Do you hunt?" "No." "Do you shoot?" "Shoot! No; I don't shoot." "Do you ride?" "No; I wish I did." "Do you drive?" "No; I don't drive either." "Then what do you do?" "I sit at home, and-" "Mend your stockings?" "No; I don't do that, but I do needlework a good deal. Sometimes I have amused myself by reading." "Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way. I don't believe in libraries. Do you mean to read all the time you are here, Miss Vavasor?" "I mean to walk about the priory ruins sometimes." "Then you must go by moonlight, and I'll go with you. Only isn't it rather late in the year for that?" "I should think it is for you, Mr. Palliser." Then the Duke spoke to her again, and she found that she got on very well during dinner. She could not help feel angry with herself for having any fear about it; and yet she could not dismiss that fear. She was conscious of a certain inferiority to Lady Glencora and Mr. Jeffrey Palliser, which almost made her unhappy. As regarded the Duke, she had no such feeling. He was old enough to be her father, and was a Cabinet Minister; therefore he was entitled to her reverence. But why did she accept that the people round her were indeed superior to herself? Was she really learning to believe that she could grow upwards by their sunlight? "Jeffrey is a pleasant fellow, is he not?" said Lady Glencora to her as they went to the drawing-room. "Very pleasant; a little sarcastic, perhaps." "I think you would be able to get the better of that if he tries it on you," said Lady Glencora; and then the ladies were in the drawing-room. "It is quite deliciously warm in the corridor," said the Duchess. "Then we had better keep moving," said a certain Mrs. Conway Sparkes, a very clever literary lady, of whom the Duchess of St. Bungay was rather afraid. "I hope we may be warm here too," said Lady Glencora. "But not deliciously warm," said Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "It makes me tremble in every limb when Mrs. Sparkes attacks the Duchess," Lady Glencora said to Alice in Alice's room that night, "for I know she'll tell the Duke; and he'll tell that tall man with red hair whom you see standing about, and he will tell Mr. Palliser, and then I shall catch it." "And who is the tall man with red hair?" "He's a political link between the Duke and Mr. Palliser. His name is Bott, and he's a Member of Parliament." "But why should he interfere?" "I suppose it's his business. I believe he's to be one of Mr. Palliser's private secretaries if he becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer. Perhaps he doesn't tell; only I think he does. He always calls me Lady Glen-cowrer. He comes from Lancashire, and used to make calico." But this happened in the bedroom, and we must go back for a while to the drawing-room. There was no general conversation. The number of ladies in the room was too great for that. Lady Glencora behaved prettily, telling the Duchess all about her pet pheasants; Mrs. Conway Sparkes told ill-natured tales of someone to Miss Euphemia Palliser; one of the Duchess's daughters walked off to a distant piano with a friend and touched a few notes; while Iphigenia Palliser boldly took up a book, and placed herself at a table. Alice speculated whether she might do the same, but her courage failed her, and she sat on, feeling out of her element. "Alice Vavasor," said Lady Glencora after a while, suddenly and loudly, "can you play billiards?" "No," said Alice, rather startled. "Then you shall learn tonight." Whereupon Lady Glencora rang the bell and ordered that the billiard-table might be got ready. "You'll play, Duchess, of course," she said. "It is so nice and warm, that I think I will," said the Duchess; but as she spoke she looked suspiciously at Mrs. Conway Sparkes. "Let us all play," said Mrs. Conway Sparkes, "and then it will be nicer - and perhaps warmer, too." The gentlemen joined them as they were settling themselves round the table, and as many of them stayed, the billiard-room became full. The duty of instructing Alice fell to Jeffrey Palliser, and the next hour passed pleasantly; though not so pleasantly as some of those hours in Switzerland with her cousins. However, Jeffrey Palliser took great trouble to teach her, and once or twice made her laugh by quizzing the Duchess's attitude as she stood up to make her stroke. "I wish I could play billiards," said Mrs. Sparkes. "I thought you said you were coming to play," said the Duchess, with a tone of triumph at her own successes. "Only to see your Grace," said Mrs. Sparkes. "I don't know that there is anything to see," said the Duchess. "Mr. Palliser, that was a cannon. Will you mark that for our side?" "Oh no, Duchess, you hit the same ball twice." "Very well; then I suppose Miss Vavasor plays now. Will you mark a miss, if you please?" Before long, the Duchess, with her partner, Lady Glencora, won the game, and made her way back into the drawing-room with a step which seemed to declare that she had trumped Mrs. Sparkes at last. Not long after this the ladies went upstairs to bed. "I'll come into your room just for one minute," Lady Glencora said to Alice; and having dismissed the maid, she sat down by the fireside. "I must keep you up for a quarter of an hour while I tell you something," she said. "But first of all, how do you like the people? Will you be comfortable with them?" Alice of course said that she thought she would; and then there came that little discussion about Mr. Bott, the man with the red hair. "But I've got something to tell you," said Lady Glencora. "Look at the fire while I say it." "Is it anything terrible?" "It's nothing wrong." "Oh, Lady Glencora, if it's-" "Don't call me Lady Glencora. Don't I call you Alice? Why are you so unkind? I am not asking you to do anything that you ought not to do." "But you are going to tell me something." Alice felt sure that it would be about Mr. Fitzgerald. "Of course I am. I'm going to tell you that in writing to you the other day I wrote a fib. It wasn't that I wished to deceive you; only I couldn't say it all in a letter." "Say all what?" "I confessed that I had been very bad in not coming to you in London last year." "I never thought of it for a moment." "You did not care whether I came or not? But never mind. Why should you have cared? But I cared. I was longing to come to you every day. But I feared I could not come without speaking of him; - and I had determined never to speak of him again." This she said in a peculiar low voice. "Then why do it now, Lady Glencora?" "Call me Cora. I had an older sister once, and she used to call me Cora. If she had lived- But never mind. She didn't live. I'll tell you why I do it now. Because I cannot help it. Besides, I've met him. I've been in the same room with him, and have spoken to him." "You have met him?" "Yes; Mr. Palliser knew all about it. When he talked of taking me to the house, I whispered to him that I thought Burgo would be there." "Do not call him by his Christian name," said Alice, almost with a shudder. "Why not? I did when I told my husband. Or perhaps I said Burgo Fitzgerald." "Well." "And he bade me go. He said it didn't signify, and that I had better learn to bear it. Bear it, indeed! If I am to meet him, and speak to him, and look at him, surely I may mention his name?" "What am I to say?" exclaimed Alice. "Anything you please, that's not a falsehood. But I don't think you will tell a falsehood. Oh, Alice, I do so want to go right, and it is so hard!" Hard, indeed, poor creature, for one so weighted as she had been, and sent out into the world with so little in the way of training or friendship! Alice began to feel now that she had been enticed to Matching Priory because her cousin wanted a friend. She got up from her chair, and kneeling down at the other's feet she kissed her. "I knew you would be good to me," said Lady Glencora. "And you may say whatever you like. But I could not bear that you should not know the real reason why I did not visit you or send for you in London. You'll come to me now; won't you, dear?" "Yes; and you'll come to me," said Alice. "I will," said Lady Glencora. "We shall have dinners and parties and lots of people." "And we shall have none," said Alice, smiling. "And therefore there is so much more reason for your coming to me. Well, dear, I'm so glad I've told you." Then she smiled and returned Alice's kiss. It was singular to see her standing on the bedroom rug in her magnificent dress, but with her hair pushed back behind her ears and her eyes red with tears, as though the burden of the magnificence remained to her after its purpose was over. "I declare it's long past twelve. Good night, dear. I wonder whether he's come up. But I would have heard his step. He seldom finishes work till after one, and sometimes goes on till three. It's the only thing he likes, I believe. God bless you! good night. I've such a lot more to say to you; and Alice, you must tell me something about yourself, too; won't you, dear?" Then without waiting for an answer Lady Glencora went, leaving Alice in a maze of bewilderment. She could hardly believe all she had heard and done since she left Queen Anne Street that morning.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 23: Dinner at Matching Priory

Mr. Grey's answer to Alice Vavasor's letter, which was duly sent by return of post and duly received on the morning after Lady Macleod's visit, may perhaps be taken as giving a sample of his worthiness. It was dated from Nethercoats, a small country-house in Cambridgeshire which belonged to him, at which he already spent much of his time, and at which he intended to live altogether after his marriage. Nethercoats, June, 186--. DEAREST ALICE, I am glad you have settled your affairs,--foreign affairs, I mean,--so much to your mind. As to your home affairs they are not, to my thinking, quite so satisfactorily arranged. But as I am a party interested in the latter my opinion may perhaps have an undue bias. Touching the tour, I quite agree with you that you and Kate would have been uncomfortable alone. It's a very fine theory, that of women being able to get along without men as well as with them; but, like other fine theories, it will be found very troublesome by those who first put it in practice. Gloved hands, petticoats, feminine softness, and the general homage paid to beauty, all stand in the way of success. These things may perhaps some day be got rid of, and possibly with advantage; but while young ladies are still encumbered with them a male companion will always be found to be a comfort. I don't quite know whether your cousin George is the best possible knight you might have chosen. I should consider myself to be infinitely preferable, had my going been upon the cards. Were you in danger of meeting Paynim foes, he, no doubt, would kill them off much quicker than I could do, and would be much more serviceable in liberating you from the dungeons of oppressors, or even from stray tigers in the Swiss forests. But I doubt his being punctual with the luggage. He will want you or Kate to keep the accounts, if any are kept. He will be slow in getting you glasses of water at the railway stations, and will always keep you waiting at breakfast. I hold that a man with two ladies on a tour should be an absolute slave to them, or they will not fully enjoy themselves. He should simply be an upper servant, with the privilege of sitting at the same table with his mistresses. I have my doubts as to whether your cousin is fit for the place; but, as to myself, it is just the thing that I was made for. Luckily, however, neither you nor Kate are without wills of your own, and perhaps you may be able to reduce Mr. Vavasor to obedience. As to the home affairs I have very little to say here,--in this letter. I shall of course run up and see you before you start, and shall probably stay a week in town. I know I ought not to do so, as it will be a week of idleness, and yet not a week of happiness. I'd sooner have an hour with you in the country than a whole day in London. And I always feel in town that I've too much to do to allow of my doing anything. If it were sheer idleness I could enjoy it, but it is a feverish idleness, in which one is driven here and there, expecting some gratification which not only never comes, but which never even begins to come. I will, however, undergo a week of it,--say the last seven days of this month, and shall trust to you to recompense me by as much of yourself as your town doings will permit. And now again as to those home affairs. If I say nothing now I believe you will understand why I refrain. You have cunningly just left me to imply, from what you say, that all my arguments have been of no avail; but you do not answer them, or even tell me that you have decided. I shall therefore imply nothing, and still trust to my personal eloquence for success. Or rather not trust,--not trust, but hope. The garden is going on very well. We are rather short of water, and therefore not quite as bright as I had hoped; but we are preparing with untiring industry for future brightness. Your commands have been obeyed in all things, and Morrison always says "The mistress didn't mean this," or "The mistress did intend that." God bless the mistress is what I now say, and send her home, to her own home, to her flowers, and her fruit, and her house, and her husband, as soon as may be, with no more of these delays which are to me so grievous, and which seem to me to be so unnecessary. That is my prayer. Yours ever and always, J. G. "I didn't give commands," Alice said to herself, as she sat with the letter at her solitary breakfast-table. "He asked me how I liked the things, and of course I was obliged to say. I was obliged to seem to care, even if I didn't care." Such were her first thoughts as she put the letter back into its envelope, after reading it the second time. When she opened it, which she did quickly, not pausing a moment lest she should suspect herself of fearing to see what might be its contents, her mind was full of that rebuke which her aunt had anticipated, and which she had almost taught herself to expect. She had torn the letter open rapidly, and had dashed at its contents with quick eyes. In half a moment she had seen what was the nature of the reply respecting the proposed companion of her tour, and then she had completed her reading slowly enough. "No; I gave no commands," she repeated to herself, as though she might thereby absolve herself from blame in reference to some possible future accusations, which might perhaps be brought against her under certain circumstances which she was contemplating. Then she considered the letter bit by bit, taking it backwards, and sipping her tea every now and then amidst her thoughts. No; she had no home, no house, there. She had no husband;--not as yet. He spoke of their engagement as though it were a betrothal, as betrothals used to be of yore; as though they were already in some sort married. Such betrothals were not made now-a-days. There still remained, both to him and to her, a certain liberty of extricating themselves from this engagement. Should he come to her and say that he found that their contemplated marriage would not make him happy, would not she release him without a word of reproach? Would not she regard him as much more honourable in doing so than in adhering to a marriage which was distasteful to him? And if she would so judge him,--judge him and certainly acquit him, was it not reasonable that she under similar circumstances should expect a similar acquittal? Then she declared to herself that she carried on this argument within her own breast simply as an argument, induced to do so by that assertion on his part that he was already her husband,--that his house was even now her home. She had no intention of using that power which was still hers. She had no wish to go back from her pledged word. She thought that she had no such wish. She loved him much, and admired him even more than she loved him. He was noble, generous, clever, good,--so good as to be almost perfect; nay, for aught she knew he was perfect. Would that he had some faults! Would that he had! Would that he had! How could she, full of faults as she knew herself to be,--how could she hope to make happy a man perfect as he was! But then there would be no doubt as to her present duty. She loved him, and that was everything. Having told him that she loved him, and having on that score accepted his love, nothing but a change in her heart towards him could justify her in seeking to break the bond which bound them together. She did love him, and she loved him only. But she had once loved her cousin. Yes, truly it was so. In her thoughts she did not now deny it. She had loved him, and was tormented by a feeling that she had had a more full delight in that love than in this other that had sprung up subsequently. She had told herself that this had come of her youth;--that love at twenty was sweeter than it could be afterwards. There had been a something of rapture in that earlier dream which could never be repeated,--which could never live, indeed, except in a dream. Now, now that she was older and perhaps wiser, love meant a partnership, in which each partner would be honest to the other, in which each would wish and strive for the other's welfare, so that thus their joint welfare might be insured. Then, in those early girlish days, it had meant a total abnegation of self. The one was of earth, and therefore possible. The other had been a ray from heaven,--and impossible, except in a dream. And she had been mistaken in her first love. She admitted that frankly. He whom she had worshipped had been an idol of clay, and she knew that it was well for her to have abandoned that idolatry. He had not only been untrue to her, but, worse than that, had been false in excusing his untruth. He had not only promised falsely, but had made such promises with a deliberate, premeditated falsehood. And he had been selfish, coldly selfish, weighing the value of his own low lusts against that of her holy love. She had known this, and had parted from him with an oath to herself that no promised contrition on his part should ever bring them again together. But she had pardoned him as a man, though never as a lover, and had bade him welcome again as a cousin and as her friend's brother. She had again become very anxious as to his career, not hiding her regard, but professing that anxiety aloud. She knew him to be clever, ambitious, bold,--and she believed even yet, in spite of her own experience, that he might not be bad at heart. Now, as she told herself that in truth she loved the man to whom her troth was plighted, I fear that she almost thought more of that other man from whom she had torn herself asunder. "Why should he find himself unhappy in London?" she said, as she went back to the letter. "Why should he pretend to condemn the very place which most men find the fittest for all their energies? Were I a man, no earthly consideration should induce me to live elsewhere. It is odd how we differ in all things. However brilliant might be his own light, he would be contented to hide it under a bushel!" And at last she recurred to that matter as to which she had been so anxious when she first opened her lover's letter. It will be remembered how assured she had expressed herself that Mr. Grey would not condescend to object to her travelling with her cousin. He had not so condescended. He had written on the matter with a pleasant joke, like a gentleman as he was, disdaining to allude to the past passages in the life of her whom he loved, abstaining even from expressing anything that might be taken as a permission on his part. There had been in Alice's words, as she told him of their proposed plan, a something that had betrayed a tremor in her thoughts. She had studiously striven so to frame her phrases that her tale might be told as any other simple statement,--as though there had been no trembling in her mind as she wrote. But she had failed, and she knew that she had failed. She had failed; and he had read all her effort and all her failure. She was quite conscious of this; she felt it thoroughly; and she knew that he was noble and a gentleman to the last drop of his blood. And yet--yet--yet there was almost a feeling of disappointment in that he had not written such a letter as Lady Macleod had anticipated. During the next week Lady Macleod still came almost daily to Queen Anne Street, but nothing further was said between her and Miss Vavasor as to the Swiss tour; nor were any questions asked about Mr. Grey's opinion on the subject. The old lady of course discovered that there was no quarrel, or, as she believed, any probability of a quarrel; and with that she was obliged to be contented. Nor did she again on this occasion attempt to take Alice to Lady Midlothian's. Indeed, their usual subjects of conversation were almost abandoned, and Lady Macleod's visits, though they were as constant as heretofore, were not so long. She did not dare to talk about Mr. Grey, and because she did not so dare, was determined to regard herself as in a degree ill-used. So she was silent, reserved, and fretful. At length came the last day of her London season, and her last visit to her niece. "I would come because it's my last day," said Lady Macleod; "but really I'm so hurried, and have so many things to do, that I hardly know how to manage it." "It's very kind," said Alice, giving her aunt an affectionate squeeze of the hand. "I'm keeping the cab, so I can just stay twenty-five minutes. I've marked the time accurately, but I know the man will swear it's over the half-hour." "You'll have no more trouble about cabs, aunt, when you are back in Cheltenham." "The flies are worse, my dear. I really think they're worse. I pay the bill every month, but they've always one down that I didn't have. It's the regular practice, for I've had them from all the men in the place." "It's hard enough to find honest men anywhere, I suppose." "Or honest women either. What do you think of Mrs. Green wanting to charge me for an extra week, because she says I didn't give her notice till Tuesday morning? I won't pay her, and she may stop my things if she dares. However, it's the last time. I shall never come up to London again, my dear." "Oh, aunt, don't say that!" "But I do say it, my dear. What should an old woman like me do, trailing up to town every year, merely because it's what people choose to call the season." "To see your friends, of course. Age doesn't matter when a person's health is so good as yours." "If you knew what I suffer from lumbago,--though I must say coming to London always does cure that for the time. But as for friends--! Well, I suppose one has no right to complain when one gets to be as old as I am; but I declare I believe that those I love best would sooner be without me than with me." "Do you mean me, aunt?" "No, my dear, I don't mean you. Of course my life would have been very different if you could have consented to remain with me till you were married. But I didn't mean you. I don't know that I meant any one. You shouldn't mind what an old woman like me says." "You're a little melancholy because you're going away." "No, indeed. I don't know why I stayed the last week. I did say to Lady Midlothian that I thought I should go on the 20th; and, though I know that she knew that I really didn't go, she has not once sent to me since. To be sure they've been out every night; but I thought she might have asked me to come and lunch. It's so very lonely dining by myself in lodgings in London." "And yet you never will come and dine with me." "No, my dear; no. But we won't talk about that. I've just one word more to say. Let me see. I've just six minutes to stay. I've made up my mind that I'll never come up to town again,--except for one thing." "And what's that, aunt?" Alice, as she asked the question, well knew what that one thing was. "I'll come for your marriage, my dear. I do hope you will not keep me long waiting." "Ah! I can't make any promise. There's no knowing when that may be." "And why should there be no knowing? I always think that when a girl is once engaged the sooner she's married the better. There may be reasons for delay on the gentleman's part." "There very often are, you know," "But, Alice, you don't mean to say that Mr. Grey is putting it off?" Alice was silent for a moment, during which Lady Macleod's face assumed a look of almost tragic horror. Was there something wrong on Mr. Grey's side of which she was altogether unaware? Alice, though for a second or two she had been guilty of a slight playful deceit, was too honest to allow the impression to remain. "No, aunt," she said; "Mr. Grey is not putting it off. It has been left to me to fix the time." "And why don't you fix it?" "It is such a serious thing! After all it is not more than four months yet since I--I accepted him. I don't know that there has been any delay." "But you might fix the time now, if he wishes it." "Well, perhaps I shall,--some day, aunt. I'm going to think about it, and you mustn't drive me." "But you should have some one to advise you, Alice." "Ah! that's just it. People always do seem to think it so terrible that a girl should have her own way in anything. She mustn't like any one at first; and then, when she does like some one, she must marry him directly she's bidden. I haven't much of my own way at present; but you see, when I'm married I shan't have it at all. You can't wonder that I shouldn't be in a hurry." "I am not advocating anything like hurry, my dear. But, goodness gracious me! I've been here twenty-eight minutes, and that horrid man will impose upon me. Good-bye; God bless you! Mind you write." And Lady Macleod hurried out of the room more intent at the present moment upon saving her sixpence than she was on any other matter whatsoever. And then John Grey came up to town, arriving a day or two after the time that he had fixed. It is not, perhaps, improbable that Alice had used some diplomatic skill in preventing a meeting between Lady Macleod and her lover. They both were very anxious to obtain the same object, and Alice was to some extent opposed to their views. Had Lady Macleod and John Grey put their forces together she might have found herself unable to resist their joint endeavours. She was resolved that she would not at any rate name any day for her marriage before her return from Switzerland; and she may therefore have thought it wise to keep Mr. Grey in the country till after Lady Macleod had gone, even though she thereby cut down the time of his sojourn in London to four days. On the occasion of that visit Mr. Vavasor did a very memorable thing. He dined at home with the view of welcoming his future son-in-law. He dined at home, and asked, or rather assented to Alice's asking, George and Kate Vavasor to join the dinner-party. "What an auspicious omen for the future nuptials!" said Kate, with her little sarcastic smile. "Uncle John dines at home, and Mr. Grey joins in the dissipation of a dinner-party. We shall all be changed soon, I suppose, and George and I will take to keeping a little cottage in the country." "Kate," said Alice, angrily, "I think you are about the most unjust person I ever met. I would forgive your raillery, however painful it might be, if it were only fair." "And to whom is it unfair on the present occasion;--to your father?" "It was not intended for him." "To yourself?" "I care nothing as to myself; you know that very well." "Then it must have been unfair to Mr. Grey." "Yes; it was Mr. Grey whom you meant to attack. If I can forgive him for not caring for society, surely you might do so." "Exactly; but that's just what you can't do, my dear. You don't forgive him. If you did you might be quite sure that I should say nothing. And if you choose to bid me hold my tongue I will say nothing. But when you tell me all your own thoughts about this thing you can hardly expect but that I should let you know mine in return. I'm not particular; and if you are ready for a little good, wholesome, useful hypocrisy, I won't balk you. I mayn't be quite so dishonest as you call me, but I'm not so wedded to truth but what I can look, and act, and speak a few falsehoods if you wish it. Only let us understand each other." "You know I wish for no falsehood, Kate." "I know it's very hard to understand what you do wish. I know that for the last year or two I have been trying to find out your wishes, and, upon my word, my success has been very indifferent. I suppose you wish to marry Mr. Grey, but I'm by no means certain. I suppose the last thing on earth you'd wish would be to marry George?" "The very last. You're right there at any rate." "Alice--! sometimes you drive me too hard; you do, indeed. You make me doubt whether I hate or love you most. Knowing what my feelings are about George, I cannot understand how you can bring yourself to speak of him to me with such contempt!" Kate Vavasor, as she spoke these words, left the room with a quick step, and hurried up to her own chamber. There Alice found her in tears, and was driven by her friend's real grief into the expression of an apology, which she knew was not properly due from her. Kate was acquainted with all the circumstances of that old affair between her brother and Alice. She had given in her adhesion to the propriety of what Alice had done. She had allowed that her brother George's behaviour had been such as to make any engagement between them impossible. The fault, therefore, had been hers in making any reference to the question of such a marriage. Nor had it been by any means her first fault of the same kind. Till Alice had become engaged to Mr. Grey she had spoken of George only as her brother, or as her friend's cousin, but now she was constantly making allusion to those past occurrences, which all of them should have striven to forget. Under these circumstances was not Lady Macleod right in saying that George Vavasor should not have been accepted as a companion for the Swiss tour? [Illustration: "Sometimes you drive me too hard."] The little dinner-party went off very quietly; and if no other ground existed for charging Mr. Grey with London dissipation than what that afforded, he was accused most unjustly. The two young men had never before met each other; and Vavasor had gone to his uncle's house, prepared not only to dislike but to despise his successor in Alice's favour. But in this he was either disappointed or gratified, as the case may be. "He has plenty to say for himself," he said to Kate on his way home. "Oh yes; he can talk." "And he doesn't talk like a prig either, which was what I expected. He's uncommonly handsome." "I thought men never saw that in each other. I never see it in any man." "I see it in every animal--in men, women, horses, dogs, and even pigs. I like to look on handsome things. I think people always do who are ugly themselves." "And so you're going into raptures in favour of John Grey." "No, I'm not. I very seldom go into raptures about anything. But he talks in the way I like a man to talk. How he bowled my uncle over about those actors; and yet if my uncle knows anything about anything it is about the stage twenty years ago." There was nothing more said then about John Grey; but Kate understood her brother well enough to be aware that this praise meant very little. George Vavasor spoke sometimes from his heart, and did so more frequently to his sister than to any one else; but his words came generally from his head. On the day after the little dinner in Queen Anne Street, John Grey came to say good-bye to his betrothed;--for his betrothed she certainly was, in spite of those very poor arguments which she had used in trying to convince herself that she was still free if she wished to claim her freedom. Though he had been constantly with Alice during the last three days, he had not hitherto said anything as to the day of their marriage. He had been constantly with her alone, sitting for hours in that ugly green drawing-room, but he had never touched the subject. He had told her much of Switzerland, which she had never yet seen but which he knew well. He had told her much of his garden and house, whither she had once gone with her father, whilst paying a visit nominally to the colleges at Cambridge. And he had talked of various matters, matters bearing in no immediate way upon his own or her affairs; for Mr. Grey was a man who knew well how to make words pleasant; but previous to this last moment he had said nothing on that subject on which he was so intent. "Well, Alice," he said, when the last hour had come, "and about that question of home affairs?" "Let us finish off the foreign affairs first." "We have finished them; haven't we?" "Finished them! why we haven't started yet." "No; you haven't started. But we've had the discussion. Is there any reason why you'd rather not have this thing settled." "No; no special reason." "Then why not let it be fixed? Do you fear coming to me as my wife?" "No." "I cannot think that you repent your goodness to me." "No; I don't repent it;--what you call my goodness? I love you too entirely for that." "My darling!" And now he passed his arm round her waist as they stood near the empty fireplace. "And if you love me--" "I do love you." "Then why should you not wish to come to me?" "I do wish it. I think I wish it." "But, Alice, you must have wished it altogether when you consented to be my wife." "A person may wish for a thing altogether, and yet not wish for it instantly." "Instantly! Come; I have not been hard on you. This is still June. Will you say the middle of September, and we shall still be in time for warm pleasant days among the lakes? Is that asking for too much?" "It is not asking for anything." "Nay, but it is, love. Grant it, and I will swear that you have granted me everything." She was silent, having things to say but not knowing in what words to put them. Now that he was with her she could not say the things which she had told herself that she would utter to him. She could not bring herself to hint to him that his views of life were so unlike her own, that there could be no chance of happiness between them, unless each could strive to lean somewhat towards the other. No man could be more gracious in word and manner than John Grey; no man more chivalrous in his carriage towards a woman; but he always spoke and acted as though there could be no question that his manner of life was to be adopted, without a word or thought of doubting, by his wife. When two came together, why should not each yield something, and each claim something? This she had meant to say to him on this day; but now that he was with her she could not say it. "John," she said at last, "do not press me about this till I return." "But then you will say the time is short. It would be short then." "I cannot answer you now;--indeed, I cannot. That is I cannot answer in the affirmative. It is such a solemn thing." "Will it ever be less solemn, dearest?" "Never, I hope never." He did not press her further then, but kissed her and bade her farewell.

Alice received Mr. Grey's answer to her letter the next morning. It was written at Nethercoats, his small country-house in Cambridgeshire, where he spent much of his time, and intended to live after his marriage. Dearest Alice, I am glad you have settled your foreign affairs so much to your liking. As for your home affairs, they are not, to my thinking, quite so satisfactorily arranged. But as I am involved in them, I may be biased. About the tour, I quite agree that you and Kate would have been uncomfortable alone. It's a very fine theory that women can get along without men just as well; but, like other fine theories, it will be found very troublesome by those who first try it, and a male companion will be a comfort. I don't quite know whether your cousin George is the best possible knight you might have chosen. I should consider myself to be infinitely preferable, if it were possible. If you should meet Paynim foes, he, no doubt, would kill them off much quicker than I could do, and would be much more useful in rescuing you from dungeons, or from any stray tigers in the Swiss forests. But I doubt if he will be punctual with the luggage. He will be slow in getting you glasses of water at railway stations, and will always keep you waiting at breakfast. I believe that a man with two ladies on a tour should be an absolute slave to them. I have my doubts as to whether your cousin is fit for the position; but, as to myself, it is just the thing that I was made for. Luckily, however, neither you nor Kate are without wills of your own, and perhaps you may be able to reduce Mr. Vavasor to obedience. As to the home affairs, I have very little to say in this letter. I shall of course run up and see you before you start, and shall probably stay a week in town. I know I ought not to do so, as it will be a week of idleness, and yet not a week of happiness. I'd sooner have an hour with you in the country than a whole day in London. And in town it is a feverish idleness, in which one is driven here and there, expecting some gratification which never comes. I will come for the last week of this month, and hope to see as much of you as your town doings will permit. About those home affairs: I believe you will understand why I saying nothing now. Perhaps all my arguments have been of no use; but as you do not answer them, I shall still trust to my eloquence in person for success. The garden is going on very well. Your commands have been obeyed in all things, and Morrison always says "The mistress didn't mean this," or "The mistress intended that." God bless the mistress is what I now say, and send her home, to her flowers, and her house, and her husband, as soon as may be, with no more of these delays which are to me so grievous, and which seem to me to be so unnecessary. That is my prayer. Yours ever and always, J. G. "I didn't give commands," Alice said to herself, as she sat with the letter at her solitary breakfast-table. "He asked me how I liked the things, and of course I was obliged to say, even if I didn't care." Such were her first thoughts after reading the letter the second time. When she opened it, her mind was full of that rebuke which she had almost taught herself to expect. She had torn the letter open rapidly, and scanned it with quick eyes. In half a moment she had seen the nature of the reply about her companion for the tour, and then she had finished reading slowly. "No; I gave no commands," she repeated, as though to absolve herself from blame in any possible future accusations. Then she considered the letter bit by bit, taking it backwards. No; she had no home, no house, there. She had no husband; not yet. He spoke of their engagement as though they were already in some way married. Yet they were both still free to withdraw from the engagement. If he came to her and said that he found that their marriage would not make him happy, would not she release him without a word of reproach? Would not she regard it as an honourable act? And if things were the other way round, was it not reasonable that she should expect a similar acquittal? Then she told herself that it was theoretical. She had no intention of going back from her word. She loved him much, and admired him even more than she loved him. He was noble, generous, clever, good - almost perfect. If only he had some faults! How could she, full of faults as she knew herself to be, make such a perfect man happy? But there was no doubt as to her present duty. She loved him, and having accepted his love, nothing but a change in her heart could justify her in seeking to break the engagement. She did love him, and him only. However, she had once loved her cousin. Yes, it was true. In her thoughts she did not deny it. She had loved him, and was tormented by a feeling that she had had a more full delight in that love than in this. She had told herself that this was a result of her youth; that love at twenty was sweeter and more rapturous than it could be afterwards. Now that she was older and perhaps wiser, love meant a partnership, in which each partner would be honest to the other, in which each would strive for the other's welfare. This love was of earth, and therefore possible. The other had been a ray from heaven - and impossible, except in a dream. And she had been mistaken in her first love. She admitted that frankly. She had worshipped an idol of clay, and had done the best thing in abandoning that idolatry. George had not only been untrue to her, but had made false excuses. He had made promises with a deliberate, premeditated falsehood. And he had been coldly selfish, weighing the value of his own low lusts against that of her love. She had known this, and had parted vowing to herself that no contrition on his part should ever bring them together again. But though she did not pardon him as a lover, she had again welcomed him as a cousin, and as her friend Kate's brother. She had become very anxious about his career. She knew him to be clever, ambitious, bold - and perhaps not bad at heart. Now, as she told herself that she loved John Grey, I fear that she almost thought more of that other man from whom she had torn herself apart. "Why should Mr. Grey find himself unhappy in London?" she said, as she went back to the letter. "Why condemn the place which most men find the fittest for their energies? If I were I a man, I would live there. It is odd how we differ in all things. However brilliant his own light might be, he would be contented to hide it under a bushel!" And at last she reflected on his response to her travelling with her cousin. He had written on the matter with a pleasant joke, like a gentleman, without alluding to the past or implying that she needed his permission. When Alice had told him of their plan, she had tried to make it a simple, ordinary statement; but she knew that she had failed, and that he had read her failure. She was quite conscious of this; and she knew that he was a gentleman to the last drop of his blood. And yet - yet there was almost a feeling of disappointment that he had not written a disapproving letter such as Lady Macleod had anticipated. During the next week Lady Macleod still came almost daily to see Alice, but nothing was said about the Swiss tour; nor did she ask about Mr. Grey's opinion. When the old lady discovered that there was no quarrel, she had to be contented. Nor did she again attempt to take Alice to Lady Midlothian's. Indeed, their usual subjects of conversation were almost abandoned. Lady Macleod did not dare to talk about Mr. Grey, and became silent, reserved, and fretful. At length came the last day of her London season, and her last visit to her niece. "I came because it's my last day," said Lady Macleod; "even though I have so many things to do." "It's very kind," said Alice, giving her aunt an affectionate squeeze of the hand. "I'm keeping the cab, so I can just stay twenty-five minutes. I've marked the time accurately, but I know the man will swear it's over the half-hour." "You'll have no more trouble about cabs, aunt, when you are back in Cheltenham." "It's my last time here. I shall never come up to London again, my dear." "Oh, aunt, don't say that!" "But I do say it, my dear. Why should an old woman like me come trailing up to town every year?" "To see your friends, of course. Age doesn't matter when a person's health is as good as yours." "If you knew what I suffer from lumbago. But as for friends-! Well, I suppose one has no right to complain; but I believe that those I love best would rather be without me than with me." "Do you mean me, aunt?" "No, my dear, I don't mean you. I don't know that I meant any one. You shouldn't mind what an old woman like me says." "You're a little melancholy because you're going away." "No, indeed. I don't know why I stayed the last week. Though I told Lady Midlothian that I should be leaving, she has not once asked me even to lunch since. It's so very lonely dining by myself in lodgings." "And yet you never will come and dine with me." "No, my dear. But we won't talk about that. I've just one word more to say. I've six minutes. I've made up my mind that I'll never come up to town again - except for one thing." "And what's that, aunt?" Alice already knew the answer. "Your marriage, my dear. I do hope you will not keep me waiting long." "Ah! I can't make any promise. There's no knowing when that may be." "Why not? When a girl is once engaged, the sooner she's married the better. You don't mean to say that Mr. Grey is putting it off?" Alice was silent for a moment, while Lady Macleod's face assumed a look of almost tragic horror. Alice was too honest to allow the impression to remain. "No, aunt," she said; "Mr. Grey is not putting it off. It has been left to me to fix the day." "And why don't you fix it?" "It is such a serious thing! After all, it is not more than four months yet since I - I accepted him." "But you might fix the day now." "Well, perhaps I shall - some time, aunt. I'm going to think about it, and you mustn't push me." "But you should have someone to advise you, Alice." "Ah! that's just it. People always do seem to think it so terrible that a girl should have her own way in anything. She mustn't like any one at first; and then, when she does like someone, she must marry him as soon as she's told. I haven't much of my own way at present; but when I'm married I shan't have it at all. So I'm in no hurry." "I am not advocating any hurry, my dear. But, goodness me! I've been here twenty-eight minutes, and that horrid man will impose upon me. Good-bye; God bless you! Mind you write." And Lady Macleod hurried out. Then John Grey came up to town. Alice may have used some diplomatic skill in preventing a meeting between Lady Macleod and her lover, for if they had put their forces together she might have found herself unable to resist their joint endeavours. She was resolved not to name any day for her marriage before her return from Switzerland. During this visit of Mr. Grey's to London, Mr. Vavasor did a very memorable thing. He dined at home to welcome his future son-in-law; and asked, or rather agreed to Alice's asking, George and Kate Vavasor to join the dinner-party. "What an auspicious omen for your marriage!" said Kate, with her little sarcastic smile. "Uncle John dines at home, and Mr. Grey joins in the dissipation of a dinner-party. We shall all be changed soon, I suppose, and George and I will take to keeping a little cottage in the country." "Kate," said Alice, angrily, "I think you are about the most unjust person I ever met." "And to whom am I being unjust; to your father?" "It was Mr. Grey whom you meant to attack. If I can forgive him for not caring for society, surely you might do so." "Exactly; but you can't, my dear. You don't forgive him. If you did, I would say nothing. But when you tell me all your own thoughts about it you can hardly expect me to keep quiet. Still, if you are ready for a little useful hypocrisy, I won't prevent you. I mayn't be quite so dishonest as you call me, but I can speak a few falsehoods if you wish it. Only let us understand each other." "You know I wish for no falsehood, Kate." "It's very hard to understand what you do wish. For the last year or two I have been trying to find out your wishes, without success. I suppose you wish to marry Mr. Grey, but I'm by no means certain. I suppose the last thing on earth you'd wish would be to marry George?" "The very last. You're right there at any rate." "Alice! You make me doubt whether I hate or love you most. Knowing what my feelings are about George, I cannot understand how you can bring yourself to speak of him with such contempt!" Kate Vavasor left the room quickly, and hurried up to her own chamber. There Alice found her in tears, and was driven by her friend's real grief into making an apology which she felt she did not owe. Kate knew all the circumstances of that old affair between her brother and Alice. She had agreed with the propriety of what Alice had done. She had admitted that her brother George's behaviour had made any engagement impossible. The fault had been hers, in referring to the possibility of such a marriage. It had not been for the first time. Since Alice had become engaged to Mr. Grey, Kate had been constantly mentioning those past events, which all of them should have tried to forget. Under these circumstances was not Lady Macleod right in saying that George Vavasor should not have been accepted as a companion for the Swiss tour? The little dinner-party went off very quietly. The two young men had never before met each other; and George Vavasor had gone to his uncle's house, prepared not only to dislike but to despise his successor. But in this he was disappointed. "He has plenty to say for himself," he said to Kate on his way home. "Oh yes; he can talk." "And he doesn't talk like a prig either, like I expected. He's uncommonly handsome." "So you're going into raptures in favour of John Grey." "No, I'm not. I very seldom go into raptures about anything. But he talks in the way I like a man to talk." There was nothing more said then about John Grey; but Kate understood her brother well enough to be aware that this praise meant very little. George Vavasor spoke sometimes from his heart, but generally from his head. On the day after the little dinner, John Grey came to say good-bye to Alice. Though he had been constantly with her during the last three days, he had not said anything about the day of their marriage. He had told her much of Switzerland, which he knew well, and of his house and garden, and other matters, for Mr. Grey was a man who knew how to make words pleasant; but he had said nothing on that subject on which he was so intent. "Well, Alice," he said, when the last hour had come, "and about that question of home affairs. Is there any reason why you'd rather not have this thing settled?" "No; no special reason." "Then why not let it be fixed? Do you fear coming to me as my wife?" "No." "I cannot think that you repent your goodness to me." "No; I love you too entirely for that." "My darling!" He passed his arm round her waist. "Then why should you not wish to come to me?" "I do wish it, I think. But a person may wish for a thing, and yet not wish for it instantly." "Instantly! Come; I have not been hard on you. This is still June. Will you say the middle of September, and we shall still be in time for warm pleasant days among the lakes? Is that asking for too much?" "It is not asking for anything." "Nay, but it is, love. Grant it, and I will swear that you have granted me everything." She was silent, not knowing what words to use. Now that he was with her she could not say the things which she had told herself that she would say to him. She could not bring herself to hint that his views of life were so unlike her own that there could be no chance of happiness between them, unless each could strive to lean towards the other. No man could be more gracious or chivalrous than John Grey; but he always spoke as though there could be no question that his manner of life was to be adopted, without a thought of doubting, by his wife. Why should not each yield something, and each claim something? This she had meant to say to him; but now that he was with her she could not say it. "John," she said at last, "do not press me about this till I return. I cannot answer you now; it is such a solemn thing." "Will it ever be less solemn, dearest?" "Never, I hope." He did not press her further then, but kissed her and bade her farewell.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 3: John Grey, the Worthy Man

When Mrs. Greenow was left alone in her lodgings, after the little entertainment which she had given to her two lovers, she sat herself down to think seriously over her affairs. There were three paths open before her. She might take Mr. Cheesacre, or she might take Captain Bellfield--or she might decide that she would have nothing more to say to either of them in the way of courting. They were very persistent, no doubt; but she thought that she would know how to make them understand her, if she should really make up her mind that she would have neither one nor the other. She was going to leave Norwich after Easter, and they knew that such was her purpose. Something had been said of her returning to Yarmouth in the summer. She was a just woman at heart, and justice required that each of them should know what was to be his prospect if she did so return. There was a good deal to be said on Mr. Cheesacre's behalf. Mahogany-furnitured bedrooms assist one's comfort in this life; and heaps of manure, though they are not brilliant in romance, are very efficacious in farming. Mrs. Greenow by no means despised these things; and as for the owner of them, though she saw that there was much amiss in his character, she thought that his little foibles were of such a nature that she, as his wife, or any other woman of spirit, might be able to repress them, if not to cure them. But she had already married for money once, as she told herself very plainly on this occasion, and she thought that she might now venture on a little love. Her marriage for money had been altogether successful. The nursing of old Greenow had not been very disagreeable to her, nor had it taken longer than she had anticipated. She had now got all the reward that she had ever promised herself, and she really did feel grateful to his memory. I almost think that among those plentiful tears some few drops belonged to sincerity. She was essentially a happy-tempered woman, blessed with a good digestion, who looked back upon her past life with contentment, and forward to her future life with confidence. She would not be greedy, she said to herself. She did not want more money, and therefore she would have none of Mr. Cheesacre. So far she resolved,--resolving also that, if possible, the mahogany-furnitured bedrooms should be kept in the family, and made over to her niece, Kate Vavasor. But should she marry for love; and if so, should Captain Bellfield be the man? Strange to say, his poverty and his scampishness and his lies almost recommended him to her. At any rate, it was not of those things that she was afraid. She had a woman's true belief in her own power, and thought that she could cure them,--as far as they needed cure. As for his stories about Inkerman, and his little debts, she cared nothing about that. She also had her Inkermans, and was quite aware that she made as good use of them as the Captain did of his. And as for the debts,--what was a man to do who hadn't got any money? She also had owed for her gloves and corsets in the ante-Greenow days of her adventures. But there was this danger,--that there might be more behind of which she had never heard. Another Mrs. Bellfield was not impossible; and what, if instead of being a real captain at all, he should be a returned ticket-of-leave man! Such things had happened. Her chief security was in this,--that Cheesacre had known the man for many years, and would certainly have told anything against him that he did know. Under all these circumstances, she could not quite make up her mind either for or against Captain Bellfield. Between nine and ten in the evening, an hour or so after Mr. Cheesacre had left her, Jeannette brought to her some arrowroot with a little sherry in it. She usually dined early, and it was her habit to take a light repast before she retired for the night. "Jeannette," she said, as she stirred the lumps of white sugar in the bowl, "I'm afraid those two gentlemen have quarrelled." "Oh, laws, ma'am, in course they have! How was they to help it?" Jeannette, on these occasions, was in the habit of standing beside the chair of her mistress, and chatting with her; and then, if the chatting was much prolonged, she would gradually sink down upon the corner of a chair herself,--and then the two women would be very comfortable together over the fire, Jeannette never forgetting that she was the servant, and Mrs. Greenow never forgetting that she was the mistress. "And why should they quarrel, Jeannette? It's very foolish." "I don't know about being foolish, ma'am; but it's the most natural thing in life. If I had two beaux as was a-courting me together, in course I should expect as they would punch each other's heads. There's some girls do it a purpose, because they like to see it. One at a time's what I say." "You're a young thing, Jeannette." "Well, ma'am--yes; I am young, no doubt. But I won't say but what I've had a beau, young as I look." "But you don't suppose that I want beaux, as you call them?" "I don't know, ma'am, as you wants 'em exactly. That's as may be. There they are; and if they was to blow each other's brains out in the gig to-night, I shouldn't be a bit surprised for one. There's nothing won't quiet them at Oileymead to-night, if brandy-and-water don't do it." As she said this, Jeannette slipt into her chair, and held up her hands in token of the intensity of her fears. "Why, you silly child, they're not going home together at all. Did not the Captain go away first?" "The Captain did go away first, certainly; but I thought perhaps it was to get his pistols and fighting things ready." "They won't fight, Jeannette. Gentlemen have given over fighting." "Have they, ma'am? That makes it much easier for ladies, no doubt. Perhaps them peaceable ways will come down to such as us in time. It'd be a comfort, I know, to them as are quiet given, like me. I hate to see men knocking each other's heads about,--I do. So Mr. Cheesacre and the Captain won't fight, ma'am?" "Of course they won't, you little fool, you." "Dear, dear; I was so sure we should have had the papers all full of it,--and perhaps one of them stretched upon his bloody bier! I wonder which it would have been? I always made up my mind that the Captain wouldn't be wounded in any of his wital parts--unless it was his heart, you know, ma'am." "But why should they quarrel at all, Jeannette? It is the most foolish thing." "Well, ma'am, I don't know about that. What else is they to do? There's some things as you can cry halves about, but there's no crying halves about this." "About what, Jeannette?"--"Why, about you, ma'am." "Jeannette, I wonder how you can say such things; as if I, in my position, had ever said a word to encourage either of them. You know it's not true, Jeannette, and you shouldn't say so." Whereupon Mrs. Greenow put her handkerchief to her eyes, and Jeannette, probably in token of contrition, put her apron to hers. "To be sure, ma'am, no lady could have behaved better through it than you have done, and goodness knows you have been tried hard." "Indeed I have, Jeannette." "And if gentlemen will make fools of themselves, it isn't your fault; is it, ma'am?" "But I'm so sorry that they should have quarrelled. They were such dear friends, you know;--quite all in all to each other." "When you've settled which it's to be, ma'am, that'll all come right again,--seeing that gentlefolks like them have given up fighting, as you say." Then there was a little pause. "I suppose, ma'am, it won't be Mr. Cheesacre? To be sure, he's a man as is uncommonly well to do in the world." "What's all that to me, Jeannette? I shall ever regard Mr. Cheesacre as a dear friend who has been very good to me at a time of trouble; but he'll never be more than that." "Then it'll be the Captain, ma'am? I'm sure, for my part, I've always thought the Captain was the nicer gentleman of the two,--and have always said so." "He's nothing to me, girl." "And as for money,--what's the good of having more than enough? If he can bring love, you can bring money; can't you, ma'am?" "He's nothing to me, girl," repeated Mrs. Greenow. "But he will be?" said Jeannette, plainly asking a question. "Well, I'm sure! What's the world come to, I wonder, when you sit yourself down there, and cross-examine your mistress in that way! Get to bed, will you? It's near ten o'clock." "I hope I haven't said anything amiss, ma'am;" and Jeannette rose from her seat. "It's my fault for encouraging you," said Mrs. Greenow. "Go down-stairs and finish your work, do; and then take yourself off to bed. Next week we shall have to be packing up, and there'll be all my things to see to before that." So Jeannette got up and departed, and after some few further thoughts about Captain Bellfield, Mrs. Greenow herself went to her bedroom. Mr. Cheesacre, when he drove back to Oileymead alone from Norwich, after dining with Mrs. Greenow, had kept himself hot, and almost comfortable, with passion against Bellfield; and his heat, if not his comfort, had been sustained by his seeing the Captain, with his portmanteau, escaping just as he reached his own homestead. But early on the following morning his mind reverted to Mrs. Greenow, and he remembered, with anything but satisfaction, some of the hard things which she had said to him. He had made mistakes in his manner of wooing. He was quite aware of that now, and was determined that they should be rectified for the future. She had rebuked him for having said nothing about his love. He would instantly mend that fault. And she had bidden him not to be so communicative about his wealth. Henceforth he would be dumb on that subject. Nevertheless, he could not but think that the knowledge of his circumstances which the lady already possessed, must be of service to him. "She can't really like a poor beggarly wretch who hasn't got a shilling," he said to himself. He was very far from feeling that the battle was already lost. Her last word to him had been an assurance of her friendship; and then why should she have been at so much trouble to tell him the way in which he ought to address her if she were herself indifferent as to his addresses? He was, no doubt, becoming tired of his courtship, and heartily wished that the work were over; but he was not minded to give it up. He therefore prepared himself for another attack, and took himself into Norwich without seeking counsel from any one. He could not trust himself to think that she could really wish to refuse him after all the encouragement she had given him. On this occasion he put on no pink shirt or shiny boots, being deterred from doing so by a remembrance of Captain Bellfield's ridicule; but, nevertheless, he dressed himself with considerable care. He clothed his nether person in knickerbockers, with tight, leathern, bright-coloured gaiters round his legs, being conscious of certain manly graces and symmetrical proportions which might, as he thought, stand him in good stead. And he put on a new shooting-coat, the buttons on which were elaborate, and a wonderful waistcoat worked over with foxes' heads. He completed his toilet with a round, low-crowned hat, with dog's-skin gloves, and a cutting whip. Thus armed he went forth resolved to conquer or to die,--as far as death might result from any wound which Mrs. Greenow might be able to give him. He waited, on this occasion, for the coming of no market-day; indeed, the journey into the city was altogether special, and he was desirous that she should know that such was the case. He drove at a great pace into the inn-yard, threw his reins to the ostler, took just one glass of cherry-brandy at the bar, and then marched off across the market-place to the Close, with quiet and decisive steps. "Is that you, Cheesacre?" said a friendly voice, in one of the narrow streets. "Who expected to see you in Norwich on a Thursday!" It was Grimsby, the son of old Grimsby of Hatherwich, a country gentleman, and one, therefore, to whom Cheesacre would generally pay much respect; but on this occasion he did not even pull up for an instant, or moderate his pace. "A little bit of private business," he said, and marched onwards with his head towards the Close. "I'm not going to be afraid of a woman--not if I know it," he said to himself; but, nevertheless, at a certain pastrycook's, of whose shop he had knowledge, he pulled up and had another glass of cherry-brandy. "Mrs. Greenow is at home," he said to Jeannette, not deigning to ask any question. "Oh, yes, sir; she is at home," said Jeannette, conscious that some occasion had arrived; and in another second he was in the presence of his angel. "Mr. Cheesacre, whoever expected to see you in Norwich on a Thursday?" said the lady, as she welcomed him, using almost the same words as his friend had done in the street. Why should not he come into Norwich on a Thursday, as well as any one else? Did they suppose that he was tied for ever to his ploughs and carts? He was minded to conduct himself with a little spirit on this occasion, and to improve the opinion which Mrs. Greenow had formed about him. On this account he answered her somewhat boldly. "There's no knowing when I may be in Norwich, Mrs. Greenow, or when I mayn't. I'm one of those men of whom nobody knows anything certain, except that I pay as I go." Then he remembered that he was not to make any more boasts about his money, and he endeavoured to cover the error. "There's one other thing they may all know if they please, but we won't say what that is just at present." "Won't you sit down, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Well,--thank you,--I will sit down for a few minutes if you'll let me, Mrs. Greenow. Mrs. Greenow, I'm in such a state of mind that I must put an end to it, or else I shall be going mad, and doing somebody a damage." "Dear me! what has happened to you? You're going out shooting, presently; are you not?" and Mrs. Greenow looked down at his garments. "No, Mrs. Greenow, I'm not going out shooting. I put on these things because I thought I might take a shot as I came along. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, and then I wouldn't take them off again. What does it matter what a man wears?" "Not in the least, so long as he is decent." "I'm sure I'm always that, Mrs. Greenow." "Oh, dear, yes. More than that, I should say. I consider you to be rather gay in your attire." "I don't pretend to anything of that kind, Mrs. Greenow. I like to be nice, and all that kind of thing. There are people who think that because a man farms his own land, he must be always in the muck. It is the case, of course, with those who have to make their rent and living out of it." Then he remembered that he was again treading on forbidden ground, and stopped himself. "But it don't matter what a man wears if his heart isn't easy within him." "I don't know why you should speak in that way, Mr. Cheesacre; but it's what I have felt every hour since--since Greenow left me." Mr. Cheesacre was rather at a loss to know how he should begin. This allusion to the departed one did not at all assist him. He had so often told the widow that care killed a cat, and that a live dog was better than a dead lion; and had found so little efficacy in the proverbs, that he did not care to revert to them. He was aware that some more decided method of proceeding was now required. Little hints at love-making had been all very well in the earlier days of their acquaintance; but there must be something more than little hints before he could hope to bring the matter to a favourable conclusion. The widow herself had told him that he ought to talk about love; and he had taken two glasses of cherry-brandy, hoping that they might enable him to do so. He had put on a coat with brilliant buttons, and new knickerbockers, in order that he might be master of the occasion. He was resolved to call a spade a spade, and to speak boldly of his passion; but how was he to begin? There was the difficulty. He was now seated in a chair, and there he remained silent for a minute or two, while she smoothed her eyebrows with her handkerchief after her last slight ebullition of grief. "Mrs. Greenow," he exclaimed at last, jumping up before her; "dearest Mrs. Greenow; darling Mrs. Greenow, will you be my wife? There! I have said it at last, and I mean it. Everything that I've got shall be yours. Of course I speak specially of my hand and heart. As for love;--oh, Arabella, if you only knew me! I don't think there's a man in Norfolk better able to love a woman than I am. Ever since I first saw you at Yarmouth, I've been in love to that extent that I've not known what I've been about. If you'll ask them at home, they'll tell you that I've not been able to look after anything about the place,--not as it should be done. I haven't really. I don't suppose I've opened the wages book half a dozen times since last July." "And has that been my fault, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Upon my word it has. I can't move about anywhere without thinking about you. My mind's made up; I won't stay at Oileymead unless you will come and be its mistress." "Not stay at Oileymead?" "No, indeed. I'll let the place, and go and travel somewheres. What's the use of my hanging on there without the woman of my heart? I couldn't do it, Mrs. Greenow; I couldn't, indeed. Of course I've got everything there that money can buy,--but it's all of no use to a man that's in love. Do you know, I've come quite to despise money and stock, and all that sort of thing. I haven't had my banker's book home these last three months. Only think of that now." "But how can I help you, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Just say one word, and the thing'll be done. Say you'll be my wife? I'll be so good to you. I will, indeed. As for your fortune, I don't care that for it! I'm not like somebody else; it's yourself I want. You shall be my pet, and my poppet, and my dearest little duck all the days of your life." "No, Mr. Cheesacre; it cannot be." "And why not? Look here, Arabella!" At these words he rose from his chair, and coming immediately before her, went down on both knees so close to her as to prevent the possibility of her escaping from him. There could be no doubt as to the efficacy of the cherry-brandy. There he was, well down on his knees; but he had not got down so low without some little cracking and straining on the part of the gaiters with which his legs were encompassed. He, in his passion, had probably omitted to notice this; but Mrs. Greenow, who was more cool in her present temperament, was painfully aware that he might not be able to rise with ease. "Mr. Cheesacre, don't make a fool of yourself. Get up," said she. "Never, till you have told me that you will be mine!" "Then you'll remain there for ever, which will be inconvenient. I won't have you take hold of my hand, Mr. Cheesacre. I tell you to have done." Whereupon his grasp upon her hand was released; but he made no attempt to rise. "I never saw a man look so much like a fool in my life," said she. "If you don't get up, I'll push you over. There; don't you hear? There's somebody coming." But Cheesacre, whose senses were less acute than the lady's, did not hear. "I'll never get up," said he, "till you have bid me hope." "Bid you play the fiddle. Get away from my knees, at any rate. There;--he'll be in the room now before--" [Illustration: Mr. Cheesacre disturbed.] Cheesacre now did hear a sound of steps, and the door was opened while he made his first futile attempt to get back to a standing position. The door was opened, and Captain Bellfield entered. "I beg ten thousand pardons," said he, "but as I did not see Jeannette, I ventured to come in. May I venture to congratulate my friend Cheesacre on his success?" In the meantime Cheesacre had risen; but he had done so slowly, and with evident difficulty. "I'll trouble you to leave the room, Captain Bellfield," said he. "I'm particularly engaged with Mrs. Greenow, as any gentleman might have seen." "There wasn't the slightest difficulty in seeing it, old fellow," said the Captain. "Shall I wish you joy?" "I'll trouble you to leave the room, sir," said Cheesacre, walking up to him. "Certainly, if Mrs. Greenow will desire me to do so," said the Captain. Then Mrs. Greenow felt herself called upon to speak. "Gentlemen, I must beg that you will not make my drawing-room a place for quarrelling. Captain Bellfield, lest there should be any misconception, I must beg you to understand that the position in which you found Mr. Cheesacre was one altogether of his own seeking. It was not with my consent that he was there." "I can easily believe that, Mrs. Greenow," said the Captain. "Who cares what you believe, sir?" said Mr. Cheesacre. "Gentlemen! gentlemen! this is really unkind. Captain Bellfield, I think I had better ask you to withdraw." "By all means," said Mr. Cheesacre. "As it is absolutely necessary that I should give Mr. Cheesacre a definite answer after what has occurred--" "Of course," said Captain Bellfield, preparing to go. "I'll take another opportunity of paying my respects to you. Perhaps I might be allowed to come this evening?" To this Mrs. Greenow half assented with an uncertain nod, and then the Captain went. As soon as the door was closed behind his back, Mr. Cheesacre again prepared to throw himself into his former position, but to this Mrs. Greenow decidedly objected. If he were allowed to go down again, there was no knowing what force might be necessary to raise him. "Mr. Cheesacre," she said, "let there be an end to this little farce between us." "Farce!" said he, standing with his hand on his heart, and his legs and knickerbockers well displayed. "It is certainly either a farce or a mistake. If the latter,--and I have been at all to blame,--I ask your pardon most sincerely." "But you'll be Mrs. Cheesacre; won't you?" "No, Mr. Cheesacre; no. One husband is enough for any woman, and mine lies buried at Birmingham." "Oh, damn it!" said he, in utter disgust at this further reference to Mr. Greenow. The expression, at such a moment, militated against courtesy; but even Mrs. Greenow herself felt that the poor man had been subjected to provocation. "Let us part friends," said she, offering him her hand. But he turned his back upon her, for there was something in his eye that he wanted to hide. I believe that he really did love her, and that at this moment he would have taken her, even though he had learned that her fortune was gone. "Will you not give me your hand," said she, "in token that there is no anger between us?" "Do think about it again--do!" said he. "If there's anything you like to have changed, I'll change it at once. I'll give up Oileymead altogether, if you don't like being so near the farm-yard. I'll give up anything; so I will. Mrs. Greenow, if you only knew how I've set my heart upon it!" And now, though his back was turned, the whimpering of his voice told plainly that tears were in his eyes. She was a little touched. No woman would feel disposed to marry a man simply because he cried, and perhaps few women would be less likely to give way to such tenderness than Mrs. Greenow. She understood men and women too well, and had seen too much both of the world's rough side and of its smooth side to fall into such a blunder as that; but she was touched. "My friend," she said, putting her hand upon his arm, "think no more of it." "But I can't help thinking of it," said he, almost blubbering in his earnestness. "No, no, no," said she, still touching him with her hand. "Why, Mr. Cheesacre, how can you bring yourself to care for an old woman like me, when so many pretty young ladies would give their eyes to get a kind word from you?" "I don't want any young lady," said he. "There's Charlie Fairstairs, who would make as good a wife as any girl I know." "Psha! Charlie Fairstairs, indeed!" The very idea of having such a bride palmed off upon him did something to restore him to his manly courage. "Or my niece, Kate Vavasor, who has a nice little fortune of her own, and who is as accomplished as she is good-looking." "She's nothing to me, Mrs. Greenow." "That's because you never asked her to be anything. If I get her to come back to Yarmouth next summer, will you think about it? You want a wife, and you couldn't do better if you searched all England over. It would be so pleasant for us to be such near friends; wouldn't it?" And again she put her hand upon his arm. "Mrs. Greenow, just at present there's only one woman in the world that I can think of." "And that's my niece." "And that's yourself. I'm a broken-hearted man,--I am, indeed. I didn't ever think I should feel so much about a thing of the kind--I didn't, really. I hardly know what to do with myself; but I suppose I'd better go back to Oileymead." He had become so painfully unconscious of his new coat and his knickerbockers that it was impossible not to pity him. "I shall always hate the place now," he said,--"always." "That will pass away. You'd be as happy as a king there, if you'd take Kate for your queen." "And what'll you do, Mrs. Greenow?" "What shall I do?"--"Yes; what will you do?" "That is, if you marry Kate? Why, I'll come and stay with you half my time, and nurse the children, as an old grand-aunt should." "But about--." Then he hesitated, and she asked him of what he was thinking. "You don't mean to take that man Bellfield, do you?" "Come, Mr. Cheesacre, that's rank jealousy. What right can you have to ask me whether I shall take any man or no man? The chances are that I shall remain as I am till I'm carried to my grave; but I'm not going to give any pledge about it to you or to any one." "You don't know that man, Mrs. Greenow; you don't, indeed. I tell it you as your friend. Does not it stand to reason, when he has got nothing in the world, that he must be a beggar? It's all very well saying that when a man is courting a lady, he shouldn't say much about his money; but you won't make me believe that any man will make a good husband who hasn't got a shilling. And for lies, there's no beating him!" "Why, then, has he been such a friend of yours?" "Well, because I've been foolish. I took up with him just because he looked pleasant, I suppose." "And you want to prevent me from doing the same thing." "If you were to marry him, Mrs. Greenow, it's my belief I should do him a mischief; it is, really. I don't think I could stand it;--a mean, skulking beggar! I suppose I'd better go now?" "Certainly, if that's the way you choose to talk about my friends." "Friends, indeed! Well, I won't say any more at present. I suppose if I was to talk for ever it wouldn't be any good?" "Come and talk to Kate Vavasor for ever, Mr. Cheesacre." To this he made no reply, but went forth from the house, and got his gig, and drove himself home to Oileymead, thinking of his disappointment with all the bitterness of a young lover. "I didn't ever think I should ever care so much about anything," he said, as he took himself up to bed that night. That evening Captain Bellfield did call in the Close, as he had said he would do, but he was not admitted. "Her mistress was very bad with a headache," Jeannette said.

When Mrs. Greenow was left alone in her lodgings, after the little dinner with her two lovers, she sat down to think. There were three paths open before her. She might take Mr. Cheesacre, or she might take Captain Bellfield - or she might take neither. She was going to leave Norwich after Easter, and they knew it. Something had been said about her returning to Yarmouth in the summer. She was a just woman at heart, and felt that each man should know his prospect if she did return. There was a good deal to be said on Mr. Cheesacre's behalf. Mahogany-furnitured bedrooms are very comfortable; and heaps of manure, though not romantic, are useful in farming. Mrs. Greenow by no means despised these things; and as for their owner, though she saw much amiss in his character, she thought that his little foibles were of such a nature that a wife of spirit might be able to repress them, if not to cure them. But she had already married for money once, as she told herself, and she thought that she might now venture on a little love. Her marriage for money had been successful. The nursing of old Greenow had not been disagreeable, nor had it taken longer than she had anticipated. She had now got her due reward, and she really did feel grateful to his memory. Some of her tears were dropped with sincerity. She was essentially a happy-natured woman, who looked back upon her past life with contentment, and forward to her future life with confidence. She would not be greedy, she said to herself. She did not want more money, and therefore she would have none of Mr. Cheesacre. However, she also resolved that, if possible, the mahogany-furnitured bedrooms should be kept in the family, and made over to her niece, Kate Vavasor. But should she marry Captain Bellfield? Strange to say, his poverty and scampishness and lies almost recommended him to her. She was not afraid of them; she thought that she could cure them - if they needed curing. As for his stories about Inkerman, and his little debts, she cared nothing about that. She also had her Inkermans, and she too had owed money for her gloves and corsets in the ante-Greenow days. But she was aware of the danger that there might be more behind, of which she had never heard. Another Mrs. Bellfield was not impossible; and what if he should not be a real captain at all! Such things had happened. Her chief security was in this: that Cheesacre had known the man for many years, and would certainly have told anything against him that he knew. Between nine and ten in the evening, Jeannette brought to her some arrowroot with sherry, which it was her habit to take before retiring for the night. "Jeannette," she said, as she stirred the bowl, "I'm afraid those two gentlemen have quarrelled." "Oh, ma'am, of course they have! How was they to help it?" Jeannette, on these occasions, usually stood by her mistress's chair, chatting with her; and if the chatting was much prolonged, she would gradually sink down upon the corner of a chair herself - and then the two women would be very comfortable together over the fire, Jeannette never forgetting that she was the servant, and Mrs. Greenow never forgetting that she was the mistress. "Why should they quarrel, Jeannette? It's very foolish." "I don't know about being foolish, ma'am; but it's natural. If I had two beaux as was a-courting me together, I should expect as they would punch each other's heads." "But you don't suppose that I want beaux, as you call them?" "That's as may be, ma'am. But they are; and if they was to blow each other's brains out in the gig tonight, I shouldn't be a bit surprised." As she said this, Jeannette slipped into her chair. "Why, you silly child, they're not going home together. Did not the Captain go away first?" "He did, but I thought perhaps it was to get his pistols ready." "They won't fight, Jeannette. Gentlemen have given over fighting." "Dear, dear; I was so sure we should have had the papers full of it, and perhaps one of them stretched upon his bloody bier! I wonder which it would have been? I always made up my mind that the Captain wouldn't be wounded." "But why should they quarrel at all, Jeannette? It is the most foolish thing. I have never said a word to encourage either of them. You know I haven't, Jeannette." Mrs. Greenow put her handkerchief to her eyes. "To be sure, ma'am, no lady could have behaved better than you have done. If gentlemen will make fools of themselves, it isn't your fault; is it, ma'am?" "But I'm so sorry that they should have quarrelled. They were such dear friends, you know." "When you've settled which it's to be, ma'am, that'll all come right again." Then there was a little pause. "I suppose, ma'am, it won't be Mr. Cheesacre?" "I shall always regard Mr. Cheesacre as a dear friend; but he'll never be more than that." "Then it'll be the Captain, ma'am? I'm sure, for my part, I've always thought the Captain was the nicer gentleman." "He's nothing to me, girl." "And as for money - what's the good of having more than enough? If he can bring love, you can bring money; can't you, ma'am?" "He's nothing to me, girl," repeated Mrs. Greenow. "But he will be?" asked Jeannette. "Well, I'm sure! What's the world come to, when you cross-examine your mistress in that way! Get to bed, will you? It's near ten o'clock. Next week we shall be packing up, and there'll be all my things to see to." So Jeannette departed, and after some further thought about Captain Bellfield, Mrs. Greenow went to her bed. Mr. Cheesacre, when he drove back to Oileymead alone, had kept himself hot with passion against Bellfield; and his heat had been sustained by his seeing the Captain, with his portmanteau, escaping just as he reached his home. But early on the following morning he thought of Mrs. Greenow, and he remembered some of the hard things which she had said to him. He had made mistakes in his manner of wooing. He was quite aware of that now, and was determined to put them right. She had rebuked him for saying nothing about his love. He would instantly mend that fault. And she had bidden him not to talk so much about his wealth. Henceforth he would be dumb on that subject. Nevertheless, he said to himself, "She can't really like a poor beggarly wretch who hasn't got a shilling." He was very far from feeling that the battle was lost. Her last word to him had been an assurance of her friendship. He was, no doubt, becoming tired of courtship, and heartily wished that the work were over; but he was not minded to give it up. So he prepared himself for another attack, and took himself back to Norwich. On this occasion he dressed himself with considerable care, in knickerbockers, with tight, bright, leather gaiters round his legs, thinking his manly proportions might stand him in good stead. And he put on a new shooting-coat, and a wonderful waistcoat embroidered with foxes' heads. He completed his outfit with a round hat, dog-skin gloves, and a whip. Thus armed he went forth resolved to conquer or to die. He drove at a great pace into the inn-yard, threw his reins to the ostler, took one glass of cherry-brandy at the bar, and then marched off across the market-place to the Close with decisive steps, pausing only at a pastrycook's where he had another glass of cherry-brandy. He knocked at the door, and in another second was in the presence of his angel. "Mr. Cheesacre, whoever expected to see you in Norwich on a Thursday?" said the lady. He answered boldly. "There's no knowing when I may be in Norwich, Mrs. Greenow. I'm one of those men of whom nobody knows anything certain, except that I pay as I go." Then he remembered that he was not to make any more boasts about his money. "There's one other thing they may all know if they please, but we won't say what that is just at present." "Won't you sit down, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Well, thank you, I will sit down for a few minutes. Mrs. Greenow, I'm in such a state of mind that I must put an end to it, or else I shall go mad, and do somebody a damage." "Dear me! what has happened to you? You're going out shooting soon, are you not?" and Mrs. Greenow looked at his clothes. "No, Mrs. Greenow, I'm not going shooting. I like to be nice, and all that kind of thing. There are people who think that because a man farms his own land, he must be always in the muck. But it don't matter what a man wears if his heart isn't easy." "I don't know why you should speak in that way, Mr. Cheesacre; but it's what I have felt every hour since - since Greenow left me." This allusion to the departed one did not help Mr. Cheesacre. He felt that some decided method of proceeding was required. Little hints at love-making had been all very well earlier on; but now there must be more than little hints. The widow herself had told him that he ought to talk about love; and he had taken two glasses of cherry-brandy, hoping that they might enable him to do so. He was resolved to speak boldly; but how was he to begin? There was the difficulty. He remained silent for a minute or two. Then he jumped up before her. "Mrs. Greenow," he exclaimed, "dearest Mrs. Greenow; will you be my wife? There! I have said it, and I mean it. Everything that I've got shall be yours. As for love; oh, Arabella, if you only knew me! I don't think there's a man in Norfolk better able to love a woman than I am. Ever since I first saw you at Yarmouth, I've been in love to that extent that I've not known what I'm about. I haven't really." "Has that been my fault, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Upon my word it has. I can't move anywhere without thinking about you. My mind's made up; I won't stay at Oileymead unless you will come and be its mistress." "Not stay at Oileymead?" "No, indeed. I'll let the place, and go and travel. What's the use of my hanging on there without the woman of my heart? I couldn't do it, Mrs. Greenow. Of course I've got everything there that money can buy - but it's all of no use to a man that's in love. Do you know, I've come quite to despise money and all that sort of thing. I haven't had my banker's book home these last three months. Only think of that now." "But how can I help you, Mr. Cheesacre?" "Say you'll be my wife? I'll be so good to you. As for your fortune, I don't care that for it! I'm not like somebody else; it's yourself I want. You shall be my pet, and my poppet, and my dearest little duck all the days of your life." "No, Mr. Cheesacre; it cannot be." "And why not? Look here, Arabella!" He rose from his chair, and went down on both knees so close to her that she could not escape. There could be no doubt about the efficacy of the cherry-brandy. There was some little cracking and straining of his gaiters as he knelt. He did not notice this; but Mrs. Greenow was painfully aware that he might not be able to rise with ease. "Mr. Cheesacre, don't make a fool of yourself. Get up," said she. "Never, till you have told me that you will be mine!" "Then you'll remain there for ever, which will be inconvenient. Don't take my hand, Mr. Cheesacre. I tell you to stop." He released her hand, but made no attempt to rise. "I never saw a man look so much like a fool in my life," said she. "If you don't get up, I'll push you over. Don't you hear? There's somebody coming." But Cheesacre did not hear. "I'll never get up," said he, "till you have bid me hope." "Bid you play the fiddle. Get away from my knees. There; he'll be in the room now before-" Cheesacre now did hear footsteps, and the door opened while he made his first futile attempt to get back to a standing position. Captain Bellfield entered. "I beg ten thousand pardons," said he, "but as I did not see Jeannette, I ventured to come in. May I congratulate my friend Cheesacre on his success?" In the meantime Cheesacre had risen, with difficulty. "I'll trouble you to leave the room, Captain Bellfield," said he. "Certainly, if Mrs. Greenow wishes me to do so," said the Captain. Mrs. Greenow felt herself called upon to speak. "Captain Bellfield, I must beg you to understand that the position in which you found Mr. Cheesacre was one altogether of his own seeking. It was not with my consent that he was there." "I can easily believe that, Mrs. Greenow," said the Captain. "Who cares what you believe, sir?" said Mr. Cheesacre. "Gentlemen! gentlemen! this is really unkind. Captain Bellfield, I think I had better ask you to withdraw." "By all means," said Mr. Cheesacre. "As it is absolutely necessary that I should give Mr. Cheesacre a definite answer-" "Of course," said Captain Bellfield, preparing to go. "Perhaps I might be allowed to come this evening?" To this Mrs. Greenow half assented with a nod, and the Captain went. As soon as the door was closed, Mr. Cheesacre again prepared to throw himself into his former position, but Mrs. Greenow promptly said, "Mr. Cheesacre, let there be an end to this little farce." "Farce!" said he, standing with his hand on his heart. "It is certainly either a farce or a mistake. If I have been at all to blame, I ask your pardon most sincerely." "But you'll be Mrs. Cheesacre; won't you?" "No, Mr. Cheesacre; no. One husband is enough for any woman, and mine lies buried at Birmingham." "Oh, damn it!" said he, in utter disgust. It was not courteous; but even Mrs. Greenow herself felt that the poor man had been provoked. "Let us part friends," said she, offering him her hand. But he turned his back upon her, for there was something in his eye that he wanted to hide. I believe that he really did love her. "Will you not give me your hand," said she, "to show that there is no anger between us?" "Do think again! If there's anything you like to have changed, I'll change it at once. I'll give up Oileymead altogether, if you don't like being so near the farm-yard. Mrs. Greenow, if you only knew how I've set my heart upon it!" And now, though his back was turned, the whimpering of his voice told plainly that tears were in his eyes. She was a little touched. No woman would feel disposed to marry a man simply because he cried, and Mrs. Greenow had seen too much of the world to fall into such a blunder as that; but she was touched. "My friend," she said, putting her hand upon his arm, "think no more of it." "But I can't help thinking of it," said he, almost blubbering. "No, no, no," said she. "Why, Mr. Cheesacre, how can you care for an old woman like me, when so many pretty young ladies would give their eyes to get a kind word from you?" "I don't want any young lady," said he. "There's Charlie Fairstairs, who would make as good a wife as any girl I know." "Psha! Charlie Fairstairs, indeed!" "Or my niece, Kate Vavasor." "She's nothing to me, Mrs. Greenow." "That's because you never asked her to be anything. If I get her to come back to Yarmouth next summer, will you think about it? You want a wife, and you couldn't do better if you searched all England. It would be so pleasant for us to be near friends; wouldn't it?" And again she put her hand upon his arm. "Mrs. Greenow, at present there's only one woman in the world that I can think of." "And that's my niece." "And that's yourself. I'm a broken-hearted man - I am, indeed. I hardly know what to do with myself; but I suppose I'd better go back to Oileymead. I shall always hate the place now," he said. "That will pass away. You'd be as happy as a king there, if you'd take Kate for your queen." "And what'll you do, Mrs. Greenow?" "What shall I do? If you marry Kate, I'll come and stay with you half my time, and nurse the children, as an old grand-aunt should." "But -" He hesitated. "You don't mean to take that man Bellfield, do you?" "Come, Mr. Cheesacre, that's jealousy. What right can you have to ask me whether I shall take any man? The chances are that I shall remain as I am till I'm carried to my grave; but I'm not going to give any promise about it to you or to anyone." "You don't know that man, Mrs. Greenow; you don't, indeed. He hasn't got a shilling. And for lies, there's no beating him!" "Why, then, has he been such a friend of yours?" "Well, because I've been foolish. I took up with him just because he looked pleasant, I suppose." "And you want to prevent me from doing the same." "If you were to marry him, Mrs. Greenow, it's my belief I should do him a mischief; I don't think I could stand it. A mean, skulking beggar! I suppose I'd better go now?" "Certainly, if that's the way you choose to talk about my friends." "Well, I won't say any more at present. I suppose if I was to talk for ever it wouldn't be any good?" "Come and talk to Kate Vavasor for ever, Mr. Cheesacre." To this he made no reply, but left, and drove home to Oileymead, thinking of his disappointment with all the bitterness of a young lover. "I didn't think I should ever care so much about anything," he said, as he took himself to bed that night. That evening Captain Bellfield did call in the Close, as he had said he would, but he was not admitted. "Her mistress had a headache," said Jeannette.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 47: Mr. Cheesacre's Disappointment

Alice came down to breakfast on that Christmas morning at Vavasor Hall without making any sign as to the letter she had received. The party there consisted of her grandfather, her father, her cousin Kate, and herself. They all made their Christmas salutations as is usual, and Alice received and made hers as did the others, without showing that anything had occurred to disturb her tranquillity. Kate remarked that she had heard that morning from Aunt Greenow, and promised to show Alice the letter after breakfast. But Alice said no word of her own letter. "Why didn't your aunt come here to eat her Christmas dinner?" said the Squire. "Perhaps, sir, because you didn't ask her," said Kate, standing close to her grandfather,--for the old man was somewhat deaf. "And why didn't you ask her;--that is, if she stands upon asking to come to her old home?" "Nay, sir, but I couldn't do that without your bidding. We Vavasors are not always fond of meeting each other." "Hold your tongue, Kate. I know what you mean, and you should be the last to speak of it. Alice, my dear, come and sit next to me. I am much obliged to you for coming down all this way to see your old grandfather at Christmas. I am indeed. I only wish you had brought better news about your sweetheart." "She'll think better of it before long, sir," said her father. "Papa, you shouldn't say that. You would not wish me to marry against my own judgement." "I don't know much about ladies' judgements," said the old man. "It does seem to me that when a lady makes a promise she ought to keep it." "According to that," said Kate, "if I were engaged to a man, and found that he was a murderer, I still ought to marry him." "But Mr. Grey is not a murderer," said the Squire. "Pray,--pray, don't talk about it," said Alice. "If you do I really cannot sit and hear it." "I have given over saying anything on the subject," said John Vavasor, speaking as though he had already expended upon it a vast amount of paternal eloquence. He had, however, never said more than has been recorded in these pages. Alice during this conversation, sat with her cousin's letter in her pocket, and as yet had not even begun to think what should be the nature of her reply. The Squire of Vavasor Hall was a stout old man, with a red face and grey eyes, which looked fiercely at you, and with long grey hair, and a rough grey beard, which gave him something of the appearance of an old lion. He was passionate, unreasoning, and specially impatient of all opposition; but he was affectionate, prone to forgive when asked to do so, unselfish, and hospitable. He was, moreover, guided strictly by rules, which he believed to be rules of right. His grandson George had offended him very deeply,--had offended him and never asked his pardon. He was determined that such pardon should never be given, unless it were asked for with almost bended knees; but, nevertheless, this grandson should be his heir. That was his present intention. The right of primogeniture could not, in accordance with his theory, be abrogated by the fact that it was, in George Vavasor's case, protected by no law. The Squire could leave Vavasor Hall to whom he pleased, but he could not have hoped to rest quietly in his grave should it be found that he had left it to any one but the eldest son of his own eldest son. Though violent, and even stern, he was more prone to love than to anger; and though none of those around him dared to speak to him of his grandson, yet he longed in his heart for some opportunity of being reconciled to him. The whole party went to church on this Christmas morning. The small parish church of Vavasor, an unpretending wooden structure, with a single bell which might be heard tinkling for a mile or two over the fells, stood all alone about half a mile from the Squire's gate. Vavasor was a parish situated on the intermediate ground between the mountains of the lake country and the plains. Its land was unproductive, ill-drained, and poor, and yet it possessed little or none of the beauty which tourists go to see. It was all amidst the fells, and very dreary. There were long skirtings of dark pines around a portion of the Squire's property, and at the back of the house there was a thick wood of firs running up to the top of what was there called the Beacon Hill. Through this there was a wild steep walk which came out upon the moorland, and from thence there was a track across the mountain to Hawes Water and Naddale, and on over many miles to the further beauties of Bowness and Windermere. They who knew the country, and whose legs were of use to them, could find some of the grandest scenery in England within reach of a walk from Vavasor Hall; but to others the place was very desolate. For myself, I can find I know not what of charm in wandering over open, unadorned moorland. It must be more in the softness of the grass to the feet, and the freshness of the air to the lungs, than in anything that meets the eye. You might walk for miles and miles to the north-east, or east, or south-east of Vavasor without meeting any object to arrest the view. The great road from Lancaster to Carlisle crossed the outskirts of the small parish about a mile from the church, and beyond that the fell seemed to be interminable. Towards the north it rose, and towards the south it fell, and it rose and fell very gradually. Here and there some slight appearance of a valley might be traced which had been formed by the action of the waters; but such breakings of ground were inconsiderable, and did not suffice to interrupt the stern sameness of the everlasting moorland. The daily life at Vavasor was melancholy enough for such a one as the Squire's son, who regarded London as the only place on the earth's surface in which a man could live with comfort. The moors offered no charms to him. Nor did he much appreciate the homely comforts of the Hall; for the house, though warm, was old-fashioned and small, and the Squire's cook was nearly as old as the Squire himself. John Vavasor's visits to Vavasor were always visits of duty rather than of pleasure. But it was not so with Alice. She could be very happy there with Kate; for, like herself, Kate was a good walker and loved the mountains. Their regard for each other had grown and become strong because they had gone together o'er river and moor, and because they had together disregarded those impediments of mud and wet which frighten so many girls away from the beauties of nature. On this Christmas Day they all went to church, the Squire being accompanied by Alice in a vehicle which in Ireland is called an inside jaunting-car, and which is perhaps the most uncomfortable kind of vehicle yet invented; while John Vavasor walked with his niece. But the girls had arranged that immediately after church they would start for a walk up the Beacon Hill, across the fells, towards Hawes Water. They always dined at the Hall at the vexatious hour of five; but as their church service, with the sacrament included, would be completed soon after twelve, and as lunch was a meal which the Squire did not himself attend, they could have full four hours for their excursion. This had all been planned before Alice received her letter; but there was nothing in that to make her change her mind about the walk. "Alice, my dear," said the old man to her when they were together in the jaunting-car, "you ought to get married." The Squire was hard of hearing, and under any circumstances an inside jaunting-car is a bad place for conversation, as your teeth are nearly shaken out of your head by every movement which the horse makes. Alice therefore said nothing, but smiled faintly, in reply to her grandfather. On returning from church he insisted that Alice should again accompany him, telling her specially that he desired to speak to her. "My dear child," he said, "I have been thinking a great deal about you, and you ought to get married." "Well, sir, perhaps I shall some day." "Not if you quarrel with all your suitors," said the old man. "You quarrelled with your cousin George, and now you have quarrelled with Mr. Grey. You'll never get married, my dear, if you go on in that way." "Why should I be married more than Kate?" "Oh, Kate! I don't know that anybody wants to marry Kate. I wish you'd think of what I say. If you don't get married before long, perhaps you'll never get married at all. Gentlemen won't stand that kind of thing for ever." The two girls took a slice of cake each in her hand, and started on their walk. "We shan't be able to get to the lake," said Kate. "No," said Alice; "but we can go as far as the big stone on Swindale Fell, where we can sit down and see it." "Do you remember the last time we sat there?" said Kate. "It is nearly three years ago, and it was then that you told me that all was to be over between you and George. Do you remember what a fool I was, and how I screamed in my sorrow? I sometimes wonder at myself and my own folly. How is it that I can never get up any interest about my own belongings? And then we got soaking wet through coming home." "I remember that very well." "And how dark it was! That was in September, but we had dined early. If we go as far as Swindale we shall have it very dark coming home to-day;--but I don't mind that through the Beacon Wood, because I know my way so well. You won't be afraid of half an hour's dark?" "Oh, no," said Alice. "Yes; I do remember that day. Well; it's all for the best, I suppose. And now I must read you my aunt's letter." Then, while they were still in the wood, Kate took out the letter from her aunt and read it, while they still walked slowly up the hill. It seemed that hitherto neither of her two suitors had brought the widow to terms. Indeed, she continued to write of Mr. Cheesacre as though that gentleman were inconsolable for the loss of Kate, and gave her niece much serious advice as to the expedience of returning to Norfolk, in order that she might secure so eligible a husband. "You must understand all the time, Alice," said Kate, pausing as she read the letter, "that the dear man has never given me the slightest ground for the faintest hope, and that I know to a certainty that he makes an offer to her twice a week,--that is, on every market day. You can't enjoy half the joke if you won't bear that in mind." Alice promised that she would bear it all in mind, and then Kate went on with her reading. Poor Bellfield was working very hard at his drill, Mrs. Greenow went on to say; so hard that sometimes she really thought the fatigue would be too much for his strength. He would come in sometimes of an evening and just take a cup of tea;--generally on Mondays and Thursdays. "These are not market days at Norwich," said Kate; "and thus unpleasant meetings are avoided." "He comes in," said Mrs. Greenow, "and takes a little tea; and sometimes I think that he will faint at my feet." "That he kneels there on every occasion," said Kate, "and repeats his offer also twice a week, I have not the least doubt in the world." "And will she accept him at last?" "Really I don't know what to think of it. Sometimes I fancy that she likes the fun of the thing, but that she is too wide-awake to put herself in any man's power. I have no doubt she lends him money, because he wants it sadly and she is very generous. She gives him money, I feel sure, but takes his receipt on stamped paper for every shilling. That's her character all over." The letter then went on to say that the writer had made up her mind to remain at Norwich certainly through the winter and spring, and that she was anxiously desirous that her dear Kate should go back to her. "Come and have one other look at Oileymead," said the letter, "and then, if you make up your mind that you don't like it or him, I won't ask you to think of them ever again. I believe him to be a very honest fellow." "Did you ever know such a woman?" said Kate; "with all her faults I believe she would go through fire and water to serve me. I think she'd lend me money without any stamped paper." Then Aunt Greenow's letter was put up, and the two girls had come out upon the open fell. It was a delicious afternoon for a winter's walk. The air was clear and cold, but not actually frosty. The ground beneath their feet was dry, and the sky, though not bright, had that appearance of enduring weather which gives no foreboding of rain. There is a special winter's light, which is very clear though devoid of all brilliancy,--through which every object strikes upon the eye with well-marked lines, and under which almost all forms of nature seem graceful to the sight if not actually beautiful. But there is a certain melancholy which ever accompanies it. It is the light of the afternoon, and gives token of the speedy coming of the early twilight. It tells of the shortness of the day, and contains even in its clearness a promise of the gloom of night. It is absolute light, but it seems to contain the darkness which is to follow it. I do not know that it is ever to be seen and felt so plainly as on the wide moorland, where the eye stretches away over miles, and sees at the world's end the faint low lines of distant clouds settling themselves upon the horizon. Such was the light of this Christmas afternoon, and both the girls had felt the effects of it before they reached the big stone on Swindale Fell, from which they intended to look down upon the loveliness of Hawes Water. As they went up through the wood there had been some laughter between them over Aunt Greenow's letter; and they had discussed almost with mirth the merits of Oileymead and Mr. Cheesacre; but as they got further on to the fell, and as the half-melancholy wildness of the place struck them, their words became less light, and after a while they almost ceased to speak. Alice had still her letter in her pocket. She had placed it there when she came down to breakfast, and had carried it with her since. She had come to no resolution as yet as to her answer to it, nor had she resolved whether or no she would show it to Kate. Kate had ever been regarded by her as her steadfast friend. In all these affairs she had spoken openly to Kate. We know that Kate had in part betrayed her, but Alice suspected no such treason. She had often quarrelled with Kate; but she had quarrelled with her not on account of any sin against the faith of their friendship. She believed in her cousin perfectly, though she found herself often called upon to disagree with her almost violently. Why should she not show this letter to Kate, and discuss it in all its bearings before she replied to it? This was in her mind as she walked silently along over the fell. The reader will surmise from this that she was already half inclined to give way, and to join her lot to that of her cousin George. Alas, yes! The reader will be right in his surmise. And yet it was not her love for the man that prompted her to run so terrible a risk. Had it been so, I think that it would be easier to forgive her. She was beginning to think that love,--the love of which she had once thought so much,--did not matter. Of what use was it, and to what had it led? What had love done for her friend Glencora? What had love done for her? Had she not loved John Grey, and had she not felt that with all her love life with him would have been distasteful to her? It would have been impossible for her to marry a man whom personally she disliked; but she liked her cousin George,--well enough, as she said to herself almost indifferently. Upon the whole it was a grievous task to her in these days,--this having to do something with her life. Was it not all vain and futile? As for that girl's dream of the joys of love which she had once dreamed,--that had gone from her slumbers, never to return. How might she best make herself useful,--useful in some sort that might gratify her ambition;--that was now the question which seemed to her to be of most importance. Her cousin's letter to her had been very crafty. He had studied the whole of her character accurately as he wrote it. When he had sat down to write it he had been indifferent to the result; but he had written it with that care to attain success which a man uses when he is anxious not to fail in an attempt. Whether or no he cared to marry his cousin was a point so little interesting to him that chance might decide it for him; but when chance had decided that he did wish it, it was necessary for his honour that he should have that for which he condescended to ask. His letter to her had been clever and very crafty. "At any rate he does me justice," she said to herself, when she read those words about her money, and the use which he proposed to make of it. "He is welcome to it all if it will help him in his career, whether he has it as my friend or as my husband." Then she thought of Kate's promise of her little mite, and declared to herself that she would not be less noble than her cousin Kate. And would it not be well that she should be the means of reconciling George to his grandfather? George was the representative of the family,--of a family so old that no one now knew which had first taken the ancient titular name of some old Saxon landowner,--the parish, or the man. There had been in old days some worthy Vavaseurs, as Chaucer calls them, whose rank and bearing had been adopted on the moorland side. Of these things Alice thought much, and felt that it should be her duty so to act, that future Vavasors might at any rate not be less in the world than they who had passed away. In a few years at furthest, George Vavasor must be Vavasor of Vavasor. Would it not be right that she should help him to make that position honourable? They walked on, exchanging now and again a word or two, till the distant Cumberland mountains began to form themselves in groups of beauty before their eyes. "There's Helvellyn at last," said Kate. "I'm always happy when I see that." "And isn't that Kidsty Pike?" asked Alice. "No; you don't see Kidsty yet. But you will when you get up to the bank there. That's Scaw Fell on the left;--the round distant top. I can distinguish it, though I doubt whether you can." Then they went on again, and were soon at the bank from whence the sharp top of the mountain which Alice had named was visible. "And now we are on Swindale, and in five minutes we shall get to the stone." In less than five minutes they were there; and then, but not till then, the beauty of the little lake, lying down below them in the quiet bosom of the hills, disclosed itself. A lake should, I think, be small, and should be seen from above, to be seen in all its glory. The distance should be such that the shadows of the mountains on its surface may just be traced, and that some faint idea of the ripple on the waters may be present to the eye. And the form of the lakes should be irregular, curving round from its base among the lower hills, deeper and still deeper into some close nook up among the mountains from which its head waters spring. It is thus that a lake should be seen, and it was thus that Hawes Water was seen by them from the flat stone on the side of Swindale Fell. The basin of the lake has formed itself into the shape of the figure of 3, and the top section of the figure lies embosomed among the very wildest of the Westmoreland mountains. Altogether it is not above three miles long, and every point of it was to be seen from the spot on which the girls sat themselves down. The water beneath was still as death, and as dark,--and looked almost as cold. But the slow clouds were passing over it, and the shades of darkness on its surface changed themselves with gradual changes. And though no movement was visible, there was ever and again in places a slight sheen upon the lake, which indicated the ripple made by the breeze. "I'm so glad I've come here," said Alice, seating herself. "I cannot bear the idea of coming to Vavasor without seeing one of the lakes at least." "We'll get over to Windermere one day," said Kate. "I don't think we shall. I don't think it possible that I should stay long. Kate, I've got a letter to show you." And there was that in the tone of her voice which instantly put Kate upon her mettle. Kate seated herself also, and put up her hand for the letter. "Is it from Mr. Grey?" she asked. "No," said Alice; "it is not from Mr. Grey." And she gave her companion the paper. Kate before she had touched it had seen that it was from her brother George; and as she opened it looked anxiously into Alice's face. "Has he offended you?" Kate asked. [Illustration: Swindale Fell.] "Read it," said Alice, "and then we'll talk of it afterwards,--as we go home." Then she got up from the stone and walked a step or two towards the brow of the fell, and stood there looking down upon the lake, while Kate read the letter. "Well!" she said, when she returned to her place. "Well," said Kate. "Alice, Alice, it will, indeed, be well if you listen to him. Oh, Alice, may I hope? Alice, my own Alice, my darling, my friend! Say that it shall be so." And Kate knelt at her friend's feet upon the heather, and looked up into her face with eyes full of tears. What shall we say of a woman who could be as false as she had been, and yet could be so true? Alice made no immediate answer, but still continued to gaze down over her friend upon the lake. "Alice," continued Kate, "I did not think I should be made so happy this Christmas Day. You could not have the heart to bring me here and show me this letter in this way, and bid me read it so calmly, and then tell me that it is all for nothing. No; you could not do that? Alice, I am so happy. I will so love this place. I hated it before." And then she put her face down upon the boulder-stone and kissed it. Still Alice said nothing, but she began to feel that she had gone further than she had intended. It was almost impossible for her now to say that her answer to George must be a refusal. Then Kate again went on speaking. "But is it not a beautiful letter? Say, Alice,--is it not a letter of which if you were his brother you would feel proud if another girl had shown it to you? I do feel proud of him. I know that he is a man with a manly heart and manly courage, who will yet do manly things. Here out on the mountain, with nobody near us, with Nature all round us, I ask you on your solemn word as a woman, do you love him?" "Love him!" said Alice. "Yes;--love him: as a woman should love her husband. Is not your heart his? Alice, there need be no lies now. If it be so, it should be your glory to say so, here, to me, as you hold that letter in your hand." "I can have no such glory, Kate. I have ever loved my cousin; but not so passionately as you seem to think." "Then there can be no passion in you." "Perhaps not, Kate. I would sometimes hope that it is so. But come; we shall be late; and you will be cold sitting there." "I would sit here all night to be sure that your answer would be as I would have it. But, Alice, at any rate you shall tell me before I move what your answer is to be. I know you will not refuse him; but make me happy by saying so with your own lips." "I cannot tell you before you move, Kate." "And why not?" "Because I have not as yet resolved." "Ah, that is impossible. That is quite impossible. On such a subject and under such circumstances a woman must resolve at the first moment. You had resolved, I know, before you had half read the letter;--though, perhaps, it may not suit you to say so." "You are quite mistaken. Come along and let us walk, and I will tell you all." Then Kate arose, and they turned their back to the lake, and began to make their way homewards. "I have not made up my mind as to what answer I will give him; but I have shown you his letter in order that I might have some one with whom I might speak openly. I knew well how it would be, and that you would strive to hurry me into an immediate promise." "No;--no; I want nothing of the kind." "But yet I could not deny myself the comfort of your friendship." "No, Alice, I will not hurry you. I will do nothing that you do not wish. But you cannot be surprised that I should be very eager. Has it not been the longing of all my life? Have I not passed my time plotting and planning and thinking of it till I have had time to think of nothing else? Do you know what I suffered when, through George's fault, the engagement was broken off? Was it not martyrdom to me,--that horrid time in which your Crichton from Cambridgeshire was in the ascendant? Did I not suffer the tortures of purgatory while that went on;--and yet, on the whole, did I not bear them with patience? And, now, can you be surprised that I am wild with joy when I begin to see that everything will be as I wish;--for it will be as I wish, Alice. It may be that you have not resolved to accept him. But you would have resolved to refuse him instantly had that been your destined answer to his letter." There was but little more said between them on the subject as they were passing over the fell, but when they were going down the path through the Beacon Wood, Kate again spoke: "You will not answer him without speaking to me first?" said Kate. "I will, at any rate, not send my answer without telling you," said Alice. "And you will let me see it?" "Nay," said Alice; "I will not promise that. But if it is unfavourable I will show it you." "Then I shall never see it," said Kate, laughing. "But that is quite enough for me. I by no means wish to criticise the love-sweet words in which you tell him that his offences are all forgiven. I know how sweet they will be. Oh, heavens! how I envy him!" Then they were at home; and the old man met them at the front door, glowering at them angrily from out his old leonine eyes, because the roast beef was already roasted. He had his great uncouth silver watch in his hand, which was always a quarter of an hour too fast, and he pointed at it fiercely, showing them the minute hand at ten minutes past the hour. "But, grandpapa, you are always too fast," said Kate. "And you are always too slow, miss," said the hungry old squire. "Indeed, it is not five yet. Is it, Alice?" "And how long are you going to be dressing?" "Not ten minutes;--are we, Alice? And, grandpapa, pray don't wait." "Don't wait! That's what they always say," he muttered, peevishly. "As if one would be any better waiting for them after the meat is on the table." But neither Kate nor Alice heard this, as they were already in their rooms. Nothing more was said that evening between Alice and Kate about the letter; but Kate, as she wished her cousin good night inside her bedroom door, spoke to her just one word--"Pray for him to-night," she said, "as you pray for those you love best." Alice made no answer, but we may believe that she did as she was desired to do.

Alice came down to breakfast on Christmas morning at Vavasor Hall to greet her grandfather, her father, and her cousin Kate. Kate remarked that she had received a letter from Aunt Greenow, and promised to show it to Alice after breakfast. But Alice said no word of her own letter. "Why didn't your aunt come here for Christmas dinner?" said the Squire. "Perhaps, sir, because you didn't ask her," said Kate, standing close to the old man, who was somewhat deaf. "And why didn't you ask her?" "I couldn't do that without your bidding, sir. We Vavasors are not always fond of meeting each other." "Hold your tongue, Kate. Alice, my dear, come and sit next to me. I am much obliged to you for coming all this way to see your old grandfather at Christmas. I only wish you had brought better news about your sweetheart." "She'll think better of it before long, sir," said her father. "Papa, you shouldn't say that. You would not wish me to marry against my own judgement." "I don't know much about ladies' judgements," said the old man. "It does seem to me that when a lady makes a promise she ought to keep it." "According to that," said Kate, "if I were engaged to a man, and found that he was a murderer, I still ought to marry him." "But Mr. Grey is not a murderer," said the Squire. "Please don't talk about it," said Alice. "I will say nothing more on the subject," said John Vavasor. Alice meanwhile sat with her cousin's letter in her pocket, and had not even begun to think how she should reply. The Squire of Vavasor Hall was a stout old man, with a red face and fierce grey eyes; his long grey hair and beard gave him the appearance of an old lion. He was excitable, unreasoning, and impatient of all opposition; but he was also affectionate, ready to forgive, unselfish, and hospitable. He was guided strictly by what he believed to be rules of right. His grandson George had offended him very deeply, and had never asked his pardon. He was determined that such pardon should never be given, unless it were asked for with bended knees; but, nevertheless, this grandson should be his heir. The Squire could not have rested quietly in his grave if he had left his estate to anyone but the eldest son of his eldest son. Though violent, he was more prone to love than anger; and he longed in his heart for some opportunity of being reconciled to George. The whole party went to church on Christmas morning. The small parish church of Vavasor, an unpretending wooden building, stood all alone half a mile from the Squire's gate. Vavasor was a parish between the mountains of the lake district and the plains. Its land was unproductive, ill-drained, and poor, with little of the beauty which tourists go to see. It was very dreary. There were dark pines around part of it, and at the back of the house there was a thick wood of firs running up to the top of a hill. Through this there was a wild steep walk which came out upon the moorland, and from there a track led across the mountain to Hawes Water, and on over many miles to the beauties of Windermere. But it was a long walk; and you might walk for miles and miles in other directions without seeing anything but the stern, everlasting moorland. The daily life at Vavasor was melancholy for John Vavasor, who regarded London as the only place where a man could live with comfort. The moors offered no charms to him; nor did the homely comforts of the old-fashioned Hall. But Alice could be very happy there with Kate; for both were good walkers and loved the mountains. Their regard for each other had grown as they had walked together over river and moor, disregarding the mud and wet which frighten so many girls away from the beauties of nature. On this Christmas Day Alice accompanied the Squire to church in a vehicle which in Ireland is called a jaunting-car, and which is perhaps the most uncomfortable vehicle yet invented. John Vavasor walked with Kate. But the girls had arranged that immediately after church they would start for a walk across the fells towards Hawes Water. They would have four hours for their excursion before dinner at five. This had all been planned before Alice received her letter. "Alice, my dear," said the old man to her in the jaunting-car after church, "you ought to get married." The Squire was hard of hearing, and a jaunting-car is a bad place for conversation, as your teeth are nearly shaken out of your head by every movement of the horse. "Well, sir, perhaps I shall some day." "Not if you quarrel with all your suitors," said the old man. "You'll never get married, my dear, if you go on in that way." "Why should I be married more than Kate?" "I don't know that anybody wants to marry Kate. I wish you'd think about it. If you don't get married before long, perhaps you never will at all." On returning home the two girls each took a slice of cake, and started on their walk. "We shan't get to the lake," said Kate. "No," said Alice; "but we can go as far as the big stone on Swindale Fell, where we can sit down and see it." "Do you remember the last time we sat there?" said Kate. "It was nearly three years ago, and it was then that you told me that all was over between you and George. Do you remember what a fool I was, and how I screamed in my sorrow? And then we got soaking wet coming home." "I remember that very well." "And how dark it was! If we go as far as Swindale we shall have it very dark coming home today; but I don't mind, because I know my way so well. You won't be afraid of half an hour's dark?" "Oh, no," said Alice. "Well; it's all for the best, I suppose. And now I must read you my aunt's letter." Kate took out the letter and read it while they walked slowly up the hill. It seemed that neither of her two suitors had succeeded with the widow. Indeed, she wrote of Mr. Cheesacre as though he were inconsolable for the loss of Kate, and advised her to return to Norfolk so that she might secure him. "You must understand, Alice," said Kate, pausing, "that the dear man has never given me the slightest ground for hope, and that I know that he makes an offer to her twice a week - on every market day." Then she went on reading. Poor Bellfield was working very hard at his drill, Mrs. Greenow wrote; sometimes she really thought the fatigue would be too much for his strength. He would sometimes come and just take a cup of tea - generally on Mondays and Thursdays. "These are not market days," said Kate; "and thus unpleasant meetings are avoided. I have not the slightest doubt that he also offers for her twice a week." "And will she accept him at last?" "Really, I don't know. Sometimes I fancy that she likes the fun of the thing, but that she is too wide-awake to put herself in any man's power. I have no doubt she lends him money, because she is very generous." The letter went on to say that her aunt had decided to remain at Norwich through the winter and spring, and that she hoped dear Kate would go back to her. "Come and have another look at Oileymead," said the letter, "and then, if you don't like it or him, I won't ask you to think of them ever again. I believe him to be a very honest fellow." "Did you ever know such a woman?" said Kate. Then Aunt Greenow's letter was put away, and the two girls had come to the open fell. It was a delicious afternoon for a winter's walk. The air was clear and cold, but not frosty. The ground was dry, and the sky gave no sign of rain. There is a special winter's light which is very clear, but melancholy; it tells of the shortness of the day and the coming of the early twilight. It is never seen so plainly as on the wide moorland, where the eye stretches away over miles to the faint low lines of distant clouds settling themselves upon the horizon. Such was the light of this Christmas afternoon, and both the girls had felt the effects of it before they reached the big stone on Swindale Fell. At first they had discussed almost with mirth the merits of Oileymead and Mr. Cheesacre; but as they got further on to the fell, the half-melancholy wildness of the place struck them, and they ceased to speak. Alice had still her letter in her pocket. She had come to no decision yet as to her answer; nor had she decided whether to show it to Kate. She regarded Kate as her steadfast friend, and suspected no treason by her. She had often quarrelled with Kate; but not because she did not trust her. Why should she not show this letter to Kate, and discuss it before she replied to it? This was in her mind as she walked silently along over the fell. The reader will surmise from this that she was already half inclined to give way, and to accept her cousin George. Alas, yes! The reader will be right. And yet it was not her love for him that prompted her to run so terrible a risk. That would have been easier to forgive. She was beginning to think that the love of which she had once thought so much did not matter. Of what use was it, and to what had it led? What had love done for her friend Glencora? What had love done for her? Had she not loved John Grey, and had she not felt that life with him would have been distasteful to her? She could not marry a man whom she disliked, but she liked her cousin George well enough, as she said to herself almost indifferently. It was a grievous task to her these days - this having to do something with her life. Was it not all futile? As for her earlier dream of the joys of love - that had gone, never to return. How she could make herself useful in some way that might gratify her ambition; that was now the question which seemed most important. Her cousin's letter to her had been very crafty. He had considered her character, and had written it with care. Whether he cared to marry his cousin was a point of so little interest to him that he left it to chance; but once chance had decided that he did wish it, it was necessary for his honour that he should get what he wanted. "At any rate he does me justice," Alice said to herself, when she read his words about her money. "He is welcome to it all if it will help him in his career, whether as my friend or as my husband." And would it not be well that she should be the means of reconciling George to his grandfather? George was the heir of a family so old that it went back to the Saxons. Alice thought much about this, and felt that it should be her duty to help George attain honour in his position. They walked on, exchanging a word or two, till the distant Cumberland mountains began to appear. "There's Helvellyn at last," said Kate. "I'm always happy when I see that. That's Scaw Fell on the left; the round distant top." Soon they were at the top of the bank; and then the beauty of the little lake of Haweswater lying down below them disclosed itself. A lake should, I think, be seen from above, to be seen in all its glory. The water beneath them was still as death, and as dark. But the slow clouds were passing over it, and the shades of darkness on its surface changed, as now a then a slight sheen was laid upon it by the breeze. "I'm so glad I've come here," said Alice, seating herself. "I cannot bear the idea of coming to Vavasor without seeing one of the lakes at least." "We'll get over to Windermere one day," said Kate. "I don't think so. I don't think I can stay long. Kate, I've got a letter to show you." And the tone of her voice instantly put Kate upon her mettle. "Is it from Mr. Grey?" she asked. "No," said Alice. She gave her companion the paper, and Kate saw it was from her brother. As she opened it looked anxiously at Alice. "Has he offended you?" she asked. "Read it," said Alice, "and then we'll talk of it as we go home." Then she got up and stood looking down upon the lake while Kate read. "Well," said Kate at last. "Alice, oh, Alice, may I hope? My own Alice, my darling! Say that it shall be so." And Kate knelt at her friend's feet upon the heather, and looked up at her with eyes full of tears. What shall we say of a woman who could be as false as she had been, and yet could be so true? Alice made no answer, but continued to gaze down upon the lake. "Alice," continued Kate, "I did not think I should be made so happy this Christmas Day. You could not have the heart to bring me here and show me this letter, and then tell me that it is all for nothing. Alice, I am so happy. I will so love this place." Alice said nothing, but she began to feel that she had gone further than she had intended. It was almost impossible for her now to say that she must refuse George. Kate went on. "Is it not a beautiful letter? I do feel proud of him. I know that he is a man with a manly heart, who will do manly things. Do you love him?" "Love him!" said Alice. "Yes. Is not your heart his?." "I have always loved my cousin. Kate; but not so passionately as you seem to think." "Then there can be no passion in you." "Perhaps not, Kate. I sometimes hope that it is so. But come; we shall be late; and you will get cold sitting there." "I would sit here all night to be sure that your answer would a yes. But, Alice, tell me what your answer is to be. I know you will not refuse him; but make me happy by saying so." "I cannot tell you, Kate. I have not yet decided." "Ah, that is impossible. On such a subject a woman must decide at the first moment. You had resolved, I know, before you had half read the letter." "You are quite mistaken. Let us walk, and I will tell you all." They turned their backs to the lake, and began to make their way homewards. "I have shown you his letter so that I might have someone with whom I could speak openly. I knew how it would be, and that you would try to hurry me into an immediate promise." "No, Alice, I will not hurry you. I will do nothing that you do not wish. But you cannot be surprised that I should be very eager. Has it not been the longing of my life? Have I not passed my time planning and thinking of it? Do you know what I suffered when the engagement was broken off? And, now, can you be surprised that I am wild with joy? - for it will be as I wish, Alice. You would have decided to refuse him instantly had that been your destiny." There was little more said until they were going down the path through the Beacon Wood. Then Kate again spoke: "You will not answer him without speaking to me first?" "I will, at any rate, not send my answer without telling you," said Alice. "And you will let me see it?" "No," said Alice. "But if it is unfavourable I will show it you." "Then I shall never see it," said Kate, laughing. "That is enough for me. I know how sweet your words of forgiveness will be. Oh, heavens! how I envy him!" Then they were at home; and the old man met them at the front door, glowering angrily, because the roast beef was ready. He had his great uncouth silver watch in his hand, which was always a quarter of an hour too fast, and he pointed at it fiercely. "But, grandpapa, you are always too fast," said Kate. "And you are always too slow, miss," said the hungry old squire. "It is not five yet." And the two girls hurried to their rooms to change. Nothing more was said that evening about the letter; but Kate, as she wished her cousin good night, said, "Pray for him tonight, as you pray for those you love best." Alice made no answer, but we may believe she did as Kate desired.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 31: Among the Fells

Some ten or twelve days after George Vavasor's return to London from Westmoreland he appeared at Mr. Scruby's offices with four small slips of paper in his hand. Mr. Scruby, as usual, was pressing for money. The third election was coming on, and money was already being spent very freely among the men of the River Bank. So, at least, Mr. Scruby declared. Mr. Grimes, of the "Handsome Man," had shown signs of returning allegiance. But Mr. Grimes could not afford to be loyal without money. He had his little family to protect. Mr. Scruby, too, had his little family, and was not ashamed to use it on this occasion. "I'm a family man, Mr. Vavasor, and therefore I never run any risks. I never go a yard further than I can see my way back." This he had said in answer to a proposition that he should take George's note of hand for the expenses of the next election, payable in three months' time. "It is so very hard to realize," said George, "immediately upon a death, when all the property left is real property." "Very hard indeed," said Mr. Scruby, who had heard with accuracy all the particulars of the old Squire's will. Vavasor understood the lawyer, cursed him inwardly, and suggested to himself that some day he might murder Mr. Scruby as well as John Grey,--and perhaps also a few more of his enemies. Two days after the interview in which his own note of hand had been refused, he again called in Great Marlborough Street. Upon this occasion he tendered to Mr. Scruby for his approval the four slips of paper which have been mentioned. Mr. Scruby regarded them with attention, looking first at one side horizontally, and then at the other side perpendicularly. But before we learn the judgement pronounced by Mr. Scruby as to these four slips of paper, we must go back to their earlier history. As they were still in their infancy, we shall not have to go back far. One morning, at about eleven o'clock the parlour-maid came up to Alice, as she sat alone in the drawing-room in Queen Anne Street, and told her there was a "gentleman" in the hall waiting to be seen by her. We all know the tone in which servants announce a gentleman when they know that the gentleman is not a gentleman. "A gentleman wanting to see me! What sort of a gentleman?" "Well, miss, I don't think he's just of our sort; but he's decent to look at." Alice Vavasor had no desire to deny herself to any person but one. She was well aware that the gentleman in the hall could not be her cousin George, and therefore she did not refuse to see him. "Let him come up," she said. "But I think, Jane, you ought to ask him his name." Jane did ask him his name, and came back immediately, announcing Mr. Levy. This occurred immediately after the return of Mr. John Vavasor from Westmoreland. He had reached home late on the preceding evening, and at the moment of Mr. Levy's call was in his dressing-room. Alice got up to receive her visitor, and at once understood the tone of her maid's voice. Mr. Levy was certainly not a gentleman of the sort to which she had been most accustomed. He was a little dark man, with sharp eyes, set very near to each other in his head, with a beaked nose, thick at the bridge, and a black moustache, but no other beard. Alice did not at all like the look of Mr. Levy, but she stood up to receive him, made him a little bow, and asked him to sit down. "Is papa dressed yet?" Alice asked the servant. "Well, miss, I don't think he is,--not to say dressed." Alice had thought it might be as well that Mr. Levy should know that there was a gentleman in the house with her. "I've called about a little bit of business, miss," said Mr. Levy, when they were alone. "Nothing as you need disturb yourself about. You'll find it all square, I think." Then he took a case out of his breast-pocket, and produced a note, which he handed to her. Alice took the note, and saw immediately that it was addressed to her by her cousin George. "Yes, Mr. George Vavasor," said Mr. Levy. "I dare say you never saw me before, miss?" "No, sir; I think not," said Alice. "I am your cousin's clerk." "Oh, you're Mr. Vavasor's clerk. I'll read his letter, if you please, sir." "If you please, miss." George Vavasor's letter to his cousin was as follows:-- DEAR ALICE, After what passed between us when I last saw you I thought that on my return from Westmoreland I should learn that you had paid in at my bankers' the money that I require. But I find that this is not so; and of course I excuse you, because women so seldom know when or how to do that which business demands of them. You have, no doubt, heard the injustice which my grandfather has done me, and will probably feel as indignant as I do. I only mention this now, because the nature of his will makes it more than ever incumbent on you that you should be true to your pledge to me. Till there shall be some ground for a better understanding between us,--and this I do not doubt will come,--I think it wiser not to call, myself, at Queen Anne Street. I therefore send my confidential clerk with four bills, each of five hundred pounds, drawn at fourteen days' date, across which I will get you to write your name. Mr. Levy will show you the way in which this should be done. Your name must come under the word "accepted," and just above the name of Messrs. Drummonds, where the money must be lying ready, at any rate, not later than Monday fortnight. Indeed, the money must be there some time on the Saturday. They know you so well at Drummonds' that you will not object to call on the Saturday afternoon, and ask if it is all right. I have certainly been inconvenienced by not finding the money as I expected on my return to town. If these bills are not properly provided for, the result will be very disastrous to me. I feel, however, sure that this will be done, both for your own sake and for mine. Affectionately yours, GEORGE VAVASOR. The unparalleled impudence of this letter had the effect which the writer had intended. It made Alice think immediately of her own remissness,--if she had been remiss,--rather than of the enormity of his claim upon her. The decision with which he asked for her money, without any pretence at an excuse on his part, did for the time induce her to believe that she had no alternative but to give it to him, and that she had been wrong in delaying it. She had told him that he should have it, and she ought to have been as good as her word. She should not have forced upon him the necessity of demanding it. But the idea of signing four bills was terrible to her, and she felt sure that she ought not to put her name to orders for so large an amount and then intrust them to such a man as Mr. Levy. Her father was in the house, and she might have asked him. The thought that she would do so of course occurred to her. But then it occurred to her also that were she to speak to her father as to this advancing of money to her cousin,--to this giving of money, for she now well understood that it would be a gift;--were she to consult her father in any way about it, he would hinder her, not only from signing the bills for Mr. Levy, but, as far as he could do so, from keeping the promise made to her cousin. She was resolved that George should have the money, and she knew that she could give it to him in spite of her father. But her father might probably be able to delay the gift, and thus rob it of its chief value. If she were to sign the bills, the money must be made to be forthcoming. So much she understood. Mr. Levy had taken out the four bills from the same case, and had placed them on the table before him. "Mr. Vavasor has explained, I believe, miss, what it is you have to do?" he said. "Yes, sir; my cousin has explained." "And there is nothing else to trouble you with, I believe. If you will just write your name across them, here, I need not detain you by staying any longer." Mr. Levy was very anxious to make his visit as short as possible, since he had heard that Mr. John Vavasor was in the house. But Alice hesitated. Two thousand pounds is a very serious sum of money. She had heard much of sharpers, and thought that she ought to be cautious. What if this man, of whom she had never before heard, should steal the bills after she had signed them? She looked again at her cousin's letter, chiefly with the object of gaining time. "It's all right, miss," said Mr. Levy. "Could you not leave them with me, sir?" said Alice. "Well; not very well, miss. No doubt Mr. Vavasor has explained it all; but the fact is, he must have them this afternoon. He has got a heavy sum to put down on the nail about this here election, and if it ain't down to-day, them on whom he has to depend will be all abroad." "But, sir, the money will not be payable to-day. If I understand it, they are not cheques." "No, miss, no; they are not cheques. But your name, miss, at fourteen days, is the same as ready money;--just the same." She paused, and while she paused, he reached a pen for her from the writing-table, and then she signed the four bills as he held them before her. She was quick enough at doing this when she had once commenced the work. Her object, then, was that the man should be gone from the house before her father could meet him. These were the four bits of paper which George Vavasor tendered to Mr. Scruby's notice on the occasion which we have now in hand. In doing so, he made use of them after the manner of a grand capitalist, who knows that he may assume certain airs as he allows the odours of the sweetness of his wealth to drop from him. "You insisted on ready money, with your d---- suspicions," said he; "and there it is. You're not afraid of fourteen days, I dare say." "Fourteen days is neither here nor there," said Mr. Scruby. "We can let our payments stand over as long as that, without doing any harm. I'll send one of my men down to Grimes, and tell him I can't see him, till,--let me see," and he looked at one of the bills, "till the 15th." But this was not exactly what George Vavasor wanted. He was desirous that the bills should be immediately turned into money, so that the necessity of forcing payments from Alice, should due provision for the bills not be made, might fall into other hands than his. "We can wait till the 15th," said Scruby, as he handed the bits of paper back to his customer. "You will want a thousand, you say?" said George. "A thousand to begin with. Certainly not less." "Then you had better keep two of them." "Well--no! I don't see the use of that. You had better collect them through your own banker, and let me have a cheque on the 15th or 16th." "How cursed suspicious you are, Scruby." "No, I ain't. I'm not a bit suspicious. I don't deal in such articles; that's all!" "What doubt can there be about such bills as those? Everybody knows that my cousin has a considerable fortune, altogether at her own disposal." "The truth is, Mr. Vavasor, that bills with ladies' names on them,--ladies who are no way connected with business,--ain't just the paper that people like." "Nothing on earth can be surer." "You take them into the City for discount, and see if the bankers don't tell you the same. They may be done, of course, upon your name. I say nothing about that." "I can explain to you the nature of the family arrangement, but I can't do that to a stranger. However, I don't mind." "Of course not. The time is so short that it does not signify. Have them collected through your own bankers, and then, if it don't suit you to call, send me a cheque for a thousand pounds when the time is up." Then Mr. Scruby turned to some papers on his right hand, as though the interview had been long enough. Vavasor looked at him angrily, opening his wound at him and cursing him inwardly. Mr. Scruby went on with his paper, by no means regarding either the wound or the unspoken curses. Thereupon Vavasor got up and went away without any word of farewell. As he walked along Great Marlborough Street, and through those unalluring streets which surround the Soho district, and so on to the Strand and his own lodgings, he still continued to think of some wide scheme of revenge,--of some scheme in which Mr. Scruby might be included. There had appeared something latterly in Mr. Scruby's manner to him, something of mingled impatience and familiarity, which made him feel that he had fallen in the attorney's estimation. It was not that the lawyer thought him to be less honourable, or less clever, than he had before thought him; but that the man was like a rat, and knew a falling house by the instinct that was in him. So George Vavasor cursed Mr. Scruby, and calculated some method of murdering him without detection. The reader is not to suppose that the Member for the Chelsea Districts had, in truth, resolved to gratify his revenge by murder,--by murdering any of those persons whom he hated so vigorously. He did not, himself, think it probable that he would become a murderer. But he received some secret satisfaction in allowing his mind to dwell upon the subject, and in making those calculations. He reflected that it would not do to take off Scruby and John Grey at the same time, as it would be known that he was connected with both of them; unless, indeed, he was to take off a third person at the same time,--a third person, as to the expediency of ending whose career he made his calculations quite as often as he did in regard to any of those persons whom he cursed so often. It need hardly be explained to the reader that this third person was the sitting Member for the Chelsea Districts. As he was himself in want of instant ready money Mr. Scruby's proposition that he should leave the four bills at his own bankers', to be collected when they came to maturity, did not suit him. He doubted much, also, whether at the end of the fourteen days the money would be forthcoming. Alice would be driven to tell her father, in order that the money might be procured, and John Vavasor would probably succeed in putting impediments in the way of the payment. He must take the bills into the City, and do the best there that he could with them. He was too late for this to-day, and therefore he went to his lodgings, and then down to the House. In the House he sat all the night with his hat over his eyes, making those little calculations of which I have spoken. "You have heard the news; haven't you?" said Mr. Bott to him, whispering in his ear. "News; no. I haven't heard any news." "Finespun has resigned, and Palliser is at this moment with the Duke of St. Bungay in the Lords' library." "They may both be at the bottom of the Lords' fishpond, for what I care," said Vavasor. "That's nonsense, you know," said Bott. "Still, you know Palliser is Chancellor of the Exchequer at this moment. What a lucky fellow you are to have such a chance come to you directly you get in. As soon as he takes his seat down there, of course we shall go up behind him." "We shall have another election in a month's time," said George. "I'm safe enough," said Bott. "It never hurts a man at elections to be closely connected with the Government." George Vavasor was in the City by times the next morning, but he found that the City did not look with favourable eyes on his four bills. The City took them up, first horizontally, and then, with a twist of its hand, perpendicularly, and looked at them with distrustful eyes. The City repeated the name, Alice Vavasor, as though it were not esteemed a good name on Change. The City suggested that as the time was so short, the holder of the bills would be wise to hold them till he could collect the amount. It was very clear that the City suspected something wrong in the transaction. The City, by one of its mouths, asserted plainly that ladies' bills never meant business. George Vavasor cursed the City, and made his calculation about murdering it. Might not a river of strychnine be turned on round the Exchange about luncheon time? Three of the bills he left at last with his own bankers for collection, and retained the fourth in his breast-pocket, intending on the morrow to descend with it into those lower depths of the money market which he had not as yet visited. Again, on the next day, he went to work and succeeded to some extent. Among those lower depths he found a capitalist who was willing to advance him two hundred pounds, keeping that fourth bill in his possession as security. The capitalist was to have forty pounds for the transaction, and George cursed him as he took his cheque. George Vavasor knew quite enough of the commercial world to enable him to understand that a man must be in a very bad condition when he consents to pay forty pounds for the use of two hundred for fourteen days. He cursed the City. He cursed the House of Commons. He cursed his cousin Alice and his sister Kate. He cursed the memory of his grandfather. And he cursed himself. Mr. Levy had hardly left the house in Queen Anne Street, before Alice had told her father what she had done. "The money must be forthcoming," said Alice. To this her father made no immediate reply, but turning himself in his chair away from her with a sudden start, sat looking at the fire and shaking his head. "The money must be made to be forthcoming," said Alice. "Papa, will you see that it is done?" This was very hard upon poor John Vavasor, and so he felt it to be. "Papa, if you will not promise, I must go to Mr. Round about it myself, and must find out a broker to sell out for me. You would not wish that my name should be dishonoured." "You will be ruined," said he, "and for such a rascal as that!" "Never mind whether he is a rascal or not, papa. You must acknowledge that he has been treated harshly by his grandfather." "I think that will was the wisest thing my father ever did. Had he left the estate to George, there wouldn't have been an acre of it left in the family in six months' time." "But the life interest, papa!" "He would have raised all he could upon that, and it would have done him no good." "At any rate, papa, he must have this two thousand pounds. You must promise me that." "And then he will want more." "No; I do not think he will ask for more. At any rate, I do not think that I am bound to give him all that I have." "I should think not. I should like to know how you can be bound to give him anything?" "Because I promised it. I have signed the bills now, and it must be done." Still Mr. Vavasor made no promise. "Papa, if you will not say that you will do it, I must go down to Mr. Round at once." "I don't know that I can do it. I don't know that Mr. Round can do it. Your money is chiefly on mortgage." Then there was a pause for a moment in the conversation. "Upon my word, I never heard of such a thing in my life," said Mr. Vavasor; "I never did. Four thousand pounds given away to such a man as that, in three months! Four thousand pounds! And you say you do not intend to marry him." "Certainly not; all that is over." "And does he know that it is over?" "I suppose he does." "You suppose so! Things of that sort are so often over with you!" This was very cruel. Perhaps she had deserved the reproach, but still it was very cruel. The blow struck her with such force that she staggered under it. Tears came into her eyes, and she could hardly speak lest she should betray herself by sobbing. "I know that I have behaved badly," she said at last; "but I am punished, and you might spare me now!" "I didn't want to punish you," he said, getting up from his chair and walking about the room. "I don't want to punish you. But, I don't want to see you ruined!" "I must go to Mr. Round then, myself." Mr. Vavasor went on walking about the room, jingling the money in his trousers-pockets, and pushing the chairs about as he chanced to meet them. At last, he made a compromise with her. He would take a day to think whether he would assist her in getting the money, and communicate his decision to her on the following morning.

Some ten or twelve days after George Vavasor's return to London he appeared at Mr. Scruby's offices with four small slips of paper in his hand. Mr. Scruby, as usual, was pressing for money. The third election was coming on, and money was already being spent very freely among the men of the River Bank. So, at least, Mr. Scruby declared. "It is very hard to realize money," said George, "immediately after a death, when all the property left is real property." "Very hard indeed," said Mr. Scruby, who had heard all about the old Squire's will. Vavasor cursed him inwardly, and suggested to himself that some day he might murder Mr. Scruby as well as John Grey - and perhaps also a few more of his enemies. Two days later, he again called, and gave Mr. Scruby the four slips of paper which have been mentioned. Before we learn Mr Scruby's judgment of those scraps of paper, we must go back to their earlier history. As they were still in their infancy, we shall not have to go back far. One morning the parlour-maid came up to Alice, as she sat alone in the drawing-room in Queen Anne Street, and told her there was a "gentleman" waiting in the hall. We all know the tone in which servants announce a gentleman when they know that he is not a gentleman. "What sort of a gentleman?" "Well, miss, I don't think he's just of our sort." Alice Vavasor was aware that the gentleman could not be her cousin George, and therefore she said, "Let him come up." Jane let him in, announcing Mr. Levy. At this time John Vavasor was in his dressing-room. Alice got up to receive her visitor, and at once understood the tone of her maid's voice. Mr. Levy was a little dark man, with sharp close-set eyes, a beaked nose, and a black moustache. Alice did not like the look of him, but she asked him to sit down. "Is papa dressed yet?" Alice asked the servant, purely to let Mr. Levy know that there was a gentleman in the house with her. "I don't think so, miss." "I've called about a little bit of business," said Mr. Levy, when they were alone. "Nothing as you need disturb yourself about. You'll find it all square, I think." Then he produced a note, which he handed to her. Alice took the note, and saw immediately that it was addressed to her by her cousin George. "I am Mr. Vavasor's clerk, miss." George Vavasor's letter was as follows: Dear Alice, After what passed between us when I last saw you, I thought that on my return from Westmorland I should learn that you had paid in at my bankers' the money that I require. But I find that this is not so; and of course I excuse you, because women so seldom know how to do what business demands of them. You have, no doubt, heard of the injustice which my grandfather has done me, and will probably feel as indignant as I do. I only mention this, because the nature of his will makes it more than ever necessary that you should be true to your pledge to me. Till there shall be some ground for a better understanding between us, I think it wiser not to call on you myself. I therefore send my clerk with four bills, each of five hundred pounds, drawn at fourteen days' date, across which I will get you to write your name. Mr. Levy will show you how this should be done. Your name must come under the word "accepted," and just above the name of Messrs. Drummonds, where the money must be lying not later than Monday fortnight. Indeed, the money must be there some time on the Saturday. Drummonds bank will not object if you call on the Saturday afternoon, and ask if it is all right. I have certainly been inconvenienced by not finding the money as I expected on my return to town. If these bills are not properly provided for, the result will be disastrous to me. I feel, however, sure that this will be done, both for your own sake and for mine. Affectionately yours, George Vavasor. The unparalleled impudence of this letter had the effect which the writer had intended. It made Alice think immediately of her own remissness, rather than of the enormity of his claim upon her. She believed that she had no alternative but to give him the money. She had told him that he should have it. She should not have forced him into the necessity of demanding it. But the idea of signing four bills was terrible to her, and she felt sure that she ought not to put her name to orders for so large an amount and then entrust them to such a man as Mr. Levy. Her father was in the house, and she thought of asking him. But it occurred to her that if she were to speak to her father about this advancing of money, he would prevent her, if he could, from keeping the promise made to her cousin. She was resolved that George should have the money; but her father might be able to delay the gift. If she signed the bills, the money must be forthcoming. Mr. Levy had taken out the four bills and had placed them on the table. "If you will just write your name across them, here, I need not detain you by staying any longer," he said. Mr. Levy was anxious to make his visit as short as possible, since he had heard that Mr. John Vavasor was in the house. But Alice hesitated. Two thousand pounds is a very serious sum of money. What if this man, of whom she had never before heard, should steal the bills after she had signed them? She looked again at her cousin's letter, chiefly with the object of gaining time. "It's all right, miss," said Mr. Levy. "Could you not leave them with me?" said Alice. "Well; not very well, miss. The fact is, Mr. Vavasor must have them this afternoon. He has got a heavy sum to put down about this here election." "But, sir, the money will not be payable today. If I understand it, they are not cheques." "No, miss, they are not cheques. But your name, miss, at fourteen days, is the same as ready money." While she paused, he handed her a pen, and then she signed the four bills quickly. These were the four bits of paper which George Vavasor offered to Mr. Scruby, in the manner of a grand capitalist. "You insisted on ready money, with your d-- suspicions," said he; "and there it is. You're not afraid of fourteen days, I dare say." "Fourteen days is neither here nor there," said Mr. Scruby. "I'll send one of my men down to Grimes, and tell him I can't see him, till" and he looked at one of the bills, "till the 15th." But this was not what George Vavasor wanted. He wished that the bills should be immediately turned into money, but not by him. "You will want a thousand, you say?" he said. "A thousand to begin with." "Then you had better keep two of them." "Well, no! I don't see the use of that. You had better collect them through your own banker, and let me have a cheque on the 15th or 16th." "How cursed suspicious you are, Scruby." "No, I ain't. I don't deal in such articles; that's all. The truth is, Mr. Vavasor, that bills with ladies' names on them ain't just what people like. You take them into the City, and see if the bankers don't tell you the same. They may be done, of course, upon your name." "I can explain to you the nature of the family arrangement, but I can't do that to a stranger. However, I don't mind." "Of course not. The time is so short that it does not signify. Have them collected through your own bankers, and then send me a cheque for a thousand pounds when the time is up." Then Mr. Scruby turned to some papers as though the interview had been long enough. Vavasor looked at him angrily, cursing him inwardly, but Mr. Scruby ignored him. So Vavasor got up and went away. As he walked along the unalluring streets which surround Soho, to the Strand and his own lodgings, he continued to think of some wide scheme of revenge - in which Mr. Scruby might be included. Some impatience and familiarity in Mr. Scruby's manner made him feel that he had fallen in the attorney's esteem. The man was like a rat, and knew a falling house by instinct. So George Vavasor cursed Mr. Scruby, and calculated some method of murdering him without detection. The reader is not to suppose that the Member for the Chelsea Districts had, in truth, any intention to become a murderer. But he received a secret satisfaction in allowing his mind to dwell upon the subject. He reflected that it would not do to knock off Scruby and John Grey at the same time, as it would be known that he was connected with both of them; unless, indeed, he was to kill himself too. As he needed instant money, Mr. Scruby's proposition that he should leave the four bills at his own bankers', to be collected when they came to maturity, did not suit him. He doubted much whether at the end of the fourteen days the money would be forthcoming. Alice would have to tell her father, and John Vavasor would probably prevent the payment. He must take the bills into the City, and do the best there that he could with them. He was too late for this today, so he went down to the House. There he sat all night with his hat over his eyes, plotting his murders. "You have heard the news; haven't you?" said Mr. Bott, whispering in his ear. "I haven't heard any news." "Finespun has resigned, and Palliser is at this moment with the Duke of St. Bungay in the Lords' library." "They may both be at the bottom of the Lords' fishpond, for all I care," said Vavasor. "That's nonsense, you know," said Bott. "What a lucky fellow you are to have such a chance come to you directly you get in. As soon as he takes his seat down there, of course we shall go up behind him." "We shall have another election in a month's time," said George. "I'm safe enough," said Bott. "It never hurts a man at elections to be closely connected with the Government." George Vavasor was in the City early the next morning, but he found that the City did not look with favourable eyes on his four bills. The City took them up distrustfully, and repeated the name Alice Vavasor, and suggested that as the time was so short, the holder of the bills would be wise to hold them till he could collect the amount. It was very clear that the City suspected something wrong in the transaction. George Vavasor cursed the City, and made his calculation about murdering it. Might not a river of strychnine be turned on the Exchange at luncheon time? At last he left three of the bills with his own bankers for collection, and kept the fourth in his pocket. The next day he descended with it into the lower depths of the money market, and found a capitalist who was willing to advance him two hundred pounds, keeping that fourth bill as security. The capitalist was to have forty pounds for the transaction, and George cursed him as he took his cheque. He knew that a man must be in a very bad condition when he consents to pay forty pounds for the use of two hundred for fourteen days. He cursed the City. He cursed the House of Commons. He cursed his cousin Alice and his sister Kate. He cursed the memory of his grandfather. And he cursed himself. Mr. Levy had hardly left the house in Queen Anne Street, before Alice had told her father what she had done. "The money must be forthcoming," said Alice. "Papa, will you see that it is done?" To this her father made no reply, but sat looking at the fire and shaking his head, feeling it to be very hard upon him. "Papa, if you will not promise, I must go to Mr. Round myself, and find a broker to sell out for me." "You will be ruined," said he, "and for such a rascal as that!" "Never mind whether he is a rascal or not, papa. You must admit that he has been treated harshly by his grandfather." "I think that will was the wisest thing my father ever did. If he had left the estate to George, there wouldn't have been an acre of it left in the family in six months' time." "At any rate, papa, he must have this two thousand pounds." "And then he will want more." "No; I do not think he will ask for more. At any rate, I do not think that I am bound to give him all that I have." "I should think not. Why are you bound to give him anything?" "Because I promised it. I have signed the bills now, and it must be done." "I don't know that Mr. Round can do it. Your money is chiefly on mortgage." He paused for a moment. "I never heard of such a thing. Four thousand pounds given away to such a man as that, in three months! And you say you do not intend to marry him." "Certainly not; all that is over." "And does he know that it is over?" "I suppose he does." "You suppose so! Things of that sort are so often over with you!" This was very cruel. The blow struck her with such force that she staggered under it. Tears came into her eyes, and she could hardly speak lest she should betray herself by sobbing. "I know that I have behaved badly," she said at last; "but I am punished, and you might spare me now!" "I didn't want to punish you," he said, getting up and walking about the room. "But I don't want to see you ruined!" At last he made a compromise with her. He would take a day to think whether he would help her get the money, and would tell her his decision on the following morning.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 60: Alice Vavasor's Name Gets into the Money Market

Alice sat alone for an hour without moving when John Grey had left her, and the last words which he had uttered were sounding in her ears all the time, "My heart is still yours, as it has been since I knew you." There had been something in his words which had soothed her spirits, and had, for the moment, almost comforted her. At any rate, he did not despise her. He could not have spoken such words as these to her had he not still held her high in his esteem. Nay;--had he not even declared that he would yet take her as his own if she would come to him? "I cannot tell you with how much joy I would take you back to my bosom!" Ah! that might never be. But yet the assurance had been sweet to her;--dangerously sweet, as she soon told herself. She knew that she had lost her Eden, but it was something to her that the master of the garden had not himself driven her forth. She sat there, thinking of her fate, as though it belonged to some other one,--not to herself; as though it were a tale that she had read. Herself she had shipwrecked altogether; but though she might sink, she had not been thrust from the ship by hands which she loved. But would it not have been better that he should have scorned her and reviled her? Had he been able to do so, he at least would have escaped the grief of disappointed love. Had he learned to despise her, he would have ceased to regret her. She had no right to feel consolation in the fact that his sufferings were equal to her own. But when she thought of this, she told herself that it could not be that it was so. He was a man, she said, not passionate by nature. Alas! it was the mistake she had ever made when summing up the items of his character! He might be persistent, she thought, in still striving to do that upon which he had once resolved. He had said so, and that which he said was always true to the letter. But, nevertheless, when this thing which he still chose to pursue should have been put absolutely beyond his reach, he would not allow his calm bosom to be harassed by a vain regret. He was a man too whole at every point,--so Alice told herself,--to allow his happiness to be marred by such an accident. But must the accident occur? Was there no chance that he might be saved, even from such trouble as might follow upon such a loss? Could it not be possible that he might be gratified,--since it would gratify him,--and that she might be saved! Over and over again she considered this,--but always as though it were another woman whom she would fain save, and not herself. But she knew that her own fate was fixed. She had been mad when she had done the thing, but the thing was not on that account the less done. She had been mad when she had trusted herself abroad with two persons, both of whom, as she had well known, were intent on wrenching her happiness from out of her grasp. She had been mad when she had told herself, whilst walking over the Westmoreland fells, that after all she might as well marry her cousin, since that other marriage was then beyond her reach! Her two cousins had succeeded in blighting all the hopes of her life;--but what could she now think of herself in that she had been so weak as to submit to such usage from their hands? Alas!--she told herself, admitting in her misery all her weakness,--alas, she had no mother. She had gloried in her independence, and this had come of it! She had scorned the prudence of Lady Macleod, and her scorn had brought her to this pass! Was she to give herself bodily,--body and soul, as she said aloud in her solitary agony,--to a man whom she did not love? Must she submit to his caresses,--lie on his bosom,--turn herself warmly to his kisses? "No," she said, "no,"--speaking audibly, as she walked about the room; "no;--it was not in my bargain; I never meant it." But if so what had she meant;--what had been her dream? Of what marriage had she thought, when she was writing that letter back to George Vavasor? How am I to analyse her mind, and make her thoughts and feelings intelligible to those who may care to trouble themselves with the study? Any sacrifice she would make for her cousin which one friend could make for another. She would fight his battles with her money, with her words, with her sympathy. She would sit with him if he needed it, and speak comfort to him by the hour. His disgrace should be her disgrace;--his glory her glory;--his pursuits her pursuits. Was not that the marriage to which she had consented? But he had come to her and asked her for a kiss, and she had shuddered before him, when he made the demand. Then that other one had come and had touched her hand, and the fibres of her body had seemed to melt within her at the touch, so that she could have fallen at his feet. She had done very wrong. She knew that she had done wrong. She knew that she had sinned with that sin which specially disgraces a woman. She had said that she would become the wife of a man to whom she could not cleave with a wife's love; and, mad with a vile ambition, she had given up the man for whose modest love her heart was longing. She had thrown off from her that wondrous aroma of precious delicacy, which is the greatest treasure of womanhood. She had sinned against her sex; and, in an agony of despair, as she crouched down upon the floor with her head against her chair, she told herself that there was no pardon for her. She understood it now, and knew that she could not forgive herself. But can you forgive her, delicate reader? Or am I asking the question too early in my story? For myself, I have forgiven her. The story of the struggle has been present to my mind for many years,--and I have learned to think that even this offence against womanhood may, with deep repentance, be forgiven. And you also must forgive her before we close the book, or else my story will have been told amiss. But let us own that she had sinned,--almost damnably, almost past forgiveness. What;--think that she knew what love meant, and not know which of two she loved! What;--doubt, of two men for whose arms she longed, of which the kisses would be sweet to bear; on which side lay the modesty of her maiden love! Faugh! She had submitted to pollution of heart and feeling before she had brought herself to such a pass as this. Come;--let us see if it be possible that she may be cleansed by the fire of her sorrow. "What am I to do?" She passed that whole day in asking herself that question. She was herself astounded at the rapidity with which the conviction had forced itself upon her that a marriage with her cousin would be to her almost impossible; and could she permit it to be said of her that she had thrice in her career jilted a promised suitor,--that three times she would go back from her word because her fancy had changed? Where could she find the courage to tell her father, to tell Kate, to tell even George himself, that her purpose was again altered? But she had a year at her disposal. If only during that year he would take her money and squander it, and then require nothing further of her hands, might she not thus escape the doom before her? Might it not be possible that the refusal should this time come from him? But she succeeded in making one resolve. She thought at least that she succeeded. Come what might, she would never stand with him at the altar. While there was a cliff from which she might fall, water that would cover her, a death-dealing grain that might be mixed in her cup, she could not submit herself to be George Vavasor's wife. To no ear could she tell of this resolve. To no friend could she hint her purpose. She owed her money to the man after what had passed between them. It was his right to count upon such assistance as that would give him, and he should have it. Only as his betrothed she could give it him, for she understood well that if there were any breach between them, his accepting of such aid would be impossible. He should have her money, and then, when the day came, some escape should be found. In the afternoon her father came to her, and it may be as well to explain that Mr. Grey had seen him again that day. Mr. Grey, when he left Queen Anne Street, had gone to his lawyer, and from thence had made his way to Mr. Vavasor. It was between five and six when Mr. Vavasor came back to his house, and he then found his daughter sitting over the drawing-room fire, without lights, in the gloom of the evening. Mr. Vavasor had returned with Grey to the lawyer's chambers, and had from thence come direct to his own house. He had been startled at the precision with which all the circumstances of his daughter's position had been explained to a mild-eyed old gentleman, with a bald head, who carried on his business in a narrow, dark, clean street, behind Doctors' Commons. Mr. Tombe was his name. "No;" Mr. Grey had said, when Mr. Vavasor had asked as to the peculiar nature of Mr. Tombe's business; "he is not specially an ecclesiastical lawyer. He had a partner at Ely, and was always employed by my father, and by most of the clergy there." Mr. Tombe had evinced no surprise, no dismay, and certainly no mock delicacy, when the whole affair was under discussion. George Vavasor was to get present moneys, but,--if it could be so arranged--from John Grey's stores rather than from those belonging to Alice. Mr. Tombe could probably arrange that with Mr. Vavasor's lawyer, who would no doubt be able to make difficulty as to raising ready money. Mr. Tombe would be able to raise ready money without difficulty. And then, at last, George Vavasor was to be made to surrender his bride, taking or having taken the price of his bargain. John Vavasor sat by in silence as the arrangement was being made, not knowing how to speak. He had no money with which to give assistance. "I wish you to understand from the lady's father," Grey said to the lawyer, "that the marriage would be regarded by him with as much dismay as by myself." "Certainly;--it would be ruinous," Mr. Vavasor had answered. "And you see, Mr. Tombe," Mr. Grey went on, "we only wish to try the man. If he be not such as we believe him to be, he can prove it by his conduct. If he is worthy of her, he can then take her." "You merely wish to open her eyes, Mr. Grey," said the mild-eyed lawyer. "I wish that he should have what money he wants, and then we shall find what it is he really wishes." "Yes; we shall know our man," said the lawyer. "He shall have the money, Mr. Grey," and so the interview had been ended. Mr. Vavasor, when he entered the drawing-room, addressed his daughter in a cheery voice. "What; all in the dark?" "Yes, papa. Why should I have candles when I am doing nothing? I did not expect you." "No; I suppose not. I came here because I want to say a few words to you about business." "What business, papa?" Alice well understood the tone of her father's voice. He was desirous of propitiating her; but was at the same time desirous of carrying some point in which he thought it probable that she would oppose him. "Well; my love, if I understood you rightly, your cousin George wants some money." "I did not say that he wants it now; but I think he will want it before the time for the election comes." "If so, he will want it at once. He has not asked you for it yet?" "No; he has merely said that should he be in need he would take me at my word." "I think there is no doubt that he wants it. Indeed, I believe that he is almost entirely without present means of his own." "I can hardly think so; but I have no knowledge about it. I can only say that he has not asked me yet, and that I should wish to oblige him whenever he may do so." "To what extent, Alice?" "I don't know what I have. I get about four hundred a year, but I do not know what it is worth, or how far it can all be turned into money. I should wish to keep a hundred a year and let him have the rest." "What; eight thousand pounds!" said the father who in spite of his wish not to oppose her, could not but express his dismay. "I do not imagine that he will want so much; but if he should, I wish that he should have it." "Heaven and earth!" said John Vavasor. "Of course we should have to give up the house." He could not suppress his trouble, or refrain from bursting out in agony at the prospect of such a loss. "But he has asked me for nothing yet, papa." "No, exactly; and perhaps he may not; but I wish to know what to do when the demand is made. I am not going to oppose you now; your money is your own, and you have a right to do with it as you please;--but would you gratify me in one thing?" "What is it, papa?" "When he does apply, let the amount be raised through me?" "How through you?" "Come to me; I mean, so that I may see the lawyer, and have the arrangements made." Then he explained to her that in dealing with large sums of money, it could not be right that she should do so without his knowledge, even though the property was her own. "I will promise you that I will not oppose your wishes," he said. Then Alice undertook that when such case should arise the money should be raised through his means. The day but one following this she received a letter from Lady Glencora, who was still at Matching Priory. It was a light-spirited, chatty, amusing letter, intended to be happy in its tone,--intended to have a flavour of happiness, but just failing through the too apparent meaning of a word here and there. "You will see that I am at Matching," the letter said, "whereas you will remember that I was to have been at Monkshade. I escaped at last by a violent effort, and am now passing my time innocently,--I fear not so profitably as she would induce me to do,--with Iphy Palliser. You remember Iphy. She is a good creature, and would fain turn even me to profit, if it were possible. I own that I am thinking of them all at Monkshade, and am in truth delighted that I am not there. My absence is entirely laid upon your shoulders. That wicked evening amidst the ruins! Poor ruins. I go there alone sometimes and fancy that I hear such voices from the walls, and see such faces through the broken windows! All the old Pallisers come and frown at me, and tell me that I am not good enough to belong to them. There is a particular window to which Sir Guy comes and makes faces at me. I told Iphy the other day, and she answered me very gravely, that I might, if I chose, make myself good enough for the Pallisers. Even for the Pallisers! Isn't that beautiful?" Then Lady Glencora went on to say, that her husband intended to come up to London early in the session, and that she would accompany him. "That is," added Lady Glencora, "if I am still good enough for the Pallisers at that time."

Alice sat alone for an hour without moving when John Grey had left her, with his last words sounding in her ears. "My heart is yours now as it has been since I knew you." It almost comforted her. At any rate, he did not despise her. Nay; had he not even declared that he would take her back with joy? Ah! that could never be. Yet the assurance was sweet to her - dangerously sweet, as she soon told herself. She sat there, thinking of her fate, as though it belonged to someone else. She had been shipwrecked altogether; but though she might sink, she had not been thrust from the ship by hands which she loved. But would it not have been better if he had reviled her? In that case, at least he would have escaped the grief of disappointed love. She had no right to feel consoled by the fact that his sufferings were equal to her own. But when she thought of this, she told herself that it could not be so. He was not a passionate man, she said. Alas! it was the mistake she had always made about his character! He might be persistent, she thought, and true; but when she was put beyond his reach, he would not allow his calmness to be harassed by vain regret. He was a man too whole at every point - so Alice told herself - to allow his happiness to be marred by such an accident. But must the accident occur? Was there no chance that he might be gratified, and that she might be saved? Over and over again she considered this, but always as though it were another woman whom she would save, and not herself. She knew that her own fate was fixed. She had been mad when she had done the thing, but the thing was done. She had been mad when she had trusted herself abroad with two people, both intent on wrenching her happiness out of her grasp. She had been mad when she had told herself, whilst walking over the Westmorland fells, that after all she might as well marry her cousin, since that other marriage was beyond her reach! Her two cousins had succeeded in blighting all the hopes of her life; but why had she had been so weak as to submit? Alas! she told herself, admitting in her misery all her weakness - alas, she had no mother. She had gloried in her independence, and this had come of it! She had scorned the prudence of Lady Macleod, and her scorn had brought her to this pass! Was she to give herself body and soul to a man whom she did not love? Must she submit to his caresses, lie on his bosom, turn warmly to his kisses? "No," she said aloud, "no; it was not in my bargain; I never meant it." But if so, what had she meant? What marriage had she thought of, when she was writing that letter to George Vavasor? She would make any sacrifice for her cousin which one friend could make for another. She would fight his battles with her money, with her words, with her sympathy. She would sit and speak comfort to him by the hour. His disgrace should be her disgrace; his glory her glory. Was not that the marriage to which she had consented? But he had come and asked her for a kiss, and she had shuddered. Then that other one had come and had touched her hand, and the fibres of her body had seemed to melt at the touch, so that she could have fallen at his feet. She had done very wrong, and she knew it. Mad with a vile ambition, she had given up the man for whom her heart was longing. She had sinned against her sex; and, in an agony of despair, as she crouched down upon the floor with her head against her chair, she told herself that there was no pardon for her. She understood it now, and knew that she could not forgive herself. But can you forgive her, delicate reader? Or am I asking the question too early in my story? For myself, I have forgiven her. Let us own that she had sinned. What; to think that she knew what love meant, and did not know which of two she loved! "What am I to do?" She passed the whole day in asking herself that question. She was herself astounded at the rapidity with which she had become convinced that she could not marry her cousin; yet could she let it be said of her that she had thrice jilted a suitor - that three times she would go back from her word? Where could she find the courage to tell her father, to tell Kate, to tell George himself, that she had changed her mind? But she had a year at her disposal. If only during that year he would take her money and squander it, and then need nothing further, might she not thus escape the doom before her? Might the refusal this time come from him? She resolved on one thing. Come what might, she would never stand with George at the altar. While there was a cliff from which she might fall, water that would cover her, poison to be mixed in her cup, she could not submit herself to be George Vavasor's wife. To no ear could she tell this resolve. She owed her money to the man, and he should have it. Only as his betrothed could she give it him. He should have her money, and then, when the day came, some escape should be found. In the afternoon her father came to her, having seen Mr. Grey again that day. Mr. Grey, when he left Queen Anne Street, had gone to his lawyer, and then to Mr. Vavasor. They had both returned to the lawyer's chambers, where Mr. Vavasor had been startled at the precision with which all his daughter's circumstances had been explained to a mild-eyed old lawyer called Mr. Tombe. Mr. Tombe had shown no surprise or dismay at the affair under discussion. George Vavasor was to get money, but from John Grey's funds rather than from Alice's. Mr. Tombe could probably arrange that with Mr. Vavasor's lawyer. And then, at last, having taken the price of his bargain, George Vavasor was to be made to surrender his bride. John Vavasor sat by in silence as the arrangement was made. He had no money with which to assist. "I wish you to understand from the lady's father," Grey said to the lawyer, "that he would regard the marriage with as much dismay as by myself." "Certainly; it would be ruinous," Mr. Vavasor said. "And you see, Mr. Tombe," Mr. Grey went on, "we only wish to try the man. If he is not as bad as we believe, he can prove it by his conduct. If he is worthy of her, he can then take her." "You merely wish to open her eyes, Mr. Grey," said the mild-eyed lawyer. "Yes; we shall know our man. He shall have the money, Mr. Grey," and so the interview had ended. Mr. Vavasor, when he came home after this and entered the drawing-room, found his daughter sitting in the dusk. He addressed her in a cheery voice. "What; all in the dark?" "Yes, papa. I did not expect you." "No; I suppose not. I want to say a few words to you about business." "What business, papa?" Alice understood the tone of her father's voice. He wanted to propitiate; but he also wanted his own way on some point. "Well; my love, if I understood you rightly, your cousin George wants some money." "I think he will want it before the election." "He has not asked you for it yet?" "No; he has merely said that if he is in need he will take me at my word. I should wish to oblige him whenever he may do so." "To what extent, Alice?" "I don't know what I have. I get about four hundred a year, but I do not know what my capital is worth, or how far it can all be turned into money. I should wish to keep a hundred a year and let him have the rest." "What; eight thousand pounds!" said the father in dismay. "I do not imagine that he will want so much; but if he should, I wish that he should have it." "Heaven and earth!" said John Vavasor, unable to restrain himself. "Of course we should have to give up the house." "But he has asked me for nothing yet, papa." "No, and perhaps he may not; but I wish to know when the demand is made. I am not going to oppose you now; your money is your own - but would you gratify me in one thing?" "What is it, papa?" "When he does apply, will you come to me, so that I may see the lawyer, and have the arrangements made?" Then he explained to her that in dealing with large sums of money, it could not be right that she should do so without his knowledge, even though the property was her own. "I promise you that I will not oppose your wishes," he said. Then Alice agreed that the money should be raised through his means. Two days after this she received a letter from Lady Glencora, who was still at Matching Priory. It was a light-spirited, chatty, amusing letter, intended to be happy in its tone, but just failing. "You will see that I am at Matching," the letter said, "instead of Monkshade. I escaped at last by a violent effort, and am now passing my time innocently with Iphy Palliser. She is a good creature. I admit that I am thinking of them all at Monkshade, and am truly delighted that I am not there. My absence is entirely laid upon your shoulders. That wicked evening amidst the ruins! Poor ruins. I go there alone sometimes and fancy that I hear such voices from the walls, and see all the old Pallisers frown at me through the broken windows, telling me that I am not good enough to belong to them. I told Iphy that the other day, and she answered very gravely, that I might, if I chose, make myself good enough for the Pallisers. Even for the Pallisers! Isn't that beautiful?" Then Lady Glencora went on to say that her husband intended to come to London early in the parliamentary session, and that she would accompany him. "That is," she added, "if I am still good enough for the Pallisers at that time."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 37: Mr. Tombe's Advice

The coming of Mrs. Greenow at this very moment was a great comfort to Kate. Without her she would hardly have known how to bear herself with her uncle and her brother. As it was, they were all restrained by something of the courtesy which strangers are bound to show to each other. George had never seen his aunt since he was a child, and some sort of introduction was necessary between them. "So you are George," said Mrs. Greenow, putting out her hand and smiling. "Yes; I'm George," said he. "And a Member of Parliament!" said Mrs. Greenow. "It's quite an honour to the family. I felt so proud when I heard it!" She said this pleasantly, meaning it to be taken for truth, and then turned away to her brother. "Papa's time was fully come," she said, "though, to tell the truth, I had no idea that he was so weak as Kate describes him to have been." "Nor I, either," said John Vavasor. "He went to church with us here on Christmas-day." "Did he, indeed? Dear, dear! He seems at last to have gone off just like poor Greenow." Here she put her handkerchief up to her face. "I think you didn't know Greenow, John?" "I met him once," said her brother. "Ah! he wasn't to be known and understood in that way. I'm aware there was a little prejudice, because of his being in trade, but we won't talk of that now. Where should I have been without him, tradesman or no tradesman?" "I've no doubt he was an excellent man." "You may say that, John. Ah, well! we can't keep everything in this life for ever." It may, perhaps, be as well to explain now that Mrs. Greenow had told Captain Bellfield at their last meeting before she left Norwich, that, under certain circumstances, if he behaved himself well, there might possibly be ground of hope. Whereupon Captain Bellfield had immediately gone to the best tailor in that city, had told the man of his coming marriage, and had given an extensive order. But the tailor had not as yet supplied the goods, waiting for more credible evidence of the Captain's good fortune. "We're all grass of the field," said Mrs. Greenow, lightly brushing a tear from her eye, "and must be cut down and put into the oven in our turns." Her brother uttered a slight sympathetic groan, shaking his head in testimony of the uncertainty of human affairs, and then said that he would go out and look about the place. George, in the meantime, had asked his sister to show him his room, and the two were already together up-stairs. Kate had made up her mind that she would say nothing about Alice at the present moment,--nothing, if it could be avoided, till after the funeral. She led the way up-stairs, almost trembling with fear, for she knew that that other subject of the will would also give rise to trouble and sorrow,--perhaps, also, to determined quarrelling. "What has brought that woman here?" was the first question that George asked. "I asked her to come," said Kate. "And why did you ask her to come here?" said George, angrily. Kate immediately felt that he was speaking as though he were master of the house, and also as though he intended to be master of her. As regarded the former idea, she had no objection to it. She thoroughly and honestly wished that he might be the master; and though she feared that he might find himself mistaken in his assumption, she herself was not disposed to deny any appearance of right that he might take upon himself in that respect. But she had already begun to tell herself that she must not submit herself to his masterdom. She had gradually so taught herself since he had compelled her to write the first letter in which Alice had been asked to give her money. "I asked her, George, before my poor grandfather's death, when I thought that he would linger perhaps for weeks. My life here alone with him, without any other woman in the house beside the servants, was very melancholy." "Why did you not ask Alice to come to you?" "Alice could not have come," said Kate, after a short pause. "I don't know why she shouldn't have come. I won't have that woman about the place. She disgraced herself by marrying a blacksmith--." "Why, George, it was you yourself who advised me to go and stay with her." "That's a very different thing. Now that he's dead, and she's got his money, it's all very well that you should go to her occasionally; but I won't have her here." "It's natural that she should come to her father's house at her father's death-bed." "I hate to be told that things are natural. It always means humbug. I don't suppose she cared for the old man any more than I did,--or than she cared for the other old man who married her. People are such intense hypocrites. There's my uncle John, pulling a long face because he has come into this house, and he will pull it as long as the body lies up there; and yet for the last twenty years there's nothing on earth he has so much hated as going to see his father. When are they going to bury him?" "On Saturday, the day after to-morrow." "Why couldn't they do it to-morrow, so that we could get away before Sunday?" "He only died on Monday, George," said Kate, solemnly. "Psha! Who has got the will?" "Mr. Gogram. He was here yesterday, and told me to tell you and uncle John that he would have it with him when he came back from the funeral." "What has my uncle John to do with it?" said George, sharply. "I shall go over to Penrith this afternoon and make Gogram give it up to me." "I don't think he'll do that, George." "What right has he to keep it? What right has he to it at all? How do I know that he has really got the old man's last will? Where did my grandfather keep his papers?" "In that old secretary, as he used to call it; the one that stands in the dining-room. It is sealed up." "Who sealed it?" "Mr. Gogram did,--Mr. Gogram and I together." "What the deuce made you meddle with it?" "I merely assisted him. But I believe he was quite right. I think it is usual in such cases." "Balderdash! You are thinking of some old trumpery of former days. Till I know to the contrary, everything here belongs to me as heir-at-law, and I do not mean to allow of any interference till I know for certain that my rights have been taken from me. And I won't accept a death-bed will. What a man chooses to write when his fingers will hardly hold the pen, goes for nothing." "You can't suppose that I wish to interfere with your rights?" "I hope not." "Oh, George!" "Well; I say, I hope not. But I know there are those who would. Do you think my uncle John would not interfere with me if he could? By ----! if he does, he shall find that he does it to his cost. I'll lead him such a life through the courts, for the next two or three years, that he'll wish that he had remained in Chancery Lane, and had never left it." A message was now brought up by the nurse, saying that Mrs. Greenow and Mr. Vavasor were going into the room where the old Squire was lying, "Would Miss Kate and Mr. George go with them?" "Mr. Vavasor!" shouted out George, making the old woman jump. She did not understand his meaning in the least. "Yes, sir; the old Squire," she said. "Will you come, George?" Kate asked. "No; what should I go there for? Why should I pretend an interest in the dead body of a man whom I hated and who hated me;--whose very last act, as far as I know as yet, was an attempt to rob me? I won't go and see him." Kate went, and was glad of an opportunity of getting away from her brother. Every hour the idea was becoming stronger in her mind that she must in some way separate herself from him. There had come upon him of late a hard ferocity which made him unendurable. And then he carried to such a pitch that hatred, as he called it, of conventional rules, that he allowed himself to be controlled by none of the ordinary bonds of society. She had felt this heretofore, with a nervous consciousness that she was doing wrong in endeavouring to bring about a marriage between him and Alice; but this demeanour and mode of talking had now so grown upon him that Kate began to feel herself thankful that Alice had been saved. Kate went up with her uncle and aunt, and saw the face of her grandfather for the last time. "Poor, dear old man!" said Mrs. Greenow, as the easy tears ran down her face. "Do you remember, John, how he used to scold me, and say that I should never come to good. He has said the same thing to you, Kate, I dare say?" "He has been very kind to me," said Kate, standing at the foot of the bed. She was not one of those whose tears stand near their eyes. "He was a fine old gentleman," said John Vavasor;--"belonging to days that are now gone by, but by no means the less of a gentleman on that account. I don't know that he ever did an unjust or ungenerous act to any one. Come, Kate, we may as well go down." Mrs. Greenow lingered to say a word or two to the nurse, of the manner in which Greenow's body was treated when Greenow was lying dead, and then she followed her brother and niece. George did not go into Penrith, nor did he see Mr. Gogram till that worthy attorney came out to Vavasor Hall on the morning of the funeral. He said nothing more on the subject, nor did he break the seals on the old upright desk that stood in the parlour. The two days before the funeral were very wretched for all the party, except, perhaps, for Mrs. Greenow, who affected not to understand that her nephew was in a bad humour. She called him "poor George," and treated all his incivility to herself as though it were the effect of his grief. She asked him questions about Parliament, which, of course, he didn't answer, and told him little stories about poor dear Greenow, not heeding his expressions of unmistakable disgust. The two days at last went by, and the hour of the funeral came. There was the doctor and Gogram, and the uncle and the nephew, to follow the corpse,--the nephew taking upon himself ostentatiously the foremost place, as though he could thereby help to maintain his pretensions as heir. The clergyman met them at the little wicket-gate of the churchyard, having, by some reasoning, which we hope was satisfactory to himself, overcome a resolution which he at first formed, that he would not read the burial service over an unrepentant sinner. But he did read it, having mentioned his scruples to none but one confidential clerical friend in the same diocese. "I'm told that you have got my grandfather's will," George said to the attorney as soon as he saw him. "I have it in my pocket," said Mr. Gogram, "and purpose to read it as soon as we return from church." "Is it usual to take a will away from a man's house in that way?" George asked. "Quite usual," said the attorney; "and in this case it was done at the express desire of the testator." "I think it is the common practice," said John Vavasor. George upon this turned round at his uncle as though about to attack him, but he restrained himself and said nothing, though he showed his teeth. The funeral was very plain, and not a word was spoken by George Vavasor during the journey there and back. John Vavasor asked a few questions of the doctor as to the last weeks of his father's life; and it was incidentally mentioned, both by the doctor and by the attorney, that the old Squire's intellect had remained unimpaired up to the last moment that he had been seen by either of them. When they returned to the hall Mrs. Greenow met them with an invitation to lunch. They all went to the dining-room, and drank each a glass of sherry. George took two or three glasses. The doctor then withdrew, and drove himself back to Penrith, where he lived. "Shall we go into the other room now?" said the attorney. The three gentlemen then rose up, and went across to the drawing-room, George leading the way. The attorney followed him, and John Vavasor closed the door behind them. Had any observer been there to watch them he might have seen by the faces of the two latter that they expected an unpleasant meeting. Mr. Gogram, as he had walked across the hall, had pulled a document out of his pocket, and held it in his hand as he took a chair. John Vavasor stood behind one of the chairs which had been placed at the table, and leaned upon it, looking across the room, up at the ceiling. George stood on the rug before the fire, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his coat tails over his arms. "Gentlemen, will you sit down?" said Mr. Gogram. John Vavasor immediately sat down. "I prefer to stand here," said George. Mr. Gogram then opened the document before him. "Before that paper is read," said George, "I think it right to say a few words. I don't know what it contains, but I believe it to have been executed by my grandfather only an hour or two before his death." "On the day before he died,--early in the day," said the attorney. "Well,--the day before he died; it is the same thing,--while he was dying, in fact. He never got out of bed afterwards." "He was not in bed at the time, Mr. Vavasor. Not that it would have mattered if he had been. And he came down to dinner on that day. I don't understand, however, why you make these observations." "If you'll listen to me you will understand. I make them because I deny my grandfather's fitness to make a will in the last moments of his existence, and at such an age. I saw him a few weeks ago, and he was not fit to be trusted with the management of property then." "I do not think this is the time, George, to put forward such objections," said the uncle. "I think it is," said George. "I believe that that paper purports to be an instrument by which I should be villanously defrauded if it were allowed to be held as good. Therefore I protest against it now, and shall question it at law if action be taken on it. You can read it now, if you please." "Oh, yes, I shall read," said Mr. Gogram; "and I say that it is as valid a will as ever a man signed." "And I say it's not. That's the difference between us." The will was read amidst sundry interjections and expressions of anger from George, which it is not necessary to repeat. Nor need I trouble my readers with the will at length. It began by expressing the testator's great desire that his property might descend in his own family, and that the house might be held and inhabited by some one bearing the name of Vavasor. He then declared that he felt himself obliged to pass over his natural heir, believing that the property would not be safe in his hands; he therefore left it in trust to his son John Vavasor, whom he appointed to be sole executor of his will. He devised it to George's eldest son,--should George ever marry and have a son,--as soon as he might reach the age of twenty-five. In the meantime the property should remain in the hands of John Vavasor for his use and benefit, with a lien on it of five hundred a year to be paid annually to his granddaughter Kate. In the event of George having no son, the property was to go to the eldest son of Kate, or failing that to the eldest son of his other granddaughter who might take the name of Vavasor. All his personal property he left to his son, John Vavasor. "And, Mr. Vavasor," said the attorney, as he finished his reading, "you will, I fear, get very little by that latter clause. The estate now owes nothing; but I doubt whether the Squire had fifty pounds in his banker's hands when he died, and the value of the property about the place is very small. He has been unwilling to spend anything during the last ten years, but has paid off every shilling that the property owed." "It is as I supposed," said George. His voice was very unpleasant, and so was the fire of his eyes and the ghastly rage of his scarred face. "The old man has endeavoured in his anger to rob me of everything because I would not obey him in his wickedness when I was here with him a short while before he died. Such a will as that can stand nowhere." "As to that I have nothing to say at present," said the attorney. "Where is his other will,--the one he made before that?" "If I remember rightly we executed two before this." "And where are they?" "It is not my business to know, Mr. Vavasor. I believe that I saw him destroy one, but I have no absolute knowledge. As to the other, I can say nothing." "And what do you mean to do?" said George, turning to his uncle. "Do! I shall carry out the will. I have no alternative. Your sister is the person chiefly interested under it. She gets five hundred a year for her life; and if she marries and you don't, or if she has a son and you don't, her son will have the whole property." George stood for a few moments thinking. Might it not be possible that by means of Alice and Kate together,--by marrying the former,--perhaps, he might still obtain possession of the property? But that which he wanted was the command of the property at once,--the power of raising money upon it instantly. The will had been so framed as to make that impossible in any way. Kate's share in it had not been left to her unconditionally, but was to be received even by her through the hands of her uncle John. Such a will shut him out from all his hopes. "It is a piece of d---- roguery," he said. "What do you mean by that, sir?" said Gogram, turning round towards him. "I mean exactly what I say. It is a piece of d---- roguery. Who was in the room when that thing was written?" "The signature was witnessed by--" "I don't ask as to the signature. Who was in the room when the thing was written?" "I was here with your grandfather." "And no one else?" "No one else. The presence of any one else at such a time would be very unusual." "Then I regard the document simply as waste paper." After saying this, George Vavasor left the room, and slammed the door after him. "I never was insulted in such a way before," said the attorney, almost with tears in his eyes. "He is a disappointed and I fear a ruined man," said John Vavasor. "I do not think you need regard what he says." "But he should not on that account insult me. I have only done my duty. I did not even advise his grandfather. It is mean on his part and unmanly. If he comes in my way again I shall tell him so." "He probably will not put himself in your way again, Mr. Gogram." Then the attorney went, having suggested to Mr. Vavasor that he should instruct his attorney in London to take steps in reference to the proving of the will. "It's as good a will as ever was made," said Mr. Gogram. "If he can set that aside, I'll give up making wills altogether." Who was to tell Kate? That was John Vavasor's first thought when he was left alone at the hall-door, after seeing the lawyer start away. And how was he to get himself back to London without further quarrelling with his nephew? And what was he to do at once with reference to the immediate duties of proprietorship which were entailed upon him as executor? It was by no means improbable, as he thought, that George might assume to himself the position of master of the house; that he might demand the keys, for instance, which no doubt were in Kate's hands at present, and that he would take possession with violence. What should he do under such circumstances? It was clear that he could not run away and get back to his club by the night mail train. He had duties there at the Hall, and these duties were of a nature to make him almost regret the position in which his father's will had placed him. Eventually he would gain some considerable increase to his means, but the immediate effect would be terribly troublesome. As he looked up at the melancholy pines which were slowly waving their heads in the wind before the door he declared to himself that he would sell his inheritance and his executorship very cheaply, if such a sale were possible. In the dining-room he found his sister alone. "Well, John," said she; "well? How is it left?" "Where is Kate?" he asked. "She has gone out with her brother." "Did he take his hat?" "Oh, yes. He asked her to walk, and she went with him at once." "Then, I suppose, he will tell her," said John Vavasor. After that he explained the circumstances of the will to Mrs. Greenow. "Bravo," exclaimed the widow. "I'm delighted. I love Kate dearly: and now she can marry almost whom she pleases."

The coming of Mrs. Greenow was a great comfort to Kate. Without her she would hardly have known how to talk to her uncle and brother. As it was, they were all restrained by the courtesy which strangers are bound to show each other, for George had not seen his aunt since he was a child. "So you are George," said Mrs. Greenow, putting out her hand and smiling. "Yes; I'm George," said he. "And a Member of Parliament!" said Mrs. Greenow. "It's quite an honour to the family. I felt so proud when I heard it!" She said this pleasantly, and then turned to her brother. "Papa's time was fully come," she said, "though, to tell the truth, I had no idea that he was so weak." "Nor I," said John Vavasor. "He went to church with us here on Christmas Day." "Dear, dear! He seems at last to have gone off just like poor Greenow." She put her handkerchief up to her face. "Ah, well! we can't keep everything in this life for ever." It may, perhaps, be as well to explain that before she left Norwich, Mrs. Greenow had told Captain Bellfield that if he behaved himself well, there might possibly be hope. Whereupon Captain Bellfield had immediately gone to the best tailor in that city, had told the man of his coming marriage, and had given an extensive order. But the tailor had not yet supplied the goods, waiting for more credible evidence of the Captain's good fortune. "We're all grass of the field," said Mrs. Greenow, lightly brushing a tear from her eye, "and must be cut down in our turn." Her brother uttered a slight sympathetic groan, and then said that he would go out and look around the place. George, in the meantime, had asked his sister to show him his room, and the two were already upstairs. Kate had made up her mind to say nothing about Alice, if it could be avoided, till after the funeral. She led the way upstairs, almost trembling with fear, for she knew that the will would also cause trouble. "What has brought that woman here?" was the first question that George asked. "I asked her to come," said Kate. "And why did you ask her to come here?" said George, angrily. Kate immediately felt that he was speaking as though he were master of the house, and also as though he intended to be master of her. She had no objection to the first idea. She wished that he might be the master. But she had already decided that she must not submit herself to his masterdom. She had gradually so taught herself since he had compelled her to write the first letter in which Alice had been asked for money. "I asked her, George, before my poor grandfather's death, when I thought that he might linger for weeks. My life here alone with him, without any other woman in the house beside the servants, was very melancholy." "Why did you not ask Alice to come to you?" "Alice could not have come," said Kate, after a short pause. "I don't know why not. I won't have that woman about the place. She disgraced herself by marrying a blacksmith-." "Why, George, you advised me to go and stay with her." "That's a very different thing. Now that he's dead, and she's got his money, it's all very well that you should go to her occasionally; but I won't have her here." "It's natural that she should come to her father's death-bed." "I hate to be told that things are natural. It always means humbug. I don't suppose she cared for the old man any more than I did - or than she cared for the old man who married her. People are such intense hypocrites. There's my uncle John, pulling a long face; and yet for the last twenty years he has hated going to see his father. When are they going to bury him?" "On Saturday, the day after tomorrow." "Why couldn't they do it tomorrow, so that we could get away before Sunday?" "He only died on Monday, George," said Kate solemnly. "Psha! Who has got the will?" "Mr. Gogram. He was here yesterday, and told me to tell you and uncle John that he would have it with him when he came back from the funeral." "What has my uncle John to do with it?" said George, sharply. "I shall go over to Penrith this afternoon and make Gogram give it up to me." "I don't think he'll do that, George." "What right has he to keep it? How do I know that he has really got the old man's last will? Where did my grandfather keep his papers?" "In that old secretary, as he used to call it, in the dining-room. It is sealed up." "Who sealed it?" "Mr. Gogram did, and I assisted him." "What the deuce made you meddle with it?" "I believe it is usual in such cases." "Balderdash! You are thinking of some old trumpery of former days. Till I know to the contrary, everything here belongs to me as heir, and I do not mean to allow any interference till I know for certain that my rights have been taken from me. And I won't accept a death-bed will. What a man chooses to write when his fingers will hardly hold the pen goes for nothing." "You can't suppose that I wish to interfere with your rights?" "I hope not." "Oh, George!" "I know there are those who would. Do you think my uncle John would not interfere with me if he could? By ---! if he does, I'll drag him through the courts." A message was now brought up by the nurse, saying that Mrs. Greenow and Mr. Vavasor were going into the room where the old Squire was lying. "Would Miss Kate and Mr. George go with them?" "Mr. Vavasor!" shouted George, making the old woman jump. She did not understand his meaning. "Yes, sir; the old Squire," she said. "Will you come, George?" Kate asked. "No. Why should I pretend an interest in the dead body of a man whom I hated and whose very last act may have been an attempt to rob me?" Kate went, and was glad to get away from her brother. Every hour the idea was becoming stronger in her mind that she must somehow separate herself from him. There had come upon him of late a hard ferocity which made him unendurable. He allowed himself to be controlled by none of the ordinary bonds of society. She had felt this before, with a nervous consciousness that she was doing wrong in trying to bring about a marriage between him and Alice; but this manner had now grown so much that Kate began to feel thankful that Alice had been saved. With her uncle and aunt, Kate saw the face of her grandfather for the last time. "Poor, dear old man!" said Mrs. Greenow, as the easy tears ran down her face. "Do you remember, John, how he used to scold me, and say that I should never come to good. He has said the same thing to you, Kate, I dare say?" "He has been very kind to me," said Kate. "He was a fine old gentleman," said John Vavasor. "I don't know that he ever did an unjust or ungenerous act to anyone. Come, Kate, we may as well go down." George did not go into Penrith, nor did he see Mr. Gogram till the attorney came to Vavasor Hall on the morning of the funeral. The two days before the funeral were very wretched for all, except, perhaps, Mrs. Greenow, who pretended not to understand that her nephew was in a bad humour. She called him "poor George," and treated all his incivility as though it were the effect of grief. At last the hour of the funeral came. There were the doctor and Gogram, and the uncle and the nephew, to follow the corpse - the nephew ostentatiously taking the foremost place. "I'm told that you have got my grandfather's will," George said to the attorney as soon as he saw him. "I have it in my pocket," said Mr. Gogram, "and intend to read it after we return from church." "Is it usual to take a will away from a man's house in that way?" George asked. "Quite usual," said the attorney; "and in this case it was done at the express desire of the testator." "I think it is the common practice," said John Vavasor. George upon this turned round at his uncle as though about to attack him, showing his teeth. The funeral was very plain, and George spoke not a word during the journey there and back. John Vavasor asked a few questions of the doctor about the last weeks of his father's life; and it was mentioned by both the doctor and the attorney that the old Squire's intellect had remained unimpaired up to the last moment. When they returned to the hall Mrs. Greenow met them; they all went to the dining-room, and drank a glass of sherry. George took two or three glasses. The doctor then left. "Shall we go into the other room now?" said the attorney. The three gentlemen went across to the drawing-room, George leading the way. The attorney followed him, and John Vavasor closed the door behind them. If an observer had been watching, he might have seen by the faces of the two latter that they expected an unpleasant meeting. Mr. Gogram held a document in his hand as he took a chair. John Vavasor stood behind one of the chairs which had been placed at the table, and leaned upon it, looking across the room. George stood on the rug before the fire, with his hands in his trouser pockets. "Gentlemen, will you sit down?" said Mr. Gogram. John Vavasor immediately sat down. "I prefer to stand here," said George. Mr. Gogram then opened the document. "Before that paper is read," said George, "I think it right to say a few words. I don't know what it contains, but I believe it to have been executed by my grandfather only an hour or two before his death." "Early on the day before he died," said the attorney. "Well, it is the same thing - while he was dying. He never got out of bed afterwards." "He was not in bed at the time, Mr. Vavasor. Not that it would have mattered if he had been. And he came down to dinner on that day. I don't understand, however, why you make these observations." "I make them because I deny my grandfather's fitness to make a will in the last moments of his existence, and at such an age. I saw him a few weeks ago, and he was not fit to be trusted with the management of property then." "I do not think this is the time, George, to put forward such objections," said the uncle. "I think it is," said George. "I believe that paper purports to villainously defraud me. Therefore I protest against it, and shall question it at law. You can read it now, if you please." "Oh, yes, I shall read it," said Mr. Gogram; "and I say that it is as valid a will as ever a man signed." "And I say it's not." The will was read amidst angry interruptions from George, which it is not necessary to repeat. Nor need I trouble my readers with the will at length. It began by expressing the testator's great desire that his property might descend in his own family, and that the house might be inhabited by someone bearing the name of Vavasor. The testator then declared that he felt himself obliged to pass over his natural heir, believing that the property would not be safe in his hands; he therefore left it in trust to his son John Vavasor, whom he appointed sole executor of his will. It would go to George's eldest son - should George ever marry and have a son - as soon as he might reach the age of twenty-five. In the meantime the property should remain in the hands of John Vavasor for his use and benefit, with five hundred a year out of it to be paid annually to his granddaughter Kate. In the event of George having no son, the property was to go to the eldest son of Kate, or failing that to the eldest son of his other granddaughter who might take the name of Vavasor. All his personal effects he left to his son, John Vavasor. "And, Mr. Vavasor," said the attorney, addressing John Vavasor as he finished his reading, "you will, I fear, get very little by that last clause. The estate now owes nothing; but I doubt whether the Squire had fifty pounds in the bank when he died, and the value of the personal property about the place is very small. He was unwilling to spend anything during the last ten years, but paid off every shilling that the property owed." "It is as I supposed," said George. His voice was very unpleasant, and so was the ghastly rage of his scarred face. "The old man has tried to rob me of everything because I would not obey him in his wickedness when I was here with him a short while before he died. Such a will as that can stand nowhere." "As to that I have nothing to say at present," said the attorney. "Where is his other will - the one he made before that?" "If I remember rightly we executed two before this." "And where are they?" "It is not my business to know, Mr. Vavasor. I believe that I saw him destroy one, but I have no absolute knowledge. As to the other, I can say nothing." "And what do you mean to do?" said George, turning to his uncle. "Do! I shall carry out the will. I have no alternative. Your sister is the person chiefly interested under it. She gets five hundred a year for her life; and if she has a son and you don't, her son will have the whole property." George stood for a few moments thinking. Might it not be possible that by means of Alice and Kate together - by marrying the former - he might still get hold of the property? But he wanted the property at once - he wanted the power of raising money upon it instantly. The will had been so framed as to make that impossible. Kate's share in it had not been left to her unconditionally, but was to be received through the hands of her uncle John. Such a will shut him out from all his hopes. "It is a piece of d--- roguery," he said. "What do you mean by that, sir?" said Gogram. "I mean exactly what I say. Who was in the room when that thing was written?" "The signature was witnessed by-" "I don't ask about the signature. Who was in the room when the thing was written?" "I was here with your grandfather." "And no one else?" "No one else. The presence of anyone else at such a time would be very unusual." "Then I regard the document simply as waste paper." With this, George Vavasor left the room, and slammed the door after him. "I never was insulted in such a way before," said the attorney, almost with tears in his eyes. "He is a disappointed and I fear a ruined man," said John Vavasor. "I do not think you need regard what he says." "But he should not insult me. I have only done my duty. I did not even advise his grandfather. It is mean and unmanly. If he comes in my way again I shall tell him so." "He probably will not put himself in your way again, Mr. Gogram." Then the attorney left, having suggested to Mr. Vavasor that he should instruct his attorney in London to take steps towards proving the will. "It's as good a will as ever was made," said Mr. Gogram. Who was to tell Kate? That was John Vavasor's first thought when he was alone. And how was he to get back to London without further quarrelling with his nephew? And what was he to do at once about his duties as executor? It was by no means improbable, as he thought, that George might assume the position of master of the house; that he might demand the keys, for instance, which no doubt were in Kate's hands at present, and that he would take possession with violence. What should he do in such circumstances? It was clear that he could not run away and get back to his club. He had duties at the Hall which made him almost regret the position in which his father's will had placed him. Eventually he would gain some increase to his means, but the immediate effect would be terribly troublesome. In the dining-room he found his sister alone. "Well, John," said she. "How is it left?" "Where is Kate?" "She has gone out to walk with her brother." "Then I suppose he will tell her," said John Vavasor. He explained the circumstances of the will to Mrs. Greenow. "Bravo," exclaimed the widow. "I'm delighted. I love Kate dearly: and now she can marry almost whom she pleases."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 55: The Will

It has been said that George Vavasor had a little establishment at Roebury, down in Oxfordshire, and thither he betook himself about the middle of November. He had been long known in this county, and whether or no men spoke well of him as a man of business in London, men spoke well of him down there, as one who knew how to ride to hounds. Not that Vavasor was popular among fellow-sportsmen. It was quite otherwise. He was not a man that made himself really popular in any social meetings of men. He did not himself care for the loose little talkings, half flat and half sharp, of men when they meet together in idleness. He was not open enough in his nature for such popularity. Some men were afraid of him, and some suspected him. There were others who made up to him, seeking his intimacy, but these he usually snubbed, and always kept at a distance. Though he had indulged in all the ordinary pleasures of young men, he had never been a jovial man. In his conversations with men he always seemed to think that he should use his time towards serving some purpose of business. With women he was quite the reverse. With women he could be happy. With women he could really associate. A woman he could really love;--but I doubt whether for all that he could treat a woman well. But he was known in the Oxfordshire country as a man who knew what he was about, and such men are always welcome. It is the man who does not know how to ride that is made uncomfortable in the hunting field by cold looks or expressed censure. And yet it is very rarely that such men do any real harm. Such a one may now and then get among the hounds or override the hunt, but it is not often so. Many such complaints are made; but in truth the too forward man, who presses the dogs, is generally one who can ride, but is too eager or too selfish to keep in his proper place. The bad rider, like the bad whist player, pays highly for what he does not enjoy, and should be thanked. But at both games he gets cruelly snubbed. At both games George Vavasor was great and he never got snubbed. There were men who lived together at Roebury in a kind of club,--four or five of them, who came thither from London, running backwards and forwards as hunting arrangements enabled them to do so,--a brewer or two and a banker, with a would-be fast attorney, a sporting literary gentleman, and a young unmarried Member of Parliament who had no particular home of his own in the country. These men formed the Roebury Club, and a jolly life they had of it. They had their own wine closet at the King's Head,--or Roebury Inn as the house had come to be popularly called,--and supplied their own game. The landlord found everything else; and as they were not very particular about their bills, they were allowed to do pretty much as they liked in the house. They were rather imperious, very late in their hours, sometimes, though not often, noisy, and once there had been a hasty quarrel which had made the landlord in his anger say that the club should be turned out of his house. But they paid well, chaffed the servants much oftener than they bullied them, and on the whole were very popular. To this club Vavasor did not belong, alleging that he could not afford to live at their pace, and alleging, also, that his stays at Roebury were not long enough to make him a desirable member. The invitation to him was not repeated and he lodged elsewhere in the little town. But he occasionally went in of an evening, and would make up with the members a table at whist. He had come down to Roebury by mail train, ready for hunting the next morning, and walked into the club-room just at midnight. There he found Maxwell the banker, Grindley the would-be fast attorney, and Calder Jones the Member of Parliament, playing dummy. Neither of the brewers were there, nor was the sporting literary gentleman. "Here's Vavasor," said Maxwell, "and now we won't play this blackguard game any longer. Somebody told me, Vavasor, that you were gone away." "Gone away;--what, like a fox?" "I don't know what it was; that something had happened to you since last season; that you were married, or dead, or gone abroad. By George, I've lost the trick after all! I hate dummy like the devil. I never hold a card in dummy's hand. Yes, I know; that's seven points on each side. Vavasor, come and cut. Upon my word if any one had asked me, I should have said you were dead." "But you see, nobody ever does think of asking you anything." "What you probably mean," said Grindley, "is that Vavasor was not returned for Chelsea last February; but you've seen him since that. Are you going to try it again, Vavasor?" "If you'll lend me the money I will." "I don't see what on earth a man gains by going into the house," said Calder Jones. "I couldn't help myself as it happened, but, upon my word it's a deuce of a bore. A fellow thinks he can do as he likes about going,--but he can't. It wouldn't do for me to give it up, because--" "Oh no, of course not; where should we all be?" said Vavasor. "It's you and me, Grindems," said Maxwell. "D---- parliament, and now let's have a rubber." They played till three and Mr. Calder Jones lost a good deal of money,--a good deal of money in a little way, for they never played above ten-shilling points, and no bet was made for more than a pound or two. But Vavasor was the winner, and when he left the room he became the subject of some ill-natured remarks. "I wonder he likes coming in here," said Grindley, who had himself been the man to invite him to belong to the club, and who had at one time indulged the ambition of an intimacy with George Vavasor. "I can't understand it," said Calder Jones, who was a little bitter about his money. "Last year he seemed to walk in just when he liked, as though he were one of us." "He's a bad sort of fellow," said Grindley; "he's so uncommonly dark. I don't know where on earth he gets his money from, He was heir to some small property in the north, but he lost every shilling of that when he was in the wine trade." "You're wrong there, Grindems," said Maxwell,--making use of a playful nickname which he had invented for his friend. "He made a pot of money at the wine business, and had he stuck to it he would have been a rich man." "He's lost it all since then, and that place in the north into the bargain." "Wrong again, Grindems, my boy. If old Vavasor were to die to-morrow, Vavasor Hall would go just as he might choose to leave it. George may be a ruined man for aught I know--" "There's no doubt about that, I believe," said Grindley. "Perhaps not, Grindems; but he can't have lost Vavasor Hall because he has never as yet had an interest in it. He's the natural heir, and will probably get it some day." "All the same," said Calder Jones, "isn't it rather odd he should come in here?" "We've asked him often enough," said Maxwell; "not because we like him, but because we want him so often to make up a rubber. I don't like George Vavasor, and I don't know who does; but I like him better than dummy. And I'd sooner play whist with men I don't like, Grindems, than I'd not play at all." A bystander might have thought from the tone of Mr. Maxwell's voice that he was alluding to Mr. Grindley himself, but Mr. Grindley didn't seem to take it in that light. "That's true, of course," said he. "We can't pick men just as we please. But I certainly didn't think that he'd make it out for another season." The club breakfasted the next morning at nine o'clock, in order that they might start at half-past for the meet at Edgehill. Edgehill is twelve miles from Roebury, and the hacks would do it in an hour and a half,--or perhaps a little less. "Does anybody know anything about that brown horse of Vavasor's?" said Maxwell. "I saw him coming into the yard yesterday with that old groom of his." "He had a brown horse last season," said Grindley;--"a little thing that went very fast, but wasn't quite sound on the road." "That was a mare," said Maxwell, "and he sold her to Cinquebars."* [*Ah, my friend, from whom I have borrowed this scion of the nobility! Had he been left with us he would have forgiven me my little theft, and now that he has gone I will not change the name.] "For a hundred and fifty," said Calder Jones, "and she wasn't worth the odd fifty." "He won seventy with her at Leamington," said Maxwell, "and I doubt whether he'd take his money now." "Is Cinquebars coming down here this year?" "I don't know," said Maxwell. "I hope not. He's the best fellow in the world, but he can't ride, and he don't care for hunting, and he makes more row than any fellow I ever met. I wish some fellow could tell me something about that fellow's brown horse." "I'd never buy a horse of Vavasor's if I were you," said Grindley. "He never has anything that's all right all round." "And who has?" said Maxwell, as he took into his plate a second mutton chop, which had just been brought up hot into the room especially for him. "That's the mistake men make about horses, and that's why there's so much cheating. I never ask for a warranty with a horse, and don't very often have a horse examined. Yet I do as well as others. You can't have perfect horses any more than you can perfect men, or perfect women. You put up with red hair, or bad teeth, or big feet,--or sometimes with the devil of a voice. But a man when he wants a horse won't put up with anything! Therefore those who've got horses to sell must lie. When I go into the market with three hundred pounds I expect a perfect animal. As I never do that now I never expect a perfect animal. I like 'em to see; I like 'em to have four legs; and I like 'em to have a little wind. I don't much mind anything else." "By Jove you're about right," said Calder Jones. The reader will therefore readily see that Mr. Maxwell the banker reigned as king in that club. Vavasor had sent two horses on in charge of Bat Smithers, and followed on a pony about fourteen hands high, which he had ridden as a cover hack for the last four years. He did not start till near ten, but he was able to catch Bat with his two horses about a mile and a half on that side of Edgehill. "Have you managed to come along pretty clean?" the master asked as he came up with his servant. "They be the most beastly roads in all England," said Bat, who always found fault with any county in which he happened to be located. "But I'll warrant I'm cleaner than most on 'em. What for any county should make such roads as them I never could tell." "The roads about there are bad, certainly;--very bad. But I suppose they would have been better had Providence sent better materials. And what do you think of the brown horse, Bat?" "Well, sir." He said no more, and that he said with a drawl. "He's as fine an animal to look at as ever I put my eye on," said George. "He's all that," said Bat. "He's got lots of pace too." "I'm sure he has, sir." "And they tell me you can't beat him at jumping." "They can mostly do that, sir, if they're well handled." "You see he's a deal over my weight." "Yes, he is, Mr. Vavasor. He is a fourteen stoner." "Or fifteen," said Vavasor. "Perhaps he may, sir. There's no knowing what a 'orse can carry till he's tried." George asked his groom no more questions, but felt sure that he had better sell his brown horse if he could. Now I here protest that there was nothing specially amiss with the brown horse. Towards the end of the preceding season he had overreached himself and had been lame, and had been sold by some owner with more money than brains who had not cared to wait for a cure. Then there had gone with him a bad character, and a vague suspicion had attached itself to him, as there does to hundreds of horses which are very good animals in their way. He had come thus to Tattersall's, and Vavasor had bought him cheap, thinking that he might make money of him, from his form and action. He had found nothing amiss with him,--nor, indeed, had Bat Smithers. But his character went with him, and therefore Bat Smithers thought it well to be knowing. George Vavasor knew as much of horses as most men can,--as, perhaps, as any man can who is not a dealer, or a veterinary surgeon; but he, like all men, doubted his own knowledge, though on that subject he would never admit that he doubted it. Therefore he took Bat's word and felt sure that the horse was wrong. "We shall have a run from the big wood," said George. "If they make un break, you will, sir," said Bat. "At any rate I'll ride the brown horse," said George. Then, as soon as that was settled between them, the Roebury Club overtook them. There was now a rush of horses on the road altogether, and they were within a quarter of a mile of Edgehill church, close to which was the meet. Bat with his two hunters fell a little behind, and the others trotted on together. The other grooms with their animals were on in advance, and were by this time employed in combing out forelocks, and rubbing stirrup leathers and horses' legs free from the dirt of the roads;--but Bat Smithers was like his master, and did not congregate much with other men, and Vavasor was sure to give orders to his servant different from the orders given by others. "Are you well mounted this year?" Maxwell asked of George Vavasor. "No, indeed; I never was what I call well mounted yet. I generally have one horse and three or four cripples. That brown horse behind there is pretty good, I believe." "I see your man has got the old chestnut mare with him." "She's one of the cripples,--not but what she's as sound as a bell, and as good a hunter as ever I wish to ride; but she makes a little noise when she's going." "So that you can hear her three fields off," said Grindley. "Five if the fields are small enough and your ears are sharp enough," said Vavasor. "All the same I wouldn't change her for the best horse I ever saw under you." "Had you there, Grindems," said Maxwell. "No, he didn't," said Grindley. "He didn't have me at all." "Your horses, Grindley, are always up to all the work they have to do," said George; "and I don't know what any man wants more than that." "Had you again, Grindems," said Maxwell. "I can ride against him any day," said Grindley. "Yes; or against a brick wall either, if your horse didn't know any better," said George. "Had you again, Grindems," said Maxwell. Whereupon Mr. Grindley trotted on, round the corner by the church, and into the field in which the hounds were assembled. The fire had become too hot for him, and he thought it best to escape. Had it been Vavasor alone he would have turned upon him and snarled, but he could not afford to exhibit any ill temper to the king of the club. Mr. Grindley was not popular, and were Maxwell to turn openly against him his sporting life down at Roebury would decidedly be a failure. The lives of such men as Mr. Grindley,--men who are tolerated in the daily society of others who are accounted their superiors, do not seem to have many attractions. And yet how many such men does one see in almost every set? Why Mr. Grindley should have been inferior to Mr. Maxwell the banker, or to Stone, or to Prettyman who were brewers, or even to Mr. Pollock the heavy-weight literary gentleman, I can hardly say. An attorney by his trade is at any rate as good as a brewer, and there are many attorneys who hold their heads high anywhere. Grindley was a rich man,--or at any rate rich enough for the life he led. I don't know much about his birth, but I believe it was as good as Maxwell's. He was not ignorant, or a fool;--whereas I rather think Maxwell was a fool. Grindley had made his own way in the world, but Maxwell would certainly not have made himself a banker if his father had not been a banker before him; nor could the bank have gone on and prospered had there not been partners there who were better men of business than our friend. Grindley knew that he had a better intellect than Maxwell; and yet he allowed Maxwell to snub him, and he toadied Maxwell in return. It was not on the score of riding that Maxwell claimed and held his superiority, for Grindley did not want pluck, and every one knew that Maxwell had lived freely and that his nerves were not what they had been. I think it had come from the outward look of the men, from the form of each, from the gait and visage which in one was good and in the other insignificant. The nature of such dominion of man over man is very singular, but this is certain that when once obtained in manhood it may be easily held. Among boys at school the same thing is even more conspicuous, because boys have less of conscience than men, are more addicted to tyranny, and when weak are less prone to feel the misery and disgrace of succumbing. Who has been through a large school and does not remember the Maxwells and Grindleys,--the tyrants and the slaves,--those who domineered and those who submitted? Nor was it, even then, personal strength, nor always superior courage, that gave the power of command. Nor was it intellect, or thoughtfulness, nor by any means such qualities as make men and boys lovable. It is said by many who have had to deal with boys, that certain among them claim and obtain ascendancy by the spirit within them; but I doubt whether the ascendancy is not rather thrust on them than claimed by them. Here again I think the outward gait of the boy goes far towards obtaining for him the submission of his fellows. But the tyrant boy does not become the tyrant man, or the slave boy the slave man, because the outward visage, that has been noble or mean in the one, changes and becomes so often mean or noble in the other. "By George, there's Pollock!" said Maxwell, as he rode into the field by the church. "I'll bet half a crown that he's come down from London this morning, that he was up all night last night, and that he tells us so three times before the hounds go out of the paddock." Mr. Pollock was the heavy-weight sporting literary gentleman.

It has been said that George Vavasor had a little establishment at Roebury, in Oxfordshire; and he went there in the middle of November, to hunt. In this county, men spoke well of him, as one who knew how to ride. Not that Vavasor was popular among his fellow-sportsmen. He did not care for the loose talk of men when they meet in idleness. He was not open enough in his nature for popularity, and kept others at a distance. He had never been a jovial man. He always seemed to think that his conversations with men should serve some purpose of business. With women he was quite the reverse. With women he could be happy. A woman he could really love; but I doubt whether he could treat a woman well. However, he was welcome in Oxfordshire as a man who knew what he was about. There were several men who formed a kind of club at Roebury, travelling to the inn there from London for the hunting. They comprised a couple of brewers, a banker, a would-be attorney, a sporting literary gentleman, and a young unmarried Member of Parliament. These men formed the Roebury Club at the King's Head, and a jolly life they had of it. They supplied their own game, while the landlord supplied everything else; and as they were not very particular about their bills, they were allowed to do pretty much as they liked. They were rather imperious, very late in their hours, and sometimes noisy; but they paid well, joked with the servants more than they bullied them, and on the whole were very popular. Vavasor did not belong to this club, claiming that he could not afford it; when he visited the little town, he lodged elsewhere. But he occasionally went in, and would make up a table at whist. He had come down to Roebury by mail train, ready for hunting the next morning, and walked into the club-room at midnight. There he found Maxwell the banker, Grindley the would-be attorney, and Calder Jones the Member of Parliament, playing dummy. "Here's Vavasor," said Maxwell. "Somebody told me, Vavasor, that you were gone away. Or that you were married, or dead. By George, I've lost the trick! I hate dummy. Yes, I know; that's seven points on each side. Vavasor, come and cut. If anyone had asked me, I should have said you were dead." "But nobody ever does think of asking you anything." "What you probably mean," said Grindley, "is that Vavasor did not win the seat at Chelsea last February. Are you going to try it again, Vavasor?" "If you'll lend me the money I will." "I don't see what a man gains by going into the House," said Calder Jones. "I couldn't help myself, but it's a dead bore. It wouldn't do for me to give it up, because-" "Oh no, of course not; where should we all be?" said Vavasor. "It's you and me, Grindems," said Maxwell. "D-- parliament, and now let's have a rubber of whist." They played till three, and Mr. Calder Jones lost a good deal of money. Vavasor was the winner, and when he left the room he became the subject of some ill-natured remarks. "I wonder he likes coming in here," said Grindley, the man who had first invited him to belong to the club, and who had hoped to become his friend. "I can't understand it," said Calder Jones, a little bitter about his money. "Last year he seemed to walk in just when he liked, as though he were one of us." "He's a bad sort of fellow," said Grindley; "I don't know where on earth he gets his money from. He was heir to some property in the north, but he lost every shilling in the wine trade." "You're wrong there, Grindems," said Maxwell. "He made a pot of money at the wine business." "He's lost it all since then, and that place in the north into the bargain." "Wrong again, Grindems, my boy. If old Vavasor were to die tomorrow, Vavasor Hall would go to him. He's the natural heir." "All the same," said Calder Jones, "isn't it rather odd he should come in here?" "We've asked him often enough," said Maxwell, "to make up a rubber. I don't like George Vavasor; but I'd sooner play whist with men I don't like, than not play at all." The club breakfasted the next morning at nine o'clock, in order to leave at half-past for the hunting meet at Edgehill. Edgehill is twelve miles from Roebury, and the horses would do it in an hour and a half. "Does anybody know anything about that brown horse of Vavasor's?" said Maxwell. "I saw him in the yard yesterday with that old groom of his." "He had a brown horse last season," said Grindley; "a very fast little thing." "That was a mare," said Maxwell, "and he sold her to Cinquebars." "For a hundred and fifty," said Calder Jones, "and she wasn't worth it." "He won seventy with her at Leamington," said Maxwell. "Is Cinquebars coming down here this year?" "I don't know," said Maxwell. "I hope not. He's the best fellow in the world, but he can't ride. I wish someone could tell me something about that fellow's brown horse." "I'd never buy a horse of Vavasor's," said Grindley. "He never has anything that's all right all round." "And who has?" said Maxwell, helping himself to a second mutton chop. "You can't have perfect horses any more than perfect women. I never expect a perfect animal. I like 'em to see; I like 'em to have four legs, and decent lungs. I don't much mind about anything else." "By Jove, you're right," said Calder Jones. The reader will see that Mr. Maxwell the banker reigned as king in that club. Vavasor had sent two horses ahead in the charge of his old groom Bat Smithers, and followed on a big pony which he kept as a hack. He did not start till near ten, but he was able to catch Bat with his two horses about a mile outside Edgehill. "Have you managed to come along pretty clean?" the master asked as he joined his servant. "They be the most beastly roads in all England," said Bat. "I'm cleaner than most on 'em. But why any county should make such roads I never could tell." "The roads are very bad, certainly. And what do you think of the brown horse, Bat?" "Well, sir." He said it with a drawl. "He's as fine an animal to look at as ever I saw," said George. "He's all that," said Bat. "He's got lots of pace too." "I'm sure he has, sir." "And they tell me you can't beat him at jumping." "They can mostly do that, sir, if they're well handled." "You see he's a deal over my weight." "Yes, he is, Mr. Vavasor. He is a fourteen stoner, or more." George asked his groom no more questions, but felt sure that he had better sell his brown horse if he could. There was nothing specially amiss with the brown horse. He had gone lame at the end of the preceding season, and had been sold by some owner who had not cared to wait for a cure. Then there had gone with him a bad character, and a vague suspicion had attached itself to him, as it does to hundreds of horses which are very good animals in their way. Vavasor had bought him cheap, and found nothing amiss with him; but his character went with him, and therefore Bat Smithers thought it well to be knowing. George Vavasor knew as much of horses as most men, but he doubted his own knowledge. Therefore he took Bat's word and felt sure that something was wrong with the horse. "We shall have a run from the big wood," said George. "I'll ride the brown horse." Then the Roebury Club overtook them. There was now a rush of horses on the road to Edgehill church. Bat, with his two hunters, fell a little behind, and the others trotted on together. "Are you well mounted this year?" Maxwell asked George Vavasor. "No, indeed; I generally have one horse and three or four cripples. That brown horse behind there is pretty good, I believe." "I see your man has got the old chestnut mare." "She's one of the cripples - sound as a bell, and a good hunter; but she makes a noise when she's going." "So that you can hear her three fields off," said Grindley. "Five if the fields are small enough," said Vavasor. "All the same I wouldn't change her for the best horse I ever saw under you." "Had you there, Grindems," said Maxwell. "No, he didn't," said Grindley. "Your horses, Grindley, are up to all the work they have to do," said George; "and I don't know what any man wants more than that." "Had you again, Grindems," said Maxwell. "I can ride against him any day," said Grindley. And he trotted round the corner by the church, and into the field in which the hounds were assembled, to escape. Had it been Vavasor alone he would have turned upon him and snarled, but he could not afford to exhibit any ill temper to the king of the club. Mr. Grindley was not popular, and he did not wish Maxwell to turn openly against him. Grindley was a rich enough man, and not ignorant, or a fool; whereas I rather think Maxwell was a fool. Grindley had made his own way in the world, but Maxwell would certainly not have made a banker if his father had not been a banker before him; there were many better men of business. Grindley knew this, yet he allowed Maxwell to snub him. Maxwell was not even a better rider; but one looked imposing and the other insignificant. So Maxwell held dominion over him. "By George, there's Pollock!" said Maxwell, as he rode into the field. "I'll bet half a crown that he's come down from London this morning, that he was up all night, and that he tells us so three times before the hounds leave the paddock." Mr. Pollock was the heavy-weight sporting literary gentleman.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 16: The Roebury Club

Kate and Alice, as they drew near to their journey's end, were both a little flurried, and I cannot but own that there was cause for nervousness. Kate Vavasor was to meet Mr. Grey for the first time. Mr. Grey was now staying at Matching and was to remain there until a week of his marriage. He was then to return to Cambridgeshire for a day or two, and after that was to become a guest at the rector's house at Matching the evening before the ceremony. "Why not let him come here at once?" Lady Glencora had said to her husband. "It is such nonsense, you know." But Mr. Palliser would not hear of it. Mr. Palliser, though a Radical in public life, would not for worlds transgress the social laws of his ancestors; and so the matter was settled. Kate on this very day of her arrival at Matching would thus see Mr. Grey for the first time, and she could not but feel that she had been the means of doing Mr. Grey much injury. She had moreover something,--not much indeed, but still something,--of that feeling which made the Pallisers terrible to the imagination, because of their rank and wealth. She was a little afraid of the Pallisers, but of Mr. Grey she was very much afraid. And Alice also was not at her ease. She would fain have prevented so very quick a marriage had she not felt that now,--after all the trouble that she had caused,--there was nothing left for her but to do as others wished. When a day had been named she had hardly dared to demur, and had allowed Lady Glencora to settle everything as she had wished. But it was not only the suddenness of her marriage which dismayed her. Its nature and attributes were terrible to her. Both Lady Midlothian and the Marchioness of Auld Reekie were coming. When this was told to her by letter she had no means of escape. "Lady Macleod is right in nearly all that she says," Lady Glencora had written to her. "At any rate, you needn't be such a fool as to run away from your cousins, simply because they have handles to their names. You must take the thing as it comes." Lady Glencora, moreover, had settled for her the list of bridesmaids. Alice had made a petition that she might be allowed to go through the ceremony with only one,--with none but Kate to back her. But she ought to have known that when she consented to be married at Matching,--and indeed she had had very little power of resisting that proposition,--all such questions would be decided for her. Two daughters therefore of Lady Midlothian were to act, Lady Jane and Lady Mary, and the one daughter of the Marchioness, who was also a Lady Jane, and there were to be two Miss Howards down from London,--girls who were known both to Alice and to Lady Glencora, and who were in some distant way connected with them both. A great attempt was made to induce the two Miss Pallisers to join the bevy, but they had frankly pleaded their age. "No woman should stand up as a bridesmaid," said the strong-minded Sophy, "who doesn't mean to get married if she can. Now I don't mean to get married, and I won't put myself among the young people." Lady Glencora was therefore obliged to submit to do the work with only six. But she swore that they should be very smart. She was to give all the dresses, and Mr. Palliser was to give a brooch and an armlet to each. "She is the only person in the world I want to pet, except yourself," Lady Glencora had said to her husband, and he had answered by giving her _carte blanche_ as regards expense. [Illustration: Alice and her bridesmaids.] All this was very terrible to Kate, who had not much feminine taste for finery. Of the dress she had heard,--of the dress which was waiting at Matching to be made up after her arrival,--though as yet she knew nothing of the trinkets. There are many girls who could submit themselves at a moment to the kindness of such a woman as Lady Glencora. Perhaps most girls would do so, for of all such women in the world, Lady Glencora was the least inclined to patronize or to be condescending in her kindnesses. But Kate Vavasor was one to whom such submission would not come easily. "I wish I was out of this boat," she said to Alice in the train. "So that I might be shipwrecked alone!" "No; there can be no shipwreck to you. When the day of action comes you will be taken away, up to heaven, upon the clouds. But what are they to do with me?" "You'll find that Glencora will not desert you. You can't conceive what taste she has." "I'd sooner be bridesmaid to Charlie Fairstairs. I would indeed. My place in the world is not among Cabinet Ministers and old countesses." "Nor mine." "Yes; it seems that yours is to be there. They are your cousins, and you have made at any rate one great friend among them,--one who is to be the biggest of them all." "And you are going to throw me over, Kate?" "To tell the truth, Alice, I sometimes think you had better throw me over. I know it would be sad,--sad for both, but perhaps it would be better. I have done you much harm and no good; and now where I am going I shall disgrace you." She talked even of getting out at some station and returning, and would have done so had not Alice made it impossible. As it was, the evening found her and Alice together entering the park-gate at Matching, in Lady Glencora's carriage. Lady Glencora had sent a note to the station. "She could not come herself," she said, "because Mr. Palliser was a little fussy. You'll understand, dear, but don't say a word." Alice didn't say a word, having been very anxious not to lower Mr. Palliser in her cousin's respect. None of the Lady Janes and Lady Marys were at Matching when they arrived. Indeed, there was no guest there but Mr. Grey, for which Kate felt herself to be extremely grateful. Mr. Grey came into the hall, standing behind Mr. Palliser, who stood behind his wife. Alice passed by them both, and was at once in her lover's arms. "Then I must introduce myself," said Lady Glencora to Kate, "and my husband also." This she did, and no woman in England could have excelled her in the manner of doing it. "I have heard so much about you," said she, still keeping Kate's hand, "and I know how good you've been;--and how wicked you have been," she added in a whisper. Then Mr. Grey was brought up to her, and they were introduced. It was not till some days had passed over them that she felt herself at all at her ease with Mr. Grey, and I doubt whether she ever reached that point with Mr. Palliser; but Lady Glencora she knew, and liked, and almost loved, from the first moment of their meeting. "Have you heard the news?" said Lady Glencora to Alice, the first minute that they were alone. Alice, of course, had not heard the news. "Mr. Bott is going to marry Mrs. Marsham. There is such a row about it. Plantagenet is nearly mad. I never knew him so disgusted in my life. Of course I don't dare to tell him so, but I am so heartily rejoiced. You know how I love them both, and I could not possibly wish any better reward for either." Alice, who had personally known more of Mr. Bott than of Mrs. Marsham, said that she couldn't but be sorry for the lady. "She's old enough to be his mother," said Lady Glencora, "otherwise I really don't know any people better suited to each other. The best is, that Mr. Bott is doing it to regain his footing with Mr. Palliser! I am sure of that;--and Plantagenet will never speak to him again. But, Alice, there is other news." "What other news?" "It is hardly news yet, and of course I am very wicked to tell you. But I feel sure Mr. Grey knows all about it, and if I didn't tell, he would." "He hasn't told me anything yet." "He hasn't had time; and when he does, you mustn't pretend to know. I believe Mr. Palliser will certainly be Chancellor of the Exchequer before next month, and, if so, he'll never come in for Silverbridge again." "But he'll be in Parliament; will he not?" "Oh, yes; he'll be in Parliament. I don't understand all about it. There is a man going out for the county,--for Barsetshire,--some man whom the Duke used to favour, and he wants Plantagenet to come in for that. I can't understand what difference it makes." "But he will be in the Cabinet?" "Oh, yes. But who do you suppose is to be the new Member for Silverbridge?" "I can't guess," said Alice. Though, of course, she did guess. "Mind, I don't know it. He has never told me. But he told me that he had been with the Duke, and asked the Duke to let Jeffrey have the seat. The Duke became as black as thunder, and said that Jeffrey had no fortune. In short, he wouldn't hear of it. Poor Jeffrey! we must try to do something for him, but I really don't know how. Then the Duke said, that Plantagenet should put in for Silverbridge some friend who would support himself; and I fancy,--mind it's only fancy,--but I fancy that Plantagenet mentioned to his Grace--one Mr. Grey." "Oh, Glencora!" "They've been talking together till sometimes I think Mr. Grey is worse than Plantagenet. When Mr. Grey began to say something the other night in the drawing-room about sugar, I knew it was all up with you. He'll be a financial Secretary; you see if he isn't; or a lord of something, or an under-somebody of State; and then some day he'll go mad, either because he does or because he doesn't get into the Cabinet." Lady Glencora, as she said all this, knew well that the news she was giving would please her cousin better than any other tidings that could be told. By degrees the guests came. The two Miss Howards were the first, and they expressed themselves as delighted with Lady Glencora's taste and with Mr. Palliser's munificence,--for at that time the brooches and armlets had been produced. Kate had said very little about these matters, but the Miss Howards were loud in their thanks. But they were good-humoured, merry girls, and the house was pleasanter after their arrival than it had been before. Then came the dreaded personage,--the guest,--Lady Midlothian! On the subject of Lady Midlothian Kate had really become curious. She had a real desire to see the face and gait of the woman, and to hear her voice. Lady Midlothian came, and with her came Lady Jane and Lady Mary. I am by no means sure that Lady Jane and Lady Mary were not nearly as old as the two Miss Pallisers; but they were not probably so fully resolved as to the condition of their future modes of living as were those two ladies, and if so, they were not wrong to shine as bridesmaids. With them Alice had made some slight acquaintance during the last spring in London, and as they were now to attend upon her as the bride they were sufficiently gracious. To Kate, too, they were civil enough, and things, in public, went on very pleasantly at Matching. A scene there was, of course, between Alice and Lady Midlothian;--a scene in private. "You must go through it," Lady Glencora had said, with jocose mournfulness; "and why should you not let her jump upon you a little? It can't hurt you now." "But I don't like people to jump upon me," Alice said. "And why are you to have everything just as you like it? You are so unreasonable. Think how I've been jumped on! Think what I have borne from them! If you knew the things she used to say to me, you would not be such a coward. I was sent down to her for a week, and had no power of helping myself. And the Marchioness used to be sent for to look at me, for she never talks. She used to look at me, and groan, and hold up her hands till I hated her the worst of the two. Think what they did to me, and yet they are my dear friends now. Why should you escape altogether?" Alice could not escape altogether, and therefore was closeted with Lady Midlothian for the best part of an hour. "Did Lady Macleod read to you what I wrote?" the Countess asked. "Yes,--that is, she gave me the letter to read." "And I hope you understand me, Alice?" "Oh, yes, I suppose so." "You suppose so, my dear! If you only suppose so I shall not be contented. I want you to appreciate my feelings towards you thoroughly. I want you to know that I am most anxious as to your future life, and that I am thoroughly satisfied with the step you are now taking." The Countess paused, but Alice said nothing. Her tongue was itching to tell the old woman that she cared nothing for this expression of satisfaction; but she was aware that she had done much that was deserving of punishment, and resolved to take this as part of her penance. She was being jumped upon, and it was unpleasant; but, after all that had happened, it was only fitting that she should undergo much unpleasantness. "Thoroughly satisfied," continued the Countess; "and now, I only wish to refer, in the slightest manner possible, to what took place between us when we were both of us under this roof last winter." "Why refer to it at all, Lady Midlothian?" "Because I think it may do good, and because I cannot make you understand that I have thoroughly forgiven everything, unless I tell you that I have forgiven that also. On that occasion I had come all the way from Scotland on purpose to say a few words to you." "I am so sorry that you should have had the trouble." "I do not regret it, Alice. I never do regret doing anything which I believe to have been my duty. There is no knowing how far what I said then may have operated for good." Alice thought that she knew very well, but she said nothing. "I must confess that what I then understood to be your obstinacy,--and I must say also, if I tell the truth, your indifference to--to--to all prudential considerations whatever, not to talk of appearances and decorum, and I might say, anything like a high line of duty or moral conduct,--shocked me very much. It did, indeed, my dear. Taking it altogether, I don't know that I was ever more shocked in my life. The thing was so inscrutable!" Here Lady Midlothian held up one hand in a manner that was truly imposing; "so inscrutable! But that is all over now. What was personally offensive to myself I could easily forgive, and I do forgive it. I shall never think of it any more." Here Lady Midlothian put up both her hands gently, as though wafting the injury away into the air. "But what I wish specially to say to you is this; your own conduct is forgiven also!" Here she paused again, and Alice winced. Who was this dreadful old Countess;--what was the Countess to her, that she should be thus tormented with the old woman's forgiveness? John Grey had forgiven her, and of external forgiveness that was enough. She had not forgiven herself,--would never forgive herself altogether; and the pardon of no old woman in England could assist her in doing so. She had sinned, but she had not sinned against Lady Midlothian. "Let her jump upon you, and have done with it," Lady Glencora had said. She had resolved that it should be so, but it was very hard to keep her resolution. "The Marchioness and I have talked it over," continued Lady Midlothian, "and she has asked me to speak for both her and myself." There is comfort at any rate in that, thought Alice, who had never yet seen the Marchioness. "We have resolved that all those little mistakes should be as though they had never been committed. We shall both be most happy to receive you and your husband, who is, I must say, one of the most gentlemanlike looking men I ever saw. It seems that he and Mr. Palliser are on most friendly,--I may say, most confidential terms, and that must be quite a pleasure to you." "It's a pleasure to him, which is more to the purpose," said Alice. "Exactly so. And now, my dear, everything is forgiven and shall be forgotten. Come and give me a kiss, and let me wish you joy." Alice did as she was bidden, and accepted the kiss and the congratulations, and a little box of jewellery which Lady Midlothian produced from out of her pocket. "The diamonds are from the Marchioness, my dear, whose means, as you doubtless are aware, greatly exceed my own. The garnets are from me. I hope they may both be worn long and happily." I hardly know which was the worst, the lecture, the kiss, or the present. The latter she would have declined, had it been possible; but it was not possible. When she had agreed to be married at Matching she had not calculated the amount of punishment which would thereby be inflicted on her. But I think that, though she bore it impatiently, she was aware that she had deserved it. Although she fretted herself greatly under the infliction of Lady Midlothian, she acknowledged to herself, even at the time, that she deserved all the lashes she received. She had made a fool of herself in her vain attempt to be greater and grander than other girls, and it was only fair that her folly should be in some sort punished before it was fully pardoned. John Grey punished it after one fashion; by declining to allude to it, or to think of it, or to take any account of it. And now Lady Midlothian had punished it after another fashion, and Alice went out of the Countess's presence with sundry inward exclamations of "mea culpa," and with many unseen beatings of the breast. Two days before the ceremony came the Marchioness and her august daughter. Her Lady Jane was much more august than the other Lady Jane;--very much more august indeed. She had very long flaxen hair, and very light blue eyes, which she did not move frequently, and she spoke very little,--one may almost say not at all, and she never seemed to do anything. But she was very august, and was, as all the world knew, engaged to marry the Duke of Dumfriesshire, who, though twice her own age, was as yet childless, as soon as he should have completed his mourning for his first wife. Kate told her cousin that she did not at all know how she should ever stand up as one in a group with so august a person as this Lady Jane, and Alice herself felt that such an attendant would quite obliterate her. But Lady Jane and her mother were both harmless. The Marchioness never spoke to Kate and hardly spoke to Alice, and the Marchioness's Lady Jane was quite as silent as her mother. On the morning of this day,--the day on which these very august people came,--a telegram arrived at the Priory calling for Mr. Palliser's immediate presence in London. He came to Alice full of regret, and behaved himself very nicely. Alice now regarded him quite as a friend. "Of course I understand," she said, "and I know that the business which takes you up to London pleases you." "Well; yes;--it does please me. I am glad,--I don't mind saying so to you. But it does not please me to think that I shall be away at your marriage. Pray make your father understand that it was absolutely unavoidable. But I shall see him, of course, when I come back. And I shall see you too before very long." "Shall you?" "Oh yes." "And why so?" "Because Mr. Grey must be at Silverbridge for his election.--But perhaps I ought not tell you his secrets." Then he took her into the breakfast-parlour and showed her his present. It was a service of Svres china,--very precious and beautiful. "I got you these things because Grey likes china." "So do I like china," said she, with her face brighter than he had ever yet seen it. "I thought you would like them best," said he. Alice looking up at him with her eyes full of tears told him that she did like them best; and then, as he wished her all happiness, and as he was stooping over her to kiss her, Lady Glencora came in. "I beg pardon," said she, "I was just one minute too soon; was I not?" "She would have them sent here and unpacked," said Mr. Palliser, "though I told her it was foolish." "Of course I would," said Lady Glencora. "Everything shall be unpacked and shown. It's easy to get somebody to pack them again." Much of the wedding tribute had already been deposited with the china, and among other things there were the jewels that Lady Midlothian had brought. "Upon my word, her ladyship's diamonds are not to be sneezed at," said Lady Glencora. "I don't care for diamonds," said Alice. Then Lady Glencora took up the Countess's trinkets, and shook her head and turned up her nose. There was a wonderfully comic expression on her face as she did so. "To me they are just as good as the others," said Alice. "To me they are not, then," said Lady Glencora. "Diamonds are diamonds, and garnets are garnets; and I am not so romantic but what I know the difference." On the evening before the marriage Alice and Lady Glencora walked for the last time through the Priory ruins. It was now September, and the evenings were still long, so that the ladies could get out upon the lawn after dinner. Whether Lady Glencora would have been allowed to walk through the ruins so late as half-past eight in the evening if her husband had been there may be doubtful, but her husband was away and she took this advantage of his absence. "Do you remember that night we were here?" said Lady Glencora. "When shall I forget it; or how is it possible that such a night should ever be forgotten?" "No; I shall never forget it. Oh dear, what wonderful things have happened since that! Do you ever think of Jeffrey?" "Yes;--of course I think of him. I did like him so much. I hope I shall see him some day." "And he liked you too, young woman; and, what was more, young woman, I thought at one time that, perhaps, you were going to like him in earnest." "Not in that way, certainly." "You've done much better, of course; especially as poor Jeffrey's chance of promotion doesn't look so good now. If I have a boy, I wonder whether he'll hate me?" "Why should he hate you?" "I can't help it, you know, if he does. Only think what it is to Plantagenet. Have you seen the difference it makes in him already?" "Of course it makes a difference;--the greatest difference in the world." "And think what it will be to me, Alice. I used to lie in bed and wish myself dead, and make up my mind to drown myself,--if I could only dare. I shan't think any more of that poor fellow now." Then she told Alice what had been done for Burgo; how his uncle had paid his bills once again, and had agreed to give him a small income. "Poor fellow!" said Lady Glencora, "it won't do more than buy him gloves, you know." The marriage was magnificent, greatly to the dismay of Alice and to the discomfort of Mr. Vavasor, who came down on the eve of the ceremony,--arriving while his daughter and Lady Glencora were in the ruins. Mr. Grey seemed to take it all very easily, and, as Lady Glencora said, played his part exactly as though he were in the habit of being married, at any rate, once a year. "Nothing on earth will ever put him out, so you need not try, my dear," she said, as Alice stood with her a moment alone in the dressing-room up-stairs before her departure. "I know that," said Alice, "and therefore I shall never try." xxxxxxxxxx

Kate and Alice, as they drew near to their journey's end, were both a little flurried and nervous. Kate was to meet Mr. Grey for the first time. He was now staying at Matching and was to remain there until a week before his marriage. He would then return to Cambridgeshire for a day or two, and after that was to be a guest at the rector's house at Matching the evening before the ceremony. "Why not let him come here at once?" Lady Glencora had said to her husband. "It is such nonsense, you know." But Mr. Palliser, though a Radical in public life, would not for worlds transgress the social laws of his ancestors. Kate could not help feeling that she had been the means of doing Mr. Grey much injury. She was awed by the Pallisers, because of their rank and wealth; but of Mr. Grey she was very much afraid. And Alice also was not at her ease. Both Lady Midlothian and the Marchioness of Auld Reekie were coming, and she had no means of escape. "Lady Macleod is right in nearly all that she says," Lady Glencora had written to her. "At any rate, you needn't be such a fool as to run away from your cousins, simply because they have titles." Lady Glencora, moreover, had settled the list of bridesmaids. Alice had asked that she might have only one - Kate. But she should have known that when she consented to be married at Matching, all such questions would be decided for her. So two daughters of Lady Midlothian were to act, Lady Jane and Lady Mary, and the daughter of the Marchioness, who was also a Lady Jane, and there were to be two Miss Howards who were distant relations. Lady Glencora swore that the bridesmaids should be very smart. She was to give all the dresses, and Mr. Palliser was to give a brooch and an armlet to each. All this was very terrible to Kate, who had not much taste for finery. There was a dress waiting at Matching to be made up after her arrival, though as yet she knew nothing of the trinkets. Although Lady Glencora was not inclined to patronize or condescend in her kindnesses, Kate Vavasor was one to whom such submission would not come easily. "I wish I was out of this boat," she said to Alice in the train. "So that I might be shipwrecked alone!" "No; there can be no shipwreck for you. But what are they to do with me? I'd sooner be bridesmaid to Charlie Fairstairs. My place in the world is not among Cabinet Ministers and countesses." "Nor mine." "Yes; they are your cousins, and you have made one great friend at least among them." "Are you going to throw me over, Kate?" "To tell the truth, Alice, I sometimes think you had better throw me over. I know it would be sad, but perhaps it would be better. I have done you much harm and no good; and now I shall disgrace you." She even talked of getting out at some station, and would have done so if Alice had not made it impossible. As it was, that evening they entered the park-gate at Matching in Lady Glencora's carriage. None of the Lady Janes and Lady Marys were there when they arrived. Indeed, there was no guest but Mr. Grey, for which Kate felt extremely grateful. Mr. Grey came into the hall behind Mr. Palliser, and Alice was at once in her lover's arms. "I must introduce myself," said Lady Glencora to Kate, "and my husband also. I have heard so much about you, and I know how good you've been; and how wicked you have been," she added in a whisper. Then Mr. Grey was brought up to her, and they were introduced. It was not for some days that she felt at her ease with Mr. Grey, and I doubt whether she ever reached that point with Mr. Palliser; but Lady Glencora she knew, and liked, and almost loved, from the first moment of their meeting. "Have you heard the news?" said Lady Glencora to Alice, the first minute that they were alone. Alice, of course, had not heard the news. "Mr. Bott is going to marry Mrs. Marsham. There is such a row about it. Plantagenet is nearly mad. I never knew him so disgusted in my life. Of course I don't dare to tell him, but I am so happy. You know how I love them both, and I could not wish any better reward for either." Alice, who had known more of Mr. Bott than of Mrs. Marsham, said that she was sorry for the lady. "She's old enough to be his mother," said Lady Glencora, "otherwise I really don't know any people better suited to each other. The best of it is, that Mr. Bott is doing it to regain his footing with Mr. Palliser! I am sure of that - and Plantagenet will never speak to him again. But, Alice, there is other news." "What other news?" "It is hardly news yet, and of course I am very wicked to tell you. But I feel sure Mr. Grey knows all about it, and if he tells you, you must pretend not to know. I believe Mr. Palliser will certainly be Chancellor of the Exchequer before next month, and, if so, he'll never stand for Silverbridge again." "But he'll be in Parliament; will he not?" "Oh, yes; he'll be in Parliament. I don't understand all about it. There is a man going out for Barsetshire, and the Duke wants Plantagenet to stand there. I can't understand what difference it makes." "But he will be in the Cabinet?" "Oh, yes. But who do you suppose is to be the new Member for Silverbridge?" "I can't guess," said Alice. Though, of course, she did guess. "Mind, I don't know it. But he told me that he had been with the Duke, and asked the Duke to let Jeffrey have the seat. The Duke became as black as thunder, and said that Jeffrey had no fortune. He wouldn't hear of it. Poor Jeffrey! we must try to do something for him, but I really don't know how. Then the Duke said that Plantagenet should put in for Silverbridge some friend who would support himself; and I think that Plantagenet mentioned - one Mr. Grey." "Oh, Glencora!" "They've been talking together till sometimes I think Mr. Grey is worse than Plantagenet. He'll be a financial Secretary; you see if he isn't; or an under-somebody of State; and then some day he'll go mad, either because he does or doesn't get into the Cabinet." Lady Glencora, as she said all this, knew well that the news she was giving would please her cousin better than any other. The guests came: the two Miss Howards first, who expressed themselves delighted with Lady Glencora's taste and with Mr. Palliser's generosity with the trinkets. Kate had said very little about these, but the Miss Howards were loud in their thanks. They were good-humoured, merry girls, and the house was pleasanter after their arrival. Then came the dreaded Lady Midlothian! Kate had really become curious about her. Lady Midlothian came, and with her came Lady Jane and Lady Mary, and as they were to be Alice's bridesmaids they were gracious to her. To Kate, too, they were civil enough, and things, in public, went on very pleasantly at Matching. Of course there was a scene in private between Alice and Lady Midlothian. "You must go through it," Lady Glencora had said, with joking mournfulness; "and why should you not let her jump upon you a little? It can't hurt you now." "But I don't like people to jump upon me," Alice said. "Why are you to have everything just as you like it? Think how I've been jumped on! If you knew the things she used to say to me, you would not be such a coward. And the Marchioness used to look at me, and groan, and hold up her hands till I hated her the worse of the two. Yet they are my dear friends now. Why should you escape altogether?" Alice could not escape altogether, and therefore was closeted with Lady Midlothian for the best part of an hour. "Did Lady Macleod read to you what I wrote?" the Countess asked. "Yes." "And I hope you understand me, Alice?" "Oh, yes, I suppose so." "You suppose so, my dear! I am most anxious about your future life, and am thoroughly satisfied with the step you are now taking." The Countess paused, but Alice said nothing. She was being jumped upon, and it was unpleasant; but, after all that had happened, it was only fitting that she should undergo much unpleasantness. "Thoroughly satisfied," continued the Countess; "and now, I only wish to refer, in the slightest manner possible, to what took place between us last winter." "Why refer to it at all, Lady Midlothian?" "Because I think it may do good, and because I wish to tell you that I have forgiven that also. On that occasion I had come all the way from Scotland on purpose to say a few words to you." "I am so sorry that you should have had the trouble." "I do not regret it, Alice. I never do regret doing anything which I believe to be my duty. I must confess that what I then understood to be your obstinacy, and in truth, your indifference to all prudential considerations, shocked me very much. It did, indeed, my dear. I don't know that I was ever more shocked in my life!" Here Lady Midlothian held up one hand in an imposing manner. "But that is all over now. I forgive and forget it. I shall never think of it any more." Here Lady Midlothian put up both her hands as though wafting the injury away into the air. "But what I wish specially to say to you is this; your own conduct is forgiven also!" Here she paused again, and Alice winced. What was the Countess to her, that she should be thus tormented with the old woman's forgiveness? John Grey had forgiven her, and that was enough. She had not forgiven herself; and no old woman in England could help her do so. She had sinned, but not against Lady Midlothian. "The Marchioness and I have talked it over," continued Lady Midlothian, "and she has asked me to speak for her. We have resolved that all those little mistakes should be as though they had never been committed. We shall both be most happy to receive you and your husband, who is, I must say, one of the most gentlemanly men I ever saw. It seems that he and Mr. Palliser are on most friendly terms, and that must be quite a pleasure to you." "It's a pleasure to him, which is more to the purpose," said Alice. "Exactly so. And now, my dear, come and give me a kiss, and let me wish you joy." Alice accepted the kiss and the congratulations, and a little box of jewellery which Lady Midlothian produced from out of her pocket. "The diamonds are from the Marchioness, my dear, whose means, as you doubtless are aware, greatly exceed my own. The garnets are from me. I hope they may both be worn long and happily." I hardly know which was the worst, the lecture, the kiss, or the present. The last Alice would have declined; but it was not possible. Although she fretted greatly under the infliction of Lady Midlothian, she acknowledged to herself that she deserved all the lashes she received. She had made a fool of herself in her vain attempt to be greater and grander than other girls, and it was only fair that her folly should be punished before it was fully pardoned. John Grey punished it after one fashion, by declining to allude to it, or to take any account of it. And now Lady Midlothian had punished it after another fashion. Two days before the ceremony the Marchioness and her daughter came. Lady Jane was very much more august than the other Lady Jane. She had very long flaxen hair, and very light blue eyes, and she spoke very little, and she never seemed to do anything. But she was very august, and was engaged to marry the Duke of Dumfriesshire, though he was twice her age, as soon as he had completed his mourning for his first wife. But Lady Jane and her mother were both harmless. The Marchioness never spoke to Kate and hardly spoke to Alice, and Lady Jane was quite as silent as her mother. On the morning after their arrival, a telegram arrived for Mr. Palliser calling for his immediate presence in London. He came, full of regret, to Alice, who now regarded him quite as a friend. "Of course I understand," she said, "and I know that the business which takes you up to London pleases you." "Well; yes; it does. But it does not please me to think that I shall be away at your marriage. Pray make your father understand that it was absolutely unavoidable. But I shall see him, of course, when I come back. And I shall see you too before very long." "Why so?" "Because Mr. Grey must be at Silverbridge for his election. But perhaps I ought not tell you his secrets." Then he took her into the breakfast-parlour and showed her his present. It was a service of Svres china, very precious and beautiful. "I got you these things because Grey likes china." "So do I," said she, her face brighter than he had ever yet seen it. "I thought you would like them best," said he. Alice, looking up at him with her eyes full of tears, told him that she did like them best; and then, as he wished her all happiness, and was stooping over her to kiss her, Lady Glencora came in. "I beg pardon," said she, "I was just one minute too soon; was I not? All the wedding gifts are displayed here. It's easy to get somebody to pack them again." Among the wedding gifts were the jewels that Lady Midlothian had brought. "Upon my word, her ladyship's diamonds are not to be sneezed at," said Lady Glencora. "I don't care for diamonds," said Alice. Lady Glencora took up the Countess's trinkets, and shook her head and turned up her nose with a wonderfully comic expression. "To me they are just as good as the others," said Alice. "To me they are not," said Lady Glencora. "Diamonds are diamonds, and garnets are garnets." On the evening before the wedding Alice and Lady Glencora walked for the last time through the Priory ruins. It was now September, and the evenings were still long. Whether Lady Glencora would have been allowed to walk through the ruins at half-past eight in the evening if her husband had been there may be doubtful, but her husband was away. "Do you remember that night we were here?" said Lady Glencora. "How could I forget it?" "Oh dear, what wonderful things have happened since that! Do you ever think of Jeffrey?" "Yes, of course. I did like him so much. I hope I shall see him some day." "And he liked you too; and, what was more, I thought at one time that you were going to like him in earnest." "Not in that way, certainly." "You've done much better, of course. If I have a boy, I wonder whether Jeffrey will hate me? I can't help it if he does. Only think what it is to Plantagenet. Have you seen the difference it makes in him already?" "Of course it makes a difference; the greatest difference in the world." "And think what it will be to me, Alice. I used to wish myself dead. I shan't think any more of that poor fellow now." Then she told Alice what had been done for Burgo. "Poor fellow!" said Lady Glencora, "that allowance won't do more than buy him gloves, you know." The wedding was magnificent, greatly to the dismay of Alice and to the discomfort of Mr. Vavasor, who arrived while his daughter and Lady Glencora were in the ruins. Mr. Grey seemed to take it all very easily, and, as Lady Glencora said, played his part exactly as though he were in the habit of being married once a year. "Nothing on earth will ever put him out, so you need not try, my dear," she said, as Alice stood with her a moment alone. "I know," said Alice, "and therefore I shall never try."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 79: Diamonds Are Diamonds

It was the butler who had knocked,--showing that the knock was of more importance than it would have been had it been struck by the knuckles of the footman in livery. "If you please, sir, the Duke of St. Bungay is here." "The Duke of St. Bungay!" said Mr. Palliser, becoming rather red as he heard the announcement. "Yes, sir, his grace is in the library. He bade me tell you that he particularly wanted to see you; so I told him that you were with my lady." "Quite right; tell his grace that I will be with him in two minutes." Then the butler retired, and Mr. Palliser was again alone with his wife. "I must go now, my dear," he said; "and perhaps I shall not see you again till the evening." "Don't let me put you out in any way," she answered. "Oh no;--you won't put me out. You will be dressing, I suppose, about nine." "I did not mean as to that," she answered. "You must not think more of Italy. He has come to tell you that you are wanted in the Cabinet." Again he turned very red. "It may be so," he answered, "but though I am wanted, I need not go. But I must not keep the duke waiting. Good-bye." And he turned to the door. She followed him and took hold of him as he went, so that he was forced to turn to her once again. She managed to get hold of both his hands, and pressed them closely, looking up into his face with her eyes laden with tears. He smiled at her gently, returned the pressure of the hands, and then left her,--without kissing her. It was not that he was minded not to kiss her. He would have kissed her willingly enough had he thought that the occasion required it. "He says that he loves me," said Lady Glencora to herself, "but he does not know what love means." But she was quite aware that he had behaved to her with genuine, true nobility. As soon as she was alone and certain of her solitude, she took out that letter from her pocket, and tearing it into very small fragments, without reading it, threw the pieces on the fire. As she did so, her mind seemed to be fixed, at any rate, to one thing,--that she would think no more of Burgo Fitzgerald as her future master. I think, however, that she had arrived at so much certainty as this, at that moment in which she had been parting with Burgo Fitzgerald, in Lady Monk's dining-room. She had had courage enough,--or shall we rather say sin enough,--to think of going with him,--to tell herself that she would do so; to put herself in the way of doing it; nay, she had had enough of both to enable her to tell her husband that she had resolved that it would be good for her to do so. But she was neither bold enough nor wicked enough to do the thing. As she had said of her own idea of destroying herself,--she did not dare to take the plunge. Therefore, knowing now that it was so, she tore up the letter that she had carried so long, and burnt it in the fire. She had in truth told him everything, believing that in doing so she was delivering her own death-warrant as regarded her future position in his house. She had done this, not hoping thereby for any escape; not with any purpose as regarded herself, but simply because deceit had been grievous to her, and had become unendurable as soon as his words and manner had in them any feeling of kindness. But her confession had no sooner been made than her fault had been forgiven. She had told him that she did not love him. She had told him, even, that she had thought of leaving him. She had justified by her own words any treatment of his, however harsh, which he might choose to practise. But the result had been--the immediate result--that he had been more tender to her than she had ever remembered him to be before. She knew that he had conquered her. However cold and heartless his home might be to her, it must be her home now. There could be no further thought of leaving him. She had gone out into the tiltyard and had tilted with him, and he had been the victor. Mr. Palliser himself had not time for much thought before he found himself closeted with the Duke; but as he crossed the hall and went up the stairs, a thought or two did pass quickly across his mind. She had confessed to him, and he had forgiven her. He did not feel quite sure that he had been right, but he did feel quite sure that the thing had been done. He recognized it for a fact that, as regarded the past, no more was to be said. There were to be no reproaches, and there must be some tacit abandoning of Mrs. Marsham's close attendance. As to Mr. Bott;--he had begun to hate Mr. Bott, and had felt cruelly ungrateful, when that gentleman endeavoured to whisper a word into his ear as he passed through the doorway into Lady Monk's dining-room. And he had offered to go abroad,--to go abroad and leave his politics, and his ambition, and his coming honours. He had persisted in his offer, even after his wife had suggested to him that the Duke of St. Bungay was now in the house with the object of offering him that very thing for which he had so longed! As he thought of this his heart became heavy within him. Such chances,--so he told himself,--do not come twice in a man's way. When returning from a twelvemonth's residence abroad he would be nobody in politics. He would have lost everything for which he had been working all his life. But he was a man of his word, and as he opened the library door he was resolute,--he thought that he could be resolute in adhering to his promise. "Duke," he said, "I'm afraid I have kept you waiting." And the two political allies shook each other by the hand. The Duke was in a glow of delight. There had been no waiting. He was only too glad to find his friend at home. He had been prepared to wait, even if Mr. Palliser had been out. "And I suppose you guess why I'm come?" said the Duke. "I would rather be told than have to guess," said Mr. Palliser, smiling for a moment. But the smile quickly passed off his face as he remembered his pledge to his wife. "He has resigned at last. What was said in the Lords last night made it necessary that he should do so, or that Lord Brock should declare himself able to support him through thick and thin. Of course, I can tell you everything now. He must have gone, or I must have done so. You know that I don't like him in the Cabinet. I admire his character and his genius, but I think him the most dangerous man in England as a statesman. He has high principles,--the very highest; but they are so high as to be out of sight to ordinary eyes. They are too exalted to be of any use for everyday purposes. He is honest as the sun, I'm sure; but it's just like the sun's honesty,--of a kind which we men below can't quite understand or appreciate. He has no instinct in politics, but reaches his conclusions by philosophical deduction. Now, in politics, I would a deal sooner trust to instinct than to calculation. I think he may probably know how England ought to be governed three centuries hence better than any man living, but of the proper way to govern it now, I think he knows less. Brock half likes him and half fears him. He likes the support of his eloquence, and he likes the power of the man; but he fears his restless activity, and thoroughly dislikes his philosophy. At any rate, he has left us, and I am here to ask you to take his place." The Duke, as he concluded his speech, was quite contented, and almost jovial. He was thoroughly satisfied with the new political arrangement which he was proposing. He regarded Mr. Palliser as a steady, practical man of business, luckily young, and therefore with a deal of work in him, belonging to the race from which English ministers ought, in his opinion, to be taken, and as being, in some respects, his own pupil. He had been the first to declare aloud that Plantagenet Palliser was the coming Chancellor of the Exchequer; and it had been long known, though no such declaration had been made aloud, that the Duke did not sit comfortably in the same Cabinet with the gentleman who had now resigned. Everything had now gone as the Duke wished; and he was prepared to celebrate some little ovation with his young friend before he left the house in Park Lane. "And who goes out with him?" asked Mr. Palliser, putting off the evil moment of his own decision; but before the Duke could answer him, he had reminded himself that under his present circumstances he had no right to ask such a question. His own decision could not rest upon that point. "But it does not matter," he said; "I am afraid I must decline the offer you bring me." "Decline it!" said the Duke, who could not have been more surprised had his friend talked of declining heaven. "I fear I must." The Duke had now risen from his chair, and was standing, with both his hands upon the table. All his contentment, all his joviality, had vanished. His fine round face had become almost ludicrously long; his eyes and mouth were struggling to convey reproach, and the reproach was almost drowned in vexation. Ever since Parliament had met he had been whispering Mr. Palliser's name into the Prime Minister's ear, and now--. But he could not, and would not, believe it. "Nonsense, Palliser," he said. "You must have got some false notion into your head. There can be no possible reason why you should not join us. Finespun himself will support us, at any rate for a time." Mr. Finespun was the gentleman whose retirement from the ministry the Duke of St. Bungay had now announced. "It is nothing of that kind," said Mr. Palliser, who perhaps felt himself quite equal to the duties proposed to him, even though Mr. Finespun should not support him. "It is nothing of that kind;--it is no fear of that sort that hinders me." "Then, for mercy's sake, what is it? My dear Palliser, I looked upon you as being as sure in this matter as myself; and I had a right to do so. You certainly intended to join us a month ago, if the opportunity offered. You certainly did." "It is true, Duke. I must ask you to listen to me now, and I must tell you what I would not willingly tell to any man." As Mr. Palliser said this a look of agony came over his face. There are men who can talk easily of all their most inmost matters, but he was not such a man. It went sorely against the grain with him to speak of the sorrow of his home, even to such a friend as the Duke; but it was essentially necessary to him that he should justify himself. "Upon my word," said the Duke, "I can't understand that there should be any reason strong enough to make you throw your party over." "I have promised to take my wife abroad." "Is that it?" said the Duke, looking at him with surprise, but at the same time with something of returning joviality in his face. "Nobody thinks of going abroad at this time of the year. Of course, you can get away for a time when Parliament breaks up." "But I have promised to go at once." "Then, considering your position, you have made a promise which it behoves you to break. I am sure Lady Glencora will see it in that light." "You do not quite understand me, and I am afraid I must trouble you to listen to matters which, under other circumstances, it would be impertinent in me to obtrude upon you." A certain stiffness of demeanour, and measured propriety of voice, much at variance with his former manner, came upon him as he said this. "Of course, Palliser, I don't want to interfere for a moment." "If you will allow me, Duke. My wife has told me that, this morning, which makes me feel that absence from England is requisite for her present comfort. I was with her when you came, and had just promised her that she should go." "But, Palliser, think of it. If this were a small matter, I would not press you; but a man in your position has public duties. He owes his services to his country. He has no right to go back, if it be possible that he should so do." "When a man has given his word, it cannot be right that he should go back from that." "Of course not. But a man may be absolved from a promise. Lady Glencora--" "My wife would, of course, absolve me. It is not that. Her happiness demands it, and it is partly my fault that it is so. I cannot explain to you more fully why it is that I must give up the great object for which I have striven with all my strength." "Oh, no!" said the Duke. "If you are sure that it is imperative--" "It is imperative." "I could give you twenty-four hours, you know." Mr. Palliser did not answer at once, and the Duke thought that he saw some sign of hesitation. "I suppose it would not be possible that I should speak to Lady Glencora?" "It could be of no avail, Duke. She would only declare, at the first word, that she would remain in London; but it would not be the less my duty on that account to take her abroad." "Well; I can't say. Of course, I can't say. Such an opportunity may not come twice in a man's life. And at your age too! You are throwing away from you the finest political position that the world can offer to the ambition of any man. No one at your time of life has had such a chance within my memory. That a man under thirty should be thought fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and should refuse it,--because he wants to take his wife abroad! Palliser, if she were dying, you should remain under such an emergency as this. She might go, but you should remain." Mr. Palliser remained silent for a moment or two in his chair; he then rose and walked towards the window, as he spoke. "There are things worse than death," he said, when his back was turned. His voice was very low, and there was a tear in his eye as he spoke them; the words were indeed whispered, but the Duke heard them, and felt that he could not press him any more on the subject of his wife. "And must this be final?" said the Duke. "I think it must. But your visit here has come so quickly on my resolution to go abroad,--which, in truth, was only made ten minutes before your name was brought to me,--that I believe I ought to ask for a portion of those twenty-four hours which you have offered me. A small portion will be enough. Will you see me, if I come to you this evening, say at eight? If the House is up in the Lords I will go to you in St. James's Square." "We shall be sitting after eight, I think." "Then I will see you there. And, Duke, I must ask you to think of me in this matter as a friend should think, and not as though we were bound together only by party feeling." "I will,--I will." "I have told you what I shall never whisper to any one else." "I think you know that you are safe with me." "I am sure of it. And, Duke, I can tell you that the sacrifice to me will be almost more than I can bear. This thing that you have offered me to-day is the only thing that I have ever coveted. I have thought of it and worked for it, have hoped and despaired, have for moments been vain enough to think that it was within my strength, and have been wretched for weeks together because I have told myself that it was utterly beyond me." "As to that, neither Brock nor I, nor any of us, have any doubt. Finespun himself says that you are the man." "I am much obliged to them. But I say all this simply that you may understand how imperative is the duty which, as I think, requires me to refuse the offer." "But you haven't refused as yet," said the Duke. "I shall wait at the House for you, whether they are sitting or not. And endeavour to join us. Do the best you can. I will say nothing as to that duty of which you speak; but if it can be made compatible with your public service, pray--pray let it be done. Remember how much such a one as you owes to his country." Then the Duke went, and Mr. Palliser was alone. He had not been alone before since the revelation which had been made to him by his wife, and the words she had spoken were still sounding in his ears. "I do love Burgo Fitzgerald;--I do! I do! I do!" They were not pleasant words for a young husband to hear. Men there are, no doubt, whose nature would make them more miserable under the infliction than it had made Plantagenet Palliser. He was calm, without strong passion, not prone to give to words a stronger significance than they should bear;--and he was essentially unsuspicious. Never for a moment had he thought, even while those words were hissing in his ears, that his wife had betrayed his honour. Nevertheless, there was that at his heart, as he remembered those words, which made him feel that the world was almost too heavy for him. For the first quarter of an hour after the Duke's departure he thought more of his wife and of Burgo Fitzgerald than he did of Lord Brock and Mr. Finespun. But of this he was aware,--that he had forgiven his wife; that he had put his arm round her and embraced her after hearing her confession,--and that she, mutely, with her eyes, had promised him that she would do her best for him. Then something of an idea of love came across his heart, and he acknowledged to himself that he had married without loving or without requiring love. Much of all this had been his own fault. Indeed, had not the whole of it come from his own wrong-doing? He acknowledged that it was so. But now,--now he loved her. He felt that he could not bear to part with her, even if there were no question of public scandal, or of disgrace. He had been torn inwardly by that assertion that she loved another man. She had got at his heart-strings at last. There are men who may love their wives, though they never can have been in love before their marriage. When the Duke had been gone about an hour, and when, under ordinary circumstances, it would have been his time to go down to the House, he took his hat and walked into the Park. He made his way across Hyde Park, and into Kensington Gardens, and there he remained for an hour, walking up and down beneath the elms. The quidnuncs of the town, who chanced to see him, and who had heard something of the political movements of the day, thought, no doubt, that he was meditating his future ministerial career. But he had not been there long before he had resolved that no ministerial career was at present open to him. "It has been my own fault," he said, as he returned to his house, "and with God's help I will mend it, if it be possible." But he was a slow man, and he did not go off instantly to the Duke. He had given himself to eight o'clock, and he took the full time. He could not go down to the House of Commons because men would make inquiries of him which he would find it difficult to answer. So he dined at home, alone. He had told his wife that he would see her at nine, and before that hour he would not go to her. He sat alone till it was time for him to get into his brougham, and thought it all over. That seat in the Cabinet and Chancellorship of the Exchequer, which he had so infinitely desired, were already done with. There was no doubt about that. It might have been better for him not to have married; but now that he was married, and that things had brought him untowardly to this pass, he knew that his wife's safety was his first duty. "We will go through Switzerland," he said to himself, "to Baden, and then we will get on to Florence and to Rome. She has seen nothing of all these things yet, and the new life will make a change in her. She shall have her own friend with her." Then he went down to the House of Lords, and saw the Duke. "Well, Palliser," said the Duke, when he had listened to him, "of course I cannot argue it with you any more. I can only say that I am very sorry;--more sorry than perhaps you will believe. Indeed, it half breaks my heart." The Duke's voice was very sad, and it might almost have been thought that he was going to shed a tear. In truth he disliked Mr. Finespun with the strongest political feeling of which he was capable, and had attached himself to Mr. Palliser almost as strongly. It was a thousand pities! How hard had he not worked to bring about this arrangement, which was now to be upset because a woman had been foolish! "I never above half liked her," said the Duke to himself, thinking perhaps a little of the Duchess's complaints of her. "I must go to Brock at once," he said aloud, "and tell him. God knows what we must do now. Goodbye! good-bye! No; I'm not angry. There shall be no quarrel. But I am very sorry." In this way the two politicians parted. We may as well follow this political movement to its end. The Duke saw Lord Brock that night, and then those two ministers sent for another minister,--another noble Lord, a man of great experience in Cabinets. These three discussed the matter together, and on the following day Lord Brock got up in the House, and made a strong speech in defence of his colleague, Mr. Finespun. To the end of the Session, at any rate, Mr. Finespun kept his position, and held the seals of the Exchequer while all the quidnuncs of the nation, shaking their heads, spoke of the wonderful power of Mr. Finespun, and declared that Lord Brock did not dare to face the Opposition without him. In the meantime Mr. Palliser had returned to his wife, and told her of his resolution with reference to their tour abroad. "We may as well make up our minds to start at once," said he. "At any rate, there is nothing on my side to hinder us."

It was the butler who had knocked. "If you please, sir, the Duke of St. Bungay is here." "The Duke of St. Bungay!" said Mr. Palliser, becoming rather red. "Yes, sir, his grace is in the library. He says that he particularly wants to see you; so I told him that you were with my lady." "Quite right; tell his grace that I will be with him in two minutes." The butler retired. "I must go now, my dear," said Mr. Palliser; "and perhaps I shall not see you again till the evening." "Don't let me put you out in any way," she answered. "You won't. You will be dressing for dinner, I suppose, about nine." "I did not mean that," she said. "You must not think any more of Italy. He has come to tell you that you are wanted in the Cabinet." Again he turned very red. "It may be so," he answered, "but though I am wanted, I need not go. But I must not keep the duke waiting. Good-bye." And he turned to the door. She followed him and took hold of him, so that he was forced to turn to her once again. She managed to get hold of both his hands, and pressed them closely, looking up with her eyes laden with tears. He smiled at her gently, returned the pressure of the hands, and then left her - without kissing her. He did not think that the occasion required it. "He says that he loves me," said Lady Glencora to herself, "but he does not know what love means." But she was quite aware that he had behaved to her with genuine, true nobility. As soon as she was alone, she took out Burgo's letter from her pocket, and tearing it into very small fragments, threw the pieces on the fire. As she did so, she resolved that she would think no more of Burgo Fitzgerald as her future master. I think, however, that she had already decided it, when she had had courage enough to tell her husband about it. She was neither bold enough nor wicked enough to do the thing. As she had said of her own idea of destroying herself, she did not dare. Therefore she tore up the letter that she had carried so long, and burnt it in the fire. She had in truth told him everything, believing that she was delivering her own death-warrant regarding her future position in his house. She had done this, not hoping for any escape, but simply because deceit had been grievous to her, and had become unbearable as soon as he showed any kindness. But her confession had no sooner been made than her fault had been forgiven. She had told him that she did not love him. She had told him, even, that she had thought of leaving him. But the immediate result was that he had been more tender to her than ever before. She knew that he had conquered her. However cold and heartless his home might be to her, it must be her home now. There could be no further thought of leaving him. She had tilted with him, and he had been the victor. Mr. Palliser had not time for much thought before he found himself closeted with the Duke; but as he went upstairs, a thought or two did pass quickly across his mind. He did not feel quite sure that he had been right to forgive her, but he did feel quite sure that the thing had been done. He recognized that no more was to be said about the past. There were to be no reproaches, and Mrs. Marsham's close attendance must abate. As for Mr. Bott - he had begun to hate Mr. Bott. And he had offered to go abroad, and leave his politics, and his ambition, and his coming honours. He had persisted in his offer, even after his wife had suggested to him that the Duke of St. Bungay was in the house to offer him that very thing for which he had so longed! As he thought of this his heart became heavy. Such chances - so he told himself - do not come twice in a man's way. When he returned from abroad he would be nobody in politics. He would have lost everything for which he had been working all his life. But he was a man of his word, and as he opened the library door he thought that he could be resolute in keeping to his promise. "Duke," he said, "I'm afraid I have kept you waiting." And they shook hands. The Duke was in a glow of delight. "I suppose you guess why I'm come?" he said. "He has resigned at last. What was said in the Lords last night made it necessary that he should do so. I can tell you everything now. You know that I don't like Finespun in the Cabinet. I admire his character and his genius, but I think him the most dangerous man in England as a statesman. He has high principles, but they are too exalted to be of any use for everyday purposes. He has no instinct in politics, but reaches his conclusions by calculation. I would sooner trust to instinct. I think he may know how England ought to be governed three centuries hence, but not the proper way to govern now. Brock likes his eloquence; but he fears his restlessness, and thoroughly dislikes his philosophy. At any rate, Finespun has left us, and I am here to ask you to take his place." The Duke was almost jovial. He was thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement which he was proposing. He regarded Mr. Palliser as a steady, practical man, and in some respects, his own pupil. He had been the first to declare aloud that Plantagenet Palliser was the future Chancellor of the Exchequer; and everything had now gone as he wished. "And who leaves with him?" asked Mr. Palliser, putting off the evil moment of his own decision; but before the Duke could answer, he had reminded himself that he had no right to ask such a question. "It does not matter," he said; "I am afraid I must decline the offer." "Decline it!" "I fear I must." The Duke had now risen from his chair, and was standing with both his hands upon the table. All his joviality had vanished. His fine round face had become almost ludicrously long; his eyes and mouth expressed reproach and vexation. Ever since Parliament had met he had been whispering Mr. Palliser's name into the Prime Minister's ear, and now- But he could not believe it. "Nonsense, Palliser," he said. "There can be no possible reason why you should not join us. You certainly intended to join us a month ago, if the opportunity offered." "It is true, Duke. I must ask you to listen to me now, and I must tell you what I would not willingly tell to any man." As Mr. Palliser said this a look of agony came over his face. He was not a man who could talk easily of inmost matters; but it was essential to justify himself. "Upon my word," said the Duke, "I can't understand that there should be any reason strong enough to make you throw your party over." "I have promised to take my wife abroad, at once." "Then you have made a promise which it behoves you to break. I am sure Lady Glencora will see it in that light." "You do not quite understand me." A certain stiffness of manner came upon him as he said this. "My wife has told me something, this morning, which makes me feel that absence from England is necessary for her present comfort. I have just promised her that she should go." "But, Palliser, think of it. If this were a small matter, I would not press you; but a man in your position owes his service to his country." "When a man has given his word, it cannot be right that he should go back from that." "Of course not. But a man may be absolved from a promise. Lady Glencora-" "My wife would, of course, absolve me. It is not that. Her happiness demands it, and it is partly my fault that it is so. I cannot explain to you more fully why it is that I must give up the great object for which I have striven with all my strength." "If you are sure that it is imperative-" "It is imperative." "I could give you twenty-four hours, you know." Mr. Palliser did not answer at once, and the Duke thought that he saw some sign of hesitation. "I suppose it would not be possible that I should speak to Lady Glencora?" "It could be of no avail, Duke. She would declare that she would remain in London; but it would still be my duty to take her abroad." "Well; I can't say. Such an opportunity may not come twice in a man's life. You are throwing away the finest political position that the world can offer. No one as young as you has had such a chance within my memory. That a man under thirty should be thought fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and should refuse it - because he wants to take his wife abroad! Palliser, if she were dying, you should remain under such an emergency as this. She might go, but you should remain." Mr. Palliser remained silent for a moment or two; he then rose and walked towards the window. "There are things worse than death," he said, when his back was turned. His voice was very low, and there was a tear in his eye as he spoke. The Duke felt that he could not press him any more on the subject. "And must this be final?" "I think it must. But your visit here has come so quickly after my resolution to go abroad, that I believe I ought to ask for some of those twenty-four hours which you have offered me. May I come to you this evening, say at eight? If the House is up in the Lords I will go to you in St. James's Square." "We shall be sitting after eight, I think." "Then I will see you there. And, Duke, I must ask you to think of me in this matter as a friend should think, and not as though we were bound together only by party feeling." "I will." "I have told you what I shall never whisper to anyone else." "You are safe with me." "I am sure of it. And, Duke, I can tell you that the sacrifice will be almost more than I can bear. The post that you have offered me today is the only thing that I have ever coveted. I have thought of it and worked for it, have hoped and despaired, and have been wretched for weeks together because I have told myself that it was utterly beyond me." "As to that, neither Brock nor I have any doubt. Finespun himself says that you are the man." "I am much obliged. But I say this simply so that you may understand how imperative is the duty which requires me to refuse the offer." "But you haven't refused yet," said the Duke. "I shall wait at the House for you, Try to join us. Do the best you can. Remember what a man like you owes to his country." Then the Duke went, and Mr. Palliser was alone. He had not been alone since the revelation which had been made to him by his wife, and the words she had spoken were still sounding in his ears. "I do love Burgo Fitzgerald; I do! I do!" They were not pleasant words for a young husband to hear. Plantagenet Palliser was a calm man, without strong passion; and he was essentially unsuspicious. Never for a moment had he thought, even while those words were hissing in his ears, that his wife had betrayed his honour. Nevertheless, the memory of those words made him feel that the world was almost too heavy for him. For the first quarter of an hour after the Duke's departure he thought more of his wife and of Burgo Fitzgerald than he did of Lord Brock and Mr. Finespun. But he was aware that he had forgiven his wife; and she, mutely, with her eyes, had promised him that she would do her best for him. Then something of an idea of love came across his heart, and he acknowledged to himself that he had married without loving or without requiring love. Much of all this had been his own fault. But now - now he loved her. He felt that he could not bear to part with her. He had been torn inwardly by that assertion that she loved another man. She had got at his heart-strings at last. When the Duke had been gone about an hour, he took his hat and walked out. He made his way across Hyde Park, and into Kensington Gardens, and there he remained for an hour, walking up and down beneath the elms. He had not been there long before he had resolved that no ministerial career was at present open to him. "It has been my own fault," he said, as he returned to his house, "and with God's help I will mend it, if it be possible." But he was a slow man, and he did not go off instantly to the Duke. He had given himself till eight o'clock, and he took the full time. He could not go down to the House of Commons because men would make inquiries of him which he would find it difficult to answer. So he dined at home, alone, and thought it all over. That seat in the Cabinet and Chancellorship of the Exchequer, which he had so infinitely desired, were already done with. There was no doubt about that. It might have been better for him not to have married; but now that he was married, he knew that his wife's safety was his first duty. "We will go through Switzerland," he said to himself, "to Baden, and then on to Florence and to Rome. She has seen nothing of all these things yet, and the new life will make a change in her. She shall have her friend with her." Then he went down to the House of Lords, and saw the Duke. "Well, Palliser," said the Duke, when he had listened to him, "I can only say that I am very sorry. Indeed, it half breaks my heart." The Duke's voice was very sad. In truth he disliked Mr. Finespun strongly, and had attached himself to Mr. Palliser almost as strongly. It was a thousand pities! "I must go to Brock at once," he said, "and tell him. God knows what we must do now. Goodbye! No; I'm not angry. But I am very sorry." In this way the two politicians parted. The Duke saw Lord Brock that night, and another noble Lord, a man of great experience. These three discussed the matter, and on the following day Lord Brock got up in the House, and made a strong speech in defence of his colleague, Mr. Finespun. Till the end of the Session, at any rate, Mr. Finespun kept his position in the Exchequer. In the meantime Mr. Palliser had returned to his wife, and told her of his resolution to tour abroad. "We may as well start at once," said he. "There is nothing on my side to hinder us."

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 59: The Duke of St. Bungay in Search of a Minister

Mr. Tombe had gained nothing for the cause by his crafty silence. George Vavasor felt perfectly certain, as he walked out from the little street which runs at the back of Doctors' Commons, that the money which he had been using had come, in some shape, through the hands of John Grey. He did not care much to calculate whether the payments had been made from the personal funds of his rival, or whether that rival had been employed to dispense Alice's fortune. Under either view of the case his position was sufficiently bitter. The truth never for a moment occurred to him. He never dreamed that there might be a conspiracy in the matter, of which Alice was as ignorant as he himself had been. He never reflected that his uncle John, together with John, the lover, whom he so hated, might be the conspirators. To him it seemed to be certain that Alice and Mr. Grey were in league;--and if they were in league, what must he think of Alice, and of her engagement with himself! There are men who rarely think well of women,--who hardly think well of any woman. They put their mothers and sisters into the background,--as though they belonged to some sex or race apart,--and then declare to themselves and to their friends that all women are false,--that no woman can be trusted unless her ugliness protect her; and that every woman may be attacked as fairly as may game in a cover, or deer on a mountain, What man does not know men who have so thought? I cannot say that such had been Vavasor's creed,--not entirely such. There had been periods of his life when he had believed implicitly in his cousin Alice;--but then there had been other moments in which he had ridiculed himself for his Quixotism in believing in any woman. And as he had grown older the moments of his Quixotism had become more rare. There would have been no such Quixotism left with him now, had not the various circumstances which I have attempted to describe, filled him, during the last twelve months, with a renewed desire to marry his cousin. Every man tries to believe in the honesty of his future wife; and, therefore, Vavasor had tried, and had in his way, believed. He had flattered himself, too, that Alice's heart had, in truth, been more prone to him than to that other suitor. Grey, as he thought, had been accepted by her cold prudence; but he thought, also, that she had found her prudence to be too cold, and had therefore returned where she had truly loved. Vavasor, though he did not love much himself, was willing enough to be the object of love. This idea of his, however, had been greatly shaken by Alice's treatment of himself personally; but still he had not, hitherto, believed that she was false to him. Now, what could he believe of her? What was there within the compass of such a one to believe? As he walked out into St. Paul's Churchyard he called her by every name which is most offensive to a woman's ears. He hated her at this moment with even a more bitter hatred than that which he felt towards John Grey. She must have deceived him with unparalleled hypocrisy, and lied to him and to his sister Kate as hardly any woman had ever lied before. Or could it be that Kate, also, was lying to him? If so, Kate also should be included in the punishment. But why should they have conspired to feed him with these moneys? There had been no deceit, at any rate, in reference to the pounds sterling which Scruby had already swallowed. They had been supplied, whatever had been the motives of the suppliers; and he had no doubt that more would be supplied if he would only keep himself quiet. He was still walking westward as he thought of this, down Ludgate Hill, on his direct line towards Suffolk Street; and he tried to persuade himself that it would be well that he should hide his wrath till after provision should have been made for this other election. They were his enemies,--Alice and Mr. Grey,--and why should he keep any terms with his enemies? It was still a trouble to him to think that he should have been in any way beholden to John Grey; but the terrible thing had been done, the evil had occurred. What would he gain by staying his hand now? Still, however, he walked on quickly along Fleet Street, and along the Strand, and was already crossing under the Picture Galleries towards Pall Mall East before he had definitely decided what steps he would take on this very day. Exactly at the corner of Suffolk Street he met John Grey. "Mr. Grey," he said, stopping himself suddenly, "I was this moment going to call on you at your lodgings." "At my lodgings, were you? Shall I return with you?" "If you please," said Vavasor, leading the way up Suffolk Street. There had been no other greeting than this between them. Mr. Grey himself, though a man very courteous in his general demeanour, would probably have passed Vavasor in the street with no more than the barest salutation. Situated as they were towards each other there could hardly be any show of friendship between them; but when Vavasor had spoken to him, he had dressed his face in that guise of civility which men always use who do not intend to be offensive;--but Vavasor dressed his as men dress theirs who do mean to be offensive; and Mr. Grey had thoroughly appreciated the dressing. "If you will allow me, I have the key," said Grey. Then they both entered the house, and Vavasor followed his host up-stairs. Mr. Grey, as he went up, felt almost angry with himself in having admitted his enemy into his lodgings. He was sure that no good could come of it, and remembered, when it was too late, that he might easily have saved himself from giving the invitation while he was still in the street. There they were, however, together in the sitting-room, and Grey had nothing to do but to listen. "Will you take a chair, Mr. Vavasor?" he said. "No," said Vavasor; "I will stand up." And he stood up, holding his hat behind his back with his left hand, with his right leg forward, and the thumb of his right hand in his waistcoat-pocket. He looked full into Grey's face, and Grey looked full into his; and as he looked the great cicatrice seemed to open itself and to become purple with fresh blood stains. "I have come here from Mr. Tombe's office in the City," said Vavasor, "to ask you of what nature has been the interference which you have taken in my money matters?" This was a question which Mr. Grey could not answer very quickly. In the first place it was altogether unexpected; in the next place he did not know what Mr. Tombe had told, and what he had not told; and then, before he replied, he must think how much of the truth he was bound to tell in answer to a question so put to him. "Do you say that you have come from Mr. Tombe?" he asked. "I think you heard me say so. I have come here direct from Mr. Tombe's chambers. He is your lawyer, I believe?" "He is so." "And I have come from him to ask you what interference you have lately taken in my money matters. When you have answered that, I shall have other questions to ask you." "But, Mr. Vavasor, has it occurred to you that I may not be disposed to answer questions so asked?" "It has not occurred to me to think that you will prevaricate. If there has been no such interference, I will ask your pardon, and go away; but if there has been such interference on your part, I have a right to demand that you shall explain to me its nature." Grey had now made up his mind that it would be better that he should tell the whole story,--better not only for himself, but for all the Vavasors, including this angry man himself. The angry man evidently knew something, and it would be better that he should know the truth. "There has been such interference, Mr. Vavasor, if you choose to call it so. Money, to the extent of two thousand pounds, I think, has by my directions been paid to your credit by Mr. Tombe." "Well," said Vavasor, taking his right hand away from his waistcoat, and tapping the round table with his fingers impatiently. "I hardly know how to explain all the circumstances under which this has been done." "I dare say not; but, nevertheless, you must explain them." Grey was a man tranquil in temperament, very little prone to quarrelling, with perhaps an exaggerated idea of the evil results of a row,--a man who would take infinite trouble to avoid any such scene as that which now seemed to be imminent; but he was a man whose courage was quite as high as that of his opponent. To bully or be bullied were alike contrary to his nature. It was clear enough now that Vavasor intended to bully him, and he made up his mind at once that if the quarrel were forced upon him it should find him ready to take his own part. "My difficulty in explaining it comes from consideration for you," he said. "Then I beg that your difficulty will cease, and that you will have no consideration for me. We are so circumstanced towards each other that any consideration must be humbug and nonsense. At any rate, I intend to have none for you. Now, let me know why you have meddled with my matters." "I think I might, perhaps, better refer you to your uncle." "No, sir; Mr. Tombe is not my uncle's lawyer. My uncle never heard his name, unless he heard of it from you." "But it was by agreement with your uncle that I commissioned Mr. Tombe to raise for you the money you were desirous of borrowing from your cousin. We thought it better that her fortune should not be for the moment disturbed." "But what had you to do with it? Why should you have done it? In the first place, I don't believe your story; it is altogether improbable. But why should he come to you of all men to raise money on his daughter's behalf?" "Unless you can behave yourself with more discretion, Mr. Vavasor, you must leave the room," said Mr. Grey. Then, as Vavasor simply sneered at him, but spoke nothing, he went on. "It was I who suggested to your uncle that this arrangement should be made. I did not wish to see Miss Vavasor's fortune squandered." "And what was her fortune to you, sir? Are you aware that she is engaged to me as my wife? I ask you, sir, whether you are aware that Miss Vavasor is to be my wife?" "I must altogether decline to discuss with you Miss Vavasor's present or future position." "By heavens, then, you shall hear me discuss it! She was engaged to you, and she has given you your dismissal. If you had understood anything of the conduct which is usual among gentlemen, or if you had had any particle of pride in you, sir, you would have left her and never mentioned her name again. I now find you meddling with her money matters, so as to get a hold upon her fortune." "I have no hold upon her fortune." "Yes, sir, you have. You do not advance two thousand pounds without knowing that you have security. She has rejected you; and in order that you may be revenged, or that you may have some further hold upon her,--that she may be in some sort within your power, you have contrived this rascally pettifogging way of obtaining power over her income. The money shall be repaid at once, with any interest that can be due; and if I find you interfering again, I will expose you." "Mr. Vavasor," said Grey very slowly, in a low tone of voice, but with something in his eye which would have told any bystander that he was much in earnest, "you have used words in your anger which I cannot allow to pass. You must recall them." "What were the words? I said that you were a pettifogging rascal. I now repeat them." As he spoke he put on his hat, so as to leave both his hands ready for action if action should be required. Grey was much the larger man and much the stronger. It may be doubted whether he knew himself the extent of his own strength, but such as it was he resolved that he must now use it. "There is no help for it," he said, as he also prepared for action. The first thing he did was to open the door, and as he did so he became conscious that his mouth was full of blood from a sharp blow upon his face. Vavasor had struck him with his fist, and had cut his lip against his teeth. Then there came a scramble, and Grey was soon aware that he had his opponent in his hands. I doubt whether he had attempted to strike a blow, or whether he had so much as clenched his fist. Vavasor had struck him repeatedly, but the blows had fallen on his body or his head, and he was unconscious of them. He had but one object now in his mind, and that object was the kicking his assailant down the stairs. Then came a scramble, as I have said, and Grey had a hold of the smaller man by the nape of his neck. So holding him he forced him back through the door on to the landing, and there succeeded in pushing him down the first flight of steps. Grey kicked at him as he went, but the kick was impotent. He had, however, been so far successful that he had thrust his enemy out of the room, and had the satisfaction of seeing him sprawling on the landing-place. Vavasor, when he raised himself, prepared to make another rush at the room, but before he could do so a man from below, hearing the noise, had come upon him and interrupted him. "Mr. Jones," said Grey, speaking from above, "if that gentleman does not leave the house, I must get you to search for a policeman." Vavasor, though the lodging-house man had hold of the collar of his coat, made no attempt to turn upon his new enemy. When two dogs are fighting, any bystander may attempt to separate them with impunity. The brutes are so anxious to tear each other that they have no energies left for other purposes. It never occurs to them to turn their teeth upon newcomers in the quarrel. So it was with George Vavasor. Jones was sufficient to prevent his further attack upon the foe up-stairs, and therefore he had no alternative but to relinquish the fight. "What's it all about, sir?" said Jones, who kept a tailor's establishment, and, as a tailor, was something of a fighting man himself. Of all tradesmen in London the tailors are, no doubt, the most combative,--as might be expected from the necessity which lies upon them of living down the general bad character in this respect which the world has wrongly given them. "What's it all about, sir?" said Jones, still holding Vavasor by his coat. "That man has ill-used me, and I've punished him; that's all." "I don't know much about punishing," said the tailor. "It seems to me he pitched you down pretty clean out of the room above. I think the best thing you can do now is to walk yourself off." It was the only thing that Vavasor could do, and he did walk himself off. He walked himself off, and went home to his own lodgings in Cecil Street, that he might smooth his feathers after the late encounter before he went down to Westminster to take his seat in the House of Commons. I do not think that he was comfortable when he got there, or that he felt himself very well able to fight another battle that night on behalf of the River Bank. He had not been hurt, but he had been worsted. Grey had probably received more personal damage than had fallen to his share; but Grey had succeeded in expelling him from the room, and he knew that he had been found prostrate on the landing-place when the tailor first saw him. But he might probably have got over the annoyance of this feeling had he not been overwhelmed by a consciousness that everything was going badly with him. He was already beginning to hate his seat in Parliament. What good had it done for him, or was it likely to do for him? He found himself to be associated there with Mr. Bott, and a few others of the same class,--men whom he despised; and even they did not admit him among them without a certain show of superiority on their part. Who has not ascertained by his own experience the different lights through which the same events may be seen, according to the success, or want of success, which pervades the atmosphere at the moment? At the present time everything was unsuccessful with George Vavasor; and though he told himself, almost from hour to hour, that he would go on with the thing which he had begun,--that he would persevere in Parliament till he had obtained a hearing there and created for himself success, he could not himself believe in the promises which he had made to himself. He had looked forward to his entrance into that Chamber as the hour of his triumph; but he had entered it with Mr. Bott, and there had been no triumph to him in doing so. He had sworn to himself that when there he would find men to hear him. Hitherto, indeed, he could not accuse himself of having missed his opportunities; his election had been so recent that he could hardly yet have made the attempt. But he had been there long enough to learn to fancy that there was no glory in attempting. This art of speaking in Parliament, which had appeared to him to be so grand, seemed already to be a humdrum, homely, dull affair. No one seemed to listen much to what was said. To such as himself,--Members without an acquired name,--men did not seem to listen at all. Mr. Palliser had once, in his hearing, spoken for two hours together, and all the House had treated his speech with respect,--had declared that it was useful, solid, conscientious, and what not; but more than half the House had been asleep more than half the time that he was on his legs. Vavasor had not as yet commenced his career as an orator; but night after night, as he sat there, the chance of commencing it with brilliance seemed to be further from him, and still further. Two thousand pounds of his own money, and two thousand more of Alice's money,--or of Mr. Grey's,--he had already spent to make his way into that assembly. He must spend, at any rate, two thousand more if he intended that his career should be prolonged beyond a three months' sitting;--and how was he to get this further sum after what had taken place to-day? He would get it. That was his resolve as he walked in by the apple-woman's stall, under the shadow of the great policeman, and between the two august lamps. He would get it;--as long as Alice had a pound over which he could obtain mastery by any act or violence within his compass. He would get it; even though it should come through the hands of John Grey and Mr. Tombe. He would get it; though in doing so he might destroy his cousin Alice and ruin his sister Kate. He had gone too far to stick at any scruples. Had he not often declared how great had been that murderer who had been able to divest himself of all such scruples,--who had scoured his bosom free from all fears of the hereafter, and, as regarded the present, had dared to trust for everything to success? He would go to Alice and demand the money from her with threats, and with that violence in his eyes which he knew so well how to assume. He believed that when he so demanded it, the money would be forthcoming so as to satisfy, at any rate, his present emergencies. That wretched old man in Westmoreland! If he would but die, there might yet be a hope remaining of permanent success! Even though the estate might be entailed so as to give him no more than a life-interest, still money might be raised on it. His life-interest in it would be worth ten or twelve years' purchase. He had an idea that his grandfather had not as yet made any such will when he left the place in Westmoreland. What a boon it would be if death could be made to overtake the old man before he did so! On this very night he walked about the lobbies of the House, thinking of all this. He went by himself from room to room, roaming along passages, sitting now for ten minutes in the gallery, and then again for a short space in the body of the House,--till he would get up and wander again out into the lobby, impatient of the neighbourhood of Mr. Bott. Certainly just at this time he felt no desire to bring before the House the subject of the River Embankment. Nor was Mr. Grey much happier when he was left alone, than was his assailant. To give Vavasor his due, the memory of the affray itself did not long trouble him much. The success between the combatants had been nearly equal, and he had, at any rate, spoken his mind freely. His misery had come from other sources. But the reflection that he had been concerned in a row was in itself enough to make John Grey wretched for the time. Such a misfortune had never hitherto befallen him. In all his dealings with men words had been sufficient, and generally words of courtesy had sufficed. To have been personally engaged in a fighting scramble with such a man as George Vavasor was to him terrible. When ordering that his money might be expended with the possible object of saving Alice from her cousin, he had never felt a moment's regret; he had never thought that he was doing more than circumstances fairly demanded of him. But now he was almost driven to utter reproach. "Oh, Alice! that this thing should have come upon me through thy fault!" When Vavasor was led away down stairs by the tailor, and Grey found that no more actual fighting would be required of him, he retired into his bedroom, that he might wash his mouth and free himself from the stains of the combat. He had heard the front door closed, and knew that the miscreant was gone,--the miscreant who had disturbed his quiet. Then he began to think what was the accusation with which Vavasor had charged him. He had been told that he had advanced money on behalf of Alice, in order that he might obtain some power over Alice's fortune, and thus revenge himself upon Alice for her treatment of him. Nothing could be more damnably false than this accusation. Of that he was well aware. But were not the circumstances of a nature to make it appear that the accusation was true? Security for the money advanced by him, of course, he had none;--of course he had desired none;--of course the money had been given out of his own pocket with the sole object of saving Alice, if that might be possible; but of all those who might hear of this affair, how many would know or even guess the truth? While he was in this wretched state of mind, washing his mouth, and disturbing his spirit, Mr. Jones, his landlord, came up to him. Mr. Jones had known him for some years, and entertained a most profound respect for his character. A rather sporting man than otherwise was Mr. Jones. His father had been a tradesman at Cambridge, and in this way Jones had become known to Mr. Grey. But though given to sport, by which he meant modern prize-fighting and the Epsom course on the Derby day, Mr. Jones was a man who dearly loved respectable customers and respectable lodgers. Mr. Grey, with his property at Nethercoats, and his august manners, and his reputation at Cambridge, was a most respectable lodger, and Mr. Jones could hardly understand how any one could presume to raise his hand against such a man. "Dear, dear, sir--this is a terrible affair!" he said, as he made his way into the room. "It was very disagreeable, certainly," said Grey. "Was the gentleman known to you?" asked the tailor. "Yes; I know who he is." "Any quarrel, sir?" "Well, yes. I should not have pushed him down stairs had he not quarrelled with me." "We can have the police after him if you wish it, sir?" "I don't wish it at all." "Or we might manage to polish him off in any other way, you know." It was some time before Mr. Grey could get rid of the tailor, but he did so at last without having told any part of the story to that warlike, worthy, and very anxious individual.

Mr. Tombe had gained nothing by his crafty silence. George Vavasor felt perfectly certain, as he walked out, that the money had come through the hands of John Grey. He did not care to speculate whether the payments had been made from his rival's personal funds, or whether his rival had been dispensing Alice's fortune. In either case, his position was bitter enough. The truth never for a moment occurred to him. He never dreamed that there might be a conspiracy in the matter, of which Alice was as ignorant as he himself. It seemed certain to him that Alice and Mr. Grey were in league; and if they were in league, what must he think of Alice, and of her engagement with himself! There are men who rarely think well of any woman. They put their mothers and sisters into the background - as though they belonged to some race apart - and then declare that all women are false; that no woman can be trusted unless her ugliness protects her; and that every woman may be attacked as fairly as a deer on a mountain. There had been periods of Vavasor's life when he had believed implicitly in his cousin Alice; but then there had been other moments in which he had ridiculed himself for believing in any woman. As he had grown older the moments of his belief had become more rare. Every man tries to believe in the honesty of his future wife; and, therefore, Vavasor had tried, and had in his way, believed. He had flattered himself, too, that Alice's heart had leaned towards him more than to that other suitor. He thought that she had found her feelings for Grey were too cold, and had therefore returned where she had truly loved. Vavasor, though he did not love much himself, was willing enough to be the object of love. This idea had been greatly shaken by Alice's treatment of him; but still he had not thought that she was false to him. Now, what could he believe of her? As he walked out into St. Paul's Churchyard he called her by every name which is most offensive to a woman's ears. He hated her just then even more bitterly than John Grey. She must have deceived him with unparalleled hypocrisy, and have lied to him and to his sister Kate as hardly any woman had ever lied before. Or could it be that Kate, also, was lying to him? If so, Kate also should be included in the punishment. But why should they have conspired to give him money? There had been no deceit about the pounds which Scruby had already swallowed. They had been supplied; and he had no doubt that more would be supplied if he kept quiet. As he walked, he tried to persuade himself that he should hide his anger till after payment had been made for the next election. It was still troubling to think that he should owe anything to John Grey; but what would he gain by stopping now? He walked quickly along Fleet Street and the Strand, and was near Pall Mall East before he had decided what to do. At the corner of Suffolk Street he met John Grey. "Mr. Grey," he said, "I was this moment going to call on you at your lodgings." "Were you? Shall I return with you?" "If you please," said Vavasor, leading the way up Suffolk Street. There was no other greeting between them. Mr. Grey himself, though a courteous man generally, would probably have passed Vavasor in the street with no more than the barest greeting; but Vavasor had spoken to him with a civil appearance, as if he did not intend to be offensive. Mr. Grey unlocked the door of his house, and Vavasor followed him upstairs. Mr. Grey felt almost angry with himself for admitting his enemy. He was sure that no good could come of it. There they were, however, together in the sitting-room. "Will you take a chair, Mr. Vavasor?" he said. "No," said Vavasor; "I will stand." And he stood up, holding his hat behind his back, and looked full into Grey's face; and the great scar seemed to open itself and become purple with fresh blood stains. "I have come here from Mr. Tombe's office in the City," said Vavasor, "to ask you how you have been interfering in my money matters?" Mr. Grey could not answer this unexpected question very quickly. He did not know what Mr. Tombe had said; and he needed to consider how much of the truth he was bound to tell in answer. "Do you say that you have come from Mr. Tombe?" he asked. "You heard me say so. I have come here direct from his chambers. He is your lawyer, I believe?" "He is." "And I have come to ask you what interference you have lately taken in my money matters. When you have answered that, I shall have other questions to ask you." "But, Mr. Vavasor, has it occurred to you that I may not be disposed to answer questions so asked?" "It has not occurred to me that you will prevaricate. If there has been no such interference, I will ask your pardon, and go away; but if there has been such interference on your part, I have a right to demand that you shall explain it to me." Grey had now made up his mind that it would be better for all concerned that he should tell the whole story. The angry man evidently knew something, and it would be better that he should know the truth. "There has been such interference, Mr. Vavasor, if you choose to call it so. Money, to the extent of two thousand pounds, I think, has by my directions been paid to your credit by Mr. Tombe." "Well," said Vavasor, tapping the table with his fingers impatiently. "I hardly know how to explain all the circumstances under which this has been done." "Nevertheless, you must explain them." Grey was a tranquil man, who would take trouble to avoid a quarrel; but his courage was quite as high as his opponent's. It was clear that Vavasor intended to bully him, and he made up his mind at once that he was ready for a quarrel. "My difficulty in explaining it comes from consideration for you," he said. "Then I beg you to have no consideration for me. I intend to have no consideration for you. Now, let me know why you have meddled." "I might, perhaps, better refer you to your uncle." "No, sir; Mr. Tombe is not my uncle's lawyer." "But it was by agreement with your uncle that I commissioned Mr. Tombe to raise the money you wished to borrow from your cousin. We thought it better that her fortune should not be for the moment disturbed." "But what had you to do with it? Why should you have done it? In the first place, I don't believe it; it is altogether improbable. But why should he come to you of all men to raise money on his daughter's behalf?" "Unless you can behave yourself with more discretion, Mr. Vavasor, you must leave the room," said Mr. Grey. Then, as Vavasor simply sneered at him, but said nothing, he went on. "It was I who suggested to your uncle that this arrangement should be made. I did not wish to see Miss Vavasor's fortune squandered." "And what was her fortune to you, sir? Are you aware that she is engaged to me as my wife?" "I decline to discuss with you Miss Vavasor's present or future position." "By heavens, then, you shall hear me discuss it! She was engaged to you, and she has given you your dismissal. If you had understood anything of the conduct which is usual among gentlemen, or if you had had any particle of pride, sir, you would have left her and never mentioned her name again. I now find you meddling with her money matters, so as to get a hold upon her fortune." "I have no hold upon her fortune." "Yes, sir, you have. You do not advance two thousand pounds without knowing that you have security. She has rejected you; and in order that you may be revenged, or that you may have some further hold upon her, you have contrived this rascally pettifogging way of obtaining power over her income. The money shall be repaid at once; and if I find you interfering again, I will expose you." "Mr. Vavasor," said Grey very slowly, in a low voice, but very much in earnest, "you have used words in your anger which I cannot allow to pass. You must recall them." "What were the words? I said that you were a pettifogging rascal. I now repeat that." As he spoke he put on his hat, so as to leave both his hands ready for action if required. Grey was much the larger and the stronger man. It may be doubted whether he knew the extent of his own strength, but he resolved that he must now use it. "There is no help for it," he said, as he opened the door. As he did so he became conscious that his mouth was full of blood from a sharp blow upon his face. Vavasor had struck him with his fist. Then there came a scramble, and Grey was soon aware that he had his opponent in his hands. I doubt whether he had attempted to strike a blow. Vavasor had struck him repeatedly, but he was unconscious of the blows that had fallen on him. He had only one object now in his mind, and that object was to kick Vavasor down the stairs. Now he had a hold of the smaller man by the nape of his neck. He forced him through the door, and succeeded in pushing him down the first flight of steps. He had the satisfaction of seeing him sprawling on the landing. Vavasor, when he raised himself, prepared to make another rush at the room, but before he could do so a man from below, hearing the noise, came out and interrupted him. "Mr. Jones," said Grey from above, "if that gentleman does not leave the house, I must get you to search for a policeman." Vavasor, though the lodging-house man had hold of his collar of his coat, made no attempt to turn upon him. All his energies were bent on John Grey. "What's it all about, sir?" said Jones, who was a tailor, and something of a fighting man himself. "That man has ill-used me, and I've punished him; that's all," said Vavasor. "I don't know much about punishing," said the tailor. "It seems to me he pitched you down pretty clean out of the room above. I think the best thing you can do now is to walk yourself off." It was the only thing that Vavasor could do, and he did walk himself off. He went home to his lodgings in Cecil Street, to smooth his feathers after the encounter before he went down to Westminster to take his seat in the House of Commons. I do not think that he was comfortable when he got there, or that he felt himself very well able to fight another battle that night on behalf of the River Bank. He had not been hurt, but he had been worsted. He had probably hurt Grey; but Grey had succeeded in throwing him out. He might have got over the annoyance of this feeling had he not been overwhelmed by a consciousness that everything was going badly with him. He was already beginning to hate his seat in Parliament. What good had it done for him? He found himself associated with Mr. Bott, and others of the same class - men whom he despised; and even they did not admit him without a show of superiority. Though he told himself that he would go on with the thing which he had begun - that he would persevere in Parliament till he had become successful - he could not believe in the promises which he had made to himself. He had looked forward to his entrance into that Chamber as the hour of his triumph; but he had entered it with Mr. Bott, and there had been no triumph in that. He had had no time to speak in Parliament yet; but he had been there long enough to learn to fancy that there was no glory in attempting. This art of speaking in Parliament, which had appeared to him to be so grand, seemed already to be a humdrum, dull affair. No one seemed to listen much to what was said. Mr. Palliser had once spoken for two hours together, and all the House had treated his speech with respect - had declared that it was useful, solid, conscientious, and what not; but more than half the House had been asleep during it. Vavasor's chance of brilliance seemed to be further from him, and still further. He had already spent two thousand pounds of his own money, and two thousand more of Alice's - or Mr. Grey's. He must spend two thousand more to prolong his career; and how was he to get that after what had taken place today? He would get it. That was his resolve as he walked into Westminster between the two august lamps. He would get it; as long as Alice had a pound, he would get it, even if it came through John Grey's hands - and even if it might destroy his cousin Alice and ruin his sister Kate. He had gone too far to stick at any scruples. He would go to Alice and demand the money from her with threats, and with that violence in his eyes which he knew so well how to assume. That wretched old man in Westmorland! If only he would die! He walked about the lobbies of the House, thinking of all this as he went from room to room, sitting now for ten minutes in the gallery, and then wandering again out into the lobby. Nor was Mr. Grey much happier. The memory of the fight itself did not trouble Vavasor much; but John Grey was made wretched by reflecting on it. He had never been involved in physical violence before. When ordering that his money might be spent to save Alice from her cousin, he had never felt a moment's regret; but now he was almost driven to reproach. "Oh, Alice! that this should have come upon me through your fault!" Once Vavasor had gone, Grey retired into his bedroom to wash his face. Then he began to think about Vavasor's accusation, that he had advanced money on Alice's behalf in order to obtain some power over her, and revenge himself for her treatment of him. Nothing could be more damnably false than this accusation. But might it not appear to be true? If people heard of this affair, how many would guess the truth? While he was in this wretched state of mind, Mr. Jones, his landlord, came up to him. Mr. Jones had known him for some years, and had a most profound respect for him. "Dear, dear, sir, this is a terrible affair!" he said, as he entered the room. "Was the gentleman known to you?" "Yes." "Any quarrel, sir?" "Well, yes. I should not have pushed him downstairs otherwise." "We can have the police after him if you wish it, sir?" "I don't wish it at all." "Or we might manage to polish him off in any other way, you know." It was some time before Mr. Grey could get rid of the tailor, but he did so without telling any part of the story to that worthy and very anxious man.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 52: What Occurred in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall

Early in April, the Easter recess being all over, Lady Monk gave a grand party in London. Lady Monk's town house was in Gloucester Square. It was a large mansion, and Lady Monk's parties in London were known to be very great affairs. She usually gave two or three in the season, and spent a large portion of her time and energy in so arranging matters that her parties should be successful. As this was her special line in life, a failure would have been very distressing to her;--and we may also say very disgraceful, taking into consideration, as we should do in forming our judgement on the subject, the very large sums of Sir Cosmo's money which she spent in this way. But she seldom did fail. She knew how to select her days, so as not to fall foul of other events. It seldom happened that people could not come to her because of a division which occupied all the Members of Parliament, or that they were drawn away by the superior magnitude of some other attraction in the world of fashion. This giving of parties was her business, and she had learned it thoroughly. She worked at it harder than most men work at their trades, and let us hope that the profits were consolatory. It was generally acknowledged to be the proper thing to go to Lady Monk's parties. There were certain people who were asked, and who went as a matter of course,--people who were by no means on intimate terms with Lady Monk, or with Sir Cosmo; but they were people to have whom was the proper thing, and they were people who understood that to go to Lady Monk's was the proper thing for them. The Duchess of St. Bungay was always there, though she hated Lady Monk, and Lady Monk always abused her; but a card was sent to the Duchess in the same way as the Lord Mayor invites a Cabinet Minister to dinner, even though the one man might believe the other to be a thief. And Mrs. Conway Sparkes was generally there; she went everywhere. Lady Monk did not at all know why Mrs. Conway Sparkes was so favoured by the world; but there was the fact, and she bowed to it. Then there were another set, the members of which were or were not invited, according to circumstances, at the time; and these were the people who were probably the most legitimate recipients of Lady Monk's hospitality. Old family friends of her husband were among the number. Let the Tuftons come in April, and perhaps again in May; then they will not feel their exclusion from that seventh heaven of glory,--the great culminating crush in July. Scores of young ladies who really loved parties belonged to this set. The mothers and aunts knew Lady Monk's sisters and cousins. They accepted so much of Lady Monk's good things as she vouchsafed them, and were thankful. Then there was another lot, which generally became, especially on that great July occasion, the most numerous of the three. It comprised all those who made strong interest to obtain admittance within her ladyship's house,--who struggled and fought almost with tooth and nail to get invitations. Against these people Lady Monk carried on an internecine war. Had she not done so she would have been swamped by them, and her success would have been at an end; but yet she never dreamed of shutting her doors against them altogether, or of saying boldly that none such should hamper her staircases. She knew that she must yield, but her effort was made to yield to as few as might be possible. When she was first told by her factotum in these operations that Mr. Bott wanted to come, she positively declined to have him. When it was afterwards intimated to her that the Duchess of St. Bungay had made a point of it, she sneered at the Duchess, and did not even then yield. But when at last it was brought home to her understanding that Mr. Palliser wished it, and that Mr. Palliser probably would not come himself unless his wishes were gratified, she gave way. She was especially anxious that Lady Glencora should come to her gathering, and she knew that Lady Glencora could not be had without Mr. Palliser. It was very much desired by her that Lady Glencora should be there. "Burgo," said she to her nephew, one morning, "look here." Burgo was at the time staying with his aunt, in Gloucester Square, much to the annoyance of Sir Cosmo, who had become heartily tired of his nephew. The aunt and the nephew had been closeted together more than once lately, and perhaps they understood each other better now than they had done down at Monkshade. The aunt had handed a little note to Burgo, which he read and then threw back to her. "You see that she is not afraid of coming," said Lady Monk. "I suppose she doesn't think much about it," said Burgo. "If that's what you really believe, you'd better give it up. Nothing on earth would justify such a step on your part except a thorough conviction that she is attached to you." Burgo looked at the fireplace, almost savagely, and his aunt looked at him very keenly. "Well," she said, "if there's to be an end of it, let there be an end of it." "I think I'd better hang myself," he said. "Burgo, I will not have you here if you talk to me in that way. I am trying to help you once again; but if you look like that, and talk like that, I will give it up." "I think you'd better give it up." "Are you becoming cowardly at last? With all your faults I never expected that of you." "No; I am not a coward. I'd go out and fight him at two paces' distance with the greatest pleasure in the world." "You know that's nonsense, Burgo. It's downright braggadocio. Men do not fight now; nor at any time would a man be called upon to fight, because you simply wanted to take his wife from him. If you had done it, indeed!" "How am I to do it? I'd do it to-morrow if it depended on me. No one can say that I'm afraid of anybody or of anything." "I suppose something in the matter depends on her?" "I believe she loves me,--if you mean that?" "Look here, Burgo," and the considerate aunt gave to the impoverished and ruined nephew such counsel as she, in accordance with her lights, was enabled to bestow. "I think you were much wronged in that matter. After what had passed I thought that you had a right to claim Lady Glencora as your wife. Mr. Palliser, in my mind, behaved very wrongly in stepping in between you and--you and such a fortune as hers, in that way. He cannot expect that his wife should have any affection for him. There is nobody alive who has a greater horror of anything improper in married women than I have. I have always shown it. When Lady Madeline Madtop left her husband, I would never allow her to come inside my doors again,--though I have no doubt he ill-used her dreadfully, and there was nothing ever proved between her and Colonel Graham. One can't be too particular in such matters. But here, if you,--if you can succeed, you know, I shall always regard the Palliser episode in Lady Glencora's life as a tragical accident. I shall indeed. Poor dear! It was done exactly as they make nuns of girls in Roman Catholic countries; and as I should think no harm of helping a nun out of her convent, so I should think no harm of helping her now. If you are to say anything to her, I think you might have an opportunity at the party." Burgo was still looking at the fireplace; and he sat on, looking and still looking, but he said nothing. "You can think of what I have said, Burgo," continued his aunt, meaning that he should get up and go. But he did not go. "Have you anything more that you wish to say to me?" she asked. "I've got no money," said Burgo, still looking at the fireplace. Lady Glencora's property was worth not less than fifty thousand a year. He was a young man ambitious of obtaining that almost incredible amount of wealth, and who once had nearly reached it, by means of her love. His present obstacle consisted in his want of a twenty-pound note! "I've got no money." The words were growled out rather than spoken, and his eyes were never turned even for a moment towards his aunt's face. "You've never got any money," said she, speaking almost with passion. "How can I help it? I can't make money. If I had a couple of hundred pounds, so that I could take her, I believe that she would go with me. It should not be my fault if she did not. It would have been all right if she had come to Monkshade." "I've got no money for you, Burgo. I have not five pounds belonging to me." "But you've got--?" "What?" said Lady Monk, interrupting him sharply. "Would Cosmo lend it me?" said he, hesitating to go on with that suggestion which he had been about to make. The Cosmo of whom he spoke was not his uncle, but his cousin. No eloquence could have induced his uncle, Sir Cosmo, to lend him another shilling. But the son of the house was a man rich with his own wealth, and Burgo had not taxed him for some years. "I do not know," said Lady Monk. "I never see him. Probably not." "It is hard," said Burgo. "Fancy that a man should be ruined for two hundred pounds, just at such a moment of his life as this!" He was a man bold by nature, and he did make his proposition. "You have jewels, aunt;--could you not raise it for me? I would redeem them with the very first money that I got." Lady Monk rose in a passion when the suggestion was first made, but before the interview was over she had promised that she would endeavour to do something in the way of raising money for him yet, once again. He was her favourite nephew, and the same almost to her as a child of her own. With one of her own children indeed she had quarrelled, and of the other, a married daughter, she rarely saw much. Such love as she had to give she gave to Burgo, and she promised him the money though she knew that she must raise it by some villanous falsehood to her husband. On the same morning Lady Glencora went to Queen Anne Street with the purpose of inducing Alice to go to Lady Monk's party; but Alice would not accede to the proposition, though Lady Glencora pressed it with all her eloquence. "I don't know her," said Alice. "My dear," said Lady Glencora, "that's absurd. Half the people there won't know her." "But they know her set, or know her friends,--or, at any rate, will meet their own friends at her house. I should only bother you, and should not in the least gratify myself." "The fact is, everybody will go who can, and I should have no sort of trouble in getting a card for you. Indeed I should simply write a note and say I meant to bring you." "Pray don't do any such thing, for I certainly shall not go. I can't conceive why you should wish it." "Mr. Fitzgerald will be there," said Lady Glencora, altering her voice altogether, and speaking in that low tone with which she used to win Alice's heart down at Matching. She was sitting close over the fire, leaning low, holding up her little hands as a screen to her face, and looking at her companion earnestly. "I'm sure that he will be there, though nobody has told me." "That may be a reason for your staying away," said Alice, slowly, "but hardly a reason for my going with you." Lady Glencora would not condescend to tell her friend in so many words that she wanted her protection. She could not bring herself to say that, though she wished it to be understood. "Ah! I thought you would have gone," said she. "It would be contrary to all my habits," said Alice: "I never go to people's houses when I don't know them. It's a kind of society which I don't like. Pray do not ask me." "Oh! very well. If it must be so, I won't press it." Lady Glencora had moved the position of one of her hands so as to get it to her pocket, and there had grasped a letter, which she still carried; but when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, and she assumed that look of childish drollery which she would sometimes put on, almost with a grimace, but still with so much prettiness that no one who saw her would regret it. "He certainly can't bite you, if you will not let him." "Do you know, Alice, though they all say that Plantagenet is one of the wisest men in London, I sometimes think that he is one of the greatest fools. Soon after we came to town I told him that we had better not go to that woman's house. Of course he understood me. He simply said that he wished that I should do so. 'I hate anything out of the way,' he said. 'There can be no reason why my wife should not go to Lady Monk's house as well as to any other.' There was an end of it, you know, as far as anything I could do was concerned. But there wasn't an end of it with him. He insists that I shall go, but he sends my duenna with me. Dear Mrs. Marsham is to be there!" "She'll do you no harm, I suppose?" "I'm not so sure of that, Alice. In the first place, one doesn't like to be followed everywhere by a policeman, even though one isn't going to pick a pocket. And then, the devil is so strong within me, that I should like to dodge the policeman. I can fancy a woman being driven to do wrong simply by a desire to show her policeman that she can be too many for him." "Glencora, you make me so wretched when you talk like that." "Will you go with me, then, so that I may have a policeman of my own choosing? He asked me if I would mind taking Mrs. Marsham with me in my carriage. So I up and spoke, very boldly, like the proud young porter, and told him I would not; and when he asked why not, I said that I preferred taking a friend of my own,--a young friend, I said, and I then named you or my cousin, Lady Jane. I told him I should bring one or the other." "And was he angry?" "No; he took it very quietly,--saying something, in his calm way, about hoping that I should get over a prejudice against one of his earliest and dearest friends. He twits at me because I don't understand Parliament and the British Constitution, but I know more of them than he does about a woman. You are quite sure you won't go, then?" Alice hesitated a moment. "Do," said Lady Glencora; and there was an amount of persuasion in her accent which should, I think, have overcome her cousin's scruples. "It is against the whole tenor of my life's way," she said, "And, Glencora, I am not happy myself. I am not fit for parties. I sometimes think that I shall never go into society again." "That's nonsense, you know." "I suppose it is, but I cannot go now. I would if I really thought--" "Oh, very well," said Lady Glencora, interrupting her. "I suppose I shall get through it. If he asks me to dance, I shall stand up with him, just as though I had never seen him before." Then she remembered the letter in her pocket,--remembered that at this moment she bore about with her a written proposition from this man to go off with him and leave her husband's house. She had intended to show it to Alice on this occasion; but as Alice had refused her request, she was glad that she had not done so. "You'll come to me the morning after," said Lady Glencora, as she went. This Alice promised to do; and then she was left alone. Alice regretted,--regretted deeply that she had not consented to go with her cousin. After all, of what importance had been her objection when compared with the cause for which her presence had been desired? Doubtless she would have been uncomfortable at Lady Monk's house; but could she not have borne some hour or two of discomfort on her friend's behalf? But, in truth, it was only after Lady Glencora had left her that she began to understand the subject fully, and to feel that she might possibly have been of service in a great danger. But it was too late now. Then she strove to comfort herself with the reflection that a casual meeting at an evening party in London could not be perilous in the same degree as a prolonged sojourn together in a country house.

Early in April, Lady Monk gave a grand party in London, at her large town house in Gloucester Square. Lady Monk usually gave two or three such parties in the season, and spent much time and energy ensuring that they would be successful. And she seldom failed. It was generally acknowledged to be the proper thing to go to Lady Monk's parties. There were certain people who went as a matter of course - people who were by no means close friends with Lady Monk, or with Sir Cosmo, but whom it was proper to invite. The Duchess of St. Bungay was always there, though she hated Lady Monk; and Mrs. Conway Sparkes was generally there, although Lady Monk did not know why Mrs. Conway Sparkes was so favoured by the world; but so the fact was, and she bowed to it. Then there were another set, who were invited only when it suited. Among these were old family friends of her husband, and scores of young ladies whose mothers and aunts knew Lady Monk's sisters and cousins. They accepted as much of Lady Monk's good things as she offered them, and were thankful. Then there was another lot again, which was the most numerous of the three. It comprised all those who fought almost tooth and nail to get invitations. If Lady Monk had admitted them all, she would have been swamped; but she did not shut her doors against them altogether. Rather, she yielded to as few as possible. When she was first told that Mr. Bott wanted to come, she positively refused to have him. When it was hinted that the Duchess of St. Bungay had requested it, she sneered at the Duchess, and did not yield. But when she learnt that Mr. Palliser wished it, and that Mr. Palliser probably would not come himself otherwise, she gave way. She was especially anxious that Lady Glencora should come to her gathering, and Lady Glencora could not be had without Mr. Palliser. "Burgo," said she to her nephew one morning, "look here." Burgo was staying with her in Gloucester Square, much to the annoyance of Sir Cosmo, who was heartily tired of his nephew. The aunt and the nephew had been closeted together often lately. Now she handed a little note to Burgo, which he read and threw back to her. "You see that she is not afraid of coming," said Lady Monk. "I suppose she doesn't think about it much," said Burgo. "If that's what you really believe, you'd better give it up. Nothing would justify such a step on your part except a conviction that she is attached to you." Burgo looked at the fireplace, almost savagely, and his aunt looked at him very keenly. "I think I'd better hang myself," he said. "Burgo, I will not have you here if you talk that way. I am trying to help you; but if you look like that, and talk like that, I will give it up." "I think you'd better give it up." "Are you becoming cowardly?" "I am not a coward. I'd go out and fight him with the greatest pleasure in the world." "You know that's nonsense, Burgo." "I'd take her tomorrow if I could. No one can say that I'm afraid. And I believe she loves me." "Look here, Burgo," the aunt advised her ruined nephew. "I think you were much wronged in that matter. I thought that you had a right to claim Lady Glencora as your wife. Mr. Palliser, in my mind, behaved very wrongly in stepping in between you and such a fortune as hers. He cannot expect that his wife should have any affection for him. Nobody has a greater horror of anything improper in married women than I have. But if you succeed, I shall always regard the Palliser episode in Lady Glencora's life as a tragic accident. Poor dear! I should think no harm of helping her. If you are to say anything to her, you might have an opportunity at the party." "I've got no money." The words were growled out rather than spoken, and Burgo did not even look at his aunt. "You've never got any money," said she. "How can I help it? I can't make money. If I had a couple of hundred pounds, so that I could take her away, I believe that she would go with me." "I've got no money for you, Burgo. I have not got five pounds." "Would Cosmo lend it me?" said he. The Cosmo he meant was not his uncle, but his cousin. Nothing could have induced his uncle, Sir Cosmo, to lend him another shilling. But the son of the house was a rich man. "I don't know," said Lady Monk. "I never see him. Probably not." "It is hard," said Burgo. "Fancy that a man should be ruined for two hundred pounds, at such a moment of his life as this! You have jewels, aunt; could you not raise it for me? I would redeem them with the very first money that I got." Lady Monk stood up in anger when he suggested this, yet before the interview was over she had promised that she would try to get some money for him. He was her favourite nephew. She had quarrelled with one of her own children, and rarely saw the other, a married daughter. Such love as she had to give, she gave to Burgo, and she promised him the money though she knew that she must raise it by some falsehood to her husband. On the same morning Lady Glencora went to visit Alice, to ask her to go to Lady Monk's party; but Alice would not agree. "I don't know her," she said. "My dear," said Lady Glencora, "that's absurd. Half the people there won't know her." "But they know her friends." "I should have no trouble in getting a card for you. Indeed I should simply write a note and say I meant to bring you." "Pray don't do any such thing, for I certainly shall not go. I can't imagine why you wish it." "Mr. Fitzgerald will be there," said Lady Glencora, speaking in a low tone. She looked at her companion earnestly. "I'm sure that he will be there, though nobody has told me." "That may be a reason for your staying away," said Alice slowly, "but hardly a reason for my going with you." Lady Glencora could not bring herself to say that she wanted her friend's protection, though she wished it to be understood. "Ah! I thought you would have gone," said she. "I never go to people's houses when I don't know them. Pray do not ask me." "Oh! very well. I won't press it." Lady Glencora had put one hand into her pocket, and had grasped a letter; but when Alice said those last cold words, "Pray do not ask me," she released the grasp, and left the letter where it was. "I suppose he won't bite me, at any rate," she said, with a pretty look of childish drollery. "He certainly can't bite you, if you will not let him." "Do you know, Alice, though they all say that Plantagenet is one of the wisest men in London, I sometimes think that he is one of the greatest fools. Soon after we came to town I told him that we had better not go to that woman's house. Of course he understood why. He simply said that he wished that I should do so. 'I hate anything out of the way,' he said. 'There can be no reason why my wife should not go to Lady Monk's house.' He insists that I shall go, but he sends my duenna with me. Dear Mrs. Marsham is to be there!" "She'll do you no harm, I suppose?" "I'm not so sure, Alice. In the first place, one doesn't like to be followed everywhere by a policeman, even though one isn't going to pick a pocket. And the devil is so strong within me, that I should like to dodge her." "Glencora, you make me wretched when you talk like that." "Will you go with me, then, so that I may have a policeman of my own choosing? He asked me if I would take Mrs. Marsham with me in my carriage. So I told him I would not; and when he asked why not, I said that I preferred to take a young friend of my own - and I named you or my cousin, Lady Jane." "And was he angry?" "No; he took it very quietly and calmly, saying something about hoping that I should get over a prejudice against one of his earliest and dearest friends. He twits at me because I don't understand Parliament and the British Constitution, but I know more about them than he does about a woman. You are quite sure you won't go, then?" Alice hesitated a moment. "Do," said Lady Glencora. "Glencora, I am not fit for parties. I sometimes think that I shall never go into society again." "That's nonsense, you know." "I suppose it is, but I cannot go now." "Oh, very well," said Lady Glencora. "I suppose I shall get through it. If he asks me to dance, I shall stand up with him, just as though I had never seen him before." Then she remembered the letter in her pocket, which was a proposition from this man to leave her husband and go off with him. As Alice had refused her request, she was glad that she had not shown it to her. "Come to me the morning after," said Lady Glencora, as she went. This Alice promised to do; and then she was left alone. It was only after Lady Glencora had left that Alice began to understand the subject fully, and to feel that she might have been of use in a great danger. She regretted deeply that she had not consented to go with her cousin. Doubtless she would have been uncomfortable at Lady Monk's house; but could she not have borne an hour or two of discomfort on her friend's behalf? However, it was too late now. She strove to comfort herself with the reflection that a casual meeting at an evening party in London could not be nearly as perilous as a prolonged stay together in a country house.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 48: Preparations for Lady Monk's Party

On the night before Christmas Eve two men were sitting together in George Vavasor's rooms in Cecil Street. It was past twelve o'clock, and they were both smoking; there were square bottles on the table containing spirits, with hot water and cold water in jugs, and one of the two men was using, and had been using, these materials for enjoyment. Vavasor had not been drinking, nor did it appear as though he intended to begin. There was a little weak brandy and water in a glass by his side, but there it had remained untouched for the last twenty minutes. His companion, however, had twice in that time replenished his beaker, and was now puffing out the smoke of his pipe with the fury of a steamer's funnel when she has not yet burned the black off her last instalment of fresh coals. This man was Burgo Fitzgerald. He was as handsome as ever;--a man whom neither man nor woman could help regarding as a thing beautiful to behold;--but not the less was there in his eyes and cheeks a look of haggard dissipation,--of riotous living, which had become wearisome, by its continuance, even to himself,--that told to all who saw him much of the history of his life. Most men who drink at nights, and are out till cockcrow doing deeds of darkness, become red in their faces, have pimpled cheeks and watery eyes, and are bloated and not comfortable to be seen. It is a kind dispensation of Providence who thus affords to such sinners a visible sign, to be seen day by day, of the injury which is being done. The first approach of a carbuncle on the nose, about the age of thirty, has stopped many a man from drinking. No one likes to have carbuncles on his nose, or to appear before his female friends with eyes which look as though they were swimming in grog. But to Burgo Fitzgerald Providence in her anger had not afforded this protection. He became at times pale, sallow, worn, and haggard. He grew thin, and still thinner. At times he had been ill to death's door. Among his intimate friends there were those who heard him declare frequently that his liver had become useless to him; and that, as for gastric juices, he had none left to him. But still his beauty remained. The perfect form of his almost god-like face was the same as ever, and the brightness of his bright blue eye was never quenched. On the present occasion he had come to Vavasor's room with the object of asking from him certain assistance, and perhaps also some amount of advice. But as regarded the latter article he was, I think, in the state of most men when they seek for counsellors who shall counsel them to do evil. Advice administered in accordance with his own views would give him comfortable encouragement, but advice on the other side he was prepared to disregard altogether. These two men had known each other long, and a close intimacy had existed between them in the days past, previous to Lady Glencora's engagement with Mr. Palliser. When Lady Glencora endeavoured, vainly as we know, to obtain aid from Alice Vavasor, Burgo had been instigated to believe that Alice's cousin might assist him. Any such assistance George Vavasor would have been quite ready to give. Some pecuniary assistance he had given, he at that time having been in good funds. Perhaps he had for a moment induced Burgo to think that he could obtain for the pair the use of the house in Queen Anne Street as a point at which they might meet, and from whence they might start on their journey of love. All that was over. Those hopes had been frustrated, and Lady Glencora M'Cluskie had become Lady Glencora Palliser and not Lady Glencora Fitzgerald. But now other hopes had sprung up, and Burgo was again looking to his friend for assistance. "I believe she would," Burgo said, as he lifted the glass to his mouth. "It's a thing of that sort that a man can only believe,--perhaps only hope,--till he has tried. I know that she is not happy with him, and I have made up my mind that I will at least ask her." "But he would have her fortune all the same?" "I don't know how that would be. I haven't inquired, and I don't mean to inquire. Of course I don't expect you or any one else to believe me, but her money has no bearing on the question now. Heaven knows I want money bad enough, but I wouldn't take away another man's wife for money." "You don't mean to say you think it would be wicked. I supposed you to be above those prejudices." "It's all very well for you to chaff." "It's no chaff at all. I tell you fairly I wouldn't run away with any man's wife. I have an old-fashioned idea that when a man has got a wife he ought to be allowed to keep her. Public opinion, I know, is against me." "I think he ran away with my wife," said Burgo, with emphasis; "that's the way I look at it. She was engaged to me first; and she really loved me, while she never cared for him." "Nevertheless, marriage is marriage, and the law is against you. But if I did go in for such a troublesome job at all, I certainly should keep an eye upon the money." "It can make no difference." "It did make a difference, I suppose, when you first thought of marrying her?" "Of course it did. My people brought us together because she had a large fortune and I had none. There's no doubt in the world about that. And I'll tell you what; I believe that old harridan of an aunt of mine is willing to do the same thing now again. Of course she doesn't say as much. She wouldn't dare do that, but I do believe she means it. I wonder where she expects to go to!" "That's grateful on your part." "Upon my soul I hate her. I do indeed. It isn't love for me now so much as downright malice against Palliser, because he baulked her project before. She is a wicked old woman. Some of us fellows are wicked enough--you and I for instance--" "Thank you. I don't know, however, that I am qualified to run in a curricle with you." "But we are angels to such an old she-devil as that. You may believe me or not, as you like.--I dare say you won't believe me." "I'll say I do, at any rate." "The truth is, I want to get her, partly because I love her; but chiefly because I do believe in my heart that she loves me." "It's for her sake then! You are ready to sacrifice yourself to do her a good turn." "As for sacrificing myself, that's done. I'm a man utterly ruined and would cut my throat to-morrow for the sake of my relations, if I cared enough about them. I know my own condition pretty well. I have made a shipwreck of everything, and have now only got to go down among the breakers." "Only you would like to take Lady Glencora with you." "No, by heavens! But sometimes, when I do think about it at all,--which I do as seldom as I can,--it seems to me that I might still become a different fellow if it were possible for me to marry her." "Had you married her when she was free to marry any one and when her money was her own, it might have been so." "I think it would be quite as much so now. I do, indeed. If I could get her once, say to Italy, or perhaps to Greece, I think I could treat her well, and live with her quietly. I know that I would try." "Without the assistance of brandy and cigars." "Yes." "And without any money." "With only a little. I know you'll laugh at me; but I make pictures to myself of a sort of life which I think would suit us, and be very different from this hideous way of living, with which I have become so sick that I loathe it." "Something like Juan and Haide, with Planty Pall coming after you, like old Lambro." By the nickname of Planty Pall George Vavasor intended to designate Lady Glencora's present husband. "He'd get a divorce, of course, and then we should be married. I really don't think he'd dislike it, when it was all done. They tell me he doesn't care for her." "You have seen her since her marriage?" "Yes; twice." "And have spoken to her?" "Once only,--so as to be able to do more than ask her if she were well. Once, for about two minutes, I did speak to her." "And what did she say?" "She said it would be better that we should not meet. When she said that, I knew that she was still fond of me. I could have fallen at her feet that moment, only the room was full of people. I do think that she is fond of me." Vavasor paused a few minutes. "I dare say she is fond of you," he then said; "but whether she has pluck for such a thing as this, is more than I can say. Probably she has not. And if she has, probably you would fail in carrying out your plan." "I must get a little money first," said Burgo. "And that's an operation which no doubt you find more difficult every day, as you grow older." "It seems to be much the same sort of thing. I went to Magruin this morning." "He's the fellow that lives out near Gray's Inn Lane?" "Just beyond the Foundling Hospital. I went to him, and he was quite civil about it. He says I owe him over three thousand pounds, but that doesn't seem to make any difference." "How much did you ever have from him?" "I don't recollect that I ever absolutely had any money. He got a bill of mine from a tailor who went to smash, and he kept on renewing that till it grew to be ever so many bills. I think he did once let me have twenty-four pounds,--but certainly never more than that." "And he says he'll give you money now? I suppose you told him why you wanted it." "I didn't name her,--but I told him what would make him understand that I hoped to get off with a lady who had a lot of tin. I asked him for two hundred and fifty. He says he'll let me have one hundred and fifty on a bill at two months for five hundred,--with your name to it." "With my name to it! That's kind on his part,--and on yours too." "Of course I can't take it up at the end of two months." "I dare say not," said Vavasor. "But he won't come upon you then,--nor for a year or more afterwards. I did pay you what you lent me before." "Yes, you did. I always thought that to be a special compliment on your part." "And you'll find I'll pull you through now in some way. If I don't succeed in this I shall go off the hooks altogether soon; and if I were dead my people would pay my debts then." Before the evening was over Vavasor promised the assistance asked of him. He knew that he was lending his name to a man who was utterly ruined, and putting it into the hands of another man who was absolutely without conscience in the use he would make of it. He knew that he was creating for himself trouble, and in all probability loss, which he was ill able to bear. But the thing was one which came within the pale of his laws. Such assistance as that he might ask of others, and had asked and received before now. It was a reckless deed on his part, but then all his doings were reckless. It was consonant with his mode of life. "I thought you would, old fellow," said Burgo, as he got up to go away. "Perhaps, you know, I shall pull through in this; and perhaps, after all, some part of her fortune will come with her. If so you'll be all right." "Perhaps I may. But look here, Burgo,--don't you give that fellow up the bill till you've got the money into your fist." "You may be quite easy about that. I know their tricks. He and I will go to the bank together, and we shall squabble there at the door about four or five odd sovereigns,--and at last I shall have to give him up two or three. Beastly old robber! I declare I think he's worse than I am myself." Then Burgo Fitzgerald took a little more brandy and water and went away. He was living at this time in the house of one of his relatives in Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street. His uncles and his aunts, and all those who were his natural friends, had clung to him with a tenacity that was surprising; for he had never been true to any of them, and did not even pretend to like them. His father, with whom for many years he had not been on speaking terms, was now dead; but he had sisters whose husbands would still open their houses to him, either in London or in the country;--would open their houses to him, and lend him their horses, and provide him with every luxury which the rich enjoy,--except ready money. When the uttermost stress of pecuniary embarrassment would come upon him, they would pay something to stave off the immediate evil. And so Burgo went on. Nobody now thought of saying much to reproach him. It was known to be waste of words, and trouble in vain. They were still fond of him because he was beautiful and never vain of his beauty;--because in the midst of his recklessness there was always about him a certain kindliness which made him pleasant to those around him. He was soft and gracious with children, and would be very courteous to his lady cousins. They knew that as a man he was worthless, but nevertheless they loved him. I think the secret of it was chiefly in this,--that he seemed to think so little of himself. But now as he walked home in the middle of the night from Cecil Street to Cavendish Square he did think much of himself. Indeed such self-thoughts come naturally to all men, be their outward conduct ever so reckless. Every man to himself is the centre of the whole world;--the axle on which it all turns. All knowledge is but his own perception of the things around him. All love, and care for others, and solicitude for the world's welfare, are but his own feelings as to the world's wants and the world's merits. He had played his part as a centre of all things very badly. Of that he was very well aware. He had sense enough to know that it should be a man's lot to earn his bread after some fashion, and he often told himself that never as yet had he earned so much as a penny roll. He had learned to comprehend that the world's progress depends on the way in which men do their duty by each other,--that the progress of one generation depends on the discharge of such duties by that which preceded it;--and he knew that he, in his generation, had done nothing to promote such progress. He thoroughly despised himself,--if there might be any good in that! But on such occasions as these, when the wine he had drunk was sufficient only to drive away from him the numbness of despair, when he was all alone with the cold night air upon his face, when the stars were bright above him and the world around him was almost quiet, he would still ask himself whether there might not yet be, even for him, some hope of a redemption, --some chance of a better life in store for him. He was still young,--wanting some years of thirty. Could there be, even for him, some mode of extrication from his misery? We know what was the mode which now, at this moment, was suggesting itself to him. He was proposing to himself, as the best thing that he could do, to take away another man's wife and make himself happy with her! What he had said to Vavasor as to disregarding Lady Glencora's money had been perfectly true. That in the event of her going off with him, some portion of her enormous wealth would still cling to her, he did believe. Seeing that she had no children he could not understand where else it should all go. But he thought of this as it regarded her, not as it regarded him. When he had before made his suit to her,--a suit which was then honourable, however disadvantageous it might have seemed to be to her--he had made in his mind certain calculations as to the good things which would result to him if he were successful He would keep hounds, and have three or four horses every day for his own riding, and he would have no more interviews with Magruin, waiting in that rogue's dingy back parlour for many a weary wretched half-hour, till the rogue should be pleased to show himself. So far he had been mercenary; but he had learned to love the girl, and to care more for her than for her money, and when the day of disappointment came upon him,--the day on which she had told him that all between them was to be over for ever,--he had, for a few hours, felt the loss of his love more than the loss of his money. Then he had had no further hope. No such idea as that which now filled his mind had then come upon him. The girl had gone from him and married another man, and there was an end of it. But by degrees tidings had reached him that she was not happy,--reaching him through the mouths of people who were glad to exaggerate all that they had heard. A whole tribe of his female relatives had been anxious to promote his marriage with Lady Glencora M'Cluskie, declaring that, after all that was come and gone, Burgo would come forth from his troubles as a man of great wealth. So great was the wealth of the heiress that it might withstand even his propensities for spending. That whole tribe had been bitterly disappointed; and when they heard that Mr. Palliser's marriage had given him no child, and that Lady Glencora was unhappy,--they made their remarks in triumph rather than in sorrow. I will not say that they looked forward approvingly to such a step as that which Burgo now wished to take,--though as regarded his aunt, Lady Monk, he himself had accused her; but they whispered that such things had been done and must be expected, when marriages were made up as had been that marriage between Mr. Palliser and his bride. As he walked on, thinking of his project, he strove hard to cheat himself into a belief that he would do a good thing in carrying Lady Glencora away from her husband. Bad as had been his life he had never before done aught so bad as that. The more fixed his intention became, the more thoroughly he came to perceive how great and grievous was the crime which he contemplated. To elope with another man's wife no longer appeared to him to be a joke at which such men as he might smile. But he tried to think that in this case there would be special circumstances which would almost justify him, and also her. They had loved each other and had sworn to love each other with constancy. There had been no change in the feelings or even in the wishes of either of them. But cold people had come between them with cold calculations, and had separated them. She had been, he told himself, made to marry a man she did not love. If they two loved each other truly, would it not still be better that they should come together? Would not the sin be forgiven on account of the injustice which had been done to them? Had Mr. Palliser a right to expect more from a wife who had been made to marry him without loving him? Then he reverted to those dreams of a life of love, in some sunny country, of which he had spoken to Vavasor, and he strove to nourish them. Vavasor had laughed at him, talking of Juan and Haide. But Vavasor, he said to himself, was a hard cold man, who had no touch of romance in his character. He would not be laughed out of his plan by such as he,--nor would he be frightened by the threat of any Lambro who might come after him, whether he might come in the guise of indignant uncle or injured husband. He had crossed from Regent Street through Hanover Square, and as he came out by the iron gates into Oxford Street, a poor wretched girl, lightly clad in thin raiment, into whose bones the sharp freezing air was penetrating, asked him for money. Would he give her something to get drink, so that for a moment she might feel the warmth of her life renewed? Such midnight petitions were common enough in his ears, and he was passing on without thinking of her. But she was urgent, and took hold of him. "For love of God," she said, "if it's only a penny to get a glass of gin! Feel my hand,--how cold it is." And she strove to put it up against his face. He looked round at her and saw that she was very young,--sixteen, perhaps, at the most, and that she had once,--nay very lately,--been exquisitely pretty. There still lingered about her eyes some remains of that look of perfect innocency and pure faith which had been hers not more than twelve months since. And now, at midnight, in the middle of the streets, she was praying for a pennyworth of gin, as the only comfort she knew, or could expect! "You are cold!" said he, trying to speak to her cheerily. "Cold!" said she, repeating the word, and striving to wrap herself closer in her rags, as she shivered--"Oh God! if you knew what it was to be as cold as I am! I have nothing in the world,--not one penny,--not a hole to lie in!" "We are alike then," said Burgo, with a slight low laugh. "I also have nothing. You cannot be poorer than I am." "You poor!" she said. And then she looked up into his face. "Gracious; how beautiful you are! Such as you are never poor." He laughed again,--in a different tone. He always laughed when any one told him of his beauty. "I am a deal poorer than you, my girl," he said. "You have nothing. I have thirty thousand pounds worse than nothing. But come along, and I will get you something to eat." "Will you?" said she, eagerly. Then looking up at him again, she exclaimed--"Oh, you are so handsome!" He took her to a public-house and gave her bread and meat and beer, and stood by her while she ate it. She was shy with him then, and would fain have taken it to a corner by herself, had he allowed her. He perceived this, and turned his back to her, but still spoke to her a word or two as she ate. The woman at the bar who served him looked at him wonderingly, staring into his face; and the pot-boy woke himself thoroughly that he might look at Burgo; and the waterman from the cab-stand stared at him; and women who came in for gin looked almost lovingly up into his eyes. He regarded them all not at all, showing no feeling of disgrace at his position, and no desire to carry himself as a ruffler. He quietly paid what was due when the girl had finished her meal, and then walked with her out of the shop. "And now," said he, "what must I do with you? If I give you a shilling can you get a bed?" She told him that she could get a bed for sixpence. "Then keep the other sixpence for your breakfast," said he. "But you must promise me that you will buy no gin to-night." She promised him, and then he gave her his hand as he wished her good night;--his hand, which it had been the dearest wish of Lady Glencora to call her own. She took it and pressed it to her lips. "I wish I might once see you again," she said, "because you are so good and so beautiful." He laughed again cheerily, and walked on, crossing the street towards Cavendish Square. She stood looking at him till he was out of sight, and then as she moved away,--let us hope to the bed which his bounty had provided, and not to a gin-shop,--she exclaimed to herself again and again--"Gracious, how beautiful he was!" "He's a good un," the woman at the public-house had said as soon as he left it; "but, my! did you ever see a man's face handsome as that fellow's?" [Illustration: Burgo Fitzgerald.] Poor Burgo! All who had seen him since life had begun with him had loved him and striven to cherish him. And with it all, to what a state had he come! Poor Burgo! had his eyes been less brightly blue, and his face less godlike in form, it may be that things would have gone better with him. A sweeter-tempered man than he never lived,--nor one who was of a kinder nature. At this moment he had barely money about him to take him down to his aunt's house at Monkshade, and as he had promised to be there before Christmas Day, he was bound to start on the next morning, before help from Mr. Magruin was possible. Nevertheless, out of his very narrow funds he had given half a crown to comfort the poor creature who had spoken to him in the street.

On the night before Christmas Eve two men were sitting together in George Vavasor's rooms in Cecil Street. It was past twelve o'clock, and they were both smoking; there were bottles of spirits and jugs of water on the table. However, Vavasor was not drinking. There was a little weak brandy and water in a glass by his side, but it had remained untouched for the last twenty minutes. In that time his companion had twice refilled his glass, and was now puffing out smoke from his pipe with the fury of a steamer's funnel. This man was Burgo Fitzgerald. He was as handsome as ever; but in his eyes and cheeks there was a look of haggard dissipation - a sign of riotous living which had become wearisome even to himself. Habitual drink did not make him red-faced and bloated, but pale, worn, and haggard. He grew thin, and at times he had been ill to death's door. He declared to his friends that that his liver had become useless. But still his beauty remained. He had come to Vavasor's room to ask him for assistance, and perhaps also for advice. These two men had known each other long, and had been close friends. When Lady Glencora tried, vainly as we know, to obtain aid from Alice Vavasor, Burgo had been led to believe that Alice's cousin might help him. George Vavasor had been quite ready to help; but Burgo's hopes had been frustrated, and Lady Glencora M'Cluskie had become Lady Glencora Palliser. But now other hopes had sprung up, and Burgo was again looking to his friend for assistance. "I believe she would," Burgo said, as he lifted the glass to his mouth. "I know that she is not happy with him, and I will at least ask her." "But he would keep her fortune all the same?" "I don't know, and I don't mean to ask. Of course I don't expect anyone to believe me, but her money has no bearing on the question now. Heaven knows I want money bad enough, but I wouldn't take away another man's wife for it." "I must tell you that I wouldn't run away with any man's wife. I have an old-fashioned idea that when a man has got a wife he ought to be allowed to keep her." "I think he ran away with my wife," said Burgo, with emphasis. "She was engaged to me first; and she really loved me, while she never cared for him." "Nevertheless, marriage is marriage, and the law is against you. But if I did go in for such a troublesome job, I certainly should keep an eye upon the money." "It can make no difference." "It did make a difference, I suppose, when you first thought of marrying her?" "Of course it did. My people brought us together because she had a fortune and I had none. And I'll tell you what; I believe that old harridan of an aunt of mine is willing to do the same thing again. Of course she doesn't dare say so, but I do believe she means it. Upon my soul I hate her. I do indeed. She is a wicked old woman. Some of us fellows are wicked enough - you and I for instance-" "Thank you. I don't know, however, that I am qualified to run alongside you." "But we are angels to that old she-devil. The truth is, I want Lady Glencora, partly because I love her; but chiefly because I believe that she loves me." "It's for her sake then! You are ready to sacrifice yourself to do her a good turn." "As for sacrificing myself, I'm utterly ruined in any case. I have made a shipwreck of everything, and have now only got to go down among the waves." "Only you would like to take Lady Glencora with you." "No, by heavens! But sometimes I think that I might still become a different fellow if I could marry her." "If you had you married her when she was free, it might have been so." "I think it would be so now. I do, indeed. If I could get her to Italy, or Greece, I think I could treat her well, and live with her quietly. I know that I would try." "Without the assistance of brandy and cigars." "Yes." "And without any money." "With only a little. I know you'll laugh at me; but I imagine a sort of life which I think would suit us, and be very different from this hideous way of living. He'd get a divorce, of course, and then we should be married. I really don't think he'd dislike it. They tell me he doesn't care for her." "You have seen her since her marriage?" "Yes; twice." "And have spoken to her?" "Once, for about two minutes." "What did she say?" "She said it would be better that we should not meet. When she said that, I knew that she was still fond of me." Vavasor paused a few minutes. "I dare say she is fond of you," he said; "but I doubt if she has courage for such a thing. And even if she has, you might fail in carrying out your plan." "I must get a little money first," said Burgo. "I went to Magruin this morning, the fellow near the Foundling Hospital. He was quite civil about it. He says I owe him over three thousand pounds." "How much did you ever have from him?" "I don't recollect. He got a bill of mine from a tailor who went to smash, and he kept on renewing that till it grew to be ever so many bills." "And he says he'll give you money now? I suppose you told him why you wanted it." "I let him understand that I hoped to get off with a lady who had a lot of tin. He says he'll let me have one hundred and fifty on a bill at two months for five hundred - with your name to it." "With my name to it! That's kind of you." "Of course I can't pay up at the end of two months." "I dare say not," said Vavasor. "But he won't come upon you for a year or more afterwards. I did pay you what you lent me before." Before the evening was over Vavasor promised the assistance asked. He knew that he was creating trouble for himself. But he had asked for such assistance from others himself before now, and had received it. It was a reckless deed on his part, but then all his doings were reckless. "I thought you would, old fellow," said Burgo, as he got up to go away. "Perhaps, you know, I shall pull through; and perhaps some of her fortune will come with her. If so you'll be all right." "Perhaps I may. But, Burgo, don't you give that fellow the bill till you've got the money in your fist." "Don't worry. I know their tricks." Then Burgo Fitzgerald took a little more brandy and water and went away. He was living at this time in the house of one of his relatives in Cavendish Square. His uncles and his aunts had clung to him with surprising tenacity; for he did not even pretend to like them. His father, with whom he had not been on speaking terms, was now dead; but he had sisters whose husbands would still open their houses to him, and lend him horses, and provide him with every luxury - except ready money. Nobody thought of reproaching him. They knew it was a waste of time. They were still fond of him because he was beautiful, yet never vain; and because he had a certain kindliness which made him pleasant. He was soft and gracious with children, and very courteous to his lady cousins. They knew he was worthless, but nevertheless they loved him - chiefly, I think, because he seemed to think so little of himself. But now as he walked home in the middle of the night he did think much of himself. Every man to himself is the centre of the whole world; the axle on which it all turns. All knowledge is but his own perception of the things around him. He had played his part very badly; of that he was well aware. He had sense enough to know that he should earn his bread in some way, and had never yet earned so much as a penny roll. He had learned that the world's progress depends on men doing their duty by each other; and he knew that he had done nothing to promote such progress. He thoroughly despised himself. But when he was alone with the cold night air upon his face, when the stars were bright above him and the world was almost quiet, he would ask himself whether there might still be some hope of redemption - some chance of a better life. And the way to this better life was to take away another man's wife and make himself happy with her! What he had said to Vavasor about disregarding Lady Glencora's money had been perfectly true. He believed that if she went off with him, some portion of her enormous wealth would still cling to her. But whereas his previous advances had been mercenary, he had learned to love the girl, and to care more for her than for her money. The girl had married another man, and there was an end of it. But gradually reports had reached him that she was not happy - reports from people who were glad to exaggerate what they had heard. A whole tribe of his female relatives had been anxious to promote his marriage with Lady Glencora M'Cluskie on account of her great wealth. That tribe had been bitterly disappointed; and when they heard that Mr. Palliser's marriage had given him no child, and that Lady Glencora was unhappy, they triumphed. I will not say that they approved of the step which Burgo now wished to take - though he accused his aunt, Lady Monk, of wanting it; but they whispered that such things must be expected, when such marriages were made. As Burgo walked on, he tried hard to cheat himself into a belief that he would do a good thing in carrying Lady Glencora away from her husband. But he had never done anything so bad in his bad life; and the more he thought about it, the more thoroughly he saw how great was the crime which he contemplated. He tried to think that there were special circumstances which would justify him. They had loved each other and had sworn constancy. There had been no change in their feelings; but she had been made to marry a man she did not love. Would it not be better that they should come together? Then he reverted to those dreams of a life of love, in some sunny country. Vavasor had laughed at him. But Vavasor, he said to himself, was a hard cold man, with no romance in his character. He had crossed from Regent Street through Hanover Square, and as he came out into Oxford Street, a poor wretched girl in thin clothing asked him for money. Would he give her something to get drink, so that for a moment she might feel warm? Such midnight petitions were common, and he was passing on when she took hold of him. "For love of God," she said, "it's only a penny to get a glass of gin! Feel my hand, how cold it is." And she put it up against his face. He looked round at her and saw that she was very young - sixteen, perhaps, at the most, and that she had once been exquisitely pretty. There still lingered about her eyes some remains of that look of innocence which had been hers twelve months since. And now, at midnight, in the streets, she was praying for a pennyworth of gin, as the only comfort she could expect! "You are cold!" said he, trying to speak cheerily. "Cold!" said she, striving to wrap herself closer in her rags, as she shivered. "Oh God! if you knew what it was to be as cold as I am! I have nothing in the world - not a hole to lie in!" "We are alike then," said Burgo, with a low laugh. "I also have nothing." "You, poor!" she said, looking up into his face. "Gracious; how beautiful you are! Such as you are never poor." He laughed again - in a different tone. He always laughed when anyone told him of his beauty. "I am a deal poorer than you, my girl," he said. "You have nothing. I have thirty thousand pounds worse than nothing. But come along, and I will get you something to eat." "Will you?" said she, eagerly. He took her to a public-house and gave her bread and meat and beer, and stood by her while she ate it. She was shy with him then, so he turned his back to her, but still spoke to her a word or two as she ate. The woman at the bar who served him looked at him wonderingly; and the pot-boy stared at him, and so did the waterman from the cab-stand, and the women who came in for gin. He was untroubled by them; he paid for the girl's meal and then walked with her out of the shop. "And now," said he, "what must I do with you? If I give you a shilling can you get a bed?" She told him that she could get a bed for sixpence. "Then keep the other sixpence for your breakfast," said he. "But you must promise me that you will buy no gin tonight." She promised him, and then she took his hand and pressed it to her lips. "I wish I might once see you again," she said, "because you are so good and so beautiful." He laughed again cheerily, and walked on. She stood looking at him till he was out of sight, and as she moved away she exclaimed to herself again: "Gracious, how beautiful he was!" Poor Burgo! All his life, people had loved him and tried to cherish him. Yet to what a state had he come! Poor Burgo! If his face had been less godlike, maybe things would have gone better with him. A sweeter-tempered man never lived. He had barely enough money to take him to his aunt's house at Monkshade the next morning. Nevertheless, he had given half a crown to comfort the poor creature who had spoken to him in the street.

Can You Forgive Her?

Chapter 29: Burgo Fitzgerald

"This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." --TENNYSON: _Locksley Hall_. On a fine evening near the end of July, Deronda was rowing himself on the Thames. It was already a year or more since he had come back to England, with the understanding that his education was finished, and that he was somehow to take his place in English society; but though, in deference to Sir Hugo's wish, and to fence off idleness, he had begun to read law, this apparent decision had been without other result than to deepen the roots of indecision. His old love of boating had revived with the more force now that he was in town with the Mallingers, because he could nowhere else get the same still seclusion which the river gave him. He had a boat of his own at Putney, and whenever Sir Hugo did not want him, it was his chief holiday to row till past sunset and come in again with the stars. Not that he was in a sentimental stage; but he was in another sort of contemplative mood perhaps more common in the young men of our day--that of questioning whether it were worth while to take part in the battle of the world: I mean, of course, the young men in whom the unproductive labor of questioning is sustained by three or five per cent, on capital which somebody else has battled for. It puzzled Sir Hugo that one who made a splendid contrast with all that was sickly and puling should be hampered with ideas which, since they left an accomplished Whig like himself unobstructed, could be no better than spectral illusions; especially as Deronda set himself against authorship--a vocation which is understood to turn foolish thinking into funds. Rowing in his dark-blue shirt and skull-cap, his curls closely clipped, his mouth beset with abundant soft waves of beard, he bore only disguised traces of the seraphic boy "trailing clouds of glory." Still, even one who had never seen him since his boyhood might have looked at him with slow recognition, due perhaps to the peculiarity of the gaze which Gwendolen chose to call "dreadful," though it had really a very mild sort of scrutiny. The voice, sometimes audible in subdued snatches of song, had turned out merely a high baritone; indeed, only to look at his lithe, powerful frame and the firm gravity of his face would have been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible, firmly-grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the hands--in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly penetrating eyes. Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which can afford to recognize poor relations. Such types meet us here and there among average conditions; in a workman, for example, whistling over a bit of measurement and lifting his eyes to answer our question about the road. And often the grand meanings of faces as well as of written words may lie chiefly in the impressions that happen just now to be of importance in relation to Deronda, rowing on the Thames in a very ordinary equipment for a young Englishman at leisure, and passing under Kew Bridge with no thought of an adventure in which his appearance was likely to play any part. In fact, he objected very strongly to the notion, which others had not allowed him to escape, that his appearance was of a kind to draw attention; and hints of this, intended to be complimentary, found an angry resonance in him, coming from mingled experiences, to which a clue has already been given. His own face in the glass had during many years associated for him with thoughts of some one whom he must be like--one about whose character and lot he continually wondered, and never dared to ask. In the neighborhood of Kew Bridge, between six and seven o'clock, the river was no solitude. Several persons were sauntering on the towing-path, and here and there a boat was plying. Deronda had been rowing fast to get over this spot, when, becoming aware of a great barge advancing toward him, he guided his boat aside, and rested on his oar within a couple of yards of the river-brink. He was all the while unconsciously continuing the low-toned chant which had haunted his throat all the way up the river--the gondolier's song in the _Otello_, where Rossini has worthily set to music the immortal words of Dante, "Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria": [Footnote: Dante's words are best rendered by our own poet in the lines at the head of the chapter.] and, as he rested on his oar, the pianissimo fall of the melodic wail "nella miseria" was distinctly audible on the brink of the water. Three or four persons had paused at various spots to watch the barge passing the bridge, and doubtless included in their notice the young gentleman in the boat; but probably it was only to one ear that the low vocal sounds came with more significance than if they had been an insect-murmur amidst the sum of current noises. Deronda, awaiting the barge, now turning his head to the river-side, and saw at a few yards' distant from him a figure which might have been an impersonation of the misery he was unconsciously giving voice to: a girl hardly more than eighteen, of low slim figure, with most delicate little face, her dark curls pushed behind her ears under a large black hat, a long woolen cloak over her shoulders. Her hands were hanging down clasped before her, and her eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable, statue-like despair. This strong arrest of his attention made him cease singing: apparently his voice had entered her inner world without her taking any note of whence it came, for when it suddenly ceased she changed her attitude slightly, and, looking round with a frightened glance, met Deronda's face. It was but a couple of moments, but that seemed a long while for two people to look straight at each other. Her look was something like that of a fawn or other gentle animal before it turns to run away: no blush, no special alarm, but only some timidity which yet could not hinder her from a long look before she turned. In fact, it seemed to Deronda that she was only half conscious of her surroundings: was she hungry, or was there some other cause of bewilderment? He felt an outleap of interest and compassion toward her; but the next instant she had turned and walked away to a neighboring bench under a tree. He had no right to linger and watch her: poorly-dressed, melancholy women are common sights; it was only the delicate beauty, picturesque lines and color of the image that was exceptional, and these conditions made it more markedly impossible that he should obtrude his interest upon her. He began to row away and was soon far up the river; but no other thoughts were busy enough quite to expel that pale image of unhappy girlhood. He fell again and again to speculating on the probable romance that lay behind that loneliness and look of desolation; then to smile at his own share in the prejudice that interesting faces must have interesting adventures; then to justify himself for feeling that sorrow was the more tragic when it befell delicate, childlike beauty. "I should not have forgotten the look of misery if she had been ugly and vulgar," he said to himself. But there was no denying that the attractiveness of the image made it likelier to last. It was clear to him as an onyx cameo; the brown-black drapery, the white face with small, small features and dark, long-lashed eyes. His mind glanced over the girl-tragedies that are going on in the world, hidden, unheeded, as if they were but tragedies of the copse or hedgerow, where the helpless drag wounded wings forsakenly, and streak the shadowed moss with the red moment-hand of their own death. Deronda of late, in his solitary excursions, had been occupied chiefly with uncertainties about his own course; but those uncertainties, being much at their leisure, were wont to have such wide-sweeping connections with all life and history that the new image of helpless sorrow easily blent itself with what seemed to him the strong array of reasons why he should shrink from getting into that routine of the world which makes men apologize for all its wrong-doing, and take opinions as mere professional equipment--why he should not draw strongly at any thread in the hopelessly-entangled scheme of things. He used his oars little, satisfied to go with the tide and be taken back by it. It was his habit to indulge himself in that solemn passivity which easily comes with the lengthening shadows and mellow light, when thinking and desiring melt together imperceptibly, and what in other hours may have seemed argument takes the quality of passionate vision. By the time he had come back again with the tide past Richmond Bridge the sun was near setting: and the approach of his favorite hour--with its deepening stillness and darkening masses of tree and building between the double glow of the sky and the river--disposed him to linger as if they had been an unfinished strain of music. He looked out for a perfectly solitary spot where he could lodge his boat against the bank, and, throwing himself on his back with his head propped on the cushions, could watch out the light of sunset and the opening of that bead-roll which some oriental poet describes as God's call to the little stars, who each answer, "Here am I." He chose a spot in the bend of the river just opposite Kew Gardens, where he had a great breadth of water before him reflecting the glory of the sky, while he himself was in shadow. He lay with his hands behind his head, propped on a level with the boat's edge, so that he could see all round him, but could not be seen by any one at a few yards' distance; and for a long while he never turned his eyes from the view right in front of him. He was forgetting everything else in a half-speculative, half-involuntary identification of himself with the objects he was looking at, thinking how far it might be possible habitually to shift his centre till his own personality would be no less outside him than the landscape--when the sense of something moving on the bank opposite him where it was bordered by a line of willow bushes, made him turn his glance thitherward. In the first moment he had a darting presentiment about the moving figure; and now he could see the small face with the strange dying sunlight upon it. He feared to frighten her by a sudden movement, and watched her with motionless attention. She looked round, but seemed only to gather security from the apparent solitude, hid her hat among the willows, and immediately took off her woolen cloak. Presently she seated herself and deliberately dipped the cloak in the water, holding it there a little while, then taking it out with effort, rising from her seat as she did so. By this time Deronda felt sure that she meant to wrap the wet cloak round her as a drowning shroud; there was no longer time to hesitate about frightening her. He rose and seized his oar to ply across; happily her position lay a little below him. The poor thing, overcome with terror at this sign of discovery from the opposite bank, sank down on the brink again, holding her cloak half out of the water. She crouched and covered her face as if she kept a faint hope that she had not been seen, and that the boatman was accidentally coming toward her. But soon he was within brief space of her, steadying his boat against the bank, and speaking, but very gently, "Don't be afraid. You are unhappy. Pray, trust me. Tell me what I can do to help you." She raised her head and looked up at him. His face now was toward the light, and she knew it again. But she did not speak for a few moments which were a renewal of their former gaze at each other. At last she said in a low sweet voice, with an accent so distinct that it suggested foreignness and yet was not foreign, "I saw you before," and then added dreamily, after a like pause, "nella miseria." Deronda, not understanding the connection of her thoughts, supposed that her mind was weakened by distress and hunger. "It was you, singing?" she went on, hesitatingly--"Nessun maggior dolore." The mere words themselves uttered in her sweet undertones seemed to give the melody to Deronda's ear. "Ah, yes," he said, understanding now, "I am often singing them. But I fear you will injure yourself staying here. Pray let me take you in my boat to some place of safety. And that wet cloak--let me take it." He would not attempt to take it without her leave, dreading lest he should scare her. Even at his words, he fancied that she shrank and clutched the cloak more tenaciously. But her eyes were fixed on him with a question in them as she said, "You look good. Perhaps it is God's command." "Do trust me. Let me help you. I will die before I will let any harm come to you." She rose from her sitting posture, first dragging the saturated cloak and then letting it fall on the ground--it was too heavy for her tired arms. Her little woman's figure as she laid her delicate chilled hands together one over the other against her waist, and went a step backward while she leaned her head forward as if not to lose sight of his face, was unspeakably touching. "Great God!" the words escaped Deronda in a tone so low and solemn that they seemed like a prayer become unconsciously vocal. The agitating impression this forsaken girl was making on him stirred a fibre that lay close to his deepest interest in the fates of women--"perhaps my mother was like this one." The old thought had come now with a new impetus of mingled feeling, and urged that exclamation in which both East and West have for ages concentrated their awe in the presence of inexorable calamity. The low-toned words seemed to have some reassurance in them for the hearer: she stepped forward close to the boat's side, and Deronda put out his hand, hoping now that she would let him help her in. She had already put her tiny hand into his which closed around it, when some new thought struck her, and drawing back she said, "I have nowhere to go--nobody belonging to me in all this land." "I will take you to a lady who has daughters," said Deronda, immediately. He felt a sort of relief in gathering that the wretched home and cruel friends he imagined her to be fleeing from were not in the near background. Still she hesitated, and said more timidly than ever, "Do you belong to the theatre?" "No; I have nothing to do with the theatre," said Deronda, in a decided tone. Then beseechingly, "I will put you in perfect safety at once; with a lady, a good woman; I am sure she will be kind. Let us lose no time: you will make yourself ill. Life may still become sweet to you. There are good people--there are good women who will take care of you." She drew backward no more, but stepped in easily, as if she were used to such action, and sat down on the cushions. "You had a covering for your head," said Deronda. "My hat?" (She lifted up her hands to her head.) "It is quite hidden in the bush." "I will find it," said Deronda, putting out his hand deprecatingly as she attempted to rise. "The boat is fixed." He jumped out, found the hat, and lifted up the saturated cloak, wringing it and throwing it into the bottom of the boat. "We must carry the cloak away, to prevent any one who may have noticed you from thinking you have been drowned," he said, cheerfully, as he got in again and presented the old hat to her. "I wish I had any other garment than my coat to offer you. But shall you mind throwing it over your shoulders while we are on the water? It is quite an ordinary thing to do, when people return late and are not enough provided with wraps." He held out the coat toward her with a smile, and there came a faint melancholy smile in answer, as she took it and put it on very cleverly. "I have some biscuits--should you like them?" said Deronda. "No; I cannot eat. I had still some money left to buy bread." He began to ply his oar without further remark, and they went along swiftly for many minutes without speaking. She did not look at him, but was watching the oar, leaning forward in an attitude of repose, as if she were beginning to feel the comfort of returning warmth and the prospect of life instead of death. The twilight was deepening; the red flush was all gone and the little stars were giving their answer one after another. The moon was rising, but was still entangled among the trees and buildings. The light was not such that he could distinctly discern the expression of her features or her glance, but they were distinctly before him nevertheless--features and a glance which seemed to have given a fuller meaning for him to the human face. Among his anxieties one was dominant: his first impression about her, that her mind might be disordered, had not been quite dissipated: the project of suicide was unmistakable, and given a deeper color to every other suspicious sign. He longed to begin a conversation, but abstained, wishing to encourage the confidence that might induce her to speak first. At last she did speak. "I like to listen to the oar." "So do I." "If you had not come, I should have been dead now." "I cannot bear you to speak of that. I hope you will never be sorry that I came." "I cannot see how I shall be glad to live. The _maggior dolore_ and the _miseria_ have lasted longer than the _tempo felice_." She paused and then went on dreamily,--"_Dolore--miseria_--I think those words are alive." Deronda was mute: to question her seemed an unwarrantable freedom; he shrank from appearing to claim the authority of a benefactor, or to treat her with the less reverence because she was in distress. She went on musingly, "I thought it was not wicked. Death and life are one before the Eternal. I know our fathers slew their children and then slew themselves, to keep their souls pure. I meant it so. But now I am commanded to live. I cannot see how I shall live." "You will find friends. I will find them for you." She shook her head and said mournfully, "Not my mother and brother. I cannot find them." "You are English? You must be--speaking English so perfectly." She did not answer immediately, but looked at Deronda again, straining to see him in the double light. Until now she had been watching the oar. It seemed as if she were half roused, and wondered which part of her impression was dreaming and which waking. Sorrowful isolation had benumbed her sense of reality, and the power of distinguishing outward and inward was continually slipping away from her. Her look was full of wondering timidity such as the forsaken one in the desert might have lifted to the angelic vision before she knew whether his message was in anger or in pity. "You want to know if I am English?" she said at last, while Deronda was reddening nervously under a gaze which he felt more fully than he saw. "I want to know nothing except what you like to tell me," he said, still uneasy in the fear that her mind was wandering. "Perhaps it is not good for you to talk." "Yes, I will tell you. I am English-born. But I am a Jewess." Deronda was silent, inwardly wondering that he had not said this to himself before, though any one who had seen delicate-faced Spanish girls might simply have guessed her to be Spanish. "Do you despise me for it?" she said presently in low tones, which had a sadness that pierced like a cry from a small dumb creature in fear. "Why should I?" said Deronda. "I am not so foolish." "I know many Jews are bad." "So are many Christians. But I should not think it fair for you to despise me because of that." "My mother and brother were good. But I shall never find them. I am come a long way--from abroad. I ran away; but I cannot tell you--I cannot speak of it. I thought I might find my mother again--God would guide me. But then I despaired. This morning when the light came, I felt as if one word kept sounding within me--Never! never! But now--I begin--to think--" her words were broken by rising sobs--"I am commanded to live--perhaps we are going to her." With an outburst of weeping she buried her head on her knees. He hoped that this passionate weeping might relieve her excitement. Meanwhile he was inwardly picturing in much embarrassment how he should present himself with her in Park Lane--the course which he had at first unreflectingly determined on. No one kinder and more gentle than Lady Mallinger; but it was hardly probable that she would be at home; and he had a shuddering sense of a lackey staring at this delicate, sorrowful image of womanhood--of glaring lights and fine staircases, and perhaps chilling suspicious manners from lady's maid and housekeeper, that might scare the mind already in a state of dangerous susceptibility. But to take her to any other shelter than a home already known to him was not to be contemplated: he was full of fears about the issue of the adventure which had brought on him a responsibility all the heavier for the strong and agitating impression this childlike creature had made on him. But another resource came to mind: he could venture to take her to Mrs. Meyrick's--to the small house at Chelsea--where he had been often enough since his return from abroad to feel sure that he could appeal there to generous hearts, which had a romantic readiness to believe in innocent need and to help it. Hans Meyrick was safe away in Italy, and Deronda felt the comfort of presenting himself with his charge at a house where he would be met by a motherly figure of quakerish neatness, and three girls who hardly knew of any evil closer to them than what lay in history-books, and dramas, and would at once associate a lovely Jewess with Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_, besides thinking that everything they did at Deronda's request would be done for their idol, Hans. The vision of the Chelsea home once raised, Deronda no longer hesitated. The rumbling thither in the cab after the stillness of the water seemed long. Happily his charge had been quiet since her fit of weeping, and submitted like a tired child. When they were in the cab, she laid down her hat and tried to rest her head, but the jolting movement would not let it rest. Still she dozed, and her sweet head hung helpless, first on one side, then on the other. "They are too good to have any fear about taking her in," thought Deronda. Her person, her voice, her exquisite utterance, were one strong appeal to belief and tenderness. Yet what had been the history which had brought her to this desolation? He was going on a strange errand--to ask shelter for this waif. Then there occurred to him the beautiful story Plutarch somewhere tells of the Delphic women: how when the Maenads, outworn with their torch-lit wanderings, lay down to sleep in the market-place, the matrons came and stood silently round them to keep guard over their slumbers; then, when they waked, ministered to them tenderly and saw them safely to their own borders. He could trust the women he was going to for having hearts as good. Deronda felt himself growing older this evening and entering on a new phase in finding a life to which his own had come--perhaps as a rescue; but how to make sure that snatching from death was rescue? The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.

On a fine evening near the end of July, Deronda was rowing on the Thames. It was over a year since he had come back to England, with the understanding that his education was finished, and that he was to take his place in English society; and he had begun to read law, though only in deference to Sir Hugo's wish, and to fence off idleness. His old love of boating had revived; he had a boat at Putney, and it was his chief holiday to row till past sunset and come in with the stars. Rowing in his dark-blue shirt and skull-cap, his curls closely clipped, the bearded man with the lithe, powerful frame bore only traces of the seraphic boy. Still, even one who had never seen him since his boyhood might have recognised him, due perhaps to the gaze which Gwendolen called "dreadful," though it had really a very mild sort of scrutiny. With his pale-brown skin and calmly penetrating eyes, he was seraphic no longer: the firm gravity of his face was thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in human dignity. Deronda objected very strongly to the notion that his appearance might draw attention. His own face in the glass was associated with thoughts of some one whom he must be like - one about whom he continually wondered, and never dared to ask. Near Kew Bridge, between six and seven o'clock, the river was no solitude. People were sauntering on the towing-path, and here and there a boat was plying. Deronda had been rowing fast, when, becoming aware of an approaching barge, he guided his boat aside, and paused near the river-bank. He was unconsciously continuing the low-toned chant which he had been singing all the way up the river - the gondolier's song in Rossini's "Otello":- "Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria." "There is no greater sorrow Than to be reminded of the happy time In misery." As he rested on his oar, the melodic fall of the "nella miseria" was distinctly audible on the bank. Three or four persons had paused to watch the barge passing the bridge, but probably it was only to one ear that the low singing came with any significance. Deronda saw a few yards away a figure which might have been an impersonation of the misery in his song: a girl hardly more than eighteen, of small, slim figure, with a most delicate little face, her dark curls pushed behind her ears under a large black hat, a long woollen cloak over her shoulders. Her eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable, statue-like despair. This strong arrest of his attention made him cease singing: at which she changed her attitude, and, looking round with a frightened glance, met Deronda's face. It was but a couple of moments, but that seemed a long while for two people to look straight at each other. Her look was something like a fawn's before it turns to run away: no blush, no alarm, but only some timidity. In fact, Deronda thought that she was only half conscious of her surroundings: was she hungry, or was there some other cause? He felt an outleap of interest and compassion toward her; but the next instant she had walked away to a bench under a tree. He had no right to linger and watch her: poorly-dressed, melancholy women are common sights; it was only the delicate beauty of the image that was exceptional. He began to row away and was soon far up the river; but he could not expel that pale image of unhappy girlhood. He began speculating on the tale behind her look of desolation; then smiled at his idea that interesting faces must have interesting adventures. "I should not have forgotten the look of misery even if she had been ugly and vulgar," he told himself. But there was no denying that the attractiveness of the image made it likelier to last. It was as clear to him as an onyx cameo; the brown-black drapery, the white face with small features and dark, long-lashed eyes. His mind glanced over the girl-tragedies that are going on in the world, hidden, unheeded. He used his oars little, satisfied to go with the tide and be taken back by it. It was his habit to indulge himself in that solemn passivity which easily comes with the lengthening shadows and mellow light. By the time he had come back again with the tide past Richmond Bridge the sun was near setting: and the approach of his favourite hour - with its deepening stillness and darkening masses of tree between the double glow of the sky and the river - disposed him to linger. He looked for a solitary spot where he could lodge his boat against the bank to watch the sunset. He chose a place in the bend of the river just opposite Kew Gardens, where he had a great breadth of water before him reflecting the glory of the sky, while he himself was in shadow. Lying with his hands behind his head, he could see all round him, but could not be seen by anyone at a few yards' distance. He was forgetting everything but the view in front of him, when the sense of something moving on the opposite bank, in the willow bushes, made him glance that way. At once he had a darting presentiment about the moving figure; and now he could see the small face with the dying sunlight upon it. Fearing to frighten her by a sudden movement, he watched her motionlessly. She looked round, and seeming to gather security from the solitude, hid her hat among the willows, and took off her woollen cloak. She seated herself and deliberately dipped the cloak in the water, holding it there, then taking it out with effort, and rising from her seat. By this time Deronda felt sure that she meant to wrap the wet cloak round her as a drowning shroud; there was no longer time to hesitate about frightening her. He rose and plied his oar towards her. The poor thing, overcome with terror at this sign of discovery, sank down again, crouching and covering her face as if she kept a faint hope that she had not been seen. But soon he was close to her, steadying his boat against the bank, and speaking very gently- "Don't be afraid. You are unhappy. Pray, trust me. Tell me what I can do to help you." She raised her head and looked at him. But she did not speak for a few moments, while they renewed their former gaze at each other. At last she said in a low sweet voice, with an accent that suggested foreignness and yet was not foreign, "I saw you before," and then added dreamily, "nella miseria. It was you, singing? Nessun maggior dolore." The mere words uttered in her sweet undertones seemed to give the melody to Deronda's ear. "Yes," he said, "I often sing that. But I fear you will injure yourself staying here. Pray let me carry you in my boat to some place of safety. And that wet cloak - let me take it." He would not take it without her leave. He fancied that she shrank and clutched the cloak tenaciously. But her eyes were fixed on him questioningly: she said, "You look good. Perhaps it is God's command." "Do trust me. Let me help you. I will die before I will let any harm come to you." She rose from her sitting posture, first dragging the saturated cloak and then letting it fall on the ground - it was too heavy for her tired arms. Her little woman's figure as she laid her delicate chilled hands together one over the other against her waist, was unspeakably touching. "Great God!" the words escaped Deronda like an unconscious prayer. The agitating impression this forsaken girl was making on him stirred his deepest interest in the fates of women- "perhaps my mother was like this one," he thought. His low-toned words seemed to reassure the hearer: she stepped close to the boat's side, and Deronda held out his hand, hoping she would let him help her in. She had already put her tiny hand into his when some new thought struck her, and drawing back she said- "I have nowhere to go - nobody belonging to me in all this land." "I will take you to a lady who has daughters," said Deronda immediately. He felt a sort of relief in gathering that the wretched home and cruel friends he imagined her to be fleeing from were not near. Still she hesitated, and said more timidly- "Do you belong to the theatre?" "No; I have nothing to do with the theatre," said Deronda decidedly. "I will take you to perfect safety with a good woman; I am sure she will be kind. Let us lose no time: you will make yourself ill. Life may still become sweet to you. There are good people who will take care of you." She stepped in and sat down on the cushions. "You had a hat," said Deronda. "I will find it." He jumped out, found the hat, and lifted up the saturated cloak, wringing it and throwing it into the bottom of the boat. "We must carry the cloak away, to prevent anyone who may have noticed you from thinking you have drowned," he said, cheerfully, as he got in again. "I wish I had any other garment than my coat to offer you. But shall you mind throwing it over your shoulders while we are on the water? It is quite an ordinary thing to do, when people return late and are chilly." He held out the coat with a smile, and there came a faint melancholy smile in answer, as she put it on. "I have some biscuits - should you like them?" said Deronda. "No; I cannot eat. I had still some money left to buy bread." He began to ply his oar without further remark, and they went along swiftly for many minutes without speaking. She was watching the oar, leaning forward in an attitude of repose, as if she were beginning to feel the comfort of returning warmth and the prospect of life instead of death. The twilight was deepening; the red flush was gone and the little stars were giving their answer one after another. The moon was rising, but was still entangled among the trees and buildings. The light was not such that he could distinctly discern her features, but they were distinctly before him nevertheless. Among his anxieties one was dominant: his first impression that her mind might be disordered, had not been quite dissipated: the project of suicide was unmistakable. He longed to begin a conversation, but hoped she would speak first. At last she did speak. "I like to listen to the oar." "So do I." "If you had not come, I should have been dead now." "I cannot bear you to speak of that. I hope you will never be sorry that I came." "I cannot see how I shall be glad to live. The maggior dolore and the miseria have lasted longer than the tempo felice." Deronda was mute: to question her seemed an unwarrantable freedom; he shrank from appearing to treat her with less respect because she was in distress. She went on musingly- "I thought it was not wicked. Death and life are one before the Eternal. I know our fathers slew their children and then slew themselves, to keep their souls pure. But now I am commanded to live. I cannot see how I shall live." "You will find friends. I will find them for you." She shook her head and said mournfully, "Not my mother and brother. I cannot find them." "You are English? You speak English perfectly." She did not answer immediately, but looked at Deronda again, with wondering timidity, as if she were unsure whether she was dreaming or awake. "You want to know if I am English?" she said at last. "I want to know nothing except what you like to tell me," he said, still uneasy in the fear that her mind was wandering. "Perhaps it is not good for you to talk." "I am English-born. But I am a Jewess." Deronda was silent, thinking that he might have guessed this, although he could equally have guessed her to be Spanish. "Do you despise me for it?" she said presently in low, sad tones. "Why should I? I am not so foolish." "I know many Jews are bad." "So are many Christians. But I should not think it fair for you to despise me because of that." "My mother and brother were good. But I shall never find them. I am come a long way - from abroad. I ran away; but I cannot speak of it. I thought I might find my mother again - God would guide me. But then I despaired. This morning I felt as if one word kept sounding within me - Never! never! But now - I begin - to think-" her words were broken by rising sobs - "I am commanded to live - perhaps we are going to her." With an outburst of weeping she buried her head on her knees. He hoped that this passionate weeping might relieve her agitation. Meanwhile he was inwardly picturing in much embarrassment how he should present himself with her in Park Lane. No one kinder and more gentle than Lady Mallinger; but she might not be at home; and he had a shuddering sense of a lackey staring at this delicate, sorrowful girl, and perhaps chilling suspicion from lady's maid and housekeeper. But to take her to any other shelter than a home already known to him was not to be contemplated. Another resource came to mind: he could take her to Mrs. Meyrick's - to the small house at Chelsea, where he felt sure that he could appeal to generous hearts. Hans Meyrick was safe away in Italy, and Deronda felt the comfort of presenting himself with his charge at a house where he would be met by a motherly figure of quakerish neatness, and three girls who hardly knew of any evil beyond what lay in history-books, and would at once associate a lovely Jewess with Rebecca in "Ivanhoe." Deronda no longer hesitated. The rumbling thither in the cab after the stillness of the water seemed long. His charge had been quiet since her fit of weeping, and submitted like a tired child. In the cab, she dozed, her sweet head hanging helpless, first on one side, then the other. "They are too good to have any fear about taking her in," thought Deronda. Yet what had brought her to this desolation? He was going on a strange errand, to ask shelter for this waif. Deronda felt himself growing older this evening, and entering on a new phase in finding a life to which his own had come: perhaps as rescue; but how to make sure of that? The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 17

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 Diplow 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 than 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 loth 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 autithetic 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, to say Kaddish in memory of her. 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 piet 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 Hans'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.

Deronda, on his return to town, assured Sir Hugo of his having lodged in Grandcourt's mind an understanding that he could get fifty thousand pounds by giving up Diplow; and that Grandcourt appeared inclined to keep up friendly communications. "And what did you think of the future bride?" 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 Diplow she seemed much more womanly and attractive - less hard and self-possessed." "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." What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke? 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 joking. He would be on his guard in future; for example, in his behaviour 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 interest. Mrs. Meyrick had sent Deronda a report of Mirah's well-being. "We are getting fonder of her every day," she had written. "At breakfast-time we all look forward to seeing her come in; and we 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 singing from her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for she is anxious to work, like my girls. Mab says our life has become like a fairy tale, and she is afraid that Mirah will turn into a nightingale again and fly away. Her voice is just perfect: not loud and strong, but searching and melting." But Mrs. Meyrick did not tell him how Amy and Mab had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue, and found the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes. They kept silence out of delicacy to Mirah, with whom her religion was a tender subject; but after a while Amy 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 feelings I would not part with for anything else in the world." After this, any criticism would have seemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah's religion was of one fibre with her affections. "She says she is a very bad Jewess, and does not know half 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." "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!" Not only the Meyricks, whose 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 made aware by Mirah's coming that they knew hardly anything about modern Judaism or Jewish history. Deronda, like his neighbours, 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 fact that Judaism was something still central in human lives; and while travelling with Sir Hugo he began to look for synagogues and books about the Jews. It was on this journey that he first entered a Jewish synagogue, at Frankfort, where his group rested one Friday. In exploring the Judengasse, the Jewish ghetto, 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 of their race, stirred that fibre of historic sympathy which had grown within him. His early-wakened sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy. The indefiniteness of his sentiments threatened to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any side, he began to see things as they probably appeared to others; so that any strong partisanship, unless it were against oppression, seemed insincere to him. He tended to fall into that reflective analysis which neutralizes sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices only mildly, thinking of them as part of human nature, which he should trace with understanding and pity. He was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections, intensely conservative, loath to part with ancient forms which, for him, were alive with memory and sentiment. He suspected himself of loving too well the losing causes of the world. And yet his fear of falling into an unreasoning narrow hatred constrained him: he apologized for the heirs of privilege; he shrank with dislike from the loser's bitterness. His too diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralyzing the force of his indignation against wrong; and he had become so keenly aware of this that he longed for some event, or inward light, to urge him into action, and focus his energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge unless it spoke to 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 know everything about the scent of violets while being unable to detect it oneself. But how and whence was the needed event to come? - the influence that would make him what he longed to be - an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without a home to render fellowship real? It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it. He found some of the fault in the way he had been brought up, which had laid no special demands on him and had given him no fixed relationship except a doubtful one; but he also knew that he had fallen into a meditative numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that energetic life which he would have proclaimed to be the best of all life, and the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotion strong. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon - first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do holding fast to the hole. This was the under-current in Deronda's mind while he was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite conversation. Meanwhile he had not set about any function in particular with zeal and steadiness. Under his calm exterior he felt the presence of poetry in everyday events. The Judengasse set him musing on two poetic elements of our historic life: the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions; and their obscure lingering decay, the dust with which they are covered only enhancing their former grandeur and glory. This imaginative stirring, as he left the Judengasse and sauntered 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 time of service at the old orthodox synagogue, he was affectionately directed by a precocious Jewish youth, who then cheated him in charging him for a book. Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf tradesman was conversing with a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag in hand, who shouted at him in Jew-dialect, and who had no sooner disappeared than another dingy man of the same pattern issued from the gloom of the shop and shouted in the same dialect. In fact, Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites just distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the same mixed morals. In his anxiety about Mirah's relatives, he had lately been thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But this evening, conscious that he was falling into an unfair and ridiculous exaggeration, he began to correct his own prejudices. At sunset, he arrived at the Rabbinische Schule, and entered with a good congregation of men. He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man, whose ample white beard and felt hat framed a fine profile which might as easily be Italian as Hebrew. 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. 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 hearing Psalms and Old Testament passages, gave himself up to that strong effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of meaning - like the effect of an Allegri's Miserere or a Palestrina's Magnificat. The most powerful feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which yearns to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and asks Good to enter and abide with us; or else a lifting up of Gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering force from the sense of communion which has lasted through 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 Chazan's 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 shabbiness of the building where a national faith which had penetrated the thinking of half the world was finding a remote echo: all were blended for him as one expression of a tragic, glorious history. He wondered at the strength of his own feeling. The service embodied a passionate regret, which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might have understood as; "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 end of the service and the movement of many indifferent faces 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. He was moving away with the rest, when he felt a hand on his arm, and turning saw the white-bearded face of his neighbour, who said to him in German, "Excuse me, young gentleman - what is your parentage - your mother's family - her maiden name?" Deronda felt resistant, and inclined to shake off the touch on his arm. He said coldly, "I am an Englishman." The questioner looked at him dubiously for an instant, and then 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 reflected 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 a liberty in asking the abrupt question, probably thinking he saw some likeness. The incident, he told himself, was trivial; but it was a reason, however, for his not mentioning the synagogue to the Mallingers. This halt at Frankfort was taken on their way home, and its impressions were kept alive in him by the duty of caring for Mirah's welfare. That question about his parentage, though trivial, 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 tell her and perhaps cast a new net of trouble around her? When he visited the Meyricks at four o'clock, he found Mirah seated with Mrs. Meyrick and Mab by the open piano, with all the glorious company of engravings. The dainty neatness of her hair and dress, and the glow of tranquil happiness in her face, made a contrast to his first vision of her that was delightful to Deronda's eyes. Mirah herself was thinking of it, and 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 think about it," said Mirah, shaking her head with decisive gravity, "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 anyone in the world except my mother. I feel like a lost bird put into a warm nest. 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 plaintively, "Sometimes I am a little afraid that I may meet my father in the street. It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only sorrow." "It is 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 if you were never to meet your mother?" She did not answer immediately. Then she said firmly, "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 would try not to grieve. I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We can never be really parted. 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?" asked Deronda. "I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians just as they did. I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of the Jews about their food and customs, and not liking Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not to like people who have been so good to me. I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to love my best friends. She would be grateful to them." Here Mirah turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her face, said, "Oh, if we ever do meet, I should be so full of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!" "God bless you, child!" said Mrs. Meyrick involuntarily. Looking at Deronda, she said, "It is curious that Mirah, who remembers her mother so well, 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 when she was in her mother's lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up." "He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good," said Mirah, eagerly. "He loved my mother. I remember more of him than that. I remember my mother's voice once calling, 'Ezra!' and then his answering from a distance 'Mother!' 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 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 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 it as work, which she had begun before self-consciousness was born. She immediately rose and went to the piano. Imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, yet showing tiny ringlets which had cunningly found their own way back. Then see the perfect cameo of her profile, cut in a dusky shell; the dark eye, delicate nostrils, the finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck, all the expression of a refinement which was not feebleness. She sang Beethoven's "Per piet non dirmi addio," with a subdued but searching pathos which, like all perfect singing, made one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessed one with the song. Deronda began by looking at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand, wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; but he was ready to meet the look of 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 painful to me that it failed in what it was wanted for. But now I can use it to get my bread. I have really been taught well. And I have two pupils, that Miss Meyrick found for me. They pay me nearly two crowns for their lessons." "I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after Christmas," said Deronda. "You would not mind singing before anyone who wished to hear you?" "Oh no, I want to do something to get money for my mother. And I can not always live on charity; though" - here she glanced at her companions - "it is the sweetest charity in all the world." "I should think you can get rich by teaching," said Deronda, smiling. "But now do sing again to us." She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani and Schubert; and then Mab said entreatingly, "Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn - the Hebrew hymn you remember your mother singing." "I should like very much to hear that," 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 - the rest is childish lisping. Do you know Hebrew? because if you do, it will seem childish nonsense." Deronda shook his head. "It will be quite good Hebrew to me." Mirah crossed her little feet and hands, 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 lisping syllables; her voice held an even sweeter tenderness than in her other songs. "It is very full of meaning," said Deronda. "Even if I had known the words, I don't think it would have had more expression for me. I went to the synagogue at Frankfort, and the service impressed me just as much as if I had followed the words." "Oh, 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. "I understand," said Deronda. "But our religion is chiefly a Hebrew religion; and all religious feelings must have much in common. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his people's religion more than that of another race - and yet" - here he hesitated in his turn - "that is perhaps not always so." "No," said Mirah, sadly. "I have seen that. I have seen them mock." "Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up to," said Deronda apologetically. "But you are not like that," said Mirah. "No, I think not; but I was not brought up as a Jew." "Ah, I am always forgetting," said Mirah, with a disappointed look, and slightly blushing. Mrs Meyrick said- "I think it is weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the contrary. One may honour one's parents, without following their notions exactly. My father was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither Scotch, nor French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I honour 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 changed their religion, and made no difference between themselves and Christians, there would be no Jews to be seen," said Mrs. Meyrick cheerfully. "Oh, please do not say that," said Mirah, the tears gathering. "It is the first unkind thing you ever said. I will never separate myself from my mother's people. I was forced to fly from my father; but if he came back in weakness and want, and needed me, should I say, 'This is not my father'? If he had shame, I must share it. 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." She clasped her hands with a sorrowful passion. "My dear child, you mistake me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed. "God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. Forgive me, come!" "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." Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him, he said, "Hans is to share my chambers when he comes at Christmas." "You have written to him about that?" said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. "How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?" "Yes, I concluded he knew everything from you." "I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a word. However! Thank you a thousand times." Deronda divined something of what was in the mother's mind. He had the same anxiety about Hans: no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her. But he urged himself to caution. "I must exercise control. I shall see Mirah as little as possible," he thought. How could he be Mirah's guardian, 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. Even if Mirah consented to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, her conscience would always feel remorse. Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own work. It was a delight to have rescued this child, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected paths. The creature we help to save, how we watch it and dote on its recovery! "I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as spoil her peace," said Deronda to himself. "It was the rarest fortune that I have friends like the Meyricks to place her with - generous, delicate friends with whom she can be not only safe but happy. There could be no refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my taking the vows, 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. But it was impossible to forbid Hans's coming to London, where he intended to get a studio. To propose that he should defer coming on some ground or other, concealing the real motive of winning time for Mirah's position to become more independent, was impracticable. Deronda tried to believe that both he and Mrs. Meyrick were foolishly troubling themselves about something which would probably not happen, but he did not quite succeed. The position was peculiar, and he could make no further provision against dangers until they came nearer. To discover 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 thought that the consequences might enter deeply into his own life. Mirah would have no idea of loving him. As to the search for Mirah's mother and brother, he put off 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. "At least, I will look about," he thought. "But I will not act till after Christmas." Like many of us, he found the calendar a convenient excuse.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 32

"_Festina lente_--celerity should be contempered with cunctation."--SIR THOMAS BROWNE. Gwendolen, we have seen, passed her time abroad in the new excitement of gambling, and in imagining herself an empress of luck, having brought from her late experience a vague impression that in this confused world it signified nothing what any one did, so that they amused themselves. We have seen, too, that certain persons, mysteriously symbolized as Grapnell & Co., having also thought of reigning in the realm of luck, and being also bent on amusing themselves, no matter how, had brought about a painful change in her family circumstances; whence she had returned home--carrying with her, against her inclination, a necklace which she had pawned and some one else had redeemed. While she was going back to England, Grandcourt was coming to find her; coming, that is, after his own manner--not in haste by express straight from Diplow to Leubronn, where she was understood to be; but so entirely without hurry that he was induced by the presence of some Russian acquaintances to linger at Baden-Baden and make various appointments with them, which, however, his desire to be at Leubronn ultimately caused him to break. Grandcourt's passions were of the intermittent, flickering kind: never flaming out strongly. But a great deal of life goes on without strong passion: myriads of cravats are carefully tied, dinners attended, even speeches made proposing the health of august personages without the zest arising from a strong desire. And a man may make a good appearance in high social positions--may be supposed to know the classics, to have his reserves on science, a strong though repressed opinion on politics, and all the sentiments of the English gentleman, at a small expense of vital energy. Also, he may be obstinate or persistent at the same low rate, and may even show sudden impulses which have a false air of daemonic strength because they seem inexplicable, though perhaps their secret lies merely in the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in--good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle. Grandcourt had not been altogether displeased by Gwendolen's running away from the splendid chance he was holding out to her. The act had some piquancy for him. He liked to think that it was due to resentment of his careless behavior in Cardell Chase, which, when he came to consider it, did appear rather cool. To have brought her so near a tender admission, and then to have walked headlong away from further opportunities of winning the consent which he had made her understand him to be asking for, was enough to provoke a girl of spirit; and to be worth his mastering it was proper that she should have some spirit. Doubtless she meant him to follow her, and it was what he meant too. But for a whole week he took no measures toward starting, and did not even inquire where Miss Harleth was gone. Mr. Lush felt a triumph that was mingled with much distrust; for Grandcourt had said no word to him about her, and looked as neutral as an alligator; there was no telling what might turn up in the slowly-churning chances of his mind. Still, to have put off a decision was to have made room for the waste of Grandcourt's energy. The guests at Diplow felt more curiosity than their host. How was it that nothing more was heard of Miss Harleth? Was it credible that she had refused Mr. Grandcourt? Lady Flora Hollis, a lively middle-aged woman, well endowed with curiosity, felt a sudden interest in making a round of calls with Mrs. Torrington, including the rectory, Offendene, and Quetcham, and thus not only got twice over, but also discussed with the Arrowpoints, the information that Miss Harleth was gone to Leubronn, with some old friends, the Baron and Baroness von Langen; for the immediate agitation and disappointment of Mrs. Davilow and the Gascoignes had resolved itself into a wish that Gwendolen's disappearance should not be interpreted as anything eccentric or needful to be kept secret. The rector's mind, indeed, entertained the possibility that the marriage was only a little deferred, for Mrs. Davilow had not dared to tell him of the bitter determination with which Gwendolen had spoken. And in spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations. Amaryllis fleeing desired that her hiding-place should be known; and that love will find out the way "over the mountain and over the wave" may be said without hyperbole in this age of steam. Gwendolen, he conceived, was an Amaryllis of excellent sense but coquettish daring; the question was whether she had dared too much. Lady Flora, coming back charged with news about Miss Harleth, saw no good reason why she should not try whether she could electrify Mr. Grandcourt by mentioning it to him at the table; and in doing so shot a few hints of a notion having got abroad that he was a disappointed adorer. Grandcourt heard with quietude, but with attention; and the next day he ordered Lush to bring about a decent reason for breaking up the party at Diplow by the end of another week, as he meant to go yachting to the Baltic or somewhere--it being impossible to stay at Diplow as if he were a prisoner on parole, with a set of people whom he had never wanted. Lush needed no clearer announcement that Grandcourt was going to Leubronn; but he might go after the manner of a creeping billiard-ball and stick on the way. What Mr. Lush intended was to make himself indispensable so that he might go too, and he succeeded; Gwendolen's repulsion for him being a fact that only amused his patron, and made him none the less willing to have Lush always at hand. This was how it happened that Grandcourt arrived at the _Czarina_ on the fifth day after Gwendolen had left Leubronn, and found there his uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger, with his family, including Deronda. It is not necessarily a pleasure either to the reigning power or the heir presumptive when their separate affairs--a touch of gout, say, in the one, and a touch of willfulness in the other--happen to bring them to the same spot. Sir Hugo was an easy-tempered man, tolerant both of differences and defects; but a point of view different from his own concerning the settlement of the family estates fretted him rather more than if it had concerned Church discipline or the ballot, and faults were the less venial for belonging to a person whose existence was inconvenient to him. In no case could Grandcourt have been a nephew after his own heart; but as the presumptive heir to the Mallinger estates he was the sign and embodiment of a chief grievance in the baronet's life--the want of a son to inherit the lands, in no portion of which had he himself more than a life-interest. For in the ill-advised settlement which his father, Sir Francis, had chosen to make by will, even Diplow with its modicum of land had been left under the same conditions as the ancient and wide inheritance of the two Toppings--Diplow, where Sir Hugo had lived and hunted through many a season in his younger years, and where his wife and daughters ought to have been able to retire after his death. This grievance had naturally gathered emphasis as the years advanced, and Lady Mallinger, after having had three daughters in quick succession, had remained for eight years till now that she was over forty without producing so much as another girl; while Sir Hugo, almost twenty years older, was at a time of life when, notwithstanding the fashionable retardation of most things from dinners to marriages, a man's hopefulness is apt to show signs of wear, until restored by second childhood. In fact, he had begun to despair of a son, and this confirmation of Grandcourt's interest in the estates certainly tended to make his image and presence the more unwelcome; but, on the other hand, it carried circumstances which disposed Sir Hugo to take care that the relation between them should be kept as friendly as possible. It led him to dwell on a plan which had grown up side by side with his disappointment of an heir; namely, to try and secure Diplow as a future residence for Lady Mallinger and her daughters, and keep this pretty bit of the family inheritance for his own offspring in spite of that disappointment. Such knowledge as he had of his nephew's disposition and affairs encouraged the belief that Grandcourt might consent to a transaction by which he would get a good sum of ready money, as an equivalent for his prospective interest in the domain of Diplow and the moderate amount of land attached to it. If, after all, the unhoped-for son should be born, the money would have been thrown away, and Grandcourt would have been paid for giving up interests that had turned out good for nothing; but Sir Hugo set down this risk as _nil_, and of late years he had husbanded his fortune so well by the working of mines and the sale of leases that he was prepared for an outlay. Here was an object that made him careful to avoid any quarrel with Grandcourt. Some years before, when he was making improvements at the Abbey, and needed Grandcourt's concurrence in his felling an obstructive mass of timber on the demesne, he had congratulated himself on finding that there was no active spite against him in his nephew's peculiar mind; and nothing had since occurred to make them hate each other more than was compatible with perfect politeness, or with any accommodation that could be strictly mutual. Grandcourt, on his side, thought his uncle a superfluity and a bore, and felt that the list of things in general would be improved whenever Sir Hugo came to be expunged. But he had been made aware through Lush, always a useful medium, of the baronet's inclinations concerning Diplow, and he was gratified to have the alternative of the money in his mind: even if he had not thought it in the least likely that he would choose to accept it, his sense of power would have been flattered by his being able to refuse what Sir Hugo desired. The hinted transaction had told for something among the motives which had made him ask for a year's tenancy of Diplow, which it had rather annoyed Sir Hugo to grant, because the excellent hunting in the neighborhood might decide Grandcourt not to part with his chance of future possession;--a man who has two places, in one of which the hunting is less good, naturally desiring a third where it is better. Also, Lush had thrown out to Sir Hugo the probability that Grandcourt would woo and win Miss Arrowpoint, and in that case ready money might be less of a temptation to him. Hence, on this unexpected meeting at Leubronn, the baronet felt much curiosity to know how things had been going on at Diplow, was bent on being as civil as possible to his nephew, and looked forward to some private chat with Lush. Between Deronda and Grandcourt there was a more faintly-marked but peculiar relation, depending on circumstances which have yet to be made known. But on no side was there any sign of suppressed chagrin on the first meeting at the _table d'hte_, an hour after Grandcourt's arrival; and when the quartette of gentlemen afterward met on the terrace, without Lady Mallinger, they moved off together to saunter through the rooms, Sir Hugo saying as they entered the large _saal_, "Did you play much at Baden, Grandcourt?" "No; I looked on and betted a little with some Russians there." "Had you luck?" "What did I win, Lush?" "You brought away about two hundred," said Lush. "You are not here for the sake of the play, then?" said Sir Hugo. "No; I don't care about play now. It's a confounded strain," said Grandcourt, whose diamond ring and demeanor, as he moved along playing slightly with his whisker, were being a good deal stared at by rouged foreigners interested in a new milord. "The fact is, somebody should invent a mill to do amusements for you, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugo, "as the Tartars get their praying done. But I agree with you; I never cared for play. It's monotonous--knits the brain up into meshes. And it knocks me up to watch it now. I suppose one gets poisoned with the bad air. I never stay here more than ten minutes. But where's your gambling beauty, Deronda? Have you seen her lately?" "She's gone," said Deronda, curtly. "An uncommonly fine girl, a perfect Diana," said Sir Hugo, turning to Grandcourt again. "Really worth a little straining to look at her. I saw her winning, and she took it as coolly as if she had known it all beforehand. The same day Deronda happened to see her losing like wildfire, and she bore it with immense pluck. I suppose she was cleaned out, or was wise enough to stop in time. How do you know she's gone?" "Oh, by the Visitor-list,..." said Deronda, with a scarcely perceptible shrug. "Vandernoodt told me her name was Harleth, and she was with the Baron and Baroness von Langen. I saw by the list that Miss Harleth was no longer there." This held no further information for Lush than that Gwendolen had been gambling. He had already looked at the list, and ascertained that Gwendolen had gone, but he had no intention of thrusting this knowledge on Grandcourt before he asked for it; and he had not asked, finding it enough to believe that the object of search would turn up somewhere or other. But now Grandcourt had heard what was rather piquant, and not a word about Miss Harleth had been missed by him. After a moment's pause he said to Deronda, "Do you know those people--the Langens?" "I have talked with them a little since Miss Harleth went away. I knew nothing of them before." "Where is she gone--do you know?" "She is gone home," said Deronda, coldly, as if he wished to say no more. But then, from a fresh impulse, he turned to look markedly at Grandcourt, and added, "But it is possible you know her. Her home is not far from Diplow: Offendene, near Winchester." Deronda, turning to look straight at Grandcourt, who was on his left hand, might have been a subject for those old painters who liked contrasts of temperament. There was a calm intensity of life and richness of tint in his face that on a sudden gaze from him was rather startling, and often made him seem to have spoken, so that servants and officials asked him automatically, "What did you say, sir?" when he had been quite silent. Grandcourt himself felt an irritation, which he did not show except by a slight movement of the eyelids, at Deronda's turning round on him when he was not asked to do more than speak. But he answered, with his usual drawl, "Yes, I know her," and paused with his shoulder toward Deronda, to look at the gambling. "What of her, eh?" asked Sir Hugo of Lush, as the three moved on a little way. "She must be a new-comer at Offendene. Old Blenny lived there after the dowager died." "A little too much of her," said Lush, in a low, significant tone; not sorry to let Sir Hugo know the state of affairs. "Why? how?" said the baronet. They all moved out of the _salon_ into an airy promenade. "He has been on the brink of marrying her," Lush went on. "But I hope it's off now. She's a niece of the clergyman--Gascoigne--at Pennicote. Her mother is a widow with a brood of daughters. This girl will have nothing, and is as dangerous as gunpowder. It would be a foolish marriage. But she has taken a freak against him, for she ran off here without notice, when he had agreed to call the next day. The fact is, he's here after her; but he was in no great hurry, and between his caprice and hers they are likely enough not to get together again. But of course he has lost his chance with the heiress." Grandcourt joining them said, "What a beastly den this is!--a worse hole than Baden. I shall go back to the hotel." When Sir Hugo and Deronda were alone, the baronet began, "Rather a pretty story. That girl has something in her. She must be worth running after--has _de l'imprvu_. I think her appearance on the scene has bettered my chance of getting Diplow, whether the marriage comes off or not." "I should hope a marriage like that would not come off," said Deronda, in a tone of disgust. "What! are you a little touched with the sublime lash?" said Sir Hugo, putting up his glasses to help his short sight in looking at his companion. "Are you inclined to run after her?" "On the contrary," said Deronda, "I should rather be inclined to run away from her." "Why, you would easily cut out Grandcourt. A girl with her spirit would think you the finer match of the two," said Sir Hugo, who often tried Deronda's patience by finding a joke in impossible advice. (A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.) "I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match," said Deronda, coldly. "The best horse will win in spite of pedigree, my boy. You remember Napoleon's _mot--Je suis un anctre_" said Sir Hugo, who habitually undervalued birth, as men after dining well often agree that the good of life is distributed with wonderful equality. "I am not sure that I want to be an ancestor," said Deronda. "It doesn't seem to me the rarest sort of origination." "You won't run after the pretty gambler, then?" said Sir Hugo, putting down his glasses. "Decidedly not." This answer was perfectly truthful; nevertheless it had passed through Deronda's mind that under other circumstances he should have given way to the interest this girl had raised in him, and tried to know more of her. But his history had given him a stronger bias in another direction. He felt himself in no sense free.

Gwendolen, we have seen, passed her time abroad in the new excitement of gambling, and in imagining herself an empress of luck, having brought from her late experience an impression that in this confused world nothing mattered but to enjoy oneself. We have seen, too, that Grapnell & Co, being also bent on amusing themselves, no matter how, had brought about a painful change in her family circumstances; whence she had returned home - carrying with her a necklace which she had pawned and someone else had redeemed. While she was going back to England, Grandcourt was coming to find her at Leubronn; coming so entirely without hurry that he was induced to linger at Baden-Baden. Grandcourt's passions were of the intermittent, flickering kind, never flaming out strongly. But a great deal of life goes on without strong passion, and a man may be obstinate at the same low rate, and even show sudden impulses which have an air of daemonic strength because they seem inexplicable. Grandcourt had not been altogether displeased by Gwendolen's running away. The act had some piquancy for him. He liked to think that it was due to resentment of his cool and careless behaviour in Cardell Chase. To have brought her so near a tender admission, and then to have walked away, was enough to provoke a girl of spirit; and to be worth his mastering it was proper that she should have some spirit. Doubtless she meant him to follow her, and it was what he meant too. But for a whole week he took no measures toward starting, and did not even inquire where Miss Harleth was gone. Mr. Lush felt a triumph mingled with distrust; for Grandcourt said no word to him about her, and looked as neutral as an alligator; there was no telling what might turn up in the slowly-churning chances of his mind. The guests at Diplow were curious. How was it that nothing more was heard of Miss Harleth? Was it credible that she had refused Mr. Grandcourt? Lady Flora Hollis, a lively middle-aged woman, learnt that Miss Harleth was gone to Leubronn with some old friends, and mentioned this to Mr. Grandcourt. The next day Grandcourt ordered Lush to break up the party at Diplow by the end of another week, as he meant to go yachting to the Baltic or somewhere. Lush needed no clearer announcement that Grandcourt was going to Leubronn; but he might go in the manner of a creeping billiard-ball, and stick on the way. Mr. Lush intended to make himself indispensable in order to go too, and he succeeded; Gwendolen's repulsion for him being a fact that merely amused his patron, and made him none the less willing to have Lush always at hand. This was how it happened that Grandcourt arrived at the Czarina Hotel on the fifth day after Gwendolen had left Leubronn, and found there his uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger, with his family, including Deronda. The meeting was not necessarily a pleasure to either. Sir Hugo was an easy-tempered, tolerant man, but Grandcourt was not a nephew after his own heart; and as the presumptive heir to the Mallinger estates he was the embodiment of Sir Hugo's chief grievance - the lack of a son. For Diplow would not go to his wife and daughters after his death. This grievance had naturally grown as the years advanced, and Lady Mallinger, after having had three daughters in quick succession, was now over forty. Sir Hugo, almost twenty years older, had begun to despair of a son. Therefore Grandcourt's presence was unwelcome; but Sir Hugo wanted the relation between them to be kept as friendly as possible. He had a plan to secure Diplow as a future residence for Lady Mallinger and her daughters, and keep this bit of the family inheritance for his own offspring. He hoped that Grandcourt might consent to take a good sum of money in exchange for his interest in Diplow and its land; and this aim made him careful to avoid any quarrel with Grandcourt. They did not hate each other more than was compatible with perfect politeness. Grandcourt, on his side, thought his uncle a superfluous bore. But Lush had made him aware of the baronet's plans concerning Diplow, and he was gratified to have the possibility of the money in his mind: even if he did not choose to accept it, his sense of power would be flattered by his being able to refuse. This was one reason why he had asked for a year's tenancy of Diplow, which had rather annoyed Sir Hugo, because the excellent hunting might make Grandcourt decide not to part with it. Also, Lush had hinted to Sir Hugo that Grandcourt would woo and win Miss Arrowpoint, which would free him from the need for ready money. So the baronet felt much curiosity to know how things had been going on at Diplow, was bent on being civil to his nephew, and looked forward to some private chat with Lush. Between Deronda and Grandcourt there was a peculiar relation, due to circumstances which have yet to be made known. But no one showed any sign of annoyance on the first meeting. The quartet of gentlemen sauntered through the rooms, Sir Hugo saying- "Did you play much at Baden, Grandcourt?" "No; I looked on and betted a little." "Had you luck?" "What did I win, Lush?" "You brought away about two hundred," said Lush. "You are not here for the play, then?" said Sir Hugo. "No; I don't care about play now. It's a confounded strain," said Grandcourt, whose diamond ring and demeanour were being a good deal stared at by foreigners interested in a new milord. "I agree with you, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugo; "I never cared for play. It knits the brain up into meshes. I never stay here more than ten minutes. But where's your gambling beauty, Deronda? Have you seen her lately?" "She's gone," said Deronda, curtly. "An uncommonly fine girl, a perfect Diana," said Sir Hugo, turning to Grandcourt again. "I saw her winning, as coolly as if she had foreseen it. Deronda happened to see her losing like wildfire, and she bore it with immense pluck. I suppose she was cleaned out, or was wise enough to stop in time. How do you know she's gone?" "Oh, by the Visitor-list," said Deronda, with a shrug. "Vandernoodt told me her name was Harleth, and she was with the Baron and Baroness von Langen." Lush had already looked at the list, and learnt that Gwendolen had gone, but he had no intention of telling Grandcourt before he asked; and he had not asked. But now Grandcourt had heard what was rather piquant. After a moment's pause he said to Deronda- "Do you know the Langens?" "I have talked with them a little since Miss Harleth left." "Where is she gone - do you know?" "She is gone home," said Deronda, coldly. But then, from a fresh impulse, he added, "It is possible you know her. Her home is not far from Diplow, at Offendene." Deronda, looking straight at Grandcourt, might have been a subject for those old painters who liked contrasts of temperament. His richly-tinted face had a calm intensity that was rather startling, and often made him seem to have spoken, so that servants asked him automatically, "What did you say, sir?" when he had been quite silent. Grandcourt felt an irritation, which he did not show except by a slight movement of the eyelids. But he answered, with his usual drawl, "Yes, I know her," and paused to look at the gambling. "What of her, eh?" asked Sir Hugo of Lush, as the other three men moved out of the salon. "He has been on the brink of marrying her," said Lush. "But I hope it's off now. She's a niece of the clergyman at Pennicote. Her mother is a widow with a brood of daughters. This girl will have nothing, and is as dangerous as gunpowder. It would be a foolish marriage. But she has taken a freak against him, for she ran off here without notice. The fact is, he's here after her; although he was in no great hurry, and they are not likely to get together again. But he has lost his chance with the heiress." When Lush and Grandcourt had departed, Sir Hugo began to Deronda- "Rather a pretty story. That girl has something in her. She must be worth running after, whether the marriage comes off or not." "I should hope a marriage like that would not come off," said Deronda, in a tone of disgust. "What! are you inclined to run after her?" said Sir Hugo. "On the contrary," said Deronda, "I should rather be inclined to run away from her." "Why, you would easily cut out Grandcourt. A girl with her spirit would think you the finer match of the two. You won't run after the pretty gambler, then?" "Decidedly not." This answer was perfectly truthful; nevertheless it had passed through Deronda's mind that under other circumstances he should have given way to his interest in this girl, and have tried to know more of her. But his history had given him a stronger bias in another direction. He felt himself in no sense free.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 15

'Tis hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by the rule of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelli concerning Caesar Borgia, who, saith he, had thought of all that might occur on his father's death, and had provided against every evil chance save only one: it had never come into his mind that when his father died, his own death would quickly follow. Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced over the best newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can hardly be said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all Germans, all commercial men, and all voters liable to use the wrong kind of soap, under the general epithet of "brutes;" but he took no action on these much-agitated questions beyond looking from under his eyelids at any man who mentioned them, and retaining a silence which served to shake the opinions of timid thinkers. But Grandcourt, within his own sphere of interest, showed some of the qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy of the wildest continental sort. No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped him. He would have denied that he was jealous; because jealousy would have implied some doubt of his own power to hinder what he had determined against. That his wife should have more inclination to another man's society than to his own would not pain him: what he required was that she should be as fully aware as she would have been of a locked hand-cuff, that her inclination was helpless to decide anything in contradiction with his resolve. However much of vacillating whim there might have been in his entrance on matrimony, there was no vacillating in his interpretation of the bond. He had not repented of his marriage; it had really brought more of aim into his life, new objects to exert his will upon; and he had not repented of his choice. His taste was fastidious, and Gwendolen satisfied it: he would not have liked a wife who had not received some elevation of rank from him; nor one who did not command admiration by her mien and beauty; nor one whose nails were not of the right shape; nor one the lobe of whose ear was at all too large and red; nor one who, even if her nails and ears were right, was at the same time a ninny, unable to make spirited answers. These requirements may not seem too exacting to refined contemporaries whose own ability to fall in love has been held in suspense for lack of indispensable details; but fewer perhaps may follow him in his contentment that his wife should be in a temper which would dispose her to fly out if she dared, and that she should have been urged into marrying him by other feelings than passionate attachment. Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit of mind should change precisely at the point of matrimony. Grandcourt did not feel that he had chosen the wrong wife; and having taken on himself the part of husband, he was not going in any way to be fooled, or allow himself to be seen in a light that could be regarded as pitiable. This was his state of mind--not jealousy; still, his behavior in some respects was as like jealousy as yellow is to yellow, which color we know may be the effect of very different causes. He had come up to town earlier than usual because he wished to be on the spot for legal consultation as to the arrangements of his will, the transference of mortgages, and that transaction with his uncle about the succession to Diplow, which the bait of ready money, adroitly dangled without importunity, had finally won him to agree upon. But another acceptable accompaniment of his being in town was the presentation of himself with the beautiful bride whom he had chosen to marry in spite of what other people might have expected of him. It is true that Grandcourt went about with the sense that he did not care a languid curse for any one's admiration: but this state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object--namely, a world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons--the persons must be and they must smile--a rudimentary truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of mankind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the race must disappoint the voracity of their contempt. Grandcourt, in town for the first time with his wife, had his non-caring abstinence from curses enlarged and diversified by splendid receptions, by conspicuous rides and drives, by presentations of himself with her on all distinguished occasions. He wished her to be sought after; he liked that "fellows" should be eager to talk with her and escort her within his observation; there was even a kind of lofty coquetry on her part that he would not have objected to. But what he did not like were her ways in relation to Deronda. After the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, when Grandcourt had observed the dialogue on the settee as keenly as Hans had done, it was characteristic of him that he named Deronda for invitation along with the Mallingers, tenaciously avoiding the possible suggestion to anybody concerned that Deronda's presence or absence could be of the least importance to him; and he made no direct observation to Gwendolen on her behavior that evening, lest the expression of his disgust should be a little too strong to satisfy his own pride. But a few days afterward he remarked, without being careful of the _ propos_, "Nothing makes a woman more of a gawky than looking out after people and showing tempers in public. A woman ought to have good manners. Else it's intolerable to appear with her." Gwendolen made the expected application, and was not without alarm at the notion of being a gawky. For she, too, with her melancholy distaste for things, preferred that her distaste should include admirers. But the sense of overhanging rebuke only intensified the strain of expectation toward any meeting with Deronda. The novelty and excitement of her town life was like the hurry and constant change of foreign travel; whatever might be the inward despondency, there was a programme to be fulfilled, not without gratification to many-sided self. But, as always happens with a deep interest, the comparatively rare occasions on which she could exchange any words with Deronda had a diffusive effect in her consciousness, magnifying their communication with each other, and therefore enlarging the place she imagined it to have in his mind. How could Deronda help this? He certainly did not avoid her; rather he wished to convince her by every delicate indirect means that her confidence in him had not been indiscreet since it had not lowered his respect. Moreover he liked being near her--how could it be otherwise? She was something more than a problem: she was a lovely woman, for the turn of whose mind and fate he had a care which, however futile it might be, kept soliciting him as a responsibility, perhaps all the more that, when he dared to think of his own future, he saw it lying far away from this splendid sad-hearted creature, who, because he had once been impelled to arrest her attention momentarily, as he might have seized her arm with warning to hinder her from stepping where there was danger, had turned to him with a beseeching persistent need. One instance in which Grandcourt stimulated a feeling in Gwendolen that he would have liked to suppress without seeming to care about it, had relation to Mirah. Gwendolen's inclination lingered over the project of the singing lessons as a sort of obedience to Deronda's advice, but day followed day with that want of perceived leisure which belongs to lives where there is no work to mark off intervals; and the continual liability to Grandcourt's presence and surveillance seemed to flatten every effort to the level of the boredom which his manner expressed; his negative mind was as diffusive as fog, clinging to all objects, and spoiling all contact. But one morning when they were breakfasting, Gwendolen, in a recurrent fit of determination to exercise the old spirit, said, dallying prettily over her prawns without eating them, "I think of making myself accomplished while we are in town, and having singing lessons." "Why?" said Grandcourt, languidly. "Why?" echoed Gwendolen, playing at sauciness; "because I can't eat _pt de foie gras_ to make me sleepy, and I can't smoke, and I can't go to the club to make me like to come away again--I want a variety of _ennui_. What would be the most convenient time, when you are busy with your lawyers and people, for me to have lessons from that little Jewess, whose singing is getting all the rage." "Whenever you like," said Grandcourt, pushing away his plate, and leaning back in his chair while he looked at her with his most lizard-like expression and, played with the ears of the tiny spaniel on his lap (Gwendolen had taken a dislike to the dogs because they fawned on him). Then he said, languidly, "I don't see why a lady should sing. Amateurs make fools of themselves. A lady can't risk herself in that way in company. And one doesn't want to hear squalling in private." "I like frankness: that seems to me a husband's great charm," said Gwendolen, with her little upward movement of her chin, as she turned her eyes away from his, and lifting a prawn before her, looked at the boiled ingenuousness of its eyes as preferable to the lizard's. "But;" she added, having devoured her mortification, "I suppose you don't object to Miss Lapidoth's singing at our party on the fourth? I thought of engaging her. Lady Brackenshaw had her, you know: and the Raymonds, who are very particular about their music. And Mr. Deronda, who is a musician himself and a first-rate judge, says there is no singing in such good taste as hers for a drawing-room. I think his opinion is an authority." She meant to sling a small stone at her husband in that way. "It's very indecent of Deronda to go about praising that girl," said Grandcourt in a tone of indifference. "Indecent!" exclaimed Gwendolen, reddening and looking at him again, overcome by startled wonder, and unable to reflect on the probable falsity of the phrase--"to go about praising." "Yes; and especially when she is patronized by Lady Mallinger. He ought to hold his tongue about her. Men can see what is his relation to her." "Men who judge of others by themselves," said Gwendolen, turning white after her redness, and immediately smitten with a dread of her own words. "Of course. And a woman should take their judgment--else she is likely to run her head into the wrong place," said Grandcourt, conscious of using pinchers on that white creature. "I suppose you take Deronda for a saint." "Oh dear no!" said Gwendolen, summoning desperately her almost miraculous power of self-control, and speaking in a high hard tone. "Only a little less of a monster." She rose, pushed her chair away without hurry, and walked out of the room with something like the care of a man who is afraid of showing that he has taken more wine than usual. She turned the keys inside her dressing-room doors, and sat down for some time looking pale and quiet as when she was leaving the breakfast-room. Even in the moments after reading the poisonous letter she had hardly had more cruel sensations than now; for emotion was at the acute point, where it is not distinguishable from sensation. Deronda unlike what she had believed him to be, was an image which affected her as a hideous apparition would have done, quite apart from the way in which it was produced. It had taken hold of her as pain before she could consider whether it were fiction or truth; and further to hinder her power of resistance came the sudden perception, how very slight were the grounds of her faith in Deronda--how little she knew of his life--how childish she had been in her confidence. His rebukes and his severity to her began to seem odious, along with all the poetry and lofty doctrine in the world, whatever it might be; and the grave beauty of his face seemed the most unpleasant mask that the common habits of men could put on. All this went on in her with the rapidity of a sick dream; and her start into resistance was very much like a waking. Suddenly from out the gray sombre morning there came a stream of sunshine, wrapping her in warmth and light where she sat in stony stillness. She moved gently and looked round her--there was a world outside this bad dream, and the dream proved nothing; she rose, stretching her arms upward and clasping her hands with her habitual attitude when she was seeking relief from oppressive feeling, and walked about the room in this flood of sunbeams. "It is not true! What does it matter whether _he_ believes it or not?" This is what she repeated to herself--but this was not her faith come back again; it was only the desperate cry of faith, finding suffocation intolerable. And how could she go on through the day in this state? With one of her impetuous alternations, her imagination flew to wild actions by which she would convince herself of what she wished: she would go to Lady Mallinger and question her about Mirah; she would write to Deronda and upbraid him with making the world all false and wicked and hopeless to her--to him she dared pour out all the bitter indignation of her heart. No; she would go to Mirah. This last form taken by her need was more definitely practicable, and quickly became imperious. No matter what came of it. She had the pretext of asking Mirah to sing at her party on the fourth. What was she going to say beside? How satisfy? She did not foresee--she could not wait to foresee. If that idea which was maddening her had been a living thing, she would have wanted to throttle it without waiting to foresee what would come of the act. She rang her bell and asked if Mr. Grandcourt were gone out: finding that he was, she ordered the carriage, and began to dress for the drive; then she went down, and walked about the large drawing-room like an imprisoned dumb creature, not recognizing herself in the glass panels, not noting any object around her in the painted gilded prison. Her husband would probably find out where she had been, and punish her in some way or other--no matter--she could neither desire nor fear anything just now but the assurance that she had not been deluding herself in her trust. She was provided with Mirah's address. Soon she was on the way with all the fine equipage necessary to carry about her poor uneasy heart, depending in its palpitations on some answer or other to questioning which she did not know how she should put. She was as heedless of what happened before she found that Miss Lapidoth was at home, as one is of lobbies and passages on the way to a court of justice--heedless of everything till she was in a room where there were folding-doors, and she heard Deronda's voice behind it. Doubtless the identification was helped by forecast, but she was as certain of it as if she had seen him. She was frightened at her own agitation, and began to unbutton her gloves that she might button them again, and bite her lips over the pretended difficulty, while the door opened, and Mirah presented herself with perfect quietude and a sweet smile of recognition. There was relief in the sight of her face, and Gwendolen was able to smile in return, while she put out her hand in silence; and as she seated herself, all the while hearing the voice, she felt some reflux of energy in the confused sense that the truth could not be anything that she dreaded. Mirah drew her chair very near, as if she felt that the sound of the conversation should be subdued, and looked at her visitor with placid expectation, while Gwendolen began in a low tone, with something that seemed like bashfulness, "Perhaps you wonder to see me--perhaps I ought to have written--but I wished to make a particular request." "I am glad to see you instead of having a letter," said Mirah, wondering at the changed expression and manner of the "Vandyke duchess," as Hans had taught her to call Gwendolen. The rich color and the calmness of her own face were in strong contrast with the pale agitated beauty under the plumed hat. "I thought," Gwendolen went on--"at least I hoped, you would not object to sing at our house on the 4th--in the evening--at a party like Lady Brackenshaw's. I should be so much obliged." "I shall be very happy to sing for you. At ten?" said Mirah, while Gwendolen seemed to get more instead of less embarrassed. "At ten, please," she answered; then paused, and felt that she had nothing more to say. She could not go. It was impossible to rise and say good-bye. Deronda's voice was in her ears. She must say it--she could contrive no other sentence, "Mr. Deronda is in the next room." "Yes," said Mirah, in her former tone. "He is reading Hebrew with my brother." "You have a brother?" said Gwendolen, who had heard this from Lady Mallinger, but had not minded it then. "Yes, a dear brother who is ill--consumptive, and Mr. Deronda is the best of friends to him, as he has been to me," said Mirah, with the impulse that will not let us pass the mention of a precious person indifferently. "Tell me," said Gwendolen, putting her hand on Mirah's, and speaking hardly above a whisper--"tell me--tell me the truth. You are sure he is quite good. You know no evil of him. Any evil that people say of him is false." Could the proud-spirited woman have behaved more like a child? But the strange words penetrated Mirah with nothing but a sense of solemnity and indignation. With a sudden light in her eyes and a tremor in her voice, she said, "Who are the people that say evil of him? I would not believe any evil of him, if an angel came to tell it me. He found me when I was so miserable--I was going to drown myself; I looked so poor and forsaken; you would have thought I was a beggar by the wayside. And he treated me as if I had been a king's daughter. He took me to the best of women. He found my brother for me. And he honors my brother--though he too was poor--oh, almost as poor as he could be. And my brother honors him. That is no light thing to say"--here Mirah's tone changed to one of profound emphasis, and she shook her head backward: "for my brother is very learned and great-minded. And Mr. Deronda says there are few men equal to him." Some Jewish defiance had flamed into her indignant gratitude and her anger could not help including Gwendolen since she seemed to have doubted Deronda's goodness. But Gwendolen was like one parched with thirst, drinking the fresh water that spreads through the frame as a sufficient bliss. She did not notice that Mirah was angry with her; she was not distinctly conscious of anything but of the penetrating sense that Deronda and his life were no more like her husband's conception than the morning in the horizon was like the morning mixed with street gas. Even Mirah's words sank into the indefiniteness of her relief. She could hardly have repeated them, or said how her whole state of feeling was changed. She pressed Mirah's hand, and said, "Thank you, thank you," in a hurried whisper, then rose, and added, with only a hazy consciousness, "I must go, I shall see you--on the fourth--I am so much obliged"--bowing herself out automatically, while Mirah, opening the door for her, wondered at what seemed a sudden retreat into chill loftiness. Gwendolen, indeed, had no feeling to spare in any effusiveness toward the creature who had brought her relief. The passionate need of contradiction to Grandcourt's estimate of Deronda, a need which had blunted her sensibility to everything else, was no sooner satisfied than she wanted to be gone. She began to be aware that she was out of place, and to dread Deronda's seeing her. And once in the carriage again, she had the vision of what awaited her at home. When she drew up before the door in Grosvenor Square, her husband was arriving with a cigar between his fingers. He threw it away and handed her out, accompanying her up-stairs. She turned into the drawing-room, lest he should follow her farther and give her no place to retreat to; then she sat down with a weary air, taking off her gloves, rubbing her hand over her forehead, and making his presence as much of a cipher as possible. But he sat, too, and not far from her--just in front, where to avoid looking at him must have the emphasis of effort. "May I ask where you have been at this extraordinary hour?" said Grandcourt. "Oh, yes; I have been to Miss Lapidoth's, to ask her to come and sing for us," said Gwendolen, laying her gloves on the little table beside her, and looking down at them. "And to ask her about her relations with Deronda?" said Grandcourt, with the coldest possible sneer in his low voice which in poor Gwendolen's ear was diabolical. For the first time since their marriage she flashed out upon him without inward check. Turning her eyes full on his she said, in a biting tone, "Yes; and what you said is false--a low, wicked falsehood." "She told you so--did she?" returned Grandcourt, with a more thoroughly distilled sneer. Gwendolen was mute. The daring anger within her was turned into the rage of dumbness. What reasons for her belief could she give? All the reasons that seemed so strong and living within her--she saw them suffocated and shrivelled up under her husband's breath. There was no proof to give, but her own impression, which would seem to him her own folly. She turned her head quickly away from him and looked angrily toward the end of the room: she would have risen, but he was in her way. Grandcourt saw his advantage. "It's of no consequence so far as her singing goes," he said, in his superficial drawl. "You can have her to sing, if you like." Then, after a pause, he added in his lowest imperious tone, "But you will please to observe that you are not to go near that house again. As my wife, you must take my word about what is proper for you. When you undertook to be Mrs. Grandcourt, you undertook not to make a fool of yourself. You have been making a fool of yourself this morning; and if you were to go on as you have begun, you might soon get yourself talked of at the clubs in a way you would not like. What do _you_ know about the world? You have married _me_, and must be guided by my opinion." Every slow sentence of that speech had a terrific mastery in it for Gwendolen's nature. If the low tones had come from a physician telling her that her symptoms were those of a fatal disease, and prognosticating its course, she could not have been more helpless against the argument that lay in it. But she was permitted to move now, and her husband never again made any reference to what had occurred this morning. He knew the force of his own words. If this white-handed man with the perpendicular profile had been sent to govern a difficult colony, he might have won reputation among his contemporaries. He had certainly ability, would have understood that it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would not have flinched from making things safe in that way. Gwendolen did not, for all this, part with her recovered faith;--rather, she kept it with a more anxious tenacity, as a Protestant of old kept his bible hidden or a Catholic his crucifix, according to the side favored by the civil arm; and it was characteristic of her that apart from the impression gained concerning Deronda in that visit, her imagination was little occupied with Mirah or the eulogised brother. The one result established for her was, that Deronda had acted simply as a generous benefactor, and the phrase "reading Hebrew" had fleeted unimpressively across her sense of hearing, as a stray stork might have made its peculiar flight across her landscape without rousing any surprised reflection on its natural history. But the issue of that visit, as it regarded her husband, took a strongly active part in the process which made an habitual conflict within her, and was the cause of some external change perhaps not observed by any one except Deronda. As the weeks went on bringing occasional transient interviews with her, he thought that he perceived in her an intensifying of her superficial hardness and resolute display, which made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more marked and disturbing to him. In fact, she was undergoing a sort of discipline for the refractory which, as little as possible like conversion, bends half the self with a terrible strain, and exasperates the unwillingness of the other half. Grandcourt had an active divination rather than discernment of refractoriness in her, and what had happened about Mirah quickened his suspicion that there was an increase of it dependent on the occasions when she happened to see Deronda: there was some "confounded nonsense" between them: he did not imagine it exactly as flirtation, and his imagination in other branches was rather restricted; but it was nonsense that evidently kept up a kind of simmering in her mind--an inward action which might become disagreeable outward. Husbands in the old time are known to have suffered from a threatening devoutness in their wives, presenting itself first indistinctly as oddity, and ending in that mild form of lunatic asylum, a nunnery: Grandcourt had a vague perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen which the unity between them in his views of marriage required him peremptorily to check. Among the means he chose, one was peculiar, and was less ably calculated than the speeches we have just heard. He determined that she should know the main purport of the will he was making, but he could not communicate this himself, because it involved the fact of his relation to Mrs. Glasher and her children; and that there should be any overt recognition of this between Gwendolen and himself was supremely repugnant to him. Like all proud, closely-wrapped natures, he shrank from explicitness and detail, even on trivialities, if they were personal: a valet must maintain a strict reserve with him on the subject of shoes and stockings. And clashing was intolerable to him; his habitual want was to put collision out of the question by the quiet massive pressure of his rule. But he wished Gwendolen to know that before he made her an offer it was no secret to him that she was aware of his relations with Lydia, her previous knowledge being the apology for bringing the subject before her now. Some men in his place might have thought of writing what he wanted her to know, in the form of a letter. But Grandcourt hated writing: even writing a note was a bore to him, and he had long been accustomed to have all his writing done by Lush. We know that there are persons who will forego their own obvious interest rather than do anything so disagreeable as to write letters; and it is not probable that these imperfect utilitarians would rush into manuscript and syntax on a difficult subject in order to save another's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even occur that he should, would, or could write to Gwendolen the information in question; and the only medium of communication he could use was Lush, who, to his mind, was as much of an implement as pen and paper. But here too Grandcourt had his reserves, and would not have uttered a word likely to encourage Lush in an impudent sympathy with any supposed grievance in a marriage which had been discommended by him. Who that has a confidant escapes believing too little in his penetration, and too much in his discretion? Grandcourt had always allowed Lush to know his external affairs indiscriminately--irregularities, debts, want of ready money; he had only used discrimination about what he would allow his confidant to say to him; and he had been so accustomed to this human tool, that the having him at call in London was a recovery of lost ease. It followed that Lush knew all the provisions of the will more exactly than they were known to the testator himself. Grandcourt did not doubt that Gwendolen, since she was a woman who could put two and two together, knew or suspected Lush to be the contriver of her interview with Lydia, and that this was the reason why her first request was for his banishment. But the bent of a woman's inferences on mixed subjects which excites mixed passions is not determined by her capacity for simple addition; and here Grandcourt lacked the only organ of thinking that could have saved him from mistake--namely, some experience of the mixed passions concerned. He had correctly divined one-half of Gwendolen's dread--all that related to her personal pride, and her perception that his will must conquer hers; but the remorseful half, even if he had known of her broken promise, was as much out of his imagination as the other side of the moon. What he believed her to feel about Lydia was solely a tongue-tied jealousy, and what he believed Lydia to have written with the jewels was the fact that she had once been used to wearing them, with other amenities such as he imputed to the intercourse with jealous women. He had the triumphant certainty that he could aggravate the jealousy and yet smite it with a more absolute dumbness. His object was to engage all his wife's egoism on the same side as his own, and in his employment of Lush he did not intend an insult to her: she ought to understand that he was the only possible envoy. Grandcourt's view of things was considerably fenced in by his general sense, that what suited him others must put up with. There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to corresponding stupidity. Mephistopheles thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, would inevitably make blunders. One morning he went to Gwendolen in the boudoir beyond the back drawing-room, hat and gloves in hand, and said with his best-tempered, most persuasive drawl, standing before her and looking down on her as she sat with a book on her lap, "A--Gwendolen, there's some business about property to be explained. I have told Lush to come and explain it to you. He knows all about these things. I am going out. He can come up now. He's the only person who can explain. I suppose you'll not mind." "You know that I do mind," said Gwendolen, angrily, starting up. "I shall not see him." She showed the intention to dart away to the door. Grandcourt was before her, with his back toward it. He was prepared for her anger, and showed none in return, saying, with the same sort of remonstrant tone that he might have used about an objection to dining out, "It's no use making a fuss. There are plenty of brutes in the world that one has to talk to. People with any _savoir vivre_ don't make a fuss about such things. Some business must be done. You can't expect agreeable people to do it. If I employ Lush, the proper thing for you is to take it as a matter of course. Not to make a fuss about it. Not to toss your head and bite your lips about people of that sort." The drawling and the pauses with which this speech was uttered gave time for crowding reflections in Gwendolen, quelling her resistance. What was there to be told her about property? This word had certain dominant associations for her, first with her mother, then with Mrs. Glasher and her children. What would be the use if she refused to see Lush? Could she ask Grandcourt to tell her himself? That might be intolerable, even if he consented, which it was certain he would not, if he had made up his mind to the contrary. The humiliation of standing an obvious prisoner, with her husband barring the door, was not to be borne any longer, and she turned away to lean against a cabinet, while Grandcourt again moved toward her. "I have arranged for Lush to come up now, while I am out," he said, after a long organ stop, during which Gwendolen made no sign. "Shall I tell him he may come?" Yet another pause before she could say "Yes"--her face turned obliquely and her eyes cast down. "I shall come back in time to ride, if you like to get ready," said Grandcourt. No answer. "She is in a desperate rage," thought he. But the rage was silent, and therefore not disagreeable to him. It followed that he turned her chin and kissed her, while she still kept her eyelids down, and she did not move them until he was on the other side of the door. What was she to do? Search where she would in her consciousness, she found no plea to justify a plaint. Any romantic illusions she had had in marrying this man had turned on her power of using him as she liked. He was using her as he liked. She sat awaiting the announcement of Lush as a sort of searing operation that she had to go through. The facts that galled her gathered a burning power when she thought of their lying in his mind. It was all a part of that new gambling, in which the losing was not simply a _minus_, but a terrible _plus_ that had never entered into her reckoning. Lush was neither quite pleased nor quite displeased with his task. Grandcourt had said to him by way of conclusion, "Don't make yourself more disagreeable than nature obliges you." "That depends," thought Lush. But he said, "I will write a brief abstract for Mrs. Grandcourt to read." He did not suggest that he should make the whole communication in writing, which was a proof that the interview did not wholly displease him. Some provision was being made for himself in the will, and he had no reason to be in a bad humor, even if a bad humor had been common with him. He was perfectly convinced that he had penetrated all the secrets of the situation; but he had no diabolical delight in it. He had only the small movements of gratified self-loving resentment in discerning that this marriage had fulfilled his own foresight in not being as satisfactory as the supercilious young lady had expected it to be, and as Grandcourt wished to feign that it was. He had no persistent spite much stronger than what gives the seasoning of ordinary scandal to those who repeat it and exaggerate it by their conjectures. With no active compassion or good-will, he had just as little active malevolence, being chiefly occupied in liking his particular pleasures, and not disliking anything but what hindered those pleasures--everything else ranking with the last murder and the last _opra bouffe_, under the head of things to talk about. Nevertheless, he was not indifferent to the prospect of being treated uncivilly by a beautiful woman, or to the counter-balancing fact that his present commission put into his hands an official power of humiliating her. He did not mean to use it needlessly; but there are some persons so gifted in relation to us that their "How do you do?" seems charged with offense. By the time that Mr. Lush was announced, Gwendolen had braced herself to a bitter resolve that he should not witness the slightest betrayal of her feeling, whatever he might have to tell. She invited him to sit down with stately quietude. After all, what was this man to her? He was not in the least like her husband. Her power of hating a coarse, familiar-mannered man, with clumsy hands, was now relaxed by the intensity with which she hated his contrast. He held a small paper folded in his hand while he spoke. "I need hardly say that I should not have presented myself if Mr. Grandcourt had not expressed a strong wish to that effect--as no doubt he has mentioned to you." From some voices that speech might have sounded entirely reverential, and even timidly apologetic. Lush had no intention to the contrary, but to Gwendolen's ear his words had as much insolence in them as his prominent eyes, and the pronoun "you" was too familiar. He ought to have addressed the folding-screen, and spoke of her as Mrs. Grandcourt. She gave the smallest sign of a bow, and Lush went on, with a little awkwardness, getting entangled in what is elegantly called tautology. "My having been in Mr. Grandcourt's confidence for fifteen years or more--since he was a youth, in fact--of course gives me a peculiar position. He can speak to me of affairs that he could not mention to any one else; and, in fact, he could not have employed any one else in this affair. I have accepted the task out of friendship for him. Which is my apology for accepting the task--if you would have preferred some one else." He paused, but she made no sign, and Lush, to give himself a countenance in an apology which met no acceptance, opened the folded paper, and looked at it vaguely before he began to speak again. "This paper contains some information about Mr. Grandcourt's will, an abstract of a part he wished you to know--if you'll be good enough to cast your eyes over it. But there is something I had to say by way of introduction--which I hope you'll pardon me for, if it's not quite agreeable." Lush found that he was behaving better than he had expected, and had no idea how insulting he made himself with his "not quite agreeable." "Say what you have to say without apologizing, please," said Gwendolen, with the air she might have bestowed on a dog-stealer come to claim a reward for finding the dog he had stolen. "I have only to remind you of something that occurred before your engagement to Mr. Grandcourt," said Lush, not without the rise of some willing insolence in exchange for her scorn. "You met a lady in Cardell Chase, if you remember, who spoke to you of her position with regard to Mr. Grandcourt. She had children with her--one a very fine boy." Gwendolen's lips were almost as pale as her cheeks; her passion had no weapons--words were no better than chips. This man's speech was like a sharp knife-edge drawn across her skin: but even her indignation at the employment of Lush was getting merged in a crowd of other feelings, dim and alarming as a crowd of ghosts. "Mr. Grandcourt was aware that you were acquainted with this unfortunate affair beforehand, and he thinks it only right that his position and intentions should be made quite clear to you. It is an affair of property and prospects; and if there were any objection you had to make, if you would mention it to me--it is a subject which of course he would rather not speak about himself--if you will be good enough just to read this." With the last words Lush rose and presented the paper to her. When Gwendolen resolved that she would betray no feeling in the presence of this man, she had not prepared herself to hear that her husband knew the silent consciousness, the silently accepted terms on which she had married him. She dared not raise her hand to take the paper, least it should visibly tremble. For a moment Lush stood holding it toward her, and she felt his gaze on her as ignominy, before she could say even with low-toned haughtiness, "Lay it on the table. And go into the next room, please." Lush obeyed, thinking as he took an easy-chair in the back drawing-room, "My lady winces considerably. She didn't know what would be the charge for that superfine article, Henleigh Grandcourt." But it seemed to him that a penniless girl had done better than she had any right to expect, and that she had been uncommonly knowing for her years and opportunities: her words to Lydia meant nothing, and her running away had probably been part of her adroitness. It had turned out a master-stroke. Meanwhile Gwendolen was rallying her nerves to the reading of the paper. She must read it. Her whole being--pride, longing for rebellion, dreams of freedom, remorseful conscience, dread of fresh visitation--all made one need to know what the paper contained. But at first it was not easy to take in the meaning of the words. When she had succeeded, she found that in the case of there being no son as issue of her marriage, Grandcourt had made the small Henleigh his heir; that was all she cared to extract from the paper with any distinctness. The other statement as to what provision would be made for her in the same case, she hurried over, getting only a confused perception of thousands and Gadsmere. It was enough. She could dismiss the man in the next room with the defiant energy which had revived in her at the idea that this question of property and inheritance was meant as a finish to her humiliations and her thraldom. She thrust the paper between the leaves of her book, which she took in her hand, and walked with her stateliest air into the next room, where Lush immediately arose, awaiting her approach. When she was four yards from him, it was hardly an instant that she paused to say in a high tone, while she swept him with her eyelashes, "Tell Mr. Grandcourt that his arrangements are just what I desired"--passing on without haste, and leaving Lush time to mingle some admiration of her graceful back with that half-amused sense of her spirit and impertinence, which he expressed by raising his eyebrows and just thrusting his tongue between his teeth. He really did not want her to be worse punished, and he was glad to think that it was time to go and lunch at the club, where he meant to have a lobster salad. What did Gwendolen look forward to? When her husband returned he found her equipped in her riding-dress, ready to ride out with him. She was not again going to be hysterical, or take to her bed and say she was ill. That was the implicit resolve adjusting her muscles before she could have framed it in words, as she walked out of the room, leaving Lush behind her. She was going to act in the spirit of her message, and not to give herself time to reflect. She rang the bell for her maid, and went with the usual care through her change of toilet. Doubtless her husband had meant to produce a great effect on her: by-and-by perhaps she would let him see an effect the very opposite of what he intended; but at present all that she could show was a defiant satisfaction in what had been presumed to be disagreeable. It came as an instinct rather than a thought, that to show any sign which could be interpreted as jealousy, when she had just been insultingly reminded that the conditions were what she had accepted with her eyes open, would be the worst self-humiliation. She said to herself that she had not time to-day to be clear about her future actions; all she could be clear about was that she would match her husband in ignoring any ground for excitement. She not only rode, but went out with him to dine, contributing nothing to alter their mutual manner, which was never that of rapid interchange in discourse; and curiously enough she rejected a handkerchief on which her maid had by mistake put the wrong scent--a scent that Grandcourt had once objected to. Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side. But to defer thought in this way was something like trying to talk without singing in her own ears. The thought that is bound up with our passion is as penetrative as air--everything is porous to it; bows, smiles, conversation, repartee, are mere honeycombs where such thoughts rushes freely, not always with a taste of honey. And without shutting herself up in any solitude, Gwendolen seemed at the end of nine or ten hours to have gone through a labyrinth of reflection, in which already the same succession of prospects had been repeated, the same fallacious outlets rejected, the same shrinking from the necessities of every course. Already she was undergoing some hardening effect from feeling that she was under eyes which saw her past actions solely in the light of her lowest motives. She lived back in the scenes of her courtship, with the new bitter consciousness of what had been in Grandcourt's mind--certain now, with her present experience of him, that he had a peculiar triumph in conquering her dumb repugnance, and that ever since their marriage he had had a cold exultation in knowing her fancied secret. Her imagination exaggerated every tyrannical impulse he was capable of. "I will insist on being separated from him"--was her first darting determination; then, "I will leave him whether he consents or not. If this boy becomes his heir, I have made an atonement." But neither in darkness nor in daylight could she imagine the scenes which must carry out those determinations with the courage to feel them endurable. How could she run away to her own family--carry distress among them, and render herself an object of scandal in the society she had left behind her? What future lay before her as Mrs. Grandcourt gone back to her mother, who would be made destitute again by the rupture of the marriage for which one chief excuse had been that it had brought that mother a maintenance? She had lately been seeing her uncle and Anna in London, and though she had been saved from any difficulty about inviting them to stay in Grosvenor Square by their wish to be with Rex, who would not risk a meeting with her, the transient visit she had had from them helped now in giving stronger color to the picture of what it would be for her to take refuge in her own family. What could she say to justify her flight? Her uncle would tell her to go back. Her mother would cry. Her aunt and Anna would look at her with wondering alarm. Her husband would have power to compel her. She had absolutely nothing that she could allege against him in judicious or judicial ears. And to "insist on separation!" That was an easy combination of words; but considered as an action to be executed against Grandcourt, it would be about as practicable as to give him a pliant disposition and a dread of other people's unwillingness. How was she to begin? What was she to say that would not be a condemnation of herself? "If I am to have misery anyhow," was the bitter refrain of her rebellious dreams, "I had better have the misery that I can keep to myself." Moreover, her capability of rectitude told her again and again that she had no right to complain of her contract, or to withdraw from it. And always among the images that drove her back to submission was Deronda. The idea of herself separated from her husband, gave Deronda a changed, perturbing, painful place in her consciousness: instinctively she felt that the separation would be from him too, and in the prospective vision of herself as a solitary, dubiously-regarded woman, she felt some tingling bashfulness at the remembrance of her behavior towards him. The association of Deronda with a dubious position for herself was intolerable. And what would he say if he knew everything? Probably that she ought to bear what she had brought on herself, unless she were sure that she could make herself a better woman by taking any other course. And what sort of woman was she to be--solitary, sickened of life, looked at with a suspicious kind of pity?--even if she could dream of success in getting that dreary freedom. Mrs. Grandcourt "run away" would be a more pitiable creature than Gwendolen Harleth condemned to teach the bishop's daughters, and to be inspected by Mrs. Mompert. One characteristic trait in her conduct is worth mentioning. She would not look a second time at the paper Lush had given her; and before ringing for her maid she locked it up in a traveling-desk which was at hand, proudly resolved against curiosity about what was allotted to herself in connection with Gadsmere--feeling herself branded in the minds of her husband and his confidant with the meanness that would accept marriage and wealth on any conditions, however dishonorable and humiliating. Day after day the same pattern of thinking was repeated. There came nothing to change the situation--no new elements in the sketch--only a recurrence which engraved it. The May weeks went on into June, and still Mrs. Grandcourt was outwardly in the same place, presenting herself as she was expected to do in the accustomed scenes, with the accustomed grace, beauty, and costume; from church at one end of the week, through all the scale of desirable receptions, to opera at the other. Church was not markedly distinguished in her mind from the other forms of self-presentation, for marriage had included no instruction that enabled her to connect liturgy and sermon with any larger order of the world than that of unexplained and perhaps inexplicable social fashions. While a laudable zeal was laboring to carry the light of spiritual law up the alleys where law is chiefly known as the policeman, the brilliant Mrs. Grandcourt, condescending a little to a fashionable rector and conscious of a feminine advantage over a learned dean, was, so far as pastoral care and religious fellowship were concerned, in as complete a solitude as a man in a lighthouse. Can we wonder at the practical submission which hid her constructive rebellion? The combination is common enough, as we know from the number of persons who make us aware of it in their own case by a clamorous unwearied statement of the reasons against their submitting to a situation which, on inquiry, we discover to be the least disagreeable within their reach. Poor Gwendolen had both too much and too little mental power and dignity to make herself exceptional. No wonder that Deronda now marked some hardening in a look and manner which were schooled daily to the suppression of feeling. For example. One morning, riding in Rotten Row with Grandcourt by her side, she saw standing against the railing at the turn, just facing them, a dark-eyed lady with a little girl and a blonde boy, whom she at once recognized as the beings in all the world the most painful for her to behold. She and Grandcourt had just slackened their pace to a walk; he being on the outer side was the nearer to the unwelcome vision, and Gwendolen had not presence of mind to do anything but glance away from the dark eyes that met hers piercingly toward Grandcourt, who wheeled past the group with an unmoved face, giving no sign of recognition. Immediately she felt a rising rage against him mingling with her shame for herself, and the words, "You might at least have raised your hat to her," flew impetuously to her lips--but did not pass them. If as her husband, in her company, he chose to ignore these creatures whom she herself had excluded from the place she was filling, how could she be the person to reproach him? She was dumb. It was not chance, but her own design, that had brought Mrs. Glasher there with her boy. She had come to town under the pretext of making purchases--really wanting educational apparatus for her children, and had had interviews with Lush in which she had not refused to soothe her uneasy mind by representing the probabilities as all on the side of her ultimate triumph. Let her keep quiet, and she might live to see the marriage dissolve itself in one way or other--Lush hinted at several ways--leaving the succession assured to her boy. She had had an interview with Grandcourt, too, who had as usual told her to behave like a reasonable woman, and threatened punishment if she were troublesome; but had, also as usual, vindicated himself from any wish to be stingy, the money he was receiving from Sir Hugo on account of Diplow encouraging him to be lavish. Lydia, feeding on the probabilities in her favor, devoured her helpless wrath along with that pleasanter nourishment; but she could not let her discretion go entirely without the reward of making a Medusa-apparition before Gwendolen, vindictiveness and jealousy finding relief in an outlet of venom, though it were as futile as that of a viper already flung on the other side of the hedge. Hence, each day, after finding out from Lush the likely time for Gwendolen to be riding, she had watched at that post, daring Grandcourt so far. Why should she not take little Henleigh into the Park? The Medusa-apparition was made effective beyond Lydia's conception by the shock it gave Gwendolen actually to see Grandcourt ignoring this woman who had once been the nearest in the world to him, along with the children she had borne him. And all the while the dark shadow thus cast on the lot of a woman destitute of acknowledged social dignity, spread itself over her visions of a future that might be her own, and made part of her dread on her own behalf. She shrank all the more from any lonely action. What possible release could there be for her from this hated vantage ground, which yet she dared not quit, any more than if fire had been raining outside it? What release, but death? Not her own death. Gwendolen was not a woman who could easily think of her own death as a near reality, or front for herself the dark entrance on the untried and invisible. It seemed more possible that Grandcourt should die:--and yet not likely. The power of tyranny in him seemed a power of living in the presence of any wish that he should die. The thought that his death was the only possible deliverance for her was one with the thought that deliverance would never come--the double deliverance from the injury with which other beings might reproach her and from the yoke she had brought on her own neck. No! she foresaw him always living, and her own life dominated by him; the "always" of her young experience not stretching beyond the few immediate years that seemed immeasurably long with her passionate weariness. The thought of his dying would not subsist: it turned as with a dream-change into the terror that she should die with his throttling fingers on her neck avenging that thought. Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, making no break in her more acknowledged consciousness and finding no obstruction in it: dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad light. Only an evening or two after that encounter in the Park, there was a grand concert at Klesmer's, who was living rather magnificently now in one of the large houses in Grosvenor Place, a patron and prince among musical professors. Gwendolen had looked forward to this occasion as one on which she was sure to meet Deronda, and she had been meditating how to put a question to him which, without containing a word that she would feel a dislike to utter, would yet be explicit enough for him to understand it. The struggle of opposite feelings would not let her abide by her instinct that the very idea of Deronda's relation to her was a discouragement to any desperate step towards freedom. The next wave of emotion was a longing for some word of his to enforce a resolve. The fact that her opportunities of conversation with him had always to be snatched in the doubtful privacy of large parties, caused her to live through them many times beforehand, imagining how they would take place and what she would say. The irritation was proportionate when no opportunity came; and this evening at Klesmer's she included Deronda in her anger, because he looked as calm as possible at a distance from her, while she was in danger of betraying her impatience to every one who spoke to her. She found her only safety in a chill haughtiness which made Mr. Vandernoodt remark that Mrs. Grandcourt was becoming a perfect match for her husband. When at last the chances of the evening brought Deronda near her, Sir Hugo and Mrs. Raymond were close by and could hear every word she said. No matter: her husband was not near, and her irritation passed without check into a fit of daring which restored the security of her self-possession. Deronda was there at last, and she would compel him to do what she pleased. Already and without effort rather queenly in her air as she stood in her white lace and green leaves she threw a royal permissiveness into her way of saying, "I wish you would come and see me to-morrow between five and six, Mr. Deronda." There could be but one answer at that moment: "Certainly," with a tone of obedience. Afterward it occurred to Deronda that he would write a note to excuse himself. He had always avoided making a call at Grandcourt's. He could not persuade himself to any step that might hurt her, and whether his excuse were taken for indifference or for the affectation of indifference it would be equally wounding. He kept his promise. Gwendolen had declined to ride out on the plea of not feeling well enough having left her refusal to the last moment when the horses were soon to be at the door--not without alarm lest her husband should say that he too would stay at home. Become almost superstitious about his power of suspicious divination, she had a glancing forethought of what she would do in that case--namely, have herself denied as not well. But Grandcourt accepted her excuse without remark, and rode off. Nevertheless when Gwendolen found herself alone, and had sent down the order that only Mr. Deronda was to be admitted, she began to be alarmed at what she had done, and to feel a growing agitation in the thought that he would soon appear, and she should soon be obliged to speak: not of trivialities, as if she had no serious motive in asking him to come: and yet what she had been for hours determining to say began to seem impossible. For the first time the impulse of appeal to him was being checked by timidity, and now that it was too late she was shaken by the possibility that he might think her invitation unbecoming. If so, she would have sunk in his esteem. But immediately she resisted this intolerable fear as an infection from her husband's way of thinking. That _he_ would say she was making a fool of herself was rather a reason why such a judgment would be remote from Deronda's mind. But that she could not rid herself from this sudden invasion of womanly reticence was manifest in a kind of action which had never occurred to her before. In her struggle between agitation and the effort to suppress it, she was walking up and down the length of the two drawing-rooms, where at one end a long mirror reflected her in her black dress, chosen in the early morning with a half-admitted reference to this hour. But above this black dress her head on its white pillar of a neck showed to advantage. Some consciousness of this made her turn hastily and hurry to the boudoir, where again there was a glass, but also, tossed over a chair, a large piece of black lace which she snatched and tied over her crown of hair so as completely to conceal her neck, and leave only her face looking out from the black frame. In this manifest contempt of appearance, she thought it possible to be freer from nervousness, but the black lace did not take away the uneasiness from her eyes and lips. She was standing in the middle of the room when Deronda was announced, and as he approached her she perceived that he too for some reason was not his usual self. She could not have defined the change except by saying that he looked less happy than usual, and appeared to be under some effort in speaking to her. And yet the speaking was the slightest possible. They both said, "How do you do?" quite curtly; and Gwendolen, instead of sitting down, moved to a little distance, resting her arms slightly on the tall back of a chair, while Deronda stood where he was,--both feeling it difficult to say any more, though the preoccupation in his mind could hardly have been more remote than it was from Gwendolen's conception. She naturally saw in his embarrassment some reflection of her own. Forced to speak, she found all her training in concealment and self-command of no use to her and began with timid awkwardness, "You will wonder why I begged you to come. I wanted to ask you something. You said I was ignorant. That is true. And what can I do but ask you?" And at this moment she was feeling it utterly impossible to put the questions she had intended. Something new in her nervous manner roused Deronda's anxiety lest there might be a new crisis. He said with the sadness of affection in his voice, "My only regret is, that I can be of so little use to you." The words and the tone touched a new spring in her, and she went on with more sense of freedom, yet still not saying anything she had designed to say, and beginning to hurry, that she might somehow arrive at the right words. "I wanted to tell you that I have always been thinking of your advice, but is it any use?--I can't make myself different, because things about me raise bad feelings--and I must go on--I can alter nothing--it is no use." She paused an instant, with the consciousness that she was not finding the right words, but began again hurriedly, "But if I go on I shall get worse. I want not to get worse. I should like to be what you wish. There are people who are good and enjoy great things--I know there are. I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if I should get wicked with hating people. I have tried to think that I would go away from everybody. But I can't. There are so many things to hinder me. You think, perhaps, that I don't mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me what I can do." She had forgotten everything but that image of her helpless misery which she was trying to make present to Deronda in broken allusive speech--wishing to convey but not express all her need. Her eyes were tearless, and had a look of smarting in their dilated brilliancy; there was a subdued sob in her voice which was more and more veiled, till it was hardly above a whisper. She was hurting herself with the jewels that glittered on her tightly-clasped fingers pressed against her heart. The feeling Deronda endured in these moments he afterward called horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck--the poor ship with its many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm. How could he grasp the long-growing process of this young creature's wretchedness?--how arrest and change it with a sentence? He was afraid of his own voice. The words that rushed into his mind seemed in their feebleness nothing better than despair made audible, or than that insensibility to another's hardship which applies precept to soothe pain. He felt himself holding a crowd of words imprisoned within his lips, as if the letting them escape would be a violation of awe before the mysteries of our human lot. The thought that urged itself foremost was--"Confess everything to your husband; have nothing concealed:"--the words carried in his mind a vision of reasons which would have needed much fuller expressions for Gwendolen to apprehend them, but before he had begun those brief sentences, the door opened and the husband entered. Grandcourt had deliberately gone out and turned back to satisfy a suspicion. What he saw was Gwendolen's face of anguish framed black like a nun's, and Deronda standing three yards from her with a look of sorrow such as he might have bent on the last struggle of life in a beloved object. Without any show of surprise Grandcourt nodded to Deronda, gave a second look at Gwendolen, passed on, and seated himself easily at a little distance crossing his legs, taking out his handkerchief and trifling with it elegantly. Gwendolen had shrunk and changed her attitude on seeing him, but she did not turn or move from her place. It was not a moment in which she could feign anything, or manifest any strong revulsion of feeling: the passionate movement of her last speech was still too strong within her. What she felt beside was a dull despairing sense that her interview with Deronda was at an end: a curtain had fallen. But he, naturally, was urged into self-possession and effort by susceptibility to what might follow for her from being seen by her husband in this betrayal of agitation; and feeling that any pretense of ease in prolonging his visit would only exaggerate Grandcourt's possible conjectures of duplicity, he merely said, "I will not stay longer now. Good bye." He put out his hand, and she let him press her poor little chill fingers; but she said no good-bye. When he had left the room, Gwendolen threw herself into a seat, with an expectation as dull as her despair--the expectation that she was going to be punished. But Grandcourt took no notice: he was satisfied to have let her know that she had not deceived him, and to keep a silence which was formidable with omniscience. He went out that evening, and her plea of feeling ill was accepted without even a sneer. The next morning at breakfast he said, "I am going yachting to the Mediterranean." "When?" said Gwendolen, with a leap of heart which had hope in it. "The day after to-morrow. The yacht is at Marseilles. Lush is gone to get everything ready." "Shall I have mamma to stay with me, then?" said Gwendolen, the new sudden possibility of peace and affection filling her mind like a burst of morning light. "No; you will go with me."

Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements touched him only through his rents. He glanced over the best newspaper columns, and his views can hardly be said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all Germans, commercial men, and voters liable to use the wrong kind of soap, under the general epithet of "brutes;" but he took no action on these questions beyond looking from under his eyelids at any man who mentioned them, and retaining an intimidating silence. But Grandcourt, within his own sphere of interest, showed some of the qualities of an international diplomat. No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped him. He would have denied that he was jealous; because jealousy implied some doubt of his own power to hinder what he had determined against. That his wife should prefer another man's society to his own would not pain him: what he required was that she should know that she was helpless to defy him. However much he may have vacillated before marrying, there was no vacillating in his interpretation of the bond. He had not repented of his marriage; it had brought him new objects to exert his will upon; and he had not repented of his choice. His taste was fastidious, and Gwendolen satisfied it: he would not have liked a wife who outranked him; nor one who did not command admiration by her beauty, or who was unable to make spirited answers. These requirements may not seem too exacting to equally fastidious contemporaries; but fewer perhaps may follow him in his contentment that his wife should be in a temper which would make her fly out if she dared, and that she should have married him because of other feelings than passionate attachment. Still, for those who prefer command to love, one does not see why the habit of mind should change precisely at the point of matrimony. Grandcourt did not feel that he had chosen the wrong wife; and having taken on the part of husband, he was not going to allow himself to look a fool. This was his state of mind - not jealousy; although the result in his behaviour was very much the same. He had come up to town earlier than usual to make arrangements about his will, and complete the transaction with his uncle about Diplow, which the bait of ready money had finally won him to agree upon. But he also wished to present himself in town with the beautiful bride whom he had chosen to marry in spite of what other people might have expected. It is true that Grandcourt believed that he did not care a languid curse for anyone's admiration: but this state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required a world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile. Grandcourt had his non-caring attitude enlarged by splendid receptions and conspicuous rides and drives with his wife on all distinguished occasions. He wished her to be sought after; he liked that "fellows" should be eager to talk with her within his sight; he would not even have objected to lofty coquetry on her part. But what he did not like were her ways in relation to Deronda. After the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, when Grandcourt had observed the dialogue on the settee, he invited Deronda along with the Mallingers, to make it clear that Deronda's presence or absence was not of the least importance to him; and he said nothing to Gwendolen on her behaviour that evening, lest his expression of disgust should be a little too strong to satisfy his own pride. But a few days afterward he remarked,- "Nothing makes a woman more of a gawky than looking out for people and showing tempers in public. A woman ought to have fine manners. Else it's intolerable to appear with her." Gwendolen understood him, and felt some alarm at the notion of being a gawky. For she, too, required admirers. But the sense of overhanging rebuke only intensified the anticipation of meeting Deronda. The excitement of her town life was like the hurry and constant change of foreign travel; there was always something to do, and not without pleasure. But the rare occasions on which she could exchange any words with Deronda became magnified in her consciousness, and enlarged the place she imagined herself to have in his mind. How could Deronda help this? He certainly did not avoid her; rather he wished to let her know that her confidence in him had not lowered his respect. Moreover he liked being near her - how could it be otherwise? She was a lovely woman, and he cared about her fate perhaps all the more because he saw his own future lying far away from this splendid sad-hearted creature, who had turned to him with a beseeching need. Gwendolen considered taking singing lessons from Mirah as a sort of obedience to Deronda's advice, but as day followed leisurely day, Grandcourt's presence seemed to flatten every effort to the level of his own boredom. His negative mind was as diffusive as fog, clinging to all objects, and spoiling all contact. But one morning at breakfast, Gwendolen, determined to show her old spirit, said- "I think of making myself accomplished while we are in town, and having singing lessons." "Why?" said Grandcourt, languidly. "Why?" echoed Gwendolen, playing at sauciness; "because I can't smoke, and I can't go to the club - I want a variety of ennui. What would be the most convenient time, when you are busy with your lawyers, for me to have lessons from that little Jewess whose singing is all the rage?" "Whenever you like," said Grandcourt, pushing away his plate, and leaning back while he looked at her with his most lizard-like expression and played with the ears of the tiny spaniel on his lap (Gwendolen had taken a dislike to the dogs because they fawned on him). "Though I don't see why a lady should sing. Amateurs make fools of themselves. One doesn't want to hear squalling in private." "Frankness seems to me a husband's great charm," said Gwendolen, lifting a prawn before her, to look at the boiled ingenuousness of its eyes as preferable to the lizard's. "But I suppose you don't object to Miss Lapidoth's singing at our party on the fourth? I thought of engaging her. Lady Brackenshaw had her, you know. And Mr. Deronda, who is a first-rate judge, says there is no singing in such good taste as hers for a drawing-room. I think his opinion is an authority." She meant to sling a small stone at her husband in that way. "It's very indecent of Deronda to go about praising that girl," said Grandcourt in a tone of indifference. "Indecent!" exclaimed Gwendolen, reddening in startled wonder, unable to reflect on the falsity of the phrase to go about praising. "He ought to hold his tongue about her. Men can see what is his relation to her." "Men who judge of others by themselves," said Gwendolen, turning white after her redness, and immediately smitten with a dread of her own words. "Of course. And a woman should accept their judgment," said Grandcourt deliberately. "I suppose you take Deronda for a saint." "Oh dear no!" said Gwendolen, desperately summoning her self-control, and speaking in a high hard tone. "Only a little less of a monster." She rose, pushed her chair away without hurry, and walked out of the room with something like the care of a man who is afraid of showing that he has taken more wine than usual. She turned the keys inside her dressing-room doors, and sat down for some time looking pale and quiet, but with cruel sensations. Deronda unlike what she had believed him to be, was a hideous and painful image. It had grasped her before she could consider whether it were true; and now came the sudden perception, how very little she knew about him - how childish she had been in her confidence. His severity to her began to seem odious; and the grave beauty of his face seemed an unpleasant mask. All this went rapidly through her mind, until she started into resistance. Suddenly from out the grey morning a stream of sunshine came, wrapping her in warmth and light. She rose, stretching her arms upward and clasping her hands, her habitual attitude in seeking relief from oppressive feeling, and walked about the room in the flood of sunbeams. "It is not true! What does it matter whether Grandcourt believes it?" This is what she repeated to herself, in a desperate cry of faith. How could she go on through the day in this state? Her impetuous imagination flew to wild actions by which she would convince herself of what she wished: she would question Lady Mallinger; she would write to Deronda and upbraid him with making the world wicked and hopeless to her. No; she would go to Mirah. This path was more definitely practicable, and quickly became imperious. She had the pretext of asking Mirah to sing at her party on the fourth. What was she going to say beside? She did not wait to foresee. She rang her bell, and on finding that Mr. Grandcourt had gone out, she ordered the carriage, and dressed for the drive. Then she went down, and walked about the drawing-room like an imprisoned animal, not recognizing herself in the glass panels. Her husband would probably find out where she had been, and punish her somehow - but all that mattered just now was the assurance that she had not been deluded in her trust. She had Mirah's address, and soon was on the way with a palpitating heart. She was heedless of everything till she found herself in a room with folding-doors, and heard Deronda's voice behind it. Frightened at her own agitation, she began to unbutton her gloves that she might button them again, biting her lips, until the door opened, and Mirah appeared with a sweet smile of recognition. There was relief in the sight of her face, and Gwendolen was able to smile in return; and as she seated herself, all the while hearing the voice, she felt some return of energy in the confused sense that the truth could not be anything that she dreaded. Mirah drew her chair very near, as if she felt that their conversation should be quiet, and looked at her visitor in expectation. Gwendolen began in a low, almost bashful tone- "Perhaps you wonder to see me - I ought to have written - but I have a particular request." "I am glad to see you instead of a letter," said Mirah, wondering at the agitated manner of the "Vandyke duchess." Gwendolen went on- "I thought - I hoped you would not object to sing at our house on the 4th - in the evening - at a party. I should be so much obliged." "I shall be very happy to sing for you. At ten?" said Mirah, while Gwendolen seemed to get more instead of less embarrassed. "At ten, please," she answered; then paused. She had nothing more to say, yet she could not go. Deronda's voice was in her ears. She must say it- "Mr. Deronda is in the next room." "Yes," said Mirah. "He is reading Hebrew with my brother." "You have a brother?" "Yes, a dear brother who is consumptive, and Mr. Deronda is the best of friends to him, as he has been to me," said Mirah. "Tell me," said Gwendolen, putting her hand on Mirah's, and speaking hardly above a whisper- "tell me the truth. You are sure he is quite good. You know no evil of him. Any evil that people say of him is false." Could the proud-spirited woman have behaved more like a child? But the strange words penetrated Mirah with nothing but solemnity and indignation. With a sudden light in her eyes and a trembling voice, she said- "Who says evil of him? I would not believe any evil of him, if an angel came to tell it me. He found me when I was going to drown myself; I looked so poor and miserable, you would have thought I was a beggar. And he treated me as if I had been a king's daughter. He took me to the best of women. He found my brother for me. And he honours my brother, though he too was poor. And my brother honours him, which is no light thing, for my brother is very learned and great-minded. Mr. Deronda says there are few men equal to him." Some Jewish defiance flamed into her indignant gratitude. But Gwendolen was like one parched with thirst and drinking fresh water. She did not notice Mirah's anger; she was not conscious of anything but of the sense that Deronda was no more like her husband's conception than the dawn was like gas-light. Her whole state of feeling was changed. She pressed Mirah's hand, and said, "Thank you, thank you," in a hurried whisper, then rose, adding, "I must go, I shall see you on the 4th - I am so much obliged" - bowing herself out, while Mirah, opening the door for her, wondered at her sudden chilly retreat. Gwendolen, indeed, had no feeling to spare for Mirah. The passionate need for confirmation of Deronda's goodness, which had over-ridden everything else, was no sooner satisfied than she wanted to be gone. She began to dread Deronda's seeing her. And once in the carriage, she had the vision of what awaited her at home. When she drew up in Grosvenor Square, her husband was arriving with a cigar between his fingers. He threw it away and handed her out, accompanying her upstairs. She turned into the drawing-room and sat down wearily, taking off her gloves, rubbing her forehead, and ignoring his presence as much as possible. But he sat in front of her, where she could not avoid looking at him. "May I ask where you have been at this extraordinary hour?" said Grandcourt. "I have been to Miss Lapidoth's, to ask her to come and sing for us," said Gwendolen, laying her gloves on the table. "And to ask her about her relations with Deronda?" said Grandcourt, with the coldest possible sneer in his low voice. For the first time since their marriage she flashed out upon him without check. Turning her eyes full on his she said, in a biting tone- "Yes; and what you said is a low, wicked falsehood." "She told you so - did she?" returned Grandcourt, with a more pronounced sneer. Gwendolen was mute. The daring anger within her was turned dumb. What reasons for her belief could she give? All her reasons would be shrivelled up under her husband's breath. There was no proof to offer but her own impression, which would seem to him her own folly. She turned and looked away from him angrily: she would have risen, but he was in her way. Grandcourt saw his advantage. "It's of no consequence so far as her singing goes," he drawled. "Have her to sing, if you like." After a pause, he added in his lowest imperious tone, "But you will please to observe that you are not to go near that house again. As my wife, you must take my word about what is proper. When you undertook to be Mrs. Grandcourt, you undertook not to make a fool of yourself. You have been making a fool of yourself this morning; and if you were to go on this way, you might get yourself talked of at the clubs in a way you would not like. What do you know about the world? You have married me, and must be guided by my opinion." Every slow sentence of that speech had a terrific mastery in it for Gwendolen. If it had come from a physician telling her that she had a fatal disease, she could not have been more helpless against it. But she was permitted to move now, and her husband never again spoke of what had occurred. He knew the force of his own words, and did not flinch from ruthlessness. Gwendolen did not, for all this, part with her recovered faith:- rather, she kept it with a more anxious tenacity, as a Protestant of old kept his Bible hidden or a Catholic his crucifix, according to the side in favour at the time; and it was characteristic of her that apart from the information gained about Deronda, Mirah and her brother did not enter her thoughts. The phrase "reading Hebrew" had fleeted across her sense of hearing without leaving any impression. But the result of that visit, as it regarded her husband, was the cause of a change in her perhaps not observed by anyone except Deronda. As the weeks went on bringing occasional transient interviews with her, he thought that he perceived an intensifying of her superficial hardness and resolute display, which made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more marked and disturbing. In fact, she was undergoing a sort of unwilling discipline for the refractory which bent her with a terrible strain. Grandcourt had divined this refractoriness in her, and suspected that it increased whenever she happened to see Deronda: there was some "confounded nonsense" between them. He did not imagine it exactly as flirtation, and his imagination in other branches was rather restricted; but it evidently kept up a kind of simmering in her mind which might turn out to be disagreeable. Grandcourt had a vague perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen which his views of marriage required him peremptorily to check. Among the means he chose, one was peculiar, and was less ably calculated than usual. He determined that she should know the contents of the will he was making, but he could not tell her himself, because it involved the fact of his relation to Mrs. Glasher; and any open recognition of this between Gwendolen and himself was supremely repugnant to him. Like all proud, closely-wrapped natures, he shrank from explicitness on personal matters. And clashing was intolerable to him; he preferred to use the quiet massive pressure of his rule. But he wished Gwendolen to know that before he made her an offer, he knew that she was aware of his relations with Lydia. Some men in his place might have thought of writing this to her, in the form of a letter. But Grandcourt hated writing: even writing a note was a bore to him, and he had long been accustomed to have all his writing done by Lush: who, to his mind, was as much of an implement as pen and paper. But here too Grandcourt was reserved, and would not utter a word likely to encourage Lush in an impudent sympathy about his marriage. Grandcourt had always allowed Lush to know his affairs and debts indiscriminately; he had only used discrimination about what he would allow his confidant to say to him; and he had been so accustomed to this human tool, that having him at call in London was a recovery of lost ease. It followed that Lush knew the provisions of the will more exactly than Grandcourt himself. Grandcourt did not doubt that Gwendolen, since she was a woman who could put two and two together, knew or suspected Lush to be the contriver of her interview with Lydia, and that this why she had requested his banishment. But here Grandcourt lacked the knowledge that could have saved him from mistake - namely, some experience of the passions concerned. He had correctly divined the half of Gwendolen's dread that related to her personal pride; but the remorseful half was as much out of his imagination as the other side of the moon. What he believed her to feel about Lydia was solely jealousy, and what he believed Lydia to have written with the jewels was the fact that she had once been used to wearing them. He aimed to aggravate the jealousy and yet smite it dumb: and Lush was the only possible envoy. Grandcourt's view of things was considerably fenced in by his lack of sympathy. This lack would make even Mephistopheles stupid: thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, he would inevitably make blunders. One morning Grandcourt went to Gwendolen in her boudoir, hat and gloves in hand, and said with his most persuasive drawl, looking down on her as she sat with a book on her lap- "A - Gwendolen, there's some business about property to be explained. I have told Lush to explain it to you. I am going out. He can come up now. I suppose you'll not mind." "You know that I do mind," said Gwendolen, angrily. "I shall not see him." She started up toward the door, but Grandcourt was prepared for her anger and was there before her, saying;- "It's no use making a fuss. There are plenty of brutes in the world that one has to talk to. One shouldn't make a fuss about such things. If I employ Lush, the proper thing for you is to take it as a matter of course. Not to make a fuss about it. Not to toss your head about people of that sort." The drawling and the pauses in this speech gave time for crowding reflections in Gwendolen. What was there to be told her about property? It might concern her mother, or Mrs. Glasher. What would be the use if she refused to see Lush? She knew Grandcourt would not tell her himself. The humiliation of standing a prisoner, with her husband barring the door, was not to be borne any longer, and she turned away. "Shall I tell Lush he may come up now?" he said. Yet another pause before she could say "Yes" - her eyes cast down. "I shall come back in time to ride, if you like to get ready," said Grandcourt. No answer. "She is in a desperate rage," thought he. But the rage was silent, and therefore not disagreeable to him. He turned her chin and kissed her, while she still kept her eyelids down, and she did not move them until he was gone. What was she to do? Her romantic illusions in marrying this man had turned on her power of using him as she liked. He was using her as he liked. She sat awaiting the announcement of Lush as a sort of searing operation that she had to go through. The thought of what her husband knew burned through her. It was all a part of that new gambling, in which the losing was not simply a minus, but a terrible plus that had never entered into her reckoning. Grandcourt had told Lush, "Don't make yourself more disagreeable than nature makes you." "That depends," thought Lush. But the idea of an interview did not wholly displease him, and he said, "I will write a brief abstract of the will for Mrs. Grandcourt to read." Some provision was made for himself in the will, and he had no reason to be in a bad humour. He was sure that he knew all the secrets of the situation; but he had no diabolical delight in it, only a gratified resentment in discerning that this marriage, as he had foreseen, was not as satisfactory as the supercilious young lady had expected it to be, and as Grandcourt wished to pretend that it was. While he had no active good-will, he had little active malevolence, being chiefly occupied in his own particular pleasures. Nevertheless, he was not indifferent to the prospect of being treated uncivilly by a beautiful woman, or to having the official power of humiliating her. By the time that Mr. Lush was announced, Gwendolen had resolved that he should not witness the slightest betrayal of her feeling. She invited him to sit down with stately quietude. After all, what was this man to her? He was not in the least like her husband. Her power of hating a coarse, familiar, clumsy man, was now relaxed by the intensity with which she hated his contrast. Lush held a small paper in his hand while he spoke. "I need hardly say that I should not have presented myself to you if Mr. Grandcourt had not expressed a strong wish to that effect." From some voices that speech might have sounded apologetic, but to Gwendolen's ear his words held as much insolence as his prominent eyes, and the pronoun "you" was too familiar. He ought to have addressed the folding-screen, and have spoken of her as Mrs. Grandcourt. She gave the smallest bow, and Lush went on. "My having been in Mr. Grandcourt's confidence for fifteen years gives me a peculiar position. He can speak to me of matters that he could not mention to anyone else; and he could not have employed anyone else in this affair. I have accepted the task out of friendship for him. Which is my apology for accepting the task - if you would have preferred some one else." He paused, but she made no sign. Lush opened the folded paper, and looked at it vaguely before he began to speak again. "This paper contains some information about Mr. Grandcourt's will, if you'll be good enough to cast your eyes over it. But there is something I had to say by way of introduction - which I hope you'll pardon me for, if it's not quite agreeable." Lush found that he was behaving better than he had expected, and had no idea how insulting he made himself with his "not quite agreeable." "Say what you have to say without apologizing, please," said Gwendolen, with the air she might have bestowed on a dog-stealer come to claim a reward for finding the dog he had stolen. "I have to remind you of something that occurred before your engagement to Mr. Grandcourt," said Lush, some willing insolence rising in exchange for her scorn. "You met a lady in Cardell Chase, if you remember, who spoke to you of her position with regard to Mr. Grandcourt. She had children with her - one a very fine boy." Gwendolen was pale. This man's speech was like a knife-edge drawn across her skin: and other feelings crowded in, dim and alarming as ghosts. "Mr. Grandcourt was aware that you were acquainted with this unfortunate affair, and he thinks it only right that his intentions regarding property should be made clear to you. If you have any objection, you should mention it to me - he would rather not speak about it himself. If you will be good enough to read this." Lush presented the paper to her. When Gwendolen resolved that she would betray no feeling, she had not prepared herself to hear that her husband knew the silently accepted terms on which she had married him. She dared not raise her hand to the paper that he held out, lest it should tremble. She said haughtily- "Lay it on the table. And go into the next room, please." Lush obeyed, thinking, "My lady winces considerably. She didn't know what would be the charge for that superfine article, Henleigh Grandcourt." But it seemed to him that as a penniless girl, she had done better than she had any right to expect, and that she had been uncommonly knowing. Her words to Lydia had meant nothing, and her running away had probably been planned: it had turned out a master-stroke. Meanwhile Gwendolen was rallying her nerves. She must read the paper. Her pride, her rebellion, her remorseful conscience all made her need to know what the paper contained. At first it was not easy to take in the meaning of the words. When she succeeded, she found that in the case of her having no son, Grandcourt had made the small Henleigh his heir; that was all she cared to extract from the paper with any distinctness. The other statement as to what provision would be made for her in the same case, she hurried over, getting only a confused perception of thousands and Gadsmere. It was enough. This inheritance was meant as a final humiliation, but she could dismiss the man in the next room with the defiant energy which it inspired. Thrusting the paper between the leaves of her book, she walked with her stateliest air into the next room, where Lush immediately arose. She said in a high tone, while she swept him with her eyelashes- "Tell Mr. Grandcourt that his arrangements are just what I desired" - passing on without haste, and leaving Lush to mingle some admiration of her graceful back with a half-amused sense of her impertinence. He really did not want her to be worse punished, and he was glad that it was time to go and lunch on lobster salad at his club. When her husband returned he found Gwendolen in her riding-dress, ready to ride out with him. She was not again going to be hysterical. She was going to act in the spirit of her message, and not to give herself time to reflect. Doubtless her husband had meant to produce a great effect on her: by-and-by perhaps she would let him see an effect the very opposite of what he intended; but at present all that she could show was a defiant satisfaction. To show anything that could be interpreted as jealousy would be the worst self-humiliation. She was not clear about her future action, except that she would match her husband in indifference. So she not only rode, but went out with him to dine, contributing nothing to alter their usual manner; and curiously enough she rejected a handkerchief on which her maid had put the wrong scent - a scent that Grandcourt had once objected to. Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this hated husband: she liked all disgust to be on her side. But to defer thought in this way proved impossible. After nine or ten hours she seemed to have gone through a labyrinth of reflection, in which every path was a dead end. Already she was undergoing some hardening effect from feeling that she was viewed solely in the light of her lowest motives. She recalled the scenes of her courtship, with the new bitter consciousness of what had been in Grandcourt's mind - certain that he had a triumph in conquering her repugnance, and a cold exultation in knowing her fancied secret. Her imagination exaggerated every tyrannical impulse he was capable of. "I will insist on being separated from him" - was her first darting determination; then, "I will leave him whether he consents or not. If this boy becomes his heir, I have made an atonement." But those scenes would be unendurable. How could she run away to her own family, causing them distress and scandal? What future lay before a Mrs. Grandcourt gone back to her mother, and made destitute by the rupture of the marriage whose chief excuse had been that it had brought that mother a maintenance? What could she say to justify her flight? Her uncle would tell her to go back. Her mother would cry. Her aunt and Anna would look at her with wondering alarm. Her husband would have power to compel her. She had absolutely nothing that she could allege against him. And to "insist on separation!" With Grandcourt, that was easier to say than do. How was she to begin? What was she to say that would not condemn herself? "If I am to have misery," was her bitter refrain, "I had better keep it secret." Moreover, her capability of rectitude told her again and again that she had no right to complain of her contract, or to withdraw from it. And always among the images that drove her back to submission was Deronda. The idea of herself separated from her husband gave Deronda a changed, disturbing place in her mind: instinctively she felt that the separation would be from him too. In the prospect of herself as a solitary, dubiously-regarded woman, she felt some tingling bashfulness when she remembered her behaviour towards him. What would he say if he knew everything? Probably that she ought to bear what she had brought on herself, unless she were sure that she could make herself a better woman by taking any other course. And what sort of woman would she be, solitary, sick of life, looked at with suspicious pity? Mrs. Grandcourt "run away" would be a more pitiable creature than Gwendolen Harleth condemned to teach the bishop's daughters, and to be inspected by Mrs. Mompert. One characteristic trait in her conduct is worth mentioning. She would not look a second time at the paper Lush had given her, but locked it away, proudly resolved against curiosity about what was allotted to herself - feeling herself branded in her husband's mind with the meanness that would accept marriage and wealth on any conditions, however dishonourable. Day after day she thought along the same lines, and nothing changed. May turned into June, and still Mrs. Grandcourt was presenting herself with the accustomed grace, beauty, and costume, whether at church or the opera. Church was not distinguished in her mind from the other forms of self-presentation, for the brilliant Mrs. Grandcourt was, so far as pastoral care and religious fellowship were concerned, in as complete a solitude as a man in a lighthouse. Can we wonder at the submission which hid her rebellion? The combination is common enough. Poor Gwendolen had both too much and too little mental power and dignity to make herself exceptional. No wonder that Deronda now saw some hardening in a look and manner which were schooled daily to the suppression of feeling. For example. One morning, riding in Rotten Row with Grandcourt, she saw standing against the railing, facing them, a dark-eyed lady with a little girl and a blonde boy, whom she at once recognized as Mrs. Glasher. Gwendolen had not presence of mind to do anything but glance away from the piercing dark eyes toward Grandcourt, who wheeled past the group with an unmoved face, giving no sign of recognition. Immediately she felt a rising rage against him mingling with her shame, and the words, "You might at least have raised your hat to her," flew to her lips - but did not pass them. She was filling Mrs. Glasher's place: how could she be the person to reproach him? She was dumb. It was not chance, but design, that had brought Mrs. Glasher there with her boy. Her interviews with Lush had made her think her ultimate triumph was probable. Let her keep quiet, and she might live to see the marriage dissolve itself, Lush hinted, leaving the succession assured to her boy. She had had an interview with Grandcourt, too, who had as usual told her to behave like a reasonable woman, and threatened punishment if she were troublesome; but had, also as usual, been lavish with his money. Lydia, feeding on the probabilities in her favour, devoured her wrath; but she could not resist making a Medusa-apparition before Gwendolen, in a vindictive outlet of venom. Hence, after finding out from Lush the likely time for Gwendolen to be riding, she had watched at that place. Her appearance was made effective beyond her conception by the shock it gave Gwendolen actually to see Grandcourt ignoring this woman, who had once been the nearest in the world to him, along with his children. And this dark shadow thus cast spread itself over her visions of a solitary future. What possible release could there be for her, but death? Not her own death. Gwendolen could not easily think of her own death as a near reality. It seemed more possible that Grandcourt should die:- and yet not likely. No! she foresaw him always living, and her own life dominated by him; the "always" of her young experience not stretching beyond the next few years that seemed immeasurably long with her passionate weariness. The thought of his dying would not subside: it turned as with a dream-change into the terror that she should die with his throttling fingers on her neck avenging that thought. Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, dark rays doing their work invisibly in daylight. An evening or two after that encounter in the Park, there was a grand concert at Klesmer's, who was living rather magnificently now in one of the large houses in Grosvenor Place. Gwendolen had looked forward to this occasion as one on which she was sure to meet Deronda, and she had been meditating how to put a question to him which, without shaming herself, would yet be explicit enough for him to understand it. She struggled with opposite feelings: the very idea of Deronda's relation to her discouraged her from taking any desperate step towards freedom, but she longed for some word of his to enforce a resolve. Because any conversations with him had always to be snatched in the doubtful privacy of large parties, she lived through them many times beforehand, imagining what she would say. Her irritation was great when no opportunity came; and this evening at Klesmer's she included Deronda in her anger, because he looked as calm as possible at a distance from her, while she was in danger of betraying her impatience. She found her only safety in a chill haughtiness which made Mr. Vandernoodt remark that Mrs. Grandcourt was becoming a perfect match for her husband. When at last Deronda was near her, Sir Hugo and Mrs. Raymond were close by and could hear every word she said. No matter: her husband was not near, and her irritation passed without check into a fit of daring which restored her self-possession. Deronda was there at last, and she would compel him to do what she pleased. Standing rather queenly in her white lace and green leaves she threw a royal permissiveness into her request, "I wish you would come and see me tomorrow between five and six, Mr. Deronda." There could be but one answer: "Certainly." Afterward it occurred to Deronda that he would write a note to excuse himself. He had always avoided making a call at Grandcourt's. But his excuse might be taken as an indifference that would hurt her, so he kept his promise. Gwendolen had declined to ride out on the last-minute plea of not feeling well - not without alarm lest her husband should say that he too would stay at home. But Grandcourt accepted her excuse without remark, and rode off. When Gwendolen found herself alone, and had sent down the order that only Mr. Deronda was to be admitted, she began to feel a growing agitation in the thought that he would soon appear, and she should be obliged to speak: yet what she had been for hours determining to say seemed impossible. For the first time, she felt timid, and was shaken by the possibility that he might think her invitation unbecoming. If so, she would have sunk in his esteem. But immediately she resisted this fear as an infection from her husband's way of thinking. In her struggle between agitation and the effort to suppress it, she was walking up and down the length of two drawing-rooms, where at one end a long mirror reflected her in her black dress, with her white pillar of a neck shown to advantage. Some consciousness of this made her turn hastily and hurry to the boudoir, where she tied a large piece of black lace so as completely to conceal her neck, and leave only her face looking out from the black frame. However, the lace did not take away the uneasiness from her eyes and lips. She was standing in the middle of the room when Deronda was announced, and as he approached her she perceived that he too for some reason was not his usual self. He looked less happy than usual, and appeared to be under some effort in speaking to her. They both said, "How do you do?" quite curtly; and Gwendolen moved to a little distance, while Deronda stood where he was,- both feeling it difficult to say any more, though the preoccupation in his mind could hardly have been more remote from Gwendolen's idea. She naturally saw in his embarrassment some reflection of her own. Forced to speak, she began with unusually timid awkwardness- "You will wonder why I begged you to come. I wanted to ask you something. You said I was ignorant. That is true. And what can I do but ask you?" At this moment she was feeling it utterly impossible to put the questions she had intended. Something new in her nervous manner roused Deronda's anxiety lest there might be a new crisis. He said with sad affection in his voice- "My only regret is, that I can be of so little use to you." The words touched a new spring in her, and she went on with more sense of freedom, yet still not saying anything she had designed to say. "I wanted to tell you that I have always been thinking of your advice, but is it any use? I can't make myself different, because things give me bad feelings - and I must go on - I can alter nothing - it is no use." She paused, conscious that she was not finding the right words, but began again hurriedly, "But if I go on I shall get worse. I want not to get worse. I should like to be what you wish. There are people who are good and enjoy great things - I know there are. I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if I should get wicked with hating people. I have tried to think that I would go away from everybody. But I can't. You think, perhaps, that I don't mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me what I can do." She had forgotten everything but that helpless misery which she was trying to convey to Deronda. Her brilliant, tearless eyes had a look of smarting; there was a subdued sob in her voice, which sank to hardly above a whisper. Her tightly-clasped fingers pressed against her heart. The feeling Deronda endured in these moments was horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck, beaten by an inescapable storm. How could he grasp her wretchedness? - how change it with a sentence? He was afraid of his own voice. The words that rushed into his mind seemed feeble and trite. The thought that urged itself foremost was- "Confess everything to your husband; conceal nothing:" - but before he had begun to speak, the door opened and the husband entered. Grandcourt had deliberately gone out and turned back to satisfy a suspicion. What he saw was Gwendolen's face of anguish, framed black like a nun's, and Deronda standing three yards from her with a look of deep sorrow. Without any show of surprise Grandcourt nodded to Deronda, gave a second look at Gwendolen, passed on, and seated himself easily at a little distance, crossing his legs, and trifling elegantly with his handkerchief. Gwendolen had shrunk on seeing him, but she did not move from her place. She could not feign anything: the passion of her last speech was still too strong within her. She felt a dull despairing sense that her interview with Deronda was at an end. But he, naturally, was urged into self-possession and effort by thinking of what might follow for her from being seen by her husband in this agitation; and as any pretence of ease would only exaggerate Grandcourt's possible conjectures, he merely said- "I will not stay longer now. Good bye." He put out his hand, and she let him press her poor little chill fingers; but she said no good-bye. When he had left, Gwendolen threw herself into a seat, with a dull expectation that she was going to be punished. But Grandcourt took no notice: he was satisfied to have let her know that she had not deceived him, and to keep an omniscient silence. He went out that evening, and her plea of feeling ill was accepted without even a sneer. The next morning at breakfast he said, "I am going yachting to the Mediterranean." "When?" said Gwendolen, with a leap of hope. "The day after tomorrow. The yacht is at Marseilles. Lush is gone to get everything ready." "Shall I have mamma to stay with me, then?" said Gwendolen, the new sudden possibility of peace and affection filling her mind like a burst of morning light. "No; you will go with me."

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 48

"My desolation does begin to make A better life." --SHAKESPEARE: _Antony and Cleopatra._ Before Deronda was summoned to a second interview with his mother, a day had passed in which she had only sent him a message to say that she was not yet well enough to receive him again; but on the third morning he had a note saying, "I leave to-day. Come and see me at once." He was shown into the same room as before; but it was much darkened with blinds and curtains. The Princess was not there, but she presently entered, dressed in a loose wrap of some soft silk, in color a dusky orange, her head again with black lace floating about it, her arms showing themselves bare from under her wide sleeves. Her face seemed even more impressive in the sombre light, the eyes larger, the lines more vigorous. You might have imagined her a sorceress who would stretch forth her wonderful hand and arm to mix youth-potions for others, but scorned to mix them for herself, having had enough of youth. She put her arms on her son's shoulders at once, and kissed him on both cheeks, then seated herself among her cushions with an air of assured firmness and dignity unlike her fitfulness in their first interview, and told Deronda to sit down by her. He obeyed, saying, "You are quite relieved now, I trust?" "Yes, I am at ease again. Is there anything more that you would like to ask me?" she said, with the matter of a queen rather than of a mother. "Can I find the house in Genoa where you used to live with my grandfather?" said Deronda. "No," she answered, with a deprecating movement of her arm, "it is pulled down--not to be found. But about our family, and where my father lived at various times--you will find all that among the papers in the chest, better than I can tell you. My father, I told you, was a physician. My mother was a Morteira. I used to hear all those things without listening. You will find them all. I was born amongst them without my will. I banished them as soon as I could." Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and said, "Anything else that I should desire to know from you could only be what it is some satisfaction to your own feeling to tell me." "I think I have told you everything that could be demanded of me," said the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, "I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go through it again. I will save myself from agitation." And she was acting out that scheme. But to Deronda's nature the moment was cruel; it made the filial yearning of his life a disappointed pilgrimage to a shrine where there were no longer the symbols of sacredness. It seemed that all the woman lacking in her was present in him, as he said, with some tremor in his voice, "Then are we to part and I never be anything to you?" "It is better so," said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice. "There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you to take the place of my son. You would not love me. Don't deny it," she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. "I know what is the truth. You don't like what I did. You are angry with me. You think I robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather's side, and you will always have a condemnation of me in your heart." Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. He rose from his seat by her, preferring to stand, if he had to obey that imperious prohibition of any tenderness. But his mother now looked up at him with a new admiration in her glance, saying, "You are wrong to be angry with me. You are the better for what I did." After pausing a little, she added, abruptly, "And now tell me what you shall do?" "Do you mean now, immediately," said Deronda; "or as to the course of my future life?" "I mean in the future. What difference will it make to you that I have told you about your birth?" "A very great difference," said Deronda, emphatically. "I can hardly think of anything that would make a greater difference." "What shall you do then?" said the Princess, with more sharpness. "Make yourself just like your grandfather--be what he wished you--turn yourself into a Jew like him?" "That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out of me," said Deronda, with increasing tenacity of tone. "But I consider it my duty--it is the impulse of my feeling--to identify myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people, and if I can see any work to be done for them that I can give my soul and hand to I shall choose to do it." His mother had her eyes fixed on him with a wondering speculation, examining his face as if she thought that by close attention she could read a difficult language there. He bore her gaze very firmly, sustained by a resolute opposition, which was the expression of his fullest self. She bent toward him a little, and said, with a decisive emphasis, "You are in love with a Jewess." Deronda colored and said, "My reasons would be independent of any such fact." "I know better. I have seen what men are," said the Princess, peremptorily. "Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept any one but a Jew. There _are_ a few such," she added, with a touch of scorn. Deronda had that objection to answer which we all have known in speaking to those who are too certain of their own fixed interpretations to be enlightened by anything we may say. But besides this, the point immediately in question was one on which he felt a repugnance either to deny or affirm. He remained silent, and she presently said, "You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I drew him." Those words touched Deronda's filial imagination, and some tenderness in his glance was taken by his mother as an assent. She went on with rising passion: "But I was leading him the other way. And now your grandfather is getting his revenge." "Mother," said Deronda, remonstrantly, "don't let us think of it in that way. I will admit that there may come some benefit from the education you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the benefit with gratitude, to dwelling with resentment on the injury. I think it would have been right that I should have been brought up with the consciousness that I was a Jew, but it must always have been a good to me to have as wide an instruction and sympathy as possible. And now, you have restored me my inheritance--events have brought a fuller restitution than you could have made--you have been saved from robbing my people of my service and me of my duty: can you not bring your whole soul to consent to this?" Deronda paused in his pleading: his mother looked at him listeningly, as if the cadence of his voice were taking her ear, yet she shook her head slowly. He began again, even more urgently. "You have told me that you sought what you held the best for me: open your heart to relenting and love toward my grandfather, who sought what he held the best for you." "Not for me, no," she said, shaking her head with more absolute denial, and folding her arms tightly. "I tell you, he never thought of his daughter except as an instrument. Because I had wants outside his purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured. If that is the right law for the world, I will not say that I love it. If my acts were wrong--if it is God who is exacting from me that I should deliver up what I withheld--who is punishing me because I deceived my father and did not warn him that I should contradict his trust--well, I have told everything. I have done what I could. And _your_ soul consents. That is enough. I have after all been the instrument my father wanted.--'I desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish heart. Every Jew should rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.'" In uttering these last sentences the Princess narrowed her eyes, waved her head up and down, and spoke slowly with a new kind of chest-voice, as if she were quoting unwillingly. "Were those my grandfather's words?" said Deronda. "Yes, yes; and you will find them written. I wanted to thwart him," said the Princess, with a sudden outburst of the passion she had shown in the former interview. Then she added more slowly, "You would have me love what I have hated from the time I was so high"--here she held her left hand a yard from the floor.--"That can never be. But what does it matter? His yoke has been on me, whether I loved it or not. You are the grandson he wanted. You speak as men do--as if you felt yourself wise. What does it all mean?" Her tone was abrupt and scornful. Deronda, in his pained feeling, and under the solemn urgency of the moment, had to keep a clutching remembrance of their relationship, lest his words should become cruel. He began in a deep entreating tone: "Mother, don't say that I feel myself wise. We are set in the midst of difficulties. I see no other way to get any clearness than by being truthful--not by keeping back facts which may--which should carry obligation within them--which should make the only guidance toward duty. No wonder if such facts come to reveal themselves in spite of concealments. The effects prepared by generations are likely to triumph over a contrivance which would bend them all to the satisfaction of self. Your will was strong, but my grandfather's trust which you accepted and did not fulfill--what you call his yoke--is the expression of something stronger, with deeper, farther-spreading roots, knit into the foundations of sacredness for all men. You renounced me--you still banish me--as a son"--there was an involuntary movement of indignation in Deronda's voice--"But that stronger Something has determined that I shall be all the more the grandson whom also you willed to annihilate." His mother was watching him fixedly, and again her face gathered admiration. After a moment's silence she said, in a low, persuasive tone, "Sit down again," and he obeyed, placing himself beside her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and went on, "You rebuke me. Well--I am the loser. And you are angry because I banish you. What could you do for me but weary your own patience? Your mother is a shattered woman. My sense of life is little more than a sense of what was--except when the pain is present. You reproach me that I parted with you. I had joy enough without you then. Now you are come back to me, and I cannot make you a joy. Have you the cursing spirit of the Jew in you? Are you not able to forgive me? Shall you be glad to think that I am punished because I was not a Jewish mother to you?" "How can you ask me that?" said Deronda, remonstrantly. "Have I not besought you that I might now at least be a son to you? My grief is that you have declared me helpless to comfort you. I would give up much that is dear for the sake of soothing your anguish." "You shall give up nothing," said his mother, with the hurry of agitation. "You shall be happy. You shall let me think of you as happy. I shall have done you no harm. You have no reason to curse me. You shall feel for me as they feel for the dead whom they say prayers for--you shall long that I may be freed from all suffering--from all punishment. And I shall see you instead of always seeing your grandfather. Will any harm come to me because I broke his trust in the daylight after he was gone into darkness? I cannot tell:--if you think _Kaddish_ will help me--say it, say it. You will come between me and the dead. When I am in your mind, you will look as you do now--always as if you were a tender son--always--as if I had been a tender mother." She seemed resolved that her agitation should not conquer her, but he felt her hand trembling on his shoulder. Deep, deep compassion hemmed in all words. With a face of beseeching he put his arm around her and pressed her head tenderly under his. They sat so for some moments. Then she lifted her head again and rose from her seat with a great sigh, as if in that breath she were dismissing a weight of thoughts. Deronda, standing in front of her, felt that the parting was near. But one of her swift alternations had come upon his mother. "Is she beautiful?" she said, abruptly. "Who?" said Deronda, changing color. "The woman you love." It was not a moment for deliberate explanation. He was obliged to say, "Yes." "Not ambitious?" "No, I think not." "Not one who must have a path of her own?" "I think her nature is not given to make great claims." "She is not like that?" said the Princess, taking from her wallet a miniature with jewels around it, and holding it before her son. It was her own in all the fire of youth, and as Deronda looked at it with admiring sadness, she said, "Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father's will was against it. My nature gave me a charter." "I do acknowledge that," said Deronda, looking from the miniature to her face, which even in its worn pallor had an expression of living force beyond anything that the pencil could show. "Will you take the portrait?" said the Princess, more gently. "If she is a kind woman, teach her to think of me kindly." "I shall be grateful for the portrait," said Deronda, "but--I ought to say, I have no assurance that she whom I love will have any love for me. I have kept silence." "Who and what is she?" said the mother. The question seemed a command. "She was brought up as a singer for the stage," said Deronda, with inward reluctance. "Her father took her away early from her mother, and her life has been unhappy. She is very young--only twenty. Her father wished to bring her up in disregard--even in dislike of her Jewish origin, but she has clung with all her affection to the memory of her mother and the fellowship of her people." "Ah, like you. She is attached to the Judaism she knows nothing of," said the Princess, peremptorily. "That is poetry--fit to last through an opera night. Is she fond of her artist's life--is her singing worth anything?" "Her singing is exquisite. But her voice is not suited to the stage. I think that the artist's life has been made repugnant to her." "Why, she is made for you then. Sir Hugo said you were bitterly against being a singer, and I can see that you would never have let yourself be merged in a wife, as your father was." "I repeat," said Deronda, emphatically--"I repeat that I have no assurance of her love for me, of the possibility that we can ever be united. Other things--painful issues may lie before me. I have always felt that I should prepare myself to renounce, not cherish that prospect. But I suppose I might feel so of happiness in general. Whether it may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it." "Do you feel in that way?" said his mother, laying her hands on his shoulders, and perusing his face, while she spoke in a low meditative tone, pausing between her sentences. "Poor boy!----I wonder how it would have been if I had kept you with me----whether you would have turned your heart to the old things against mine----and we should have quarreled----your grandfather would have been in you----and you would have hampered my life with your young growth from the old root." "I think my affection might have lasted through all our quarreling," said Deronda, saddened more and more, "and that would not have hampered--surely it would have enriched your life." "Not then, not then----I did not want it then----I might have been glad of it now," said the mother, with a bitter melancholy, "if I could have been glad of anything." "But you love your other children, and they love you?" said Deronda, anxiously. "Oh, yes," she answered, as to a question about a matter of course, while she folded her arms again. "But,"----she added in a deeper tone,----"I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. It is a talent to love--I lack it. Others have loved me--and I have acted their love. I know very well what love makes of men and women--it is subjection. It takes another for a larger self, enclosing this one,"--she pointed to her own bosom. "I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been subject to me." "Perhaps the man who was subject was the happier of the two," said Deronda--not with a smile, but with a grave, sad sense of his mother's privation. "Perhaps--but I _was_ happy--for a few years I was happy. If I had not been afraid of defeat and failure, I might have gone on. I miscalculated. What then? It is all over. Another life! Men talk of 'another life,' as if it only began on the other side of the grave. I have long entered on another life." With the last words she raised her arms till they were bare to the elbow, her brow was contracted in one deep fold, her eyes were closed, her voice was smothered: in her dusky flame-colored garment, she looked like a dreamed visitant from some region of departed mortals. Deronda's feeling was wrought to a pitch of acuteness in which he was no longer quite master of himself. He gave an audible sob. His mother opened her eyes, and letting her hands again rest on his shoulders, said, "Good-bye, my son, good-bye. We shall hear no more of each other. Kiss me." He clasped his arms round her neck, and they kissed each other. Deronda did not know how he got out of the room. He felt an older man. All his boyish yearnings and anxieties about his mother had vanished. He had gone through a tragic experience which must forever solemnize his life and deepen the significance of the acts by which he bound himself to others.

On the third morning after his meeting with his mother, Deronda had a note from her saying, "I leave today. Come and see me at once." He was shown into the same room as before, but darkened with blinds. The Princess presently entered, dressed in a loose wrap of dusky orange silk, with black lace about her head. Her face seemed even more impressive in the sombre light, the eyes larger, the lines more vigorous. You might have imagined her a sorceress. She kissed Deronda on both cheeks, then seated herself among her cushions, and told Deronda to sit down by her. "Is there anything more that you would like to ask me?" she said with a queenly air. "Can I find the house in Genoa where you used to live with my grandfather?" said Deronda. "No, it is pulled down. But you will find out about our family from the papers in the chest. My father was a physician. My mother was a Morteira. You will find all these things. I was born amongst them without my will. I banished them as soon as I could." Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and said, "Is there anything else you wish to tell me?" "I think I have told you everything that could be demanded of me," said the Princess coldly. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, "I have confessed all. I will not go through it again." But to Deronda the moment was cruel; it made the filial yearning of his life a disappointed pilgrimage to a ruined shrine. He said, with some tremor in his voice- "Then are we to part and I never to be anything to you?" "It is better so," said the Princess, in a softer voice. "There could be nothing but hard duty for you. You would not love me. Don't deny it," she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. "I know the truth. You are angry with me. You think I robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather's side, and you will always condemn me in your heart." Deronda stood up in silence. But his mother now looked at him with a new admiration in her glance, saying- "You are wrong to be angry. You are the better for what I did. What shall you do? What difference will it make that I have told you about your birth?" "A very great difference," said Deronda, emphatically. "What shall you do then?" said the Princess, more sharply. "Make yourself into a Jew just like your grandfather?" "That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away with," said Deronda. "But it is my duty and my impulse to identify myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people, and if I can do any work for them that I can give my soul and hand to, I shall do it." His mother studied him with a wondering speculation, as if she could read a difficult language in his face, while he bore her gaze with firm resolution. She said- "You are in love with a Jewess." Deronda coloured. "My reasons would be independent of any such fact." "I know better. I have seen what men are," said the Princess. "Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept anyone but a Jew. There are a few such," she added, with a touch of scorn. Deronda remained silent, and she presently said, with rising passion- "You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I drew him. But I was leading him the other way. And now your grandfather is getting his revenge." "Mother, don't let us think of it in that way. I admit that there may come some benefit from the education you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the benefit, to dwelling with resentment on the injury. I think it would have been right that I should have been brought up knowing that I was a Jew, but I had a good upbringing. And now, you have restored my inheritance - you have been saved from robbing me of my duty: can you not bring yourself to consent to this?" His mother slowly shook her head, and he said, more urgently, "You have told me that you sought what you held the best for me: open your heart and relent toward my grandfather, who sought what he held the best for you." "Not for me, no," she said, shaking her head, and folding her arms tightly. "He never thought of his daughter except as an instrument. Because I had wishes outside his purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured. If that is the right law for the world, I will not say that I love it. If my acts were wrong - well, I have told everything. I have done what I could. I have after all been the instrument my father wanted - 'I desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish heart.'" "Were those my grandfather's words?" said Deronda. "Yes, yes. I wanted to thwart him," said the Princess, with a sudden outburst of passion. "You would have me love what I have hated since I was small. But what does it matter? His yoke has been on me, whether I loved it or not. You are the grandson he wanted. You speak as men do - as if you felt yourself wise. What does it all mean?" Her tone was abrupt and scornful. Deronda, pained, had to remember their relationship, lest his words should become cruel. "Mother, don't say that I feel myself wise. I think only the truth can bring us guidance toward duty. Your will was strong, but my grandfather's trust in you - what you call his yoke - is the expression of something stronger, with deeper roots. You renounced me - you banish me as a son"- there was an involuntary indignation in Deronda's voice- "but that stronger Something has determined that I shall be the grandson whom you willed to annihilate." His mother was watching him fixedly, and again her face gathered admiration. "Sit down again," she said, and he obeyed. She laid her hand on his shoulder and went on- "You rebuke me. You are angry because I banish you. What could you do for me but weary your own patience? Your mother is a shattered woman. You reproach me that I parted with you. I had joy enough without you. Now you are come back to me, and I cannot make you a joy. Have you the cursing spirit of the Jew in you? Are you not able to forgive me? Shall you be glad to think that I am punished?" "How can you ask me that?" said Deronda, remonstrantly. "Have I not sought to be a son to you? My grief is that you have declared me helpless to comfort you. I would give up much to soothe your anguish." "You shall give up nothing," said his mother, agitated. "You shall be happy. I shall have done you no harm. You have no reason to curse me. You shall pray that I may be freed from suffering. And I shall see you instead of always seeing your grandfather. If you think Kaddish will help me, say it. You will come between me and the dead. When I am in your mind, you will look as you do now - as if you were a tender son - as if I had been a tender mother." Her hand trembled on his shoulder. Deep compassion hemmed in his words. Putting his arm around her, he pressed her head tenderly to his. They sat so for some moments. Then she lifted her head and rose from her seat with a sigh. "Is she beautiful?" she said, abruptly. "Who?" "The woman you love." He was obliged to say, "Yes." "Not ambitious?" "No, I think not." "She is not like that?" said the Princess, taking from her wallet a miniature. It was her own portrait in youth, and as Deronda looked at it with admiring sadness, she said, "Had I not a rightful claim to be more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist." "I do acknowledge that," said Deronda. "Will you take the portrait?" said the Princess, more gently. "Teach her to think of me kindly." "I shall be grateful for the portrait," said Deronda, "but I have no assurance that she whom I love will have any love for me. I have kept silence." "Who and what is she?" "She was brought up as a singer for the stage," he said reluctantly. "Her father took her away early from her mother, and her life has been unhappy. She is only twenty. Her father wished to bring her up in disregard of her Jewish origin, but she has clung with affection to the memory of her mother and her people." "Ah, like you. She is attached to the Judaism she knows nothing of," said the Princess, peremptorily. "Is her singing worth anything?" "Her singing is exquisite. But her voice is not suited to the stage, and the artist's life has been made repugnant to her." "Why, she is made for you then. Sir Hugo said you were bitterly against being a singer." "I repeat," said Deronda, emphatically, "that I have no assurance of her love for me. Other painful issues lie before me. I have always felt that I should prepare myself to renounce, not cherish that prospect. But whether happiness may come or not, one should prepare one's self to do without it." "Do you feel in that way?" said his mother. "Poor boy! I wonder how it would have been if I had kept you with me - whether we should have quarrelled - your grandfather would have been in you - and you would have hampered my life." "I think my affection might have lasted through our quarrelling," said Deronda, saddened, "and that surely would have enriched your life." "Not then, I did not want it then. I might have been glad of it now," said the mother, with a bitter melancholy. "But you love your other children, and they love you?" said Deronda, anxiously. "Oh, yes. But I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. I know what love makes of men and women - it is subjection. I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been subject to me. For a few years I was happy. What then? It is all over. Another life! Men talk of 'another life,' as if it only began on the other side of the grave. I have long entered on another life." Her eyes were closed, her voice was smothered: in her dusky flame-coloured garment, she looked like a visitant from some land of the dead. Deronda was no longer quite master of himself. He gave an audible sob. His mother, opening her eyes, said- "Good-bye, my son, good-bye. We shall hear no more of each other. Kiss me." He clasped his arms round her neck, and they kissed each other. Deronda did not know how he got out of the room. He felt an older man. All his boyish yearnings about his mother had vanished. He had gone through a tragic experience which must forever solemnize his life.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 53

"Her wit Values itself so highly, that to her All matter else seems weak." --_Much Ado About Nothing._ Gwendolen's reception in the neighborhood fulfilled her uncle's expectations. From Brackenshaw Castle to the Firs at Wanchester, where Mr. Quallon the banker kept a generous house, she was welcomed with manifest admiration, and even those ladies who did not quite like her, felt a comfort in having a new, striking girl to invite; for hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking. Then, in order to have Gwendolen as a guest, it was not necessary to ask any one who was disagreeable, for Mrs. Davilow always made a quiet, picturesque figure as a chaperon, and Mr. Gascoigne was everywhere in request for his own sake. Among the houses where Gwendolen was not quite liked, and yet invited, was Quetcham Hall. One of her first invitations was to a large dinner-party there, which made a sort of general introduction for her to the society of the neighborhood; for in a select party of thirty and of well-composed proportions as to age, few visitable families could be entirely left out. No youthful figure there was comparable to Gwendolen's as she passed through the long suite of rooms adorned with light and flowers, and, visible at first as a slim figure floating along in white drapery, approached through one wide doorway after another into fuller illumination and definiteness. She had never had that sort of promenade before, and she felt exultingly that it befitted her: any one looking at her for the first time might have supposed that long galleries and lackeys had always been a matter of course in her life; while her cousin Anna, who was really more familiar with these things, felt almost as much embarrassed as a rabbit suddenly deposited in that well-lit-space. "Who is that with Gascoigne?" said the archdeacon, neglecting a discussion of military manoeuvres on which, as a clergyman, he was naturally appealed to. And his son, on the other side of the room--a hopeful young scholar, who had already suggested some "not less elegant than ingenious," emendations of Greek texts--said nearly at the same time, "By George! who is that girl with the awfully well-set head and jolly figure?" But to a mind of general benevolence, wishing everybody to look well, it was rather exasperating to see how Gwendolen eclipsed others: how even the handsome Miss Lawe, explained to be the daughter of Lady Lawe, looked suddenly broad, heavy and inanimate; and how Miss Arrowpoint, unfortunately also dressed in white, immediately resembled a _carte-de-visite_ in which one would fancy the skirt alone to have been charged for. Since Miss Arrowpoint was generally liked for the amiable unpretending way in which she wore her fortunes, and made a softening screen for the oddities of her mother, there seemed to be some unfitness in Gwendolen's looking so much more like a person of social importance. "She is not really so handsome if you come to examine her features," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, later in the evening, confidentially to Mrs. Vulcany. "It is a certain style she has, which produces a great effect at first, but afterward she is less agreeable." In fact, Gwendolen, not intending it, but intending the contrary, had offended her hostess, who, though not a splenetic or vindictive woman, had her susceptibilities. Several conditions had met in the Lady of Quetcham which to the reasoners in that neighborhood seemed to have an essential connection with each other. It was occasionally recalled that she had been the heiress of a fortune gained by some moist or dry business in the city, in order fully to account for her having a squat figure, a harsh parrot-like voice, and a systematically high head-dress; and since these points made her externally rather ridiculous, it appeared to many only natural that she should have what are called literary tendencies. A little comparison would have shown that all these points are to be found apart; daughters of aldermen being often well-grown and well-featured, pretty women having sometimes harsh or husky voices, and the production of feeble literature being found compatible with the most diverse forms of _physique_, masculine as well as feminine. Gwendolen, who had a keen sense of absurdity in others, but was kindly disposed toward any one who could make life agreeable to her, meant to win Mrs. Arrowpoint by giving her an interest and attention beyond what others were probably inclined to show. But self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather imbecile. Gwendolen, with all her cleverness and purpose to be agreeable, could not escape that form of stupidity: it followed in her mind, unreflectingly, that because Mrs. Arrowpoint was ridiculous she was also likely to be wanting in penetration, and she went through her little scenes without suspicion that the various shades of her behavior were all noted. "You are fond of books as well as of music, riding, and archery, I hear," Mrs. Arrowpoint said, going to her for a _tete--tete_ in the drawing-room after dinner. "Catherine will be very glad to have so sympathetic a neighbor." This little speech might have seemed the most graceful politeness, spoken in a low, melodious tone; but with a twang, fatally loud, it gave Gwendolen a sense of exercising patronage when she answered, gracefully: "It is I who am fortunate. Miss Arrowpoint will teach me what good music is. I shall be entirely a learner. I hear that she is a thorough musician." "Catherine has certainly had every advantage. We have a first-rate musician in the house now--Herr Klesmer; perhaps you know all his compositions. You must allow me to introduce him to you. You sing, I believe. Catherine plays three instruments, but she does not sing. I hope you will let us hear you. I understand you are an accomplished singer." "Oh, no!--'die Kraft ist schwach, allein die Lust ist gross,' as Mephistopheles says." "Ah, you are a student of Goethe. Young ladies are so advanced now. I suppose you have read everything." "No, really. I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice." For an instant Mrs. Arrowpoint's glance was a little sharper, but the perilous resemblance to satire in the last sentence took the hue of girlish simplicity when Gwendolen added, "I would give anything to write a book!" "And why should you not?" said Mrs. Arrowpoint, encouragingly. "You have but to begin as I did. Pen, ink, and paper are at everybody's command. But I will send you all I have written with pleasure." "Thanks. I shall be so glad to read your writings. Being acquainted with authors must give a peculiar understanding of their books: one would be able to tell then which parts were funny and which serious. I am sure I often laugh in the wrong place." Here Gwendolen herself became aware of danger, and added quickly, "In Shakespeare, you know, and other great writers that we can never see. But I always want to know more than there is in the books." "If you are interested in any of my subjects I can lend you many extra sheets in manuscript," said Mrs. Arrowpoint--while Gwendolen felt herself painfully in the position of the young lady who professed to like potted sprats. "These are things I dare say I shall publish eventually: several friends have urged me to do so, and one doesn't like to be obstinate. My Tasso, for example--I could have made it twice the size." "I dote on Tasso," said Gwendolen. "Well, you shall have all my papers, if you like. So many, you know, have written about Tasso; but they are all wrong. As to the particular nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, and the real cause of his imprisonment, and the character of Leonora, who, in my opinion, was a cold-hearted woman, else she would have married him in spite of her brother--they are all wrong. I differ from everybody." "How very interesting!" said Gwendolen. "I like to differ from everybody. I think it is so stupid to agree. That is the worst of writing your opinions; you make people agree with you." This speech renewed a slight suspicion in Mrs. Arrowpoint, and again her glance became for a moment examining. But Gwendolen looked very innocent, and continued with a docile air: "I know nothing of Tasso except the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, which we read and learned by heart at school." "Ah, his life is more interesting than his poetry, I have constructed the early part of his life as a sort of romance. When one thinks of his father Bernardo, and so on, there is much that must be true." "Imagination is often truer than fact," said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. "I shall be so glad to learn all about Tasso--and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad." "To be sure--'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling'; and somebody says of Marlowe, 'For that fine madness still he did maintain, Which always should possess the poet's brain.'" "But it was not always found out, was it?" said Gwendolen innocently. "I suppose some of them rolled their eyes in private. Mad people are often very cunning." Again a shade flitted over Mrs. Arrowpoint's face; but the entrance of the gentlemen prevented any immediate mischief between her and this too quick young lady, who had over-acted her _navet_. "Ah, here comes Herr Klesmer," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, rising; and presently bringing him to Gwendolen, she left them to a dialogue which was agreeable on both sides, Herr Klesmer being a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion, and brown eyes in spectacles. His English had little foreignness except its fluency; and his alarming cleverness was made less formidable just then by a certain softening air of silliness which will sometimes befall even Genius in the desire of being agreeable to Beauty. Music was soon begun. Miss Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer played a four-handed piece on two pianos, which convinced the company in general that it was long, and Gwendolen in particular that the neutral, placid-faced Miss Arrowpoint had a mastery of the instrument which put her own execution out of question--though she was not discouraged as to her often-praised touch and style. After this every one became anxious to hear Gwendolen sing; especially Mr. Arrowpoint; as was natural in a host and a perfect gentleman, of whom no one had anything to say but that he married Miss Cuttler and imported the best cigars; and he led her to the piano with easy politeness. Herr Klesmer closed the instrument in readiness for her, and smiled with pleasure at her approach; then placed himself at a distance of a few feet so that he could see her as she sang. Gwendolen was not nervous; what she undertook to do she did without trembling, and singing was an enjoyment to her. Her voice was a moderately powerful soprano (some one had told her it was like Jenny Lind's), her ear good, and she was able to keep in tune, so that her singing gave pleasure to ordinary hearers, and she had been used to unmingled applause. She had the rare advantage of looking almost prettier when she was singing than at other times, and that Herr Klesmer was in front of her seemed not disagreeable. Her song, determined on beforehand, was a favorite aria of Belini's, in which she felt quite sure of herself. "Charming!" said Mr. Arrowpoint, who had remained near, and the word was echoed around without more insincerity than we recognize in a brotherly way as human. But Herr Klesmer stood like a statue--if a statue can be imagined in spectacles; at least, he was as mute as a statue. Gwendolen was pressed to keep her seat and double the general pleasure, and she did not wish to refuse; but before resolving to do so, she moved a little toward Herr Klesmer, saying with a look of smiling appeal, "It would be too cruel to a great musician. You cannot like to hear poor amateur singing." "No, truly; but that makes nothing," said Herr Klesmer, suddenly speaking in an odious German fashion with staccato endings, quite unobservable in him before, and apparently depending on a change of mood, as Irishmen resume their strongest brogue when they are fervid or quarrelsome. "That makes nothing. It is always acceptable to see you sing." Was there ever so unexpected an assertion of superiority--at least before the late Teutonic conquest? Gwendolen colored deeply, but, with her usual presence of mind, did not show an ungraceful resentment by moving away immediately; and Miss Arrowpoint, who had been near enough to overhear (and also to observe that Herr Klesmer's mode of looking at Gwendolen was more conspicuously admiring than was quite consistent with good taste), now with the utmost tact and kindness came close to her and said, "Imagine what I have to go through with this professor! He can hardly tolerate anything we English do in music. We can only put up with his severity, and make use of it to find out the worst that can be said of us. It is a little comfort to know that; and one can bear it when every one else is admiring." "I should be very much obliged to him for telling me the worst," said Gwendolen, recovering herself. "I dare say I have been extremely ill taught, in addition to having no talent--only liking for music." This was very well expressed considering that it had never entered her mind before. "Yes, it is true: you have not been well taught," said Herr Klesmer, quietly. Woman was dear to him, but music was dearer. "Still, you are not quite without gifts. You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture--a dawdling, canting, see-saw kind of stuff--the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion--no conflict--no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it. Sing now something larger. And I shall see." "Oh, not now--by-and-by," said Gwendolen, with a sinking of heart at the sudden width of horizon opened round her small musical performance. For a lady desiring to lead, this first encounter in her campaign was startling. But she was bent on not behaving foolishly, and Miss Arrowpoint helped her by saying, "Yes, by-and-by. I always require half an hour to get up my courage after being criticised by Herr Klesmer. We will ask him to play to us now: he is bound to show us what is good music." To be quite safe on this point Herr Klesmer played a composition of his own, a fantasia called _Freudvoll, Leidvoll, Gedankenvoll_--an extensive commentary on some melodic ideas not too grossly evident; and he certainly fetched as much variety and depth of passion out of the piano as that moderately responsive instrument lends itself to, having an imperious magic in his fingers that seem to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, and compel the strings to make a quivering lingering speech for him. Gwendolen, in spite of her wounded egoism, had fullness of nature enough to feel the power of this playing, and it gradually turned her inward sob of mortification into an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference about her own doings, or at least a determination to get a superiority over them by laughing at them as if they belonged to somebody else. Her eyes had become brighter, her cheeks slightly flushed, and her tongue ready for any mischievous remarks. "I wish you would sing to us again, Miss Harleth," said young Clintock, the archdeacon's classical son, who had been so fortunate as to take her to dinner, and came up to renew conversation as soon as Herr Klesmer's performance was ended, "That is the style of music for me. I never can make anything of this tip-top playing. It is like a jar of leeches, where you can never tell either beginnings or endings. I could listen to your singing all day." "Yes, we should be glad of something popular now--another song from you would be a relaxation," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, who had also come near with polite intentions. "That must be because you are in a puerile state of culture, and have no breadth of horizon. I have just learned that. I have been taught how bad my taste is, and am feeling growing pains. They are never pleasant," said Gwendolen, not taking any notice of Mrs. Arrowpoint, and looking up with a bright smile at young Clintock. Mrs. Arrowpoint was not insensible to this rudeness, but merely said, "Well, we will not press anything disagreeably," and as there was a perceptible outburst of imprisoned conversation just then, and a movement of guests seeking each other, she remained seated where she was, and looked around her with the relief of a hostess at finding she is not needed. "I am glad you like this neighborhood," said young Clintock, well-pleased with his station in front of Gwendolen. "Exceedingly. There seems to be a little of everything and not much of anything." "That is rather equivocal praise." "Not with me. I like a little of everything; a little absurdity, for example, is very amusing. I am thankful for a few queer people; but much of them is a bore." (Mrs. Arrowpoint, who was hearing this dialogue, perceived quite a new tone in Gwendolen's speech, and felt a revival of doubt as to her interest in Tasso's madness.) "I think there should be more croquet, for one thing," said young Clintock; "I am usually away, but if I were more here I should go in for a croquet club. You are one of the archers, I think. But depend upon it croquet is the game of the future. It wants writing up, though. One of our best men has written a poem on it, in four cantos;--as good as Pope. I want him to publish it--You never read anything better." "I shall study croquet to-morrow. I shall take to it instead of singing." "No, no, not that; but do take to croquet. I will send you Jenning's poem if you like. I have a manuscript copy." "Is he a great friend of yours?" "Well, rather." "Oh, if he is only rather, I think I will decline. Or, if you send it to me, will you promise not to catechise me upon it and ask me which part I like best? Because it is not so easy to know a poem without reading it as to know a sermon without listening." "Decidedly," Mrs. Arrowpoint thought, "this girl is double and satirical. I shall be on my guard against her." But Gwendolen, nevertheless, continued to receive polite attentions from the family at Quetcham, not merely because invitations have larger grounds than those of personal liking, but because the trying little scene at the piano had awakened a kindly solicitude toward her in the gentle mind of Miss Arrowpoint, who managed all the invitations and visits, her mother being otherwise occupied.

Gwendolen's reception in the neighbourhood fulfilled her uncle's expectations. She was welcomed with admiration, and even those ladies who did not quite like her felt a comfort in having a new, striking girl to invite to their parties. In addition, Mrs. Davilow always made a quiet, picturesque figure as a chaperon, and Mr. Gascoigne was everywhere in demand for his own sake. Among the houses where Gwendolen was not quite liked, and yet invited, was Quetcham Hall. One of her first invitations was to a large dinner-party there, which introduced her to the society of the neighbourhood. No figure there compared to Gwendolen's as she passed through the long suite of rooms adorned with light and flowers. Visible at first as a slim figure floating in white drapery, she approached through one wide doorway after another into fuller illumination. She had never had that sort of promenade before, and she felt exultingly that it befitted her: while her cousin Anna felt as embarrassed as a rabbit suddenly deposited in that well-lit-space. "By George!" said the Archdeacon's son. "Who is that girl with the awfully well-set head and jolly figure?" But to some onlookers, it was rather exasperating to see how Gwendolen eclipsed others, including Miss Arrowpoint, unfortunately also dressed in white. Since Miss Arrowpoint was generally liked for the amiable unpretending way in which she wore her fortunes, and softened the oddities of her mother, it did not seem fitting for Gwendolen to look so much more important. "She is not really so handsome," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, later in the evening, confidentially to Mrs. Vulcany. "She has a certain style, which produces a great effect at first, but afterward she is less agreeable." In fact, Gwendolen had unintentionally offended her hostess. The lady of Quetcham had a squat figure, a harsh parrot-like voice, and a high head-dress; and since these points made her appear rather ridiculous, it seemed only natural that she should have literary tendencies. Gwendolen, who was kindly disposed toward anyone who could make life agreeable to her, meant to win Mrs. Arrowpoint by showing her more interest and attention than other people were likely to. But self-confidence is apt to imagine dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and the young raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, assuming them to be deaf and slow. Gwendolen, with all her cleverness, could not escape that form of stupidity: she thought, unreflectingly, that because Mrs. Arrowpoint was ridiculous she was also likely to be lacking in penetration, and she went through her little scenes without suspicion that her behaviour was noted. "You are fond of books, I hear," Mrs. Arrowpoint said to her after dinner. "Catherine will be very glad to have so sympathetic a neighbour." This little speech might have seemed gracefully polite if spoken in a low, melodious tone; but with a twang, fatally loud, it gave Gwendolen a sense of exercising patronage when she answered: "It is I who am fortunate. Miss Arrowpoint will teach me what good music is. I shall be entirely a learner. I hear that she is a thorough musician." "Catherine has certainly had every advantage. We have a first-rate musician in the house - Herr Klesmer; perhaps you know his compositions. You sing, I believe. Catherine plays three instruments, but she does not sing. I hope you will let us hear you. I understand you are an accomplished singer." "Oh, no! - 'die Kraft ist schwach, allein die Lust ist gross,' as Mephistopheles says." "Ah, you are a student of Goethe. Young ladies are so advanced now. I suppose you have read everything." "No, really. I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. There is nothing readable in the library at Offendene; the books smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice." For an instant Mrs. Arrowpoint's glance was a little sharper, but Gwendolen appeared more simple than satirical when she added, "I would give anything to write a book!" "And why should you not?" said Mrs. Arrowpoint, encouragingly. "Pen and paper are at everybody's command. But I will send you all I have written with pleasure." "Thanks. I shall be so glad to read your writings. Knowing authors must give a special understanding of their books: one would be able to tell then which parts were funny and which serious. I am sure I often laugh in the wrong place." Here Gwendolen became aware of danger, and added quickly, "In Shakespeare, you know, and other great writers. But I always want to know more than there is in the books." "If you are interested in any of my subjects I can lend you many extra sheets in manuscript," said Mrs. Arrowpoint - while Gwendolen felt herself painfully in the position of the young lady who pretended to like potted sprats. "These are things I dare say I shall publish eventually: my Tasso, for example." "I dote on Tasso," said Gwendolen. "Well, you shall have my papers, if you like. So many have written about Tasso; but as to the nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, they are all wrong. I differ from everybody." "How very interesting!" said Gwendolen. "I like to differ from everybody. I think it is so stupid to agree. That is the worst of writing your opinions; you make people agree with you." This speech renewed a slight suspicion in Mrs. Arrowpoint. But Gwendolen looked very innocent, and continued with a docile air: "I know nothing of Tasso except the Gerusalemme Liberata, which we read at school." "Ah, his life is more interesting than his poetry. I have constructed the early part of his life as a sort of romance." "Imagination is often truer than fact," said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. "I shall be so glad to learn all about Tasso - and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad, although they are not always found out. Mad people are often very cunning." Again a shade flitted over Mrs. Arrowpoint's face; but then the gentlemen came in. "Ah, here is Herr Klesmer," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, rising; and introducing him to Gwendolen, she left them together. Herr Klesmer had a happy combination of German, Slav and Semitic looks, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion, and brown eyes in spectacles. His English had little foreignness; and his alarming cleverness was made less formidable by a softening air of silliness which will sometimes befall even Genius in the desire of being agreeable to Beauty. Music was soon begun. Miss Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer played a four-handed piece on two pianos, which convinced the company in general that it was long, and Gwendolen in particular that the placid-faced Miss Arrowpoint had a mastery of the instrument which put her own performance out of the question. After this everyone became anxious to hear Gwendolen sing; and Mr. Arrowpoint led her to the piano. Herr Klesmer smiled with pleasure at her approach; then placed himself a few feet away so that he could see her as she sang. Gwendolen was not nervous: she enjoyed singing. Her voice was a moderately powerful soprano, her ear good, and she was able to keep in tune, so that her singing gave pleasure to ordinary hearers, and she had been used to unmingled applause. She had the rare advantage of looking almost prettier when she was singing than at other times, and to have Herr Klesmer in front of her was not disagreeable. Her song was an aria of Bellini's, in which she felt quite sure of herself. "Charming!" said Mr. Arrowpoint, and the word was echoed around the room. But Herr Klesmer stood as mute as a statue. Gwendolen was pressed to sing again, and she did not wish to refuse; but first she said to Herr Klesmer, with a smiling appeal, "It would be cruel to a great musician. You cannot like to hear poor amateur singing." "No, truly; but that makes nothing," said Herr Klesmer, suddenly speaking in an odious German fashion with staccato endings, just as Irishmen resume their strongest brogue when they are agitated. "That makes nothing. It is always acceptable to see you sing." Was there ever so unexpected an assertion of superiority? Gwendolen coloured deeply, but, with her usual presence of mind, did not show an ungraceful resentment by moving away immediately; and Miss Arrowpoint, who had been near enough to overhear (and also to see that Herr Klesmer was looking at Gwendolen with more conspicuous admiration than was quite consistent with good taste), now with the utmost tact and kindness came up and said- "Imagine what I have to go through with this professor! He can hardly tolerate anything we English do in music. We can only put up with his severity. One can bear it when everyone else is admiring." Gwendolen, recovering herself, answered, "I dare say I have been extremely ill taught, in addition to having no talent - only liking for music." This was very well expressed considering that it had never entered her mind before. "Yes, it is true: you have not been well taught," said Herr Klesmer, quietly. Woman was dear to him, but music was dearer. "Still, you are not quite without gifts. You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair voice. But you produce your notes badly; and that dawdling, see-saw kind of music is beneath you. It has no breadth of horizon. There is a self-satisfied folly about such melody; no deep, mysterious passion - no conflict - no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it. Sing now something larger." "Oh, not now. By-and-by," said Gwendolen, with a sinking heart. For a lady desiring to lead, this first encounter in her campaign was startling. But she was bent on not behaving foolishly, and Miss Arrowpoint helped her by saying, "Yes, by-and-by. I always require half an hour to get up my courage after being criticised by Herr Klesmer. We will ask him to play to us now: he will show us what is good music." To be quite safe on this point Herr Klesmer played a composition of his own; and he certainly fetched as much passion out of the piano as that instrument lends itself to, having an imperious magic in his fingers that drew a quivering lingering speech from the strings. Gwendolen, despite her wounded egoism, could feel the power of this playing, and it gradually turned her mortification into an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference to her own shortcomings, or at least a determination to laugh at them. Her eyes had become brighter, her cheeks flushed, and her tongue ready for any mischief. "I wish you would sing to us again, Miss Harleth," said Clintock, the Archdeacon's son, as soon as Herr Klesmer's performance was ended. "That is the style of music for me. I never can make anything of this tip-top playing, but I could listen to your singing all day." "Yes, we should be glad of something popular now - another song from you would be a relaxation," said Mrs. Arrowpoint politely. "That must be because you have no breadth of horizon. I have just been taught how bad my taste is, and am feeling growing pains. They are never pleasant," said Gwendolen, ignoring Mrs. Arrowpoint, and smiling at young Clintock. Mrs. Arrowpoint was not insensible to this rudeness, but merely said, "Well, we will not press you." "I am glad you like this neighbourhood," said young Clintock, well-pleased to be with Gwendolen. "Exceedingly. There seems to be a little of everything, and not too much of anything. I like a little of everything; a little absurdity, for example, is very amusing." "Decidedly," Mrs. Arrowpoint thought, "this girl is satirical. I shall be on my guard against her." But Gwendolen, nevertheless, continued to receive polite attentions from the family at Quetcham; the trying scene at the piano had awakened a kindly solicitude toward her in the gentle mind of Miss Arrowpoint, who managed all the invitations and visits, her mother being otherwise occupied.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 5

Behold my lady's carriage stop the way. With powdered lacquey and with charming bay; She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair. Her arduous function solely "to be there." Like Sirius rising o'er the silent sea. She hides her heart in lustre loftily. So the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card for the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, there being reasons of business which made Sir Hugo know beforehand that his ill-beloved nephew was coming up. It was only the third evening after their arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth who had gone through so much, and was "capable of submitting to anything in the form of duty." For Gwendolen had remembered nearly every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that phrase, which she repeated to herself bitterly, having an ill-defined consciousness that her own submission was something very different. She would have been obliged to allow, if any one had said it to her, that what she submitted to could not take the shape of duty, but was submission to a yoke drawn on her by an action she was ashamed of, and worn with a strength of selfish motives that left no weight for duty to carry. The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, all white, gold, and pale crimson, were agreeably furnished, and not crowded with guests, before Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered; and more than half an hour of instrumental music was being followed by an interval of movement and chat. Klesmer was there with his wife, and in his generous interest for Mirah he proposed to accompany her singing of Leo's "_O patria mia_," which he had before recommended her to choose, as more distinctive of her than better known music. He was already at the piano, and Mirah was standing there conspicuously, when Gwendolen, magnificent in her pale green velvet and poisoned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honor well in view of them. With her long sight and self-command she had the rare power of quickly distinguishing persons and objects on entering a full room, and while turning her glance toward Mirah she did not neglect to exchange a bow with Klesmer as she passed. The smile seemed to each a lightning-flash back on that morning when it had been her ambition to stand as the "little Jewess" was standing, and survey a grand audience from the higher rank of her talent--instead of which she was one of the ordinary crowd in silk and gems, whose utmost performance it must be to admire or find fault. "He thinks I am in the right road now," said the lurking resentment within her. Gwendolen had not caught sight of Deronda in her passage, and while she was seated acquitting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful lest an anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something "damnably vulgar." But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes that met Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the "amateur too fond of Meyerbeer," Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to find useful as a half-caste among gentlemen. He was standing near her husband, who, however, turned a shoulder toward him, and was being understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How was it that at this moment, for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen, like a disagreeable sensation, the idea that this man knew all about her husband's life? He had been banished from her sight, according to her will, and she had been satisfied; he had sunk entirely into the background of her thoughts, screened away from her by the agitating figures that kept up an inward drama in which Lush had no place. Here suddenly he reappeared at her husband's elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being connected with the secrets that made her wretched. She was conscious of effort in turning her head away from him, trying to continue her wandering survey as if she had seen nothing of more consequence than the picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes from him, without having got any recognition, consoling herself with the assurance that he must have seen her come in. In fact, he was not standing far from the door with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful to bring into Lady Mallinger's list. They were both a little more anxious than was comfortable lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. Deronda even felt himself on the brink of betraying emotion, Mirah's presence now being linked with crowding images of what had gone before and was to come after--all centering in the brother he was soon to reveal to her; and he had escaped as soon as he could from the side of Lady Pentreath, who had said in her violoncello voice, "Well, your Jewess is pretty--there's no denying that. But where is her Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned that on the stage." He was beginning to feel on Mirah's behalf something of what he had felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him if he would like to be a great singer--an indignant dislike to her being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public, and he winced the more because Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name "Jewess" was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese silk. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was immediately appealed to by Hans about "that Vandyke duchess of a beauty." Pray excuse Deronda that in this moment he felt a transient renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if she and her beauty and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah as a woman--a feeling something like class animosity, which affection for what is not fully recognized by others, whether in persons or in poetry, rarely allows us to escape. To Hans admiring Gwendolen with his habitual hyperbole, he answered, with a sarcasm that was not quite good-natured, "I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice." "That is the style I worship--not admire," said Hans. "Other styles of women I might make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I could make myself--well, pretty good, which is something much more difficult." "Hush," said Deronda, under the pretext that the singing was going to begin. He was not so delighted with the answer as might have been expected, and was relieved by Hans's movement to a more advanced spot. Deronda had never before heard Mirah sing "_O patria mia_." He knew well Leopardi's fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping), and the few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole, which seemed to breathe an inspiration through the music. Mirah singing this, made Mordecai more than ever one presence with her. Certain words not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies from the invisible, "Non ti difende Nessun d tuoi! L'armi, qua l'armi: io solo Combatter, procomber sol io"-- [Footnote: Do none of thy children defend thee? Arms! bring me arms! alone I will fight, alone I will fall.] they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said to devote itself in vain when it achieves the god-like end of manifesting unselfish love. And that passion was present to Deronda now as the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility of battle. Mirah was equal to his wishes. While the general applause was sounding, Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only--"Good, good--the crescendo better than before." But her chief anxiety was to know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on her part this evening would have pained her as an especial injury to him. Of course all her prospects were due to what he had done for her; still, this occasion of singing in the house that was his home brought a peculiar demand. She looked toward him in the distance, and he saw that she did; but he remained where he was, and watched the streams of emulous admirers closing round her, till presently they parted to make way for Gwendolen, who was taken up to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier now about "the little Jewess," Daniel relented toward poor Gwendolen in her splendor, and his memory went back, with some penitence for his momentary hardness, over all the signs and confessions that she too needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer by the river--a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. The silent question--"But is it not cowardly to make that a reason for turning away?" was the form in which he framed his resolve to go near her on the first opportunity, and show his regard for her past confidence, in spite of Sir Hugo's unwelcome hints. Klesmer, having risen to Gwendolen as she approached, and being included by her in the opening conversation with Mirah, continued near them a little while, looking down with a smile, which was rather in his eyes than on his lips, at the piquant contrast of the two charming young creatures seated on the red divan. The solicitude seemed to be all on the side of the splendid one. "You must let me say how much I am obliged to you," said Gwendolen. "I had heard from Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat in your singing, but I was too ignorant to imagine how great." "You are very good to say so," answered Mirah, her mind chiefly occupied in contemplating Gwendolen. It was like a new kind of stage-experience to her to be close to genuine grand ladies with genuine brilliants and complexions, and they impressed her vaguely as coming out of some unknown drama, in which their parts perhaps got more tragic as they went on. "We shall all want to learn of you--I, at least," said Gwendolen. "I sing very badly, as Herr Klesmer will tell you,"--here she glanced upward to that higher power rather archly, and continued--"but I have been rebuked for not liking to be middling, since I can be nothing more. I think that is a different doctrine from yours?" She was still looking at Klesmer, who said quickly, "Not if it means that it would be worth while for you to study further, and for Miss Lapidoth to have the pleasure of helping you." With that he moved away, and Mirah taking everything with _nave_ seriousness, said, "If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to teach, but I have only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by remembering how my master taught me." Gwendolen was in reality too uncertain about herself to be prepared for this simple promptitude of Mirah's, and in her wish to change the subject, said, with some lapse from the good taste of her first address, "You have not been long in London, I think?--but you were perhaps introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?" "No," said Mirah; "I never saw him before I came to England in the summer." "But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he not?" said Gwendolen, led on partly by the wish to hear anything about Deronda, and partly by the awkwardness which besets the readiest person, in carrying on a dialogue when empty of matter. "He spoke of you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well." "Oh, I was poor and needed help," said Mirah, in a new tone of feeling, "and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is the only way he came to know anything about me--because he was sorry for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe everything to him." Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a struggling artist herself, could nevertheless not escape the impression that a mode of inquiry which would have been rather rude toward herself was an amiable condescension to this Jewess who was ready to give her lessons. The only effect on Mirah, as always on any mention of Deronda, was to stir reverential gratitude and anxiety that she should be understood to have the deepest obligation to him. But both he and Hans, who were noticing the pair from a distance, would have felt rather indignant if they had known that the conversation had led up to Mirah's representation of herself in this light of neediness. In the movement that prompted her, however, there was an exquisite delicacy, which perhaps she could not have stated explicitly--the feeling that she ought not to allow any one to assume in Deronda a relation of more equality or less generous interest toward her than actually existed. Her answer was delightful to Gwendolen: she thought of nothing but the ready compassion which in another form she had trusted in and found herself; and on the signals that Klesmer was about to play she moved away in much content, entirely without presentiment that this Jewish _protg_ would ever make a more important difference in her life than the possible improvement of her singing--if the leisure and spirits of a Mrs. Grandcourt would allow of other lessons than such as the world was giving her at rather a high charge. With her wonted alternation from resolute care of appearances to some rash indulgence of an impulse, she chose, under the pretext of getting farther from the instrument, not to go again to her former seat, but placed herself on a settee where she could only have one neighbor. She was nearer to Deronda than before: was it surprising that he came up in time to shake hands before the music began--then, that after he had stood a little while by the elbow of the settee at the empty end, the torrent-like confluences of bass and treble seemed, like a convulsion of nature, to cast the conduct of petty mortals into insignificance, and to warrant his sitting down? But when at the end of Klesmer's playing there came the outburst of talk under which Gwendolen had hoped to speak as she would to Deronda, she observed that Mr. Lush was within hearing, leaning against the wall close by them. She could not help her flush of anger, but she tried to have only an air of polite indifference in saying, "Miss Lapidoth is everything you described her to be." "You have been very quick in discovering that," said Deronda, ironically. "I have not found out all the excellencies you spoke of--I don't mean that," said Gwendolen; "but I think her singing is charming, and herself, too. Her face is lovely--not in the least common; and she is such a complete little person. I should think she will be a great success." This speech was grating on Deronda, and he would not answer it, but looked gravely before him. She knew that he was displeased with her, and she was getting so impatient under the neighborhood of Mr. Lush, which prevented her from saying any word she wanted to say, that she meditated some desperate step to get rid of it, and remained silent, too. That constraint seemed to last a long while, neither Gwendolen nor Deronda looking at the other, till Lush slowly relieved the wall of his weight, and joined some one at a distance. Gwendolen immediately said, "You despise me for talking artificially." "No," said Deronda, looking at her coolly; "I think that is quite excusable sometimes. But I did not think what you were last saying was altogether artificial." "There was something in it that displeased you," said Gwendolen. "What was it?" "It is impossible to explain such things," said Deronda. "One can never communicate niceties of feeling about words and manner." "You think I am shut out from understanding them," said Gwendolen, with a slight tremor in her voice, which she was trying to conquer. "Have I shown myself so very dense to everything you have said?" There was an indescribable look of suppressed tears in her eyes, which were turned on him. "Not at all," said Deronda, with some softening of voice. "But experience differs for different people. We don't all wince at the same things. I have had plenty of proof that you are not dense." He smiled at her. "But one may feel things and are not able to do anything better for all that," said Gwendolen, not smiling in return--the distance to which Deronda's words seemed to throw her chilling her too much. "I begin to think we can only get better by having people about us who raise good feelings. You must not be surprised at anything in me. I think it is too late for me to alter. I don't know how to set about being wise, as you told me to be." "I seldom find I do any good by my preaching. I might as well have kept from meddling," said Deronda, thinking rather sadly that his interference about that unfortunate necklace might end in nothing but an added pain to him in seeing her after all hardened to another sort of gambling than roulette. "Don't say that," said Gwendolen, hurriedly, feeling that this might be her only chance of getting the words uttered, and dreading the increase of her own agitation. "If you despair of me, I shall despair. Your saying that I should not go on being selfish and ignorant has been some strength to me. If you say you wish you had not meddled--that means you despair of me and forsake me. And then you will decide for me that I shall not be good. It is you who will decide; because you might have made me different by keeping as near to me as you could, and believing in me." She had not been looking at him as she spoke, but at the handle of the fan which she held closed. With the last words she rose and left him, returning to her former place, which had been left vacant; while every one was settling into quietude in expectation of Mirah's voice, which presently, with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion, gave forth, _Per piet non dirmi addio_. In Deronda's ear the strain was for the moment a continuance of Gwendolen's pleading--a painful urging of something vague and difficult, irreconcilable with pressing conditions, and yet cruel to resist. However strange the mixture in her of a resolute pride and a precocious air of knowing the world, with a precipitate, guileless indiscretion, he was quite sure now that the mixture existed. Sir Hugo's hints had made him alive to dangers that his own disposition might have neglected; but that Gwendolen's reliance on him was unvisited by any dream of his being a man who could misinterpret her was as manifest as morning, and made an appeal which wrestled with his sense of present dangers, and with his foreboding of a growing incompatible claim on him in her mind. There was a foreshadowing of some painful collision: on the one side the grasp of Mordecai's dying hand on him, with all the ideals and prospects it aroused; on the other the fair creature in silk and gems, with her hidden wound and her self-dread, making a trustful effort to lean and find herself sustained. It was as if he had a vision of himself besought with outstretched arms and cries, while he was caught by the waves and compelled to mount the vessel bound for a far-off coast. That was the strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes of Mirah's song; but when it ceased he moved from his seat with the reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own importance, and a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's view of himself, as if he could really have any decisive power over her. "What an enviable fellow you are," said Hans to him, "sitting on a sofa with that young duchess, and having an interesting quarrel with her!" "Quarrel with her?" repeated Deronda, rather uncomfortably. "Oh, about theology, of course; nothing personal. But she told you what you ought to think, and then left you with a grand air which was admirable. Is she an Antinomian--if so, tell her I am an Antinomian painter, and introduce me. I should like to paint her and her husband. He has the sort of handsome _physique_ that the Duke ought to have in _Lucrezia Borgia_--if it could go with a fine baritone, which it can't." Deronda devoutly hoped that Hans's account of the impression his dialogue with Gwendolen had made on a distant beholder was no more than a bit of fantastic representation, such as was common with him. And Gwendolen was not without her after-thoughts that her husband's eyes might have been on her, extracting something to reprove--some offence against her dignity as his wife; her consciousness telling her that she had not kept up the perfect air of equability in public which was her own ideal. But Grandcourt made no observation on her behavior. All he said as they were driving home was, "Lush will dine with us among the other people to-morrow. You will treat him civilly." Gwendolen's heart began to beat violently. The words that she wanted to utter, as one wants to return a blow, were. "You are breaking your promise to me--the first promise you made me." But she dared not utter them. She was as frightened at a quarrel as if she had foreseen that it would end with throttling fingers on her neck. After a pause, she said in the tone rather of defeat than resentment, "I thought you did not intend him to frequent the house again." "I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated civilly." Silence. There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar. If these are the sort of lovers' vows at which Jove laughs, he must have a merry time of it.

The Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card for the musical party at Lady Mallinger's. It was only the third evening after their arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth who had gone through so much, and was "capable of submitting to any duty." For Gwendolen remembered nearly every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and repeated that phrase to herself bitterly, conscious that her own submission was very different. What she submitted to was not duty, but a yoke laid on her by an action she was ashamed of, and worn with selfish motives. The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, white, gold, and pale crimson, were not crowded when Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered. Half an hour of instrumental music was being followed by an interval of movement and chat. Klesmer was there with his wife, and he generously proposed to accompany Mirah's singing of Leo's "O patria mia." He was already at the piano, and Mirah was standing there, when Gwendolen, magnificent in her pale green velvet and poisoned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honour well in view of them. While turning her glance toward Mirah, she did not neglect to exchange a bow with Klesmer as she passed. The smile seemed to each to flash back to that morning when it had been her ambition to stand as the "little Jewess" was standing - instead of which she was one of the ordinary crowd in silk and gems, whose performance must be to admire or find fault. "He thinks I am in the right road now," said the lurking resentment within her. Gwendolen had not seen Deronda, and while she was seated in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful lest a search for Deronda might be observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as "damnably vulgar." Amongst the eyes that met Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of Mr. Lush, who was standing near her husband. At this moment, for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen the disagreeable idea that this man knew all about her husband's life. When banished from her sight, he had sunk into the background of her thoughts; but now there sprang up in her, like an instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being connected with the secrets that made her wretched. With an effort she turned her head away from him, trying to continue her survey with an indifferent manner, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes, consoling herself with the assurance that he must have seen her come in. He was standing by Hans Meyrick; and they were both anxious that Mirah should be heard to advantage. Deronda felt on the brink of betraying emotion. He had escaped as soon as he could from Lady Pentreath, who had said in her deep voice- "Well, your Jewess is pretty - there's no denying that. But where is her Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned that on the stage." He was beginning to feel on Mirah's behalf what he had felt as a boy, when Sir Hugo asked him if he would like to be a great singer - an indignant dislike to her being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were a commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was immediately appealed to by Hans about "that Vandyke duchess of a beauty." Deronda felt a momentary renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if she and her beauty and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah. To Hans he answered sarcastically- "I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice." "That is the style I worship - not admire," said Hans. "Other styles of women I might make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I could make myself - well, pretty good, which is much more difficult." "Hush," said Deronda, for the singing was going to begin. He had never before heard Mirah sing "O patria mia." He knew well Leopardi's fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face and weeping), and the words were filled for him with an inspiring grandeur. Mirah singing this, made Mordecai more than ever one presence with her. Her singing was equal to his wishes. During the general applause, Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only- "Good, good - the crescendo better than before." But her chief anxiety was to know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda. She looked toward him in the distance; but he remained where he was, while streams of admirers closed round her. Gwendolen was taken up to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier now about "the little Jewess," Daniel relented toward poor Gwendolen in her splendour, and his memory went back over all the confessions that she too needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer by the river - a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. He resolved not to turn away from her, but to show his regard for her past confidences at the first opportunity, in spite of Sir Hugo's hints. Klesmer stood near Gwendolen and Mirah for a little while, smiling at the piquant contrast of the two charming young creatures seated on the red divan. "I must say how much I am obliged to you," said Gwendolen to Mirah. "I had heard from Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat in your singing, but I was too ignorant to imagine how great." "You are very good to say so," answered Mirah, contemplating this genuine grand lady with genuine jewels. "We shall all want to learn of you - I, at least," said Gwendolen. "I sing very badly, as Herr Klesmer will tell you,"- here she glanced at him rather archly. Mirah said with nave seriousness- "If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to teach, but I have only just begun." Gwendolen was too uncertain about herself to be prepared for this simple promptitude of Mirah's, and in her wish to change the subject, said, with some lapse from good taste- "You have not been long in London, I think?- but you were perhaps introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?" "No," said Mirah; "I never saw him before I came to England in the summer." "But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he not?" said Gwendolen, led on partly by the wish to hear anything about Deronda, and partly by the common awkwardness of making small talk. "He spoke of you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well." "I was poor and needed help," said Mirah, with feeling, "and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is the only way he came to know me - because he was sorry for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe everything to him." Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a struggling artist herself, could nevertheless not help feeling that her questions bordered on the rude. The only effect on Mirah, as on any mention of Deronda, was to stir her reverential gratitude towards him. But both he and Hans, who were noticing the pair from a distance, would have felt rather indignant if they had known that Mirah had been led to represent herself in this light of neediness. However, she was prompted by the delicate feeling, which perhaps she could not have stated explicitly, that she ought not to allow anyone to assume that Deronda had a less generous interest in her than actually existed. Her answer was delightful to Gwendolen, who found Deronda's ready compassion confirmed; and with the signals that Klesmer was about to play she moved away in much content. With her usual alternation from resolute care of appearances to the rash indulgence of an impulse, she did not go to her former seat, but placed herself on a settee where she could only have one neighbour. She was near to Deronda: was it surprising that he came up to shake hands before the music began - and that after a little while, he sat down? But when at the end of Klesmer's playing there came the outburst of talk under which Gwendolen had hoped to speak freely to Deronda, she observed that Mr. Lush was within hearing, leaning against the wall. Despite her flush of anger, she tried to assume an air of polite indifference in saying- "Miss Lapidoth is everything you described her to be." "You have been very quick in discovering that," said Deronda, ironically. "I have not found out all the excellencies you spoke of - I don't mean that," said Gwendolen; "but her singing is charming, and herself, too. Her face is lovely - not in the least common; and she is such a complete little person. I should think she will be a great success." This speech was grating on Deronda, and he would not answer it, but looked gravely before him. She knew that he was displeased, and she was getting so impatient with the presence of Mr. Lush, which prevented her from saying any word she wanted to say, that she remained silent, too. For a long while, neither Gwendolen nor Deronda looked at the other, till Lush slowly relieved the wall of his weight, and moved away. Gwendolen immediately said, "You despise me for talking artificially." "No," said Deronda, looking at her coolly; "I think that is quite excusable sometimes. But I did not think what you were last saying was altogether artificial." "There was something in it that displeased you," said Gwendolen. "What was it?" "It is impossible to explain such niceties of word and manner," said Deronda. "You think I am shut out from understanding them," said Gwendolen, with a slight tremor in her voice, which she tried to conquer. "Have I shown myself so very dense to everything you have said?" There was an indescribable look of suppressed tears in her eyes, which were turned on him. "Not at all," said Deronda, his voice softening. "I have had plenty of proof that you are not dense." He smiled at her. "But one may feel things and not be able to do anything better for all that," said Gwendolen, not smiling in return. "I begin to think we can only get better by having people about us who raise good feelings. I think it is too late for me to alter. I don't know how to set about being wise, as you told me to be." "I seldom find I do any good by my preaching. I should not have meddled," said Deronda. "Don't say that," said Gwendolen, hurriedly, feeling that this might be her only chance of speaking, and dreading the increase of her own agitation. "If you despair of me, I shall despair. Your saying that I should not go on being selfish and ignorant has been some strength to me. If you say you wish you had not meddled - that means you despair of me, and decide for me that I shall not be good. You might have made me different by keeping as near to me as you could, and believing in me." She had not been looking at him as she spoke, but at the handle of her fan. She rose and left him, returning to her former place, while everyone settled into quiet expectation of Mirah's voice, which presently, with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion, gave forth, Per piet non dirmi addio. In Deronda's ear the song was almost a continuance of Gwendolen's pleading: a painful urging of something vague and difficult, and yet cruel to resist. However strange the mixture in her of resolute pride and worldliness with guileless indiscretion, he was quite sure now that the mixture existed. For all Sir Hugo's hints, he knew that Gwendolen did not dream that he might misinterpret her. He dimly foresaw some painful collision: on the one side the grasp of Mordecai's dying hand, with all the ideals and prospects it aroused; on the other the fair creature in silk and gems, with her hidden wound and her self-dread, making a trustful effort to lean on him. It was as if he saw himself besought with outstretched arms and cries, while he was compelled to board a ship bound for a far-off coast. That was the feeling inspired by Mirah's song; but when it ceased he stood up with the reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own importance, and a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's view of himself, as if he could really have any decisive power over her. "What an enviable fellow you are," said Hans to him, "sitting on a sofa with that young duchess, and having an interesting quarrel!" "Quarrel?" repeated Deronda, rather uncomfortably. "Oh, about theology, of course; nothing personal. But she told you what you ought to think, and then left you with an admirably grand air. I should like to paint her and her husband." Deronda devoutly hoped that Hans's impression of his dialogue with Gwendolen was no more than his usual fantasising. And Gwendolen thought that her husband's eyes might have been on her, extracting something to reprove - some offence against her dignity as his wife; for she was aware that she had not kept the perfect air of equability in public which was her ideal. But all Grandcourt said as they were driving home was- "Lush will dine with us tomorrow. You will treat him civilly." Gwendolen's heart began to beat violently. She wanted to retaliate with the words: "You are breaking your promise to me - your first promise." But she dared not utter them. The prospect of a quarrel frightened her. After a pause, she said in the tone of defeat- "I thought you did not intend him to visit the house again." "I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated civilly." Silence. There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has pledged to drop smoking during courtship, for the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar. If these are the sort of lovers' vows at which Jove laughs, he must have a merry time of it.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 45

"Let no flower of the spring pass by us; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered."--BOOK OF WISDOM. Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth's childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and--kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favor of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead. But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen's life. It was only a year before her recall from Leubronn that Offendene had been chosen as her mamma's home, simply for its nearness to Pennicote Rectory, and that Mrs. Davilow, Gwendolen, and her four half-sisters (the governess and the maid following in another vehicle) had been driven along the avenue for the first time, on a late October afternoon when the rooks were crawing loudly above them, and the yellow elm-leaves were whirling. The season suited the aspect of the old oblong red-brick house, rather too anxiously ornamented with stone at every line, not excepting the double row of narrow windows and the large square portico. The stone encouraged a greenish lichen, the brick a powdery gray, so that though the building was rigidly rectangular there was no harshness in the physiognomy which it turned to the three avenues cut east, west and south in the hundred yards' breadth of old plantation encircling the immediate grounds. One would have liked the house to have been lifted on a knoll, so as to look beyond its own little domain to the long thatched roofs of the distant villages, the church towers, the scattered homesteads, the gradual rise of surging woods, and the green breadths of undulating park which made the beautiful face of the earth in that part of Wessex. But though standing thus behind a screen amid flat pastures, it had on one side a glimpse of the wider world in the lofty curves of the chalk downs, grand steadfast forms played over by the changing days. The house was but just large enough to be called a mansion, and was moderately rented, having no manor attached to it, and being rather difficult to let with its sombre furniture and faded upholstery. But inside and outside it was what no beholder could suppose to be inhabited by retired trades-people: a certainty which was worth many conveniences to tenants who not only had the taste that shrinks from new finery, but also were in that border-territory of rank where annexation is a burning topic: and to take up her abode in a house which had once sufficed for dowager countesses gave a perceptible tinge to Mrs. Davilow's satisfaction in having an establishment of her own. This, rather mysteriously to Gwendolen, appeared suddenly possible on the death of her step-father, Captain Davilow, who had for the last nine years joined his family only in a brief and fitful manner, enough to reconcile them to his long absences; but she cared much more for the fact than for the explanation. All her prospects had become more agreeable in consequence. She had disliked their former way of life, roving from one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another, always feeling new antipathies to new suites of hired furniture, and meeting new people under conditions which made her appear of little importance; and the variation of having passed two years at a showy school, where, on all occasions of display, she had been put foremost, had only deepened her sense that so exceptional a person as herself could hardly remain in ordinary circumstances or in a social position less than advantageous. Any fear of this latter evil was banished now that her mamma was to have an establishment; for on the point of birth Gwendolen was quite easy. She had no notion how her maternal grandfather got the fortune inherited by his two daughters; but he had been a West Indian--which seemed to exclude further question; and she knew that her father's family was so high as to take no notice of her mamma, who nevertheless preserved with much pride the miniature of a Lady Molly in that connection. She would probably have known much more about her father but for a little incident which happened when she was twelve years old. Mrs. Davilow had brought out, as she did only at wide intervals, various memorials of her first husband, and while showing his miniature to Gwendolen recalled with a fervor which seemed to count on a peculiar filial sympathy, the fact that dear papa had died when his little daughter was in long clothes. Gwendolen, immediately thinking of the unlovable step-father whom she had been acquainted with the greater part of her life while her frocks were short, said, "Why did you marry again, mamma? It would have been nicer if you had not." Mrs. Davilow colored deeply, a slight convulsive movement passed over her face, and straightway shutting up the memorials she said, with a violence quite unusual in her, "You have no feeling, child!" Gwendolen, who was fond of her mamma, felt hurt and ashamed, and had never since dared to ask a question about her father. This was not the only instance in which she had brought on herself the pain of some filial compunction. It was always arranged, when possible, that she should have a small bed in her mamma's room; for Mrs. Davilow's motherly tenderness clung chiefly to her eldest girl, who had been born in her happier time. One night under an attack of pain she found that the specific regularly placed by her bedside had been forgotten, and begged Gwendolen to get out of bed and reach it for her. That healthy young lady, snug and warm as a rosy infant in her little couch, objected to step out into the cold, and lying perfectly still, grumbling a refusal. Mrs. Davilow went without the medicine and never reproached her daughter; but the next day Gwendolen was keenly conscious of what must be in her mamma's mind, and tried to make amends by caresses which cost her no effort. Having always been the pet and pride of the household, waited on by mother, sisters, governess and maids, as if she had been a princess in exile, she naturally found it difficult to think her own pleasure less important than others made it, and when it was positively thwarted felt an astonished resentment apt, in her cruder days, to vent itself in one of those passionate acts which look like a contradiction of habitual tendencies. Though never even as a child thoughtlessly cruel, nay delighting to rescue drowning insects and watch their recovery, there was a disagreeable silent remembrance of her having strangled her sister's canary-bird in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had again and again jarringly interrupted her own. She had taken pains to buy a white mouse for her sister in retribution, and though inwardly excusing herself on the ground of a peculiar sensitiveness which was a mark of her general superiority, the thought of that infelonious murder had always made her wince. Gwendolen's nature was not remorseless, but she liked to make her penances easy, and now that she was twenty and more, some of her native force had turned into a self-control by which she guarded herself from penitential humiliation. There was more show of fire and will in her than ever, but there was more calculation underneath it. On this day of arrival at Offendene, which not even Mrs. Davilow had seen before--the place having been taken for her by her brother-in-law, Mr. Gascoigne--when all had got down from the carriage, and were standing under the porch in front of the open door, so that they could have a general view of the place and a glimpse of the stone hall and staircase hung with sombre pictures, but enlivened by a bright wood fire, no one spoke; mamma, the four sisters and the governess all looked at Gwendolen, as if their feelings depended entirely on her decision. Of the girls, from Alice in her sixteenth year to Isabel in her tenth, hardly anything could be said on a first view, but that they were girlish, and that their black dresses were getting shabby. Miss Merry was elderly and altogether neutral in expression. Mrs. Davilow's worn beauty seemed the more pathetic for the look of entire appeal which she cast at Gwendolen, who was glancing round at the house, the landscape and the entrance hall with an air of rapid judgment. Imagine a young race-horse in the paddock among untrimmed ponies and patient hacks. "Well, dear, what do you think of the place," said Mrs. Davilow at last, in a gentle, deprecatory tone. "I think it is charming," said Gwendolen, quickly. "A romantic place; anything delightful may happen in it; it would be a good background for anything. No one need be ashamed of living here." "There is certainly nothing common about it." "Oh, it would do for fallen royalty or any sort of grand poverty. We ought properly to have been living in splendor, and have come down to this. It would have been as romantic as could be. But I thought my uncle and aunt Gascoigne would be here to meet us, and my cousin Anna," added Gwendolen, her tone changed to sharp surprise. "We are early," said Mrs. Davilow, and entering the hall, she said to the housekeeper who came forward, "You expect Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne?" "Yes, madam; they were here yesterday to give particular orders about the fires and the dinner. But as to fires, I've had 'em in all the rooms for the last week, and everything is well aired. I could wish some of the furniture paid better for all the cleaning it's had, but I _think_ you'll see the brasses have been done justice to. I _think_ when Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne come, they'll tell you nothing has been neglected. They'll be here at five, for certain." This satisfied Gwendolen, who was not prepared to have their arrival treated with indifference; and after tripping a little way up the matted stone staircase to take a survey there, she tripped down again, and followed by all the girls looked into each of the rooms opening from the hall--the dining-room all dark oak and worn red satin damask, with a copy of snarling, worrying dogs from Snyders over the side-board, and a Christ breaking bread over the mantel-piece; the library with a general aspect and smell of old brown-leather; and lastly, the drawing-room, which was entered through a small antechamber crowded with venerable knick-knacks. "Mamma, mamma, pray come here!" said Gwendolen, Mrs. Davilow having followed slowly in talk with the housekeeper. "Here is an organ. I will be Saint Cecilia: some one shall paint me as Saint Cecilia. Jocosa (this was her name for Miss Merry), let down my hair. See, mamma?" She had thrown off her hat and gloves, and seated herself before the organ in an admirable pose, looking upward; while the submissive and sad Jocosa took out the one comb which fastened the coil of hair, and then shook out the mass till it fell in a smooth light-brown stream far below its owner's slim waist. Mrs. Davilow smiled and said, "A charming picture, my dear!" not indifferent to the display of her pet, even in the presence of a housekeeper. Gwendolen rose and laughed with delight. All this seemed quite to the purpose on entering a new house which was so excellent a background. "What a queer, quaint, picturesque room!" she went on, looking about her. "I like these old embroidered chairs, and the garlands on the wainscot, and the pictures that may be anything. That one with the ribs--nothing but ribs and darkness--I should think that is Spanish, mamma." "Oh, Gwendolen!" said the small Isabel, in a tone of astonishment, while she held open a hinged panel of the wainscot at the other end of the room. Every one, Gwendolen first, went to look. The opened panel had disclosed the picture of an upturned dead face, from which an obscure figure seemed to be fleeing with outstretched arms. "How horrible!" said Mrs. Davilow, with a look of mere disgust; but Gwendolen shuddered silently, and Isabel, a plain and altogether inconvenient child with an alarming memory, said, "You will never stay in this room by yourself, Gwendolen." "How dare you open things which were meant to be shut up, you perverse little creature?" said Gwendolen, in her angriest tone. Then snatching the panel out of the hand of the culprit, she closed it hastily, saying, "There is a lock--where is the key? Let the key be found, or else let one be made, and let nobody open it again; or rather, let the key be brought to me." At this command to everybody in general Gwendolen turned with a face which was flushed in reaction from her chill shudder, and said, "Let us go up to our own room, mamma." The housekeeper on searching found the key in the drawer of the cabinet close by the panel, and presently handed it to Bugle, the lady's-maid, telling her significantly to give it to her Royal Highness. "I don't know what you mean, Mrs. Startin," said Bugle, who had been busy up-stairs during the scene in the drawing-room, and was rather offended at this irony in a new servant. "I mean the young lady that's to command us all--and well worthy for looks and figure," replied Mrs. Startin in propitiation. "She'll know what key it is." "If you have laid out what we want, go and see to the others, Bugle," Gwendolen had said, when she and Mrs. Davilow entered their black and yellow bedroom, where a pretty little white couch was prepared by the side of the black and yellow catafalque known as the best bed. "I will help mamma." But her first movement was to go to the tall mirror between the windows, which reflected herself and the room completely, while her mamma sat down and also looked at the reflection. "That is a becoming glass, Gwendolen; or is it the black and gold color that sets you off?" said Mrs. Davilow, as Gwendolen stood obliquely with her three-quarter face turned toward the mirror, and her left hand brushing back the stream of hair. "I should make a tolerable St. Cecilia with some white roses on my head," said Gwendolen,--"only how about my nose, mamma? I think saint's noses never in the least turn up. I wish you had given me your perfectly straight nose; it would have done for any sort of character--a nose of all work. Mine is only a happy nose; it would not do so well for tragedy." "Oh, my dear, any nose will do to be miserable with in this world," said Mrs. Davilow, with a deep, weary sigh, throwing her black bonnet on the table, and resting her elbow near it. "Now, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a strongly remonstrant tone, turning away from the glass with an air of vexation, "don't begin to be dull here. It spoils all my pleasure, and everything may be so happy now. What have you to be gloomy about _now_?" "Nothing, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, seeming to rouse herself, and beginning to take off her dress. "It is always enough for me to see you happy." "But you should be happy yourself," said Gwendolen, still discontentedly, though going to help her mamma with caressing touches. "Can nobody be happy after they are quite young? You have made me feel sometimes as if nothing were of any use. With the girls so troublesome, and Jocosa so dreadfully wooden and ugly, and everything make-shift about us, and you looking so dull--what was the use of my being anything? But now you _might_ be happy." "So I shall, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, patting the cheek that was bending near her. "Yes, but really. Not with a sort of make-believe," said Gwendolen, with resolute perseverance. "See what a hand and arm!--much more beautiful than mine. Any one can see you were altogether more beautiful." "No, no, dear; I was always heavier. Never half so charming as you are." "Well, but what is the use of my being charming, if it is to end in my being dull and not minding anything? Is that what marriage always comes to?" "No, child, certainly not. Marriage is the only happy state for a woman, as I trust you will prove." "I will not put up with it if it is not a happy state. I am determined to be happy--at least not to go on muddling away my life as other people do, being and doing nothing remarkable. I have made up my mind not to let other people interfere with me as they have done. Here is some warm water ready for you, mamma," Gwendolen ended, proceeding to take off her own dress and then waiting to have her hair wound up by her mamma. There was silence for a minute or two, till Mrs. Davilow said, while coiling the daughter's hair, "I am sure I have never crossed you, Gwendolen." "You often want me to do what I don't like." "You mean, to give Alice lessons?" "Yes. And I have done it because you asked me. But I don't see why I should, else. It bores me to death, she is so slow. She has no ear for music, or language, or anything else. It would be much better for her to be ignorant, mamma: it is her _rle_, she would do it well." "That is a hard thing to say of your poor sister, Gwendolen, who is so good to you, and waits on you hand and foot." "I don't see why it is hard to call things by their right names, and put them in their proper places. The hardship is for me to have to waste my time on her. Now let me fasten up your hair, mamma." "We must make haste; your uncle and aunt will be here soon. For heaven's sake, don't be scornful to _them_, my dear child! or to your cousin Anna, whom you will always be going out with. Do promise me, Gwendolen. You know, you can't expect Anna to be equal to you." "I don't want her to be equal," said Gwendolen, with a toss of her head and a smile, and the discussion ended there. When Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne and their daughter came, Gwendolen, far from being scornful, behaved as prettily as possible to them. She was introducing herself anew to relatives who had not seen her since the comparatively unfinished age of sixteen, and she was anxious--no, not anxious, but resolved that they should admire her. Mrs. Gascoigne bore a family likeness to her sister. But she was darker and slighter, her face was unworn by grief, her movements were less languid, her expression more alert and critical as that of a rector's wife bound to exert a beneficent authority. Their closest resemblance lay in a non-resistant disposition, inclined to imitation and obedience; but this, owing to the difference in their circumstances, had led them to very different issues. The younger sister had been indiscreet, or at least unfortunate in her marriages; the elder believed herself the most enviable of wives, and her pliancy had ended in her sometimes taking shapes of surprising definiteness. Many of her opinions, such as those on church government and the character of Archbishop Laud, seemed too decided under every alteration to have been arrived at otherwise than by a wifely receptiveness. And there was much to encourage trust in her husband's authority. He had some agreeable virtues, some striking advantages, and the failings that were imputed to him all leaned toward the side of success. One of his advantages was a fine person, which perhaps was even more impressive at fifty-seven than it had been earlier in life. There were no distinctively clerical lines in the face, no tricks of starchiness or of affected ease: in his Inverness cape he could not have been identified except as a gentleman with handsome dark features, a nose which began with an intention to be aquiline but suddenly became straight, and iron-gray hair. Perhaps he owed this freedom from the sort of professional make-up which penetrates skin, tones and gestures and defies all drapery, to the fact that he had once been Captain Gaskin, having taken orders and a diphthong but shortly before his engagement to Miss Armyn. If any one had objected that his preparation for the clerical function was inadequate, his friends might have asked who made a better figure in it, who preached better or had more authority in his parish? He had a native gift for administration, being tolerant both of opinions and conduct, because he felt himself able to overrule them, and was free from the irritations of conscious feebleness. He smiled pleasantly at the foible of a taste which he did not share--at floriculture or antiquarianism for example, which were much in vogue among his fellow-clergyman in the diocese: for himself, he preferred following the history of a campaign, or divining from his knowledge of Nesselrode's motives what would have been his conduct if our cabinet had taken a different course. Mr. Gascoigne's tone of thinking after some long-quieted fluctuations had become ecclesiastical rather than theological; not the modern Anglican, but what he would have called sound English, free from nonsense; such as became a man who looked at a national religion by daylight, and saw it in its relation to other things. No clerical magistrate had greater weight at sessions, or less of mischievous impracticableness in relation to worldly affairs. Indeed, the worst imputation thrown out against him was worldliness: it could not be proved that he forsook the less fortunate, but it was not to be denied that the friendships he cultivated were of a kind likely to be useful to the father of six sons and two daughters; and bitter observers--for in Wessex, say ten years ago, there were persons whose bitterness may now seem incredible--remarked that the color of his opinions had changed in consistency with this principle of action. But cheerful, successful worldliness has a false air of being more selfish than the acrid, unsuccessful kind, whose secret history is summed up in the terrible words, "Sold, but not paid for." Gwendolen wondered that she had not better remembered how very fine a man her uncle was; but at the age of sixteen she was a less capable and more indifferent judge. At present it was a matter of extreme interest to her that she was to have the near countenance of a dignified male relative, and that the family life would cease to be entirely, insipidly feminine. She did not intend that her uncle should control her, but she saw at once that it would be altogether agreeable to her that he should be proud of introducing her as his niece. And there was every sign of his being likely to feel that pride. He certainly looked at her with admiration as he said, "You have outgrown Anna, my dear," putting his arm tenderly round his daughter, whose shy face was a tiny copy of his own, and drawing her forward. "She is not so old as you by a year, but her growing days are certainly over. I hope you will be excellent companions." He did give a comparing glance at his daughter, but if he saw her inferiority, he might also see that Anna's timid appearance and miniature figure must appeal to a different taste from that which was attracted by Gwendolen, and that the girls could hardly be rivals. Gwendolen at least, was aware of this, and kissed her cousin with real cordiality as well as grace, saying, "A companion is just what I want. I am so glad we are come to live here. And mamma will be much happier now she is near you, aunt." The aunt trusted indeed that it would be so, and felt it a blessing that a suitable home had been vacant in their uncle's parish. Then, of course, notice had to be taken of the four other girls, whom Gwendolen had always felt to be superfluous: all of a girlish average that made four units utterly unimportant, and yet from her earliest days an obtrusive influential fact in her life. She was conscious of having been much kinder to them than could have been expected. And it was evident to her that her uncle and aunt also felt it a pity there were so many girls:--what rational person could feel otherwise, except poor mamma, who never would see how Alice set up her shoulders and lifted her eyebrows till she had no forehead left, how Bertha and Fanny whispered and tittered together about everything, or how Isabel was always listening and staring and forgetting where she was, and treading on the toes of her suffering elders? "You have brothers, Anna," said Gwendolen, while the sisters were being noticed. "I think you are enviable there." "Yes," said Anna, simply. "I am very fond of them; but of course their education is a great anxiety to papa. He used to say they made me a tomboy. I really was a great romp with Rex. I think you will like Rex. He will come home before Christmas." "I remember I used to think you rather wild and shy; but it is difficult now to imagine you a romp," said Gwendolen, smiling. "Of course, I am altered now; I am come out, and all that. But in reality I like to go blackberrying with Edwy and Lotta as well as ever. I am not very fond of going out; but I dare say I shall like it better now you will be often with me. I am not at all clever, and I never know what to say. It seems so useless to say what everybody knows, and I can think of nothing else, except what papa says." "I shall like going out with you very much," said Gwendolen, well disposed toward this _nave_ cousin. "Are you fond of riding?" "Yes, but we have only one Shetland pony amongst us. Papa says he can't afford more, besides the carriage-horses and his own nag; he has so many expenses." "I intend to have a horse and ride a great deal now," said Gwendolen, in a tone of decision. "Is the society pleasant in this neighborhood?" "Papa says it is, very. There are the clergymen all about, you know; and the Quallons, and the Arrowpoints, and Lord Brackenshaw, and Sir Hugo Mallinger's place, where there is nobody--that's very nice, because we make picnics there--and two or three families at Wanchester: oh, and old Mrs. Vulcany, at Nuttingwood, and--" But Anna was relieved of this tax on her descriptive powers by the announcement of dinner, and Gwendolen's question was soon indirectly answered by her uncle, who dwelt much on the advantages he had secured for them in getting a place like Offendene. Except the rent, it involved no more expense than an ordinary house at Wanchester would have done. "And it is always worth while to make a little sacrifice for a good style of house," said Mr. Gascoigne, in his easy, pleasantly confident tone, which made the world in general seem a very manageable place of residence: "especially where there is only a lady at the head. All the best people will call upon you; and you need give no expensive dinners. Of course, I have to spend a good deal in that way; it is a large item. But then I get my house for nothing. If I had to pay three hundred a year for my house I could not keep a table. My boys are too great a drain on me. You are better off than we are, in proportion; there is no great drain on you now, after your house and carriage." "I assure you, Fanny, now that the children are growing up, I am obliged to cut and contrive," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "I am not a good manager by nature, but Henry has taught me. He is wonderful for making the best of everything; he allows himself no extras, and gets his curates for nothing. It is rather hard that he has not been made a prebendary or something, as others have been, considering the friends he has made and the need there is for men of moderate opinions in all respects. If the Church is to keep its position, ability and character ought to tell." "Oh, my dear Nancy, you forget the old story--thank Heaven, there are three hundred as good as I. And ultimately, we shall have no reason to complain, I am pretty sure. There could hardly be a more thorough friend than Lord Brackenshaw--your landlord, you know, Fanny. Lady Brackenshaw will call upon you. And I have spoken for Gwendolen to be a member of our Archery Club--the Brackenshaw Archery Club--the most select thing anywhere. That is, if she has no objection," added Mr. Gascoigne, looking at Gwendolen with pleasant irony. "I should like it of all things," said Gwendolen. "There is nothing I enjoy more than taking aim--and hitting," she ended, with a pretty nod and smile. "Our Anna, poor child, is too short-sighted for archery. But I consider myself a first-rate shot, and you shall practice with me. I must make you an accomplished archer before our great meeting in July. In fact, as to neighborhood, you could hardly be better placed. There are the Arrowpoints--they are some of our best people. Miss Arrowpoint is a delightful girl--she has been presented at Court. They have a magnificent place--Quetcham Hall--worth seeing in point of art; and their parties, to which you are sure to be invited, are the best things of the sort we have. The archdeacon is intimate there, and they have always a good kind of people staying in the house. Mrs. Arrowpoint is peculiar, certainly; something of a caricature, in fact; but well-meaning. And Miss Arrowpoint is as nice as possible. It is not all young ladies who have mothers as handsome and graceful as yours and Anna's." Mrs. Davilow smiled faintly at this little compliment, but the husband and wife looked affectionately at each other, and Gwendolen thought, "My uncle and aunt, at least, are happy: they are not dull and dismal." Altogether, she felt satisfied with her prospects at Offendene, as a great improvement on anything she had known. Even the cheap curates, she incidentally learned, were almost always young men of family, and Mr. Middleton, the actual curate, was said to be quite an acquisition: it was only a pity he was so soon to leave. But there was one point which she was so anxious to gain that she could not allow the evening to pass without taking her measures toward securing it. Her mamma, she knew, intended to submit entirely to her uncle's judgment with regard to expenditure; and the submission was not merely prudential, for Mrs. Davilow, conscious that she had always been seen under a cloud as poor dear Fanny, who had made a sad blunder with her second marriage, felt a hearty satisfaction in being frankly and cordially identified with her sister's family, and in having her affairs canvassed and managed with an authority which presupposed a genuine interest. Thus the question of a suitable saddle-horse, which had been sufficiently discussed with mamma, had to be referred to Mr. Gascoigne; and after Gwendolen had played on the piano, which had been provided from Wanchester, had sung to her hearers' admiration, and had induced her uncle to join her in a duet--what more softening influence than this on any uncle who would have sung finely if his time had not been too much taken up by graver matters?--she seized the opportune moment for saying, "Mamma, you have not spoken to my uncle about my riding." "Gwendolen desires above all things to have a horse to ride--a pretty, light, lady's horse," said Mrs. Davilow, looking at Mr. Gascoigne. "Do you think we can manage it?" Mr. Gascoigne projected his lower lip and lifted his handsome eyebrows sarcastically at Gwendolen, who had seated herself with much grace on the elbow of her mamma's chair. "We could lend her the pony sometimes," said Mrs. Gascoigne, watching her husband's face, and feeling quite ready to disapprove if he did. "That might be inconveniencing others, aunt, and would be no pleasure to me. I cannot endure ponies," said Gwendolen. "I would rather give up some other indulgence and have a horse." (Was there ever a young lady or gentleman not ready to give up an unspecified indulgence for the sake of the favorite one specified?) "She rides so well. She has had lessons, and the riding-master said she had so good a seat and hand she might be trusted with any mount," said Mrs. Davilow, who, even if she had not wished her darling to have the horse, would not have dared to be lukewarm in trying to get it for her. "There is the price of the horse--a good sixty with the best chance, and then his keep," said Mr. Gascoigne, in a tone which, though demurring, betrayed the inward presence of something that favored the demand. "There are the carriage-horses--already a heavy item. And remember what you ladies cost in toilet now." "I really wear nothing but two black dresses," said Mrs. Davilow, hastily. "And the younger girls, of course, require no toilet at present. Besides, Gwendolen will save me so much by giving her sisters lessons." Here Mrs. Davilow's delicate cheek showed a rapid blush. "If it were not for that, I must really have a more expensive governess, and masters besides." Gwendolen felt some anger with her mamma, but carefully concealed it. "That is good--that is decidedly good," said Mr. Gascoigne, heartily, looking at his wife. And Gwendolen, who, it must be owned, was a deep young lady, suddenly moved away to the other end of the long drawing-room, and busied herself with arranging pieces of music. "The dear child has had no indulgences, no pleasures," said Mrs. Davilow, in a pleading undertone. "I feel the expense is rather imprudent in this first year of our settling. But she really needs the exercise--she needs cheering. And if you were to see her on horseback, it is something splendid." "It is what we could not afford for Anna," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "But she, dear child, would ride Lotta's donkey and think it good enough." (Anna was absorbed in a game with Isabel, who had hunted out an old back-gammon-board, and had begged to sit up an extra hour.) "Certainly, a fine woman never looks better than on horseback," said Mr. Gascoigne. "And Gwendolen has the figure for it. I don't say the thing should not be considered." "We might try it for a time, at all events. It can be given up, if necessary," said Mrs. Davilow. "Well, I will consult Lord Brackenshaw's head groom. He is my _fidus Achates_ in the horsey way." "Thanks," said Mrs. Davilow, much relieved. "You are very kind." "That he always is," said Mrs. Gascoigne. And later that night, when she and her husband were in private, she said, "I thought you were almost too indulgent about the horse for Gwendolen. She ought not to claim so much more than your own daughter would think of. Especially before we see how Fanny manages on her income. And you really have enough to do without taking all this trouble on yourself." "My dear Nancy, one must look at things from every point of view. This girl is really worth some expense: you don't often see her equal. She ought to make a first-rate marriage, and I should not be doing my duty if I spared my trouble in helping her forward. You know yourself she has been under a disadvantage with such a father-in-law, and a second family, keeping her always in the shade. I feel for the girl, And I should like your sister and her family now to have the benefit of your having married rather a better specimen of our kind than she did." "Rather better! I should think so. However, it is for me to be grateful that you will take so much on your shoulders for the sake of my sister and her children. I am sure I would not grudge anything to poor Fanny. But there is one thing I have been thinking of, though you have never mentioned it." "What is that?" "The boys. I hope they will not be falling in love with Gwendolen." "Don't presuppose anything of the kind, my dear, and there will be no danger. Rex will never be at home for long together, and Warham is going to India. It is the wiser plan to take it for granted that cousins will not fall in love. If you begin with precautions, the affair will come in spite of them. One must not undertake to act for Providence in these matters, which can no more be held under the hand than a brood of chickens. The boys will have nothing, and Gwendolen will have nothing. They can't marry. At the worst there would only be a little crying, and you can't save boys and girls from that." Mrs. Gascoigne's mind was satisfied: if anything did happen, there was the comfort of feeling that her husband would know what was to be done, and would have the energy to do it.

Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth's childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land; a spot where early memories may be entwined with affection as a sweet habit of the blood. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead. But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been lacking in Gwendolen's life. Only a year before her recall from Leubronn, Offendene was chosen as her mamma's home simply for its nearness to Pennicote Rectory; and Mrs. Davilow, Gwendolen, and her four half-sisters were driven along the avenue for the first time on a late October afternoon when the rooks were cawing loudly, and the yellow elm-leaves were whirling. The season suited the aspect of the old oblong red-brick house, rather too anxiously ornamented with stone at every line. The building was softened with green and grey lichen, so that there was no harshness in the face which it turned to the three avenues that cut through the grounds. One would have liked the house to have been lifted on a hill, so as to look over to the long thatched roofs of the distant villages, the church towers, the scattered homesteads and the gradual rise of surging woods in that beautiful part of Wessex. The house was just large enough to be called a mansion, and had been let with sombre furniture and faded upholstery. But nobody could suppose it to be inhabited by trades-people: and to live in a house which had once sufficed for dowager countesses added to Mrs. Davilow's satisfaction in having her own establishment. This was suddenly possible on the death of Gwendolen's step-father, Captain Davilow, who had for the last nine years joined his family only in a brief and fitful manner; but Gwendolen cared not why, only that her prospects had become more agreeable in consequence. She had disliked their former way of life, roving from one foreign watering-place to another, always feeling new dislike for new suites of hired furniture, and meeting new people under conditions which made her appear of little importance. The two years she had passed at a showy school, where she had been put in a foremost position, had only deepened her sense of herself as an exceptional person who could not remain in ordinary circumstances. Any fear of this evil was banished now that her mamma was to have an establishment. She would probably have known more about her father but for an incident which happened when she was twelve years old. Mrs. Davilow had brought out, as she did only at wide intervals, mementos of her first husband, and while showing his miniature to Gwendolen recalled the fact that dear papa had died when his little daughter was in baby-clothes. Gwendolen, immediately thinking of the unlovable step-father whom she had known while she was in short frocks, said- "Why did you marry again, mamma? It would have been nicer if you had not." Mrs. Davilow coloured deeply, a slight convulsive movement passed over her face, and she said, with a violence quite unusual in her- "You have no feeling, child!" Gwendolen, who was fond of her mamma, felt hurt and ashamed, and had never since dared to ask a question about her father. This was not the only time she had felt a painful guilt towards her mother. It was always arranged, when possible, that she should have a small bed in her mamma's room; for Mrs. Davilow's motherly tenderness clung chiefly to her eldest girl. One night under an attack of pain she found that the medicine regularly placed by her bedside had been forgotten, and begged Gwendolen to get out of bed and reach it for her. That healthy young lady, snug and warm as a rosy infant, objected to step out into the cold, and lying perfectly still, grumbled a refusal. Mrs. Davilow went without the medicine and never reproached her daughter; but the next day Gwendolen was keenly conscious of what must be in her mamma's mind, and tried to make amends by caresses which cost her no effort. Having always been the pet and pride of the household, waited on by all, she naturally found it difficult to think her own pleasure unimportant, and when it was thwarted felt an astonished and passionate resentment. Though never as a child thoughtlessly cruel, nay delighting to rescue drowning insects, there was a disagreeable silent remembrance of her having strangled her sister's canary-bird in a fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had again and again jarringly interrupted her own. She had bought a white mouse for her sister in retribution, and though inwardly excusing herself on the grounds of a peculiar sensitivity which was a mark of her superiority, the thought of that understandable murder had always made her wince. Gwendolen was not without remorse, but she liked to make her penances easy, and now that she was twenty, she guarded herself from the humiliation of penance. There was more show of fire and will in her than ever, but there was more calculation underneath it. On this day of arrival at Offendene, a place which not even Mrs. Davilow had seen before, her brother-in-law Mr. Gascoigne having rented it for her - all four got down from the carriage, and were standing in front of the open door, to have a general view of the place and a glimpse of the stone hall and staircase hung with sombre pictures. No one spoke; mamma, the four sisters and the governess all looked at Gwendolen, as if their feelings depended entirely on her decision. Of the girls, from Alice in her sixteenth year to Isabel in her tenth, hardly anything could be said but that they were girlish, and that their black dresses were getting shabby. Miss Merry, the elderly governess, was altogether neutral in expression. Mrs. Davilow's worn beauty seemed the more pathetic for the look of appeal which she cast at Gwendolen, who was glancing round at her surroundings with an air of rapid judgment. Imagine a young race-horse in the paddock among ponies and patient hacks. "Well, dear, what do you think of the place?" said Mrs. Davilow. "I think it is charming," said Gwendolen, quickly. "A romantic place; anything delightful may happen in it. No one need be ashamed of living here." "There is certainly nothing common about it." "Oh, it would do for fallen royalty. But I thought my uncle and aunt Gascoigne would be here to meet us, and my cousin Anna," added Gwendolen, her tone changed to sharp surprise. "We are early," said Mrs. Davilow, and entering the hall, she said to the housekeeper, "You expect Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne?" "Yes, madam; they were here yesterday to give orders about the fires and the dinner. Everything is well aired and cleaned. When Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne come, they'll tell you nothing has been neglected. They'll be here at five, for certain." This satisfied Gwendolen; and after tripping a little way up the stone staircase to take a survey there, she tripped down again, and followed by all the girls looked into each of the rooms opening from the hall - the dining-room all dark oak and worn red satin damask, the library with a smell of old brown-leather; and lastly the drawing-room. "Mamma, mamma, pray come here!" said Gwendolen. "Here is an organ. I will be Saint Cecilia: some one shall paint me as Saint Cecilia. Jocosa (this was her name for Miss Merry), let down my hair. See, mamma?" She had thrown off her hat and gloves, and seated herself before the organ in an admirable pose, looking upward; while the submissive Jocosa took out the comb which fastened her hair, till it fell in a smooth light-brown stream far below its owner's slim waist. Mrs. Davilow smiled and said, "A charming picture, my dear!" Gwendolen rose and laughed with delight. "What a queer, quaint, picturesque room!" she said. "I like these old embroidered chairs, and the garlands on the wainscot, and the pictures that may be anything." "Oh, Gwendolen!" said the small Isabel, in a tone of astonishment, while she held open a hinged panel of the wainscot at the other end of the room. Everyone went to look. The opened wall-panel had disclosed the picture of an upturned dead face, from which a figure seemed to be fleeing with outstretched arms. "How horrible!" said Mrs. Davilow; but Gwendolen shuddered silently, and Isabel, a plain and inconvenient child with an alarming memory, said, "You will never stay in this room by yourself, Gwendolen." "How dare you open things which were meant to be shut up, you perverse little creature?" said Gwendolen angrily. She closed the panel hastily, saying, "There is a lock - where is the key? Let nobody open this again; and bring the key to me." Then turning with a flushed face, she said, "Let us go to our own room, mamma." The housekeeper found the key in the drawer of a cabinet, and later handed it to Bugle, the lady's-maid, telling her significantly to give it to her Royal Highness. "I don't know who you mean, Mrs. Startin," said Bugle, rather offended at this irony in a new servant. "I mean the young lady that's to command us all," replied Mrs. Startin. When Gwendolen and Mrs. Davilow entered their black and yellow bedroom, where a pretty little white couch sat by the side of the bed, Gwendolen's first movement was to go to the tall mirror, while her mamma sat down and looked at the reflection of her daughter and the room. "That is a becoming glass, Gwendolen; or is it the black and gold colour that sets you off?" said Mrs. Davilow, as Gwendolen stood brushing back her hair. "I should make a tolerable St. Cecilia with some white roses on my head," said Gwendolen, "only how about my nose, mamma? Saints' noses never turn up. I wish you had given me your straight nose. Now, mamma," she said, going to help her mamma undress with caressing touches, "you should be happy. Can nobody be happy after they are quite young? You have made me feel sometimes as if nothing were of any use. But now you might be happy." "So I shall, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, patting her cheek. "Yes, but really. Not with a sort of make-believe," said Gwendolen resolutely. "See your hand and arm!- much more beautiful than mine. Anyone can see you were more beautiful." "No, dear; I was always heavier. Never half so charming as you are." "Well, what is the use of my being charming, if it is to end in my being dull and not minding anything? Is that what marriage always comes to?" "No, child, certainly not. Marriage is the only happy state for a woman, as I trust you will prove." "I will not put up with it if it is not a happy state. I am determined to be happy - at least not to muddle away my life as other people do, being nothing remarkable. I shall not let other people interfere with me as they have done." Gwendolen proceeded to take off her own dress, waiting to have her hair wound up by her mamma. There was silence for a minute, till Mrs. Davilow, coiling up her daughter's hair, said, "I am sure I have never crossed you, Gwendolen." "You often want me to do what I don't like." "You mean, giving Alice lessons?" "Yes. I have done it because you asked me. But I don't see why I should. It bores me to death, she is so slow. It would be much better for her to be ignorant, mamma; she would do it well." "That is a hard thing to say of your poor sister, Gwendolen, who is so good to you, and waits on you hand and foot." "I don't see why it is hard to call things by their right names, and put them in their proper places. The hardship is for me to have to waste my time on her. Now let me do your hair, mamma." "Make haste; your uncle and aunt will be here soon. For heaven's sake, don't be scornful to them, my dear child! or to your cousin Anna. Do promise me, Gwendolen. You can't expect Anna to be equal to you." "I don't want her to be equal," said Gwendolen, with a toss of her head and a smile. When Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne and their daughter came, Gwendolen, far from being scornful, behaved as prettily as possible. Her relatives had not seen her since she was sixteen, and she was anxious - no, not anxious, but resolved that they should admire her. Mrs. Gascoigne bore a family likeness to her younger sister. But she was darker and slighter than Gwendolen's mother, her face was unworn by grief, her movements were less languid, her expression more alert and critical, as suited a rector's wife. They both had natures inclined to obedience; but had ended up in very different places. The younger sister had been unfortunate in her marriages; the elder believed herself the most enviable of wives, and based her decided opinions on her husband's authority. And there was much to encourage trust there. Mr Gascoigne had agreeable virtues, some striking advantages, and his failings leaned toward the side of success. One of his advantages was a fine appearance, even more impressive at fifty-seven than it had been earlier in life. He looked a gentleman with his handsome dark features and iron-grey hair. Perhaps he owed this unclerical aspect to the fact that he had once been Captain Gaskin, having taken orders and a diphthong only shortly before his engagement. He had authority in his parish, and a gift for administration, being a tolerant man. He smiled pleasantly at the flower-growing interests of his fellow-clergyman: for himself, he preferred following the history of a campaign. Mr. Gascoigne would have thought of himself as free from nonsense, a man who looked at religion by daylight, and saw it in its relation to other things. Indeed, the worst criticism of him was worldliness: not that he did not care for the poor, but it was not to be denied that the friendships he cultivated were of a kind likely to be useful to the father of six sons and two daughters. Gwendolen wondered that she had not remembered how very fine a man her uncle was. It was a matter of extreme interest to her that she should have a dignified male relative nearby, and that her family life would cease to be entirely, insipidly feminine. She did not intend that her uncle should control her, but she saw at once that she would like him to be proud of introducing her as his niece. And he appeared likely to feel that pride. He certainly looked at her with admiration as he said- "You have outgrown Anna, my dear," putting his arm tenderly round his daughter, whose shy face was a tiny copy of his own. "She is a year younger than you, but her growing days are certainly over. I hope you will be excellent companions." He did give a comparing glance at his daughter; but it was clear that Anna's timid appearance and miniature figure must appeal to a different taste from that which was attracted by Gwendolen, and that the girls could hardly be rivals. Gwendolen, at least, was aware of this, and kissed her cousin with real cordiality, saying, "A companion is just what I want. I am so glad we are come to live here. And mamma will be much happier now she is near you, aunt." The aunt trusted that it would be so, and felt it a blessing that a suitable home had been vacant in their uncle's parish. Then, of course, notice had to be taken of the four other girls, whom Gwendolen had always felt to be superfluous and unimportant, and yet from her earliest days an obtrusive fact in her life. She was conscious of having been much kinder to them than could have been expected. She could tell that her uncle and aunt also felt it a pity there were so many girls:- what rational person could feel otherwise, except poor mamma, who never would see how Alice hunched her shoulders, how Bertha and Fanny whispered and tittered together about everything, or how Isabel was always listening and staring and forgetting where she was? "You have brothers, Anna," said Gwendolen. "I think you are enviable there." "Yes," said Anna, simply. "I am very fond of them; but of course their education is a great anxiety to papa. He used to say they made me a tomboy. I really was a great romp with Rex. I think you will like Rex. He will come home before Christmas." "I remember I used to think you rather wild and shy; but it is difficult to imagine you a romp," said Gwendolen, smiling. "Of course, I am altered now; I am come out, and all that. But I like to go blackberrying with Edwy and Lotta as well as ever. I am not very fond of society; but I dare say I shall like it better now you will be often with me. I am not at all clever, and I never know what to say." "I shall like going out with you very much," said Gwendolen, well disposed toward this nave cousin. "Are you fond of riding?" "Yes, but we have only one Shetland pony. Papa can't afford more; he has so many expenses." "I intend to have a horse and ride a great deal," said Gwendolen decisively. "Is the society pleasant in this neighbourhood?" "Papa says it is, very. There are clergymen all about, you know; and the Quallons, and the Arrowpoints, and Lord Brackenshaw, and Sir Hugo Mallinger's place, where there is nobody- that's very nice, because we make picnics there." Just then dinner was announced, and Gwendolen's question was soon answered by her uncle, who dwelt much on the advantages of their getting a place like Offendene. "It is always worth while to make a little sacrifice for a good style of house," said Mr. Gascoigne, in his easy, pleasantly confident tone; "all the best people will call upon you; and you need give no expensive dinners. Of course, I have to spend a good deal in that way; but then I get my house for nothing. If I had to pay three hundred a year for my house I could not keep a table. My boys are too great a drain on me. You are better off than we are, in proportion; there is no great drain on you now, after your house and carriage." "I assure you, Fanny, now that the children are growing up, I am obliged to cut and contrive," said his wife. "Henry has taught me how to manage. He is wonderful for making the best of everything; he allows himself no extras, and gets his curates for nothing. It is rather hard that he has not been made a prebendary." "Oh, my dear Nancy, thank Heaven, there are three hundred as good as I. And ultimately, we shall have no reason to complain, I am pretty sure. There could hardly be a better friend than Lord Brackenshaw - your landlord, you know, Fanny. Lady Brackenshaw will call upon you. And I have spoken for Gwendolen to be a member of the Brackenshaw Archery Club - the most select thing anywhere. That is, if she has no objection," added Mr. Gascoigne. "I should like it of all things," said Gwendolen. "There is nothing I enjoy more than taking aim - and hitting," she ended, with a pretty smile. "Anna, poor child, is too short-sighted for archery. But you shall practise with me. I must make you an accomplished archer before our great meeting in July. In fact, as to neighbourhood, you could hardly be better placed. There are the Arrowpoints - they are some of our best people. Miss Arrowpoint is a delightful girl - she has been presented at Court. They have a magnificent place at Quetcham Hall; and their parties are the best things of the sort we have. Mrs. Arrowpoint is peculiar, certainly; but well-meaning, and Miss Arrowpoint is as nice as possible. It is not all young ladies who have mothers as handsome and graceful as yours and Anna's." Mrs. Davilow smiled faintly at this little compliment, but the husband and wife looked affectionately at each other, and Gwendolen thought, "My uncle and aunt, at least, are not dull and dismal." Altogether, she felt satisfied with her prospects at Offendene. Even the curates were almost always young men of family, and Mr. Middleton, the present curate, was said to be quite an acquisition: it was only a pity he was soon to leave. But there was one point about which she was anxious. Her mamma, she knew, intended to submit to her uncle's judgment about expenditure: so the question of a saddle-horse had to be referred to Mr. Gascoigne. After Gwendolen had played on the piano, had sung to her hearers' admiration, and had joined her uncle in a duet, she seized the opportune moment for saying, "Mamma, you have not spoken to my uncle about my riding." "Gwendolen desires above all things to have a horse to ride - a pretty, light, lady's horse," said Mrs. Davilow, looking at Mr. Gascoigne. "Do you think we can manage it? She rides so well. She has had lessons, and the riding-master said she might be trusted with any mount." Even if Mrs. Davilow had not wished her darling to have a horse, she would not have dared to be lukewarm in trying to get it for her. "We could lend her the pony sometimes," said Mrs. Gascoigne, watching her husband's face, and quite ready to disapprove if he did. "I cannot endure ponies," said Gwendolen. "I would rather give up some other indulgence and have a horse." (Was there ever a young person not ready to give up an unspecified indulgence for the sake of a favourite one?) "There is the price of the horse, and then his keep," said Mr. Gascoigne, considering. "The carriage-horses are already a heavy item. And remember what you ladies cost in clothes now." "I really wear nothing but two black dresses," said Mrs. Davilow hastily. "And the younger girls need nothing yet. Besides, Gwendolen will save me so much by giving her sisters lessons." Here Mrs. Davilow blushed. "If it were not for that, I must have a more expensive governess, and masters besides." "That is decidedly good," said Mr. Gascoigne, heartily. And Gwendolen, who was a deep young lady, suddenly moved away to the other end of the long drawing-room, and busied herself with pieces of music. "The dear child has had no pleasures," said Mrs. Davilow pleadingly. "She really needs the exercise - she needs cheering. And if you were to see her on horseback, it is something splendid." "Certainly, a fine woman never looks better than on horseback," said Mr. Gascoigne. "And Gwendolen has the figure for it. I will consult Lord Brackenshaw's head groom." "You are very kind." "That he always is," said Mrs. Gascoigne. And later that night, when she and her husband were in private, she said, "I thought you were almost too indulgent about the horse for Gwendolen. She ought not to claim so much more than your own daughter; especially before we see how Fanny manages on her income. You have enough to do without taking this trouble on yourself." "My dear Nancy, this girl is worth some expense: you don't often see her equal. She ought to make a first-rate marriage, and I should not be doing my duty if I did not help her forward. She has been under a disadvantage with such a stepfather. I feel for the girl. And I should like your sister to have the benefit of your having married rather a better specimen of our kind than she did." "Rather better! I should think so. I would not grudge anything to poor Fanny. But I have been thinking of one thing you have never mentioned." "What is that?" "The boys. I hope they will not be falling in love with Gwendolen." "Don't presuppose anything of the kind, my dear, and there will be no danger. Rex will never be at home for long, and Warham is going to India. It is wiser to take it for granted that cousins will not fall in love. The boys will have nothing, and Gwendolen will have nothing. They can't marry. At the worst there would only be a little crying, and you can't save boys and girls from that." Mrs. Gascoigne's mind was satisfied: if anything did happen, there was the comfort of feeling that her husband would know what was to be done, and would have the energy to do it.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 3: A Year Previously

"Rien ne pese tant qu'un secret Le porter loin est difficile aux dames: Et je sais mesme sur ce fait Bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes." --LA FONTAINE. Meanwhile Deronda had been fastened and led off by Mr. Vandernoodt, who wished for a brisker walk, a cigar, and a little gossip. Since we cannot tell a man his own secrets, the restraint of being in his company often breeds a desire to pair off in conversation with some more ignorant person, and Mr. Vandernoodt presently said, "What a washed-out piece of cambric Grandcourt is! But if he is a favorite of yours, I withdraw the remark." "Not the least in the world," said Deronda. "I thought not. One wonders how he came to have a great passion again; and he must have had--to marry in this way. Though Lush, his old chum, hints that he married this girl out of obstinacy. By George! it was a very accountable obstinacy. A man might make up his mind to marry her without the stimulus of contradiction. But he must have made himself a pretty large drain of money, eh?" "I know nothing of his affairs." "What! not of the other establishment he keeps up?" "Diplow? Of course. He took that of Sir Hugo. But merely for the year." "No, no; not Diplow: Gadsmere. Sir Hugo knows, I'll answer for it." Deronda said nothing. He really began to feel some curiosity, but he foresaw that he should hear what Mr. Vandernoodt had to tell, without the condescension of asking. "Lush would not altogether own to it, of course. He's a confident and go-between of Grandcourt's. But I have it on the best authority. The fact is, there's another lady with four children at Gadsmere. She has had the upper hand of him these ten years and more, and by what I can understand has it still--left her husband for him, and used to travel with him everywhere. Her husband's dead now; I found a fellow who was in the same regiment with him, and knew this Mrs. Glasher before she took wing. A fiery dark-eyed woman--a noted beauty at that time--he thought she was dead. They say she has Grandcourt under her thumb still, and it's a wonder he didn't marry her, for there's a very fine boy, and I understand Grandcourt can do absolutely as he pleases with the estates. Lush told me as much as that." "What right had he to marry this girl?" said Deronda, with disgust. Mr. Vandernoodt, adjusting the end of his cigar, shrugged his shoulders and put out his lips. "_She_ can know nothing of it," said Deronda, emphatically. But that positive statement was immediately followed by an inward query--"Could she have known anything of it?" "It's rather a piquant picture," said Mr. Vandernoodt--"Grandcourt between two fiery women. For depend upon it this light-haired one has plenty of devil in her. I formed that opinion of her at Leubronn. It's a sort of Medea and Cresa business. Fancy the two meeting! Grandcourt is a new kind of Jason: I wonder what sort of a part he'll make of it. It's a dog's part at best. I think I hear Ristori now, saying, 'Jasone! Jasone!' These fine women generally get hold of a stick." "Grandcourt can bite, I fancy," said Deronda. "He is no stick." "No, no; I meant Jason. I can't quite make out Grandcourt. But he's a keen fellow enough--uncommonly well built too. And if he comes into all this property, the estates will bear dividing. This girl, whose friends had come to beggary, I understand, may think herself lucky to get him. I don't want to be hard on a man because he gets involved in an affair of that sort. But he might make himself more agreeable. I was telling him a capital story last night, and he got up and walked away in the middle. I felt inclined to kick him. Do you suppose that is inattention or insolence, now?" "Oh, a mixture. He generally observes the forms: but he doesn't listen much," said Deronda. Then, after a moment's pause, he went on, "I should think there must be some exaggeration or inaccuracy in what you have heard about this lady at Gadsmere." "Not a bit, depend upon it; it has all lain snug of late years. People have forgotten all about it. But there the nest is, and the birds are in it. And I know Grandcourt goes there. I have good evidence that he goes there. However, that's nobody's business but his own. The affair has sunk below the surface." "I wonder you could have learned so much about it," said Deronda, rather drily. "Oh, there are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the manners of my time--contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a straw about the _faux pas_ of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of the historical men--more interested in a lady when she's got a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out. Does that flatter your imagination?" "Well, if she had any woes in her love, one has the satisfaction of knowing that she's well out of them." "Ah, you are thinking of the Medea, I see." Deronda then chose to point to some giant oaks worth looking at in their bareness. He also felt an interest in this piece of contemporary gossip, but he was satisfied that Mr. Vandernoodt had no more to tell about it. Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his own birth, his mind had perhaps never been so active in weaving probabilities about any private affair as it had now begun to be about Gwendolen's marriage. This unavowed relation of Grandcourt's--could she have gained some knowledge of it, which caused her to shrink from the match--a shrinking finally overcome by the urgence of poverty? He could recall almost every word she had said to him, and in certain of these words he seemed to discern that she was conscious of having done some wrong--inflicted some injury. His own acute experience made him alive to the form of injury which might affect the unavowed children and their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under all her determined show of satisfaction, gnawed by a double, a treble-headed grief--self-reproach, disappointment, jealousy? He dwelt especially on all the slight signs of self-reproach: he was inclined to judge her tenderly, to excuse, to pity. He thought he had found a key now by which to interpret her more clearly: what magnifying of her misery might not a young creature get into who had wedded her fresh hopes to old secrets! He thought he saw clearly enough now why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this affair to him; and immediately the image of this Mrs. Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden birth. Gwendolen knowing of that woman and her children, marrying Grandcourt, and showing herself contented, would have been among the most repulsive of beings to him; but Gwendolen tasting the bitterness of remorse for having contributed to their injury was brought very near to his fellow-feeling. If it were so, she had got to a common plane of understanding with him on some difficulties of life which a woman is rarely able to judge of with any justice or generosity; for, according to precedent, Gwendolen's view of her position might easily have been no other than that her husband's marriage with her was his entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs. Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And Deronda had naturally some resentment on behalf of the Hagars and Ishmaels. Undeniably Deronda's growing solicitude about Gwendolen depended chiefly on her peculiar manner toward him; and I suppose neither man nor woman would be the better for an utter insensibility to such appeals. One sign that his interest in her had changed its footing was that he dismissed any caution against her being a coquette setting snares to involve him in a vulgar flirtation, and determined that he would not again evade any opportunity of talking to her. He had shaken off Mr. Vandernoodt, and got into a solitary corner in the twilight; but half an hour was long enough to think of those possibilities in Gwendolen's position and state of mind; and on forming the determination not to avoid her, he remembered that she was likely to be at tea with the other ladies in the drawing-room. The conjecture was true; for Gwendolen, after resolving not to go down again for the next four hours, began to feel, at the end of one, that in shutting herself up she missed all chances of seeing and hearing, and that her visit would only last two days more. She adjusted herself, put on her little air of self-possession, and going down, made herself resolutely agreeable. Only ladies were assembled, and Lady Pentreath was amusing them with a description of a drawing-room under the Regency, and the figure that was cut by ladies and gentlemen in 1819, the year she was presented--when Deronda entered. "Shall I be acceptable?" he said. "Perhaps I had better go back and look for the others. I suppose they are in the billiard-room." "No, no; stay where you are," said Lady Pentreath. "They were all getting tired of me; let us hear what _you_ have to say." "That is rather an embarrassing appeal," said Deronda, drawing up a chair near Lady Mallinger's elbow at the tea-table. "I think I had better take the opportunity of mentioning our songstress," he added, looking at Lady Mallinger--"unless you have done so." "Oh, the little Jewess!" said Lady Mallinger. "No, I have not mentioned her. It never entered my head that any one here wanted singing lessons." "All ladies know some one else who wants singing lessons," said Deronda. "I have happened to find an exquisite singer,"--here he turned to Lady Pentreath. "She is living with some ladies who are friends of mine--the mother and sisters of a man who was my chum at Cambridge. She was on the stage at Vienna; but she wants to leave that life, and maintain herself by teaching." "There are swarms of those people, aren't there?" said the old lady. "Are her lessons to be very cheap or very expensive? Those are the two baits I know of." "There is another bait for those who hear her," said Deronda. "Her singing is something quite exceptional, I think. She has had such first-rate teaching--or rather first-rate instinct with her teaching--that you might imagine her singing all came by nature." "Why did she leave the stage, then?" said Lady Pentreath. "I'm too old to believe in first-rate people giving up first-rate chances." "Her voice was too weak. It is a delicious voice for a room. You who put up with my singing of Schubert would be enchanted with hers," said Deronda, looking at Mrs. Raymond. "And I imagine she would not object to sing at private parties or concerts. Her voice is quite equal to that." "I am to have her in my drawing-room when we go up to town," said Lady Mallinger. "You shall hear her then. I have not heard her myself yet; but I trust Daniel's recommendation. I mean my girls to have lessons of her." "Is it a charitable affair?" said Lady Pentreath. "I can't bear charitable music." Lady Mallinger, who was rather helpless in conversation, and felt herself under an engagement not to tell anything of Mirah's story, had an embarrassed smile on her face, and glanced at Deronda. "It is a charity to those who want to have a good model of feminine singing," said Deronda. "I think everybody who has ears would benefit by a little improvement on the ordinary style. If you heard Miss Lapidoth"--here he looked at Gwendolen--"perhaps you would revoke your resolution to give up singing." "I should rather think my resolution would be confirmed," said Gwendolen. "I don't feel able to follow your advice of enjoying my own middlingness." "For my part," said Deronda, "people who do anything finely always inspirit me to try. I don't mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world." "But then, if we can't imitate it, it only makes our own life seem the tamer," said Gwendolen, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on her own insignificance. "That depends on the point of view, I think," said Deronda. "We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practice art only in the light of private study--preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us. I think Miss Lapidoth is one of the few." "She must be a very happy person, don't you think?" said Gwendolen, with a touch of sarcasm, and a turn of her neck toward Mrs. Raymond. "I don't know," answered the independent lady; "I must hear more of her before I say that." "It may have been a bitter disappointment to her that her voice failed her for the stage," said Juliet Fenn, sympathetically. "I suppose she's past her best, though," said the deep voice of Lady Pentreath. "On the contrary, she has not reached it," said Deronda. "She is barely twenty." "And very pretty," interposed Lady Mallinger, with an amiable wish to help Deronda. "And she has very good manners. I'm sorry she's a bigoted Jewess; I should not like it for anything else, but it doesn't matter in singing." "Well, since her voice is too weak for her to scream much, I'll tell Lady Clementina to set her on my nine granddaughters," said Lady Pentreath; "and I hope she'll convince eight of them that they have not voice enough to sing anywhere but at church. My notion is, that many of our girls nowadays want lessons not to sing." "I have had my lessons in that," said Gwendolen, looking at Deronda. "You see Lady Pentreath is on my side." While she was speaking, Sir Hugo entered with some of the other gentlemen, including Grandcourt, and standing against the group at the low tea-table said, "What imposition is Deronda putting on you, ladies--slipping in among you by himself?" "Wanting to pass off an obscurity on us as better than any celebrity," said Lady Pentreath--"a pretty singing Jewess who is to astonish these young people. You and I, who heard Catalani in her prime, are not so easily astonished." Sir Hugo listened with his good-humored smile as he took a cup of tea from his wife, and then said, "Well, you know, a Liberal is bound to think that there have been singers since Catalani's time." "Ah, you are younger than I am. I dare say you are one of the men who ran after Alcharisi. But she married off and left you all in the lurch." "Yes, yes; it's rather too bad when these great singers marry themselves into silence before they have a crack in their voices. And the husband is a public robber. I remember Leroux saying, 'A man might as well take down a fine peal of church bells and carry them off to the steppes," said Sir Hugo, setting down his cup and turning away, while Deronda, who had moved from his place to make room for others, and felt that he was not in request, sat down a little apart. Presently he became aware that, in the general dispersion of the group, Gwendolen had extricated herself from the attentions of Mr. Vandernoodt and had walked to the piano, where she stood apparently examining the music which lay on the desk. Will any one be surprised at Deronda's concluding that she wished him to join her? Perhaps she wanted to make amends for the unpleasant tone of resistance with which she had met his recommendation of Mirah, for he had noticed that her first impulse often was to say what she afterward wished to retract. He went to her side and said, "Are you relenting about the music and looking for something to play or sing?" "I am not looking for anything, but I _am_ relenting," said Gwendolen, speaking in a submissive tone. "May I know the reason?" "I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have lessons from her, since you admire her so much--that is, of course, when we go to town. I mean lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and my own deficiency," said Gwendolen, turning on him a sweet, open smile. "I shall be really glad for you to see and hear her," said Deronda, returning the smile in kind. "Is she as perfect in every thing else as in her music?" "I can't vouch for that exactly. I have not seen enough of her. But I have seen nothing in her that I could wish to be different. She has had an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood, and she has grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that no advantages could have given her more grace and truer refinement." "I wonder what sort of trouble hers were?" "I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the brink of drowning herself in despair." "And what hindered her?" said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda. "Some ray or other came--which made her feel that she ought to live--that it was good to live," he answered, quietly. "She is full of piety, and seems capable of submitting to anything when it takes the form of duty." "Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impatiently. "I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don't believe in their great sufferings." Her fingers moved quickly among the edges of the music. "It is true," said Deronda, "that the consciousness of having done wrong is something deeper, more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures can never feel so much for the irreproachable as for those who are bruised in the struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient story, that of the lost sheep--but it comes up afresh every day." "That is a way of speaking--it is not acted upon, it is not real," said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her blameless, perfect. And you know you would despise a woman who had done something you thought very wrong." "That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done," said Deronda. "You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "No, not satisfied--full of sorrow for her. It was not a mere way of speaking. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is not more adorable; I meant that those who would be comparatively uninteresting beforehand may become worthier of sympathy when they do something that awakens in them a keen remorse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when they are suffering in that way one must care for them more than for the comfortably self-satisfied." Deronda forgot everything but his vision of what Gwendolen's experience had probably been, and urged by compassion let his eyes and voice express as much interest as they would. Gwendolen had slipped on to the music-stool, and looked up at him with pain in her long eyes, like a wounded animal asking for help. "Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to play to us, Dan?" said Sir Hugo, coming up and putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder with a gentle, admonitory pinch. "I cannot persuade myself," said Gwendolen, rising. Others had followed Sir Hugo's lead, and there was an end of any liability to confidences for that day. But the next was New Year's Eve; and a grand dance, to which the chief tenants were invited, was to be held in the picture-gallery above the cloister--the sort of entertainment in which numbers and general movement may create privacy. When Gwendolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance of Leubronn, to put on the old turquoise necklace for her sole ornament; but she dared not offend her husband by appearing in that shabby way on an occasion when he would demand her utmost splendor. Determined to wear the memorial necklace somehow, she wound it thrice round her wrist and made a bracelet of it--having gone to her room to put it on just before the time of entering the ball-room. It was always a beautiful scene, this dance on New Year's Eve, which had been kept up by the family tradition as nearly in the old fashion as inexorable change would allow. Red carpet was laid down for the occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in bowers at the extremities and in every recess of the gallery; and the old portraits stretching back through generations, even to the pre-portraying period, made a piquant line of spectators. Some neighboring gentry, major and minor, were invited; and it was certainly an occasion when a prospective master and mistress of Abbott's and King's Topping might see their future glory in an agreeable light, as a picturesque provincial supremacy with a rent-roll personified by the most prosperous-looking tenants. Sir Hugo expected Grandcourt to feel flattered by being asked to the Abbey at a time which included this festival in honor of the family estate; but he also hoped that his own hale appearance might impress his successor with the probable length of time that would elapse before the succession came, and with the wisdom of preferring a good actual sum to a minor property that must be waited for. All present, down to the least important farmer's daughter, knew that they were to see "young Grandcourt," Sir Hugo's nephew, the presumptive heir and future baronet, now visiting the Abbey with his bride after an absence of many years; any coolness between uncle and nephew having, it is understood, given way to a friendly warmth. The bride opening the ball with Sir Hugo was necessarily the cynosure of all eyes; and less than a year before, if some magic mirror could have shown Gwendolen her actual position, she would have imagined herself moving in it with a glow of triumphant pleasure, conscious that she held in her hands a life full of favorable chances which her cleverness and spirit would enable her to make the best of. And now she was wondering that she could get so little joy out of the exultation to which she had been suddenly lifted, away from the distasteful petty empire of her girlhood with its irksome lack of distinction and superfluity of sisters. She would have been glad to be even unreasonably elated, and to forget everything but the flattery of the moment; but she was like one courting sleep, in whom thoughts insist like willful tormentors. Wondering in this way at her own dullness, and all the while longing for an excitement that would deaden importunate aches, she was passing through files of admiring beholders in the country-dance with which it was traditional to open the ball, and was being generally regarded by her own sex as an enviable woman. It was remarked that she carried herself with a wonderful air, considering that she had been nobody in particular, and without a farthing to her fortune. If she had been a duke's daughter, or one of the royal princesses, she could not have taken the honors of the evening more as a matter of course. Poor Gwendolen! It would by-and-by become a sort of skill in which she was automatically practiced to bear this last great gambling loss with an air of perfect self-possession. The next couple that passed were also worth looking at. Lady Pentreath had said, "I shall stand up for one dance, but I shall choose my partner. Mr. Deronda, you are the youngest man, I mean to dance with you. Nobody is old enough to make a good pair with me. I must have a contrast." And the contrast certainly set off the old lady to the utmost. She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had had the wisdom to embrace the beauty of age as early as possible. What might have seemed harshness in her features when she was young, had turned now into a satisfactory strength of form and expression which defied wrinkles, and was set off by a crown of white hair; her well-built figure was well covered with black drapery, her ears and neck comfortably caressed with lace, showing none of those withered spaces which one would think it a pitiable condition of poverty to expose. She glided along gracefully enough, her dark eyes still with a mischievous smile in them as she observed the company. Her partner's young richness of tint against the flattened hues and rougher forms of her aged head had an effect something like that of a fine flower against a lichenous branch. Perhaps the tenants hardly appreciated this pair. Lady Pentreath was nothing more than a straight, active old lady: Mr. Deronda was a familiar figure regarded with friendliness; but if he had been the heir, it would have been regretted that his face was not as unmistakably English as Sir Hugo's. Grandcourt's appearance when he came up with Lady Mallinger was not impeached with foreignness: still the satisfaction in it was not complete. It would have been matter of congratulation if one who had the luck to inherit two old family estates had had more hair, a fresher color, and a look of greater animation; but that fine families dwindled off into females, and estates ran together into the single heirship of a mealy-complexioned male, was a tendency in things which seemed to be accounted for by a citation of other instances. It was agreed that Mr. Grandcourt could never be taken for anything but what he was--a born gentleman; and that, in fact, he looked like an heir. Perhaps the person least complacently disposed toward him at that moment was Lady Mallinger, to whom going in procession up this country-dance with Grandcourt was a blazonment of herself as the infelicitous wife who had produced nothing but daughters, little better than no children, poor dear things, except for her own fondness and for Sir Hugo's wonderful goodness to them. But such inward discomfort could not prevent the gentle lady from looking fair and stout to admiration, or her full blue eyes from glancing mildly at her neighbors. All the mothers and fathers held it a thousand pities that she had not had a fine boy, or even several--which might have been expected, to look at her when she was first married. The gallery included only three sides of the quadrangle, the fourth being shut off as a lobby or corridor: one side was used for dancing, and the opposite side for the supper-table, while the intermediate part was less brilliantly lit, and fitted with comfortable seats. Later in the evening Gwendolen was in one of these seats, and Grandcourt was standing near her. They were not talking to each other: she was leaning backward in her chair, and he against the wall; and Deronda, happening to observe this, went up to ask her if she had resolved not to dance any more. Having himself been doing hard duty in this way among the guests, he thought he had earned the right to sink for a little while into the background, and he had spoken little to Gwendolen since their conversation at the piano the day before. Grandcourt's presence would only make it the easier to show that pleasure in talking to her even about trivialities which would be a sign of friendliness; and he fancied that her face looked blank. A smile beamed over it as she saw him coming, and she raised herself from her leaning posture. Grandcourt had been grumbling at the _ennui_ of staying so long in this stupid dance, and proposing that they should vanish: she had resisted on the ground of politeness--not without being a little frightened at the probability that he was silently angry with her. She had her reason for staying, though she had begun to despair of the opportunity for the sake of which she had put the old necklace on her wrist. But now at last Deronda had come. "Yes; I shall not dance any more. Are you not glad?" she said, with some gayety, "you might have felt obliged humbly to offer yourself as a partner, and I feel sure you have danced more than you like already." "I will not deny that," said Deronda, "since you have danced as much as you like." "But will you take trouble for me in another way, and fetch me a glass of that fresh water?" It was but a few steps that Deronda had to go for the water. Gwendolen was wrapped in the lightest, softest of white woolen burnouses, under which her hands were hidden. While he was gone she had drawn off her glove, which was finished with a lace ruffle, and when she put up her hand to take the glass and lifted it to her mouth, the necklace-bracelet, which in its triple winding adapted itself clumsily to her wrist, was necessarily conspicuous. Grandcourt saw it, and saw that it was attracting Deronda's notice. "What is that hideous thing you have got on your wrist?" said the husband. "That?" said Gwendolen, composedly, pointing to the turquoises, while she still held the glass; "it is an old necklace I like to wear. I lost it once, and someone found it for me." With that she gave the glass again to Deronda, who immediately carried it away, and on returning said, in order to banish any consciousness about the necklace, "It is worth while for you to go and look out at one of the windows on that side. You can see the finest possible moonlight on the stone pillars and carving, and shadows waving across it in the wind." "I should like to see it. Will you go?" said Gwendolen, looking up at her husband. He cast his eyes down at her, and saying, "No, Deronda will take you," slowly moved from his leaning attitude, and walked away. Gwendolen's face for a moment showed a fleeting vexation: she resented this show of indifference toward her. Deronda felt annoyed, chiefly for her sake; and with a quick sense, that it would relieve her most to behave as if nothing peculiar had occurred, he said, "Will you take my arm and go, while only servants are there?" He thought that he understood well her action in drawing his attention to the necklace: she wished him to infer that she had submitted her mind to rebuke--her speech and manner had from the first fluctuated toward that submission--and that she felt no lingering resentment. Her evident confidence in his interpretation of her appealed to him as a peculiar claim. When they were walking together, Gwendolen felt as if the annoyance which had just happened had removed another film of reserve from between them, and she had more right than before to be as open as she wished. She did not speak, being filled with the sense of silent confidence, until they were in front of the window looking out on the moonlit court. A sort of bower had been made round the window, turning it into a recess. Quitting his arm, she folded her hands in her burnous, and pressed her brow against the glass. He moved slightly away, and held the lapels of his coat with his thumbs under the collar as his manner was: he had a wonderful power of standing perfectly still, and in that position reminded one sometimes of Dante's _spiriti magni con occhi tardi e gravi_. (Doubtless some of these danced in their youth, doubted of their own vocation, and found their own times too modern.) He abstained from remarking on the scene before them, fearing that any indifferent words might jar on her: already the calm light and shadow, the ancient steadfast forms, and aloofness enough from those inward troubles which he felt sure were agitating her. And he judged aright: she would have been impatient of polite conversation. The incidents of the last minute or two had receded behind former thoughts which she had imagined herself uttering to Deronda, which now urged themselves to her lips. In a subdued voice, she said, "Suppose I had gambled again, and lost the necklace again, what should you have thought of me?" "Worse than I do now." "Then you are mistaken about me. You wanted me not to do that--not to make my gain out of another's loss in that way--and I have done a great deal worse." "I can't imagine temptations," said Deronda. "Perhaps I am able to understand what you mean. At least I understand self-reproach." In spite of preparation he was almost alarmed at Gwendolen's precipitancy of confidence toward him, in contrast with her habitual resolute concealment. "What should you do if you were like me--feeling that you were wrong and miserable, and dreading everything to come?" It seemed that she was hurrying to make the utmost use of this opportunity to speak as she would. "That is not to be amended by doing one thing only--but many," said Deronda, decisively. "What?" said Gwendolen, hastily, moving her brow from the glass and looking at him. He looked full at her in return, with what she thought was severity. He felt that it was not a moment in which he must let himself be tender, and flinch from implying a hard opinion. "I mean there are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it." She turned her brow to the window again, and said impatiently, "You must tell me then what to think and what to do; else why did you not let me go on doing as I liked and not minding? If I had gone on gambling I might have won again, and I might have got not to care for anything else. You would not let me do that. Why shouldn't I do as I like, and not mind? Other people do." Poor Gwendolen's speech expressed nothing very clearly except her irritation. "I don't believe you would ever get not to mind," said Deronda, with deep-toned decision. "If it were true that baseness and cruelty made an escape from pain, what difference would that make to people who can't be quite base or cruel? Idiots escape some pain; but you can't be an idiot. Some may do wrong to another without remorse; but suppose one does feel remorse? I believe you could never lead an injurious life--all reckless lives are injurious, pestilential--without feeling remorse." Deronda's unconscious fervor had gathered as he went on: he was uttering thoughts which he had used for himself in moments of painful meditation. "Then tell me what better I can do," said Gwendolen, insistently. "Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action--something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot." For an instant or two Gwendolen was mute. Then, again moving her brow from the glass, she said, "You mean that I am selfish and ignorant." He met her fixed look in silence before he answered firmly--"You will not go on being selfish and ignorant!" She did not turn away her glance or let her eyelids fall, but a change came over her face--that subtle change in nerve and muscle which will sometimes give a childlike expression even to the elderly: it is the subsidence of self-assertion. "Shall I lead you back?" said Deronda, gently, turning and offering her his arm again. She took it silently, and in that way they came in sight of Grandcourt, who was walking slowly near their former place. Gwendolen went up to him and said, "I am ready to go now. Mr. Deronda will excuse us to Lady Mallinger." "Certainly," said Deronda. "Lord and Lady Pentreath disappeared some time ago." Grandcourt gave his arm in silent compliance, nodding over his shoulder to Deronda, and Gwendolen too only half turned to bow and say, "Thanks." The husband and wife left the gallery and paced the corridors in silence. When the door had closed on them in the boudoir, Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, "Sit down." She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately obeyed. Turning his eyes toward her, he began, "Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play." "What do you mean?" said Gwendolen. "I suppose there is some understanding between you and Deronda about that thing you have on your wrist. If you have anything to say to him, say it. But don't carry on a telegraphing which other people are supposed not to see. It's damnably vulgar." "You can know all about the necklace," said Gwendolen, her angry pride resisting the nightmare of fear. "I don't want to know. Keep to yourself whatever you like." Grandcourt paused between each sentence, and in each his speech seemed to become more preternaturally distinct in its inward tones. "What I care to know I shall know without your telling me. Only you will please to behave as becomes my wife. And not make a spectacle of yourself." "Do you object to my talking to Mr. Deronda?" "I don't care two straws about Deronda, or any other conceited hanger-on. You may talk to him as much as you like. He is not going to take my place. You are my wife. And you will either fill your place properly--to the world and to me--or you will go to the devil." "I never intended anything but to fill my place properly," said Gwendolen, with bitterest mortification in her soul. "You put that thing on your wrist, and hid it from me till you wanted him to see it. Only fools go into that deaf and dumb talk, and think they're secret. You will understand that you are not to compromise yourself. Behave with dignity. That's all I have to say." With that last word Grandcourt rose, turned his back to the fire and looked down on her. She was mute. There was no reproach that she dared to fling back at him in return for these insulting admonitions, and the very reason she felt them to be insulting was that their purport went with the most absolute dictate of her pride. What she would least like to incur was the making a fool of herself and being compromised. It was futile and irrelevant to try and explain that Deronda too had only been a monitor--the strongest of all monitors. Grandcourt was contemptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain of all the subjection he cared for. Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that could close round her wherever she might turn. She sat in her splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even make a passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms, as she would have done in her maiden days. The sense of his scorn kept her still. "Shall I ring?" he said, after what seemed to her a long while. She moved her head in assent, and after ringing he went to his dressing-room. Certain words were gnawing within her. "The wrong you have done me will be your own curse." As he closed the door, the bitter tears rose, and the gnawing words provoked an answer: "Why did you put your fangs into me and not into him?" It was uttered in a whisper, as the tears came up silently. But she immediately pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, and checked her tendency to sob. The next day, recovered from the shuddering fit of this evening scene, she determined to use the charter which Grandcourt had scornfully given her, and to talk as much as she liked with Deronda; but no opportunities occurred, and any little devices she could imagine for creating them were rejected by her pride, which was now doubly active. Not toward Deronda himself--she was singularly free from alarm lest he should think her openness wanting in dignity: it was part of his power over her that she believed him free from all misunderstanding as to the way in which she appealed to him; or rather, that he should misunderstand her had never entered into her mind. But the last morning came, and still she had never been able to take up the dropped thread of their talk, and she was without devices. She and Grandcourt were to leave at three o'clock. It was too irritating that after a walk in the grounds had been planned in Deronda's hearing, he did not present himself to join in it. Grandcourt was gone with Sir Hugo to King's Topping, to see the old manor-house; others of the gentlemen were shooting; she was condemned to go and see the decoy and the waterfowl, and everything else that she least wanted to see, with the ladies, with old Lord Pentreath and his anecdotes, with Mr. Vandernoodt and his admiring manners. The irritation became too strong for her; without premeditation, she took advantage of the winding road to linger a little out of sight, and then set off back to the house, almost running when she was safe from observation. She entered by a side door, and the library was on her left hand; Deronda, she knew, was often there; why might she not turn in there as well as into any other room in the house? She had been taken there expressly to see the illuminated family tree, and other remarkable things--what more natural than that she should like to look in again? The thing most to be feared was that the room would be empty of Deronda, for the door was ajar. She pushed it gently, and looked round it. He was there, writing busily at a distant table, with his back toward the door (in fact, Sir Hugo had asked him to answer some constituents' letters which had become pressing). An enormous log fire, with the scent of Russia from the books, made the great room as warmly odorous as a private chapel in which the censors have been swinging. It seemed too daring to go in--too rude to speak and interrupt him; yet she went in on the noiseless carpet, and stood still for two or three minutes, till Deronda, having finished a letter, pushed it aside for signature, and threw himself back to consider whether there were anything else for him to do, or whether he could walk out for the chance of meeting the party which included Gwendolen, when he heard her voice saying, "Mr. Deronda." It was certainly startling. He rose hastily, turned round, and pushed away his chair with a strong expression of surprise. "Am I wrong to come in?" said Gwendolen. "I thought you were far on your walk," said Deronda. "I turned back," said Gwendolen. "Do you intend to go out again? I could join you now, if you would allow me." "No; I want to say something, and I can't stay long," said Gwendolen, speaking quickly in a subdued tone, while she walked forward and rested her arms and muff on the back of the chair he had pushed away from him. "I want to tell you that it is really so--I can't help feeling remorse for having injured others. That was what I meant when I said that I had done worse than gamble again and pawn the necklace again--something more injurious, as you called it. And I can't alter it. I am punished, but I can't alter it. You said I could do many things. Tell me again. What should you do--what should you feel if you were in my place?" The hurried directness with which she spoke--the absence of all her little airs, as if she were only concerned to use the time in getting an answer that would guide her, made her appeal unspeakably touching. Deronda said, "I should feel something of what you feel--deep sorrow." "But what would you try to do?" said Gwendolen, with urgent quickness. "Order my life so as to make any possible amends, and keep away from doing any sort of injury again," said Deronda, catching her sense that the time for speech was brief. "But I can't--I can't; I must go on," said Gwendolen, in a passionate loud whisper. "I have thrust out others--I have made my gain out of their loss--tried to make it--tried. And I must go on. I can't alter it." It was impossible to answer this instantaneously. Her words had confirmed his conjecture, and the situation of all concerned rose in swift images before him. His feeling for those who had been thrust out sanctioned her remorse; he could not try to nullify it, yet his heart was full of pity for her. But as soon as he could he answered--taking up her last words, "That is the bitterest of all--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease?--and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. There are many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled." "But you have not wronged any one, or spoiled their lives," said Gwendolen, hastily. "It is only others who have wronged _you_." Deronda colored slightly, but said immediately--"I suppose our keen feeling for ourselves might end in giving us a keen feeling for others, if, when we are suffering acutely, we were to consider that others go through the same sharp experience. That is a sort of remorse before commission. Can't you understand that?" "I think I do--now," said Gwendolen. "But you were right--I _am_ selfish. I have never thought much of any one's feelings, except my mother's. I have not been fond of people. But what can I do?" she went on, more quickly. "I must get up in the morning and do what every one else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. I seem to see all that can be--and I am tired and sick of it. And the world is all confusion to me"--she made a gesture of disgust. "You say I am ignorant. But what is the good of trying to know more, unless life were worth more?" "This good," said Deronda promptly, with a touch of indignant severity, which he was inclined to encourage as his own safeguard; "life _would_ be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life--forgive me--of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?" Deronda paused, but Gwendolen, looking startled and thrilled as by an electric shock, said nothing, and he went on more insistently, "I take what you said of music for a small example--it answers for all larger things--you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy in it. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction? If one firmament has no stimulus for our attention and awe, I don't see how four would have it. We should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own inanity--which is necessarily impious, without faith or fellowship. The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are clad with knowledge." The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda's voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child--shaken out of its wailing into awe, and she said humbly, "I will try. I will think." They both stood silent for a minute, as if some third presence had arrested them,--for Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure which is apt to come when our own winged words seem to be hovering around us,--till Gwendolen began again, "You said affection was the best thing, and I have hardly any--none about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible. Things have changed to me so--in such a short time. What I used not to like I long for now. I think I am almost getting fond of the old things now they are gone." Her lip trembled. "Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light," said Deronda, more gently. "You are conscious of more beyond the round of your own inclinations--you know more of the way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours. I don't think you could have escaped the painful process in some form or other." "But it is a very cruel form," said Gwendolen, beating her foot on the ground with returning agitation. "I am frightened at everything. I am frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring things--take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself." She was looking at nothing outside her; but her eyes were directed toward the window, away from Deronda, who, with quick comprehension said, "Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may do a great deal toward defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision." Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger. "Yes, I know; I understand what you mean," said Gwendolen in her loud whisper, not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small gloved hand and waving it in deprecation of the notion that it was easy to obey that advice. "But if feelings rose--there are some feelings--hatred and anger--how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer----" She broke off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compassion which was spread over his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said, "I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You _can_ help me. I will think of everything. I will try. Tell me--it will not be a pain to you that I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when you rebuked me." There was a melancholy smile on her lips as she said that, but she added more entreatingly, "It will not be a pain to you?" "Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come," said Deronda, with strong emphasis; "otherwise, it will be a lasting pain." "No--no--it shall not be. It may be--it shall be better with me because I have known you." She turned immediately, and quitted the room. When she was on the first landing of the staircase, Sir Hugo passed across the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. Grandcourt was not with him. Deronda, when the baronet entered, was standing in his ordinary attitude, grasping his coat-collar, with his back to the table, and with that indefinable expression by which we judge that a man is still in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved, however, and began to arrange the letters. "Has Mrs. Grandcourt been in here?" said Sir Hugo. "Yes, she has." "Where are the others?" "I believe she left them somewhere in the grounds." After a moment's silence, in which Sir Hugo looked at a letter without reading it, he said "I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan--you understand me?" "I believe I do, sir," said Deronda, after a slight hesitation, which had some repressed anger in it. "But there is nothing answering to your metaphor--no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching." Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then said, "So much the better. For, between ourselves, I fancy there may be some hidden gunpowder in that establishment."

Meanwhile Deronda had been led off by Mr. Vandernoodt, who wished for a cigar and a little gossip. That gentleman presently said- "What a washed-out piece of cambric Grandcourt is! But if he is a favourite of yours, I withdraw the remark." "Not the least in the world," said Deronda. "I thought not. One wonders how he came to have a great passion again; though Lush, his old chum, hints that he married this girl out of obstinacy. By George! it was a very accountable obstinacy. But it must be a pretty large drain of money, eh?" "I know nothing of his affairs." "What! not of the other establishment he keeps up?" "Diplow? Of course." "No, no; not Diplow: Gadsmere. Sir Hugo knows, I'll answer for it." Deronda said nothing, despite feeling some curiosity; but Mr. Vandernoodt required no prompting. "Lush would not altogether own to it, of course. But I have it on the best authority. The fact is, there's another lady with four children at Gadsmere. She has had the upper hand of him these ten years and more - left her husband for him. He's dead now; I found a fellow who was in the same regiment with him, and knew this Mrs. Glasher before she took wing. A noted beauty at that time - he thought she was dead. They say she has Grandcourt under her thumb still, and it's a wonder he didn't marry her, for there's a very fine boy, and I understand Grandcourt can do as he pleases with the estates." "What right had he to marry this girl?" said Deronda, with disgust. Mr. Vandernoodt, adjusting his cigar, shrugged. "She can know nothing of it," said Deronda, emphatically. But that statement was immediately followed by an inward query - "Could she have known?" "It's rather a piquant picture," said Mr. Vandernoodt, "Grandcourt between two fiery women. These fine women generally get hold of a stick." "Grandcourt is no stick," said Deronda. "I can't quite make him out. But this girl may think herself lucky to get him. I don't want to be hard on a man because he gets involved in an affair of that sort. But he might make himself more agreeable. I was telling him a capital story last night, and he got up and walked away in the middle. I felt inclined to kick him." "He doesn't listen much," said Deronda. After a pause, he went on, "I think there must be some exaggeration in what you have heard about this lady at Gadsmere." "Not a bit. People have forgotten all about it. But there the nest is, and the birds are in it. And I have good evidence that Grandcourt goes there. However, that's nobody's business but his own. The affair has sunk below the surface." Deronda then chose to point to some giant oaks worth looking at: although this piece of gossip interested him, he felt that Mr. Vandernoodt had no more to tell. Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his own birth, his mind had never been so active in weaving probabilities as it now began to be about Gwendolen's marriage. Could she have gained some knowledge of this other household, which caused her to shrink from the match - a shrinking finally overcome by poverty? Her words seemed to show that she was conscious of having done some wrong. His own acute experience made him alive to the injury which might affect the unavowed children and their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under all her determined show of satisfaction, gnawed by self-reproach, disappointment or jealousy? He dwelt especially on the signs of self-reproach: he was inclined to judge her tenderly. He thought he had found a key by which to interpret her more clearly, imagining the misery of a young creature who had wedded her fresh hopes to old secrets; and he saw why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this affair to him. Immediately the image of Mrs. Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden birth. Gwendolen knowing of that woman and her children, marrying Grandcourt, and showing herself contented, would have repulsed him; but Gwendolen tasting bitter remorse for contributing to their injury was a sympathetic figure. She seemed to have reached a common plane of understanding with him on matters which a woman is rarely able to judge of with justice or generosity: for she might easily have taken the view that her husband's marriage was his entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs. Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And Deronda had naturally some resentment on behalf of the abandoned Hagars and Ishmaels. Undeniably his growing solicitude about Gwendolen depended chiefly on her peculiar manner toward him; but he dismissed any idea of her being a coquette trying to involve him in a vulgar flirtation, and he determined that he would not again evade any opportunity of talking to her. That evening, he realised that she was likely to be at tea with the other ladies in the drawing-room. The conjecture was true; for Gwendolen, after resolving not to go down again, began to feel that in shutting herself up she missed all chances of seeing and hearing, and that her visit would only last two days more. She adjusted herself, put on her self-possession, and going down, made herself resolutely agreeable. Lady Pentreath was amusing the assembled ladies with a description of a Regency drawing-room, when Deronda entered. "Shall I be acceptable?" he said. "Perhaps I had better go back to the others in the billiard-room." "No, no; stay where you are," said Lady Pentreath. "Let us hear what you have to say." "That is rather an embarrassing appeal," said Deronda, drawing up a chair. "I think I had better take the opportunity of mentioning our songstress," he added, looking at Lady Mallinger- "unless you have done so." "Oh, the little Jewess!" said Lady Mallinger. "No, I have not mentioned her. It never entered my head that anyone here wanted singing lessons." "All ladies know someone else who wants singing lessons," said Deronda. "I have happened to find an exquisite singer,"- here he turned to Lady Pentreath. "She is living with some ladies who are friends of mine. She was on the stage at Vienna; but she wants to leave that life, and maintain herself by teaching." "There are swarms of those people, aren't there?" said the old lady. "Are her lessons to be very cheap or very expensive? Those are the two baits I know of." "There is another bait for those who hear her," said Deronda. "Her singing is something quite exceptional, I think." "Why did she leave the stage, then?" said Lady Pentreath. "Her voice was too weak. It is a delicious voice for a room. You who put up with my singing of Schubert would be enchanted with hers," said Deronda. "And I imagine she would not object to sing at private parties or concerts. Her voice is quite equal to that." "I am to have her in my drawing-room when we go up to town," said Lady Mallinger. "You shall hear her then. I have not heard her; but I trust Daniel's recommendation. I mean my girls to have lessons." "Is it a charitable affair?" said Lady Pentreath. "It is a charity to those who want to have a good model of feminine singing," said Deronda. "If you heard Miss Lapidoth" - here he looked at Gwendolen - "perhaps you would change your resolution to give up singing." "I should rather think my resolution would be confirmed," said Gwendolen. "I don't feel able to follow your advice of enjoying my own middlingness." "For my part," said Deronda, "people who do anything finely always encourage me to try. I don't mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the thing seem worthy of doing. Although my own music is not good for much, the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence shows us the spiritual wealth of the world." "But if we can't imitate it, it only makes our own life seem tamer," said Gwendolen. "That depends on the point of view, I think," said Deronda. "Most of us ought to practice art only as private study - preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us. I think Miss Lapidoth is one of the few." "She must be a very happy person, don't you think?" said Gwendolen, with a touch of sarcasm. "It may have been a bitter disappointment to her that her voice failed her for the stage," said Juliet Fenn, sympathetically. "I suppose she's past her best, though," said Lady Pentreath. "On the contrary, she has not reached it," said Deronda. "She is barely twenty." "And very pretty," interposed Lady Mallinger, with an amiable wish to help Deronda. "And she has very good manners. I'm sorry she's a Jewess; but it doesn't matter in singing." "Well, I'll tell Lady Clementina to set her on my nine granddaughters," said Lady Pentreath; "and I hope she'll convince eight of them that they have not voice enough to sing anywhere but at church. I think many of our girls nowadays want lessons not to sing." "I have had my lessons in that," said Gwendolen, looking at Deronda. While she was speaking, Sir Hugo entered with some of the other gentlemen, including Grandcourt, and said- "What is Deronda imposing on you, ladies - slipping in among you by himself?" "A pretty singing Jewess who is to astonish these young people," said Lady Pentreath. "You and I, who heard Catalani in her prime, are not so easily astonished." Sir Hugo listened with his good-humoured smile as he took a cup of tea from his wife, and then said, "Well, you know, there have been singers since Catalani's time." "Ah, you are younger than I am. I dare say you are one of the men who ran after Alcharisi. But she married and left you all in the lurch." "Yes, it's too bad when these great singers marry themselves into silence," said Sir Hugo, while Deronda moved away to make room for others, and sat down a little apart. Presently he became aware that Gwendolen had walked to the piano, where she stood apparently examining the music which lay there. Will anyone be surprised at his concluding that she wished him to join her? He went to her side and said- "Are you relenting about the music and looking for something to play or sing?" "I am not looking for anything, but I am relenting," said Gwendolen. "I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have lessons from her, since you admire her so much, when we go to town. I mean lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and my own deficiency," said Gwendolen, turning on him a sweet, open smile. "I shall be really glad for you to see and hear her," said Deronda, returning the smile. "She has had an unhappy life, and has grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that no advantages could have given her more grace and truer refinement." "I wonder what sort of trouble hers were?" "I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the brink of drowning herself in despair." "And what hindered her?" said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda. "Some ray or other came - which made her feel that it was good to live," he answered quietly. "She is full of piety, and seems capable of submitting to any duty." "Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impatiently, fingering the music. "I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don't believe in their great sufferings." "It is true," said Deronda, "that the consciousness of having done wrong is deeper and more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures feel the most for those who struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient story, that of the lost sheep." "That is a way of speaking - it is not real," said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her blameless. You would despise a woman who had done something you thought very wrong." "That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done," said Deronda. "You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "No, not satisfied - full of sorrow for her. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is not more adorable; I meant that people may become worthier of sympathy when they do something that awakens in them a keen remorse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when they are suffering in that way one must care for them more than for the comfortably self-satisfied." Deronda forgot everything but his vision of what Gwendolen's experience had probably been, and, urged by compassion, let his eyes and voice express as much interest as they would. Gwendolen, sitting on the music-stool, looked up at him with pain in her eyes, like a wounded animal asking for help. "Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to play to us, Dan?" said Sir Hugo, coming up and putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder with a gentle, admonitory pinch. "I cannot persuade myself," said Gwendolen, rising. There was an end of any confidences for that day. But the next was New Year's Eve; and a grand dance, to which the chief tenants were invited, was to be held in the picture-gallery above the cloister. When Gwendolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance of Leubronn, to put on the old turquoise necklace for her sole ornament; but she dared not offend her husband by appearing in that shabby way on an occasion when he would demand her utmost splendour. Determined to wear the necklace somehow, she wound it thrice round her wrist and made a bracelet of it just before entering the ball-room. It was always a beautiful scene, this dance on New Year's Eve, which had been kept up by family tradition. Red carpet was laid down for the occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in every recess of the gallery; and the old portraits made a piquant line of spectators. Some neighbouring gentry were invited; and Sir Hugo expected Grandcourt to feel flattered by being asked to the Abbey at a time which included this festival. All present knew that they were to see "young Grandcourt," Sir Hugo's nephew, the presumptive heir, now visiting the Abbey with his bride; and Gwendolen, opening the ball with Sir Hugo, was necessarily the focus of all eyes. A year before, if some magic mirror could have shown Gwendolen her position, she would have imagined herself in a glow of triumphant pleasure, ready to make the best of her cleverness and spirit in her new life. And now she was wondering that she could get so little joy out of her exalted state, above the petty empire of her girlhood with its irksome lack of distinction and superfluity of sisters. Wondering in this way at her own dullness, and longing for an excitement that would deaden her aches, she passed through files of admiring beholders in the country-dance with which the ball opened, and was generally regarded by her own sex as an enviable woman, who carried herself with a wonderful air, considering her origins. Poor Gwendolen! She would by-and-by become practised in the skill of bearing this last great gambling loss with an air of perfect self-possession. The next couple that passed were also worth looking at. Lady Pentreath had insisted on standing up with Mr. Deronda. The contrast certainly set off the old lady well. She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had wisely embraced the beauty of age as early as possible. What might have seemed harshness in her face when she was young, had turned now into a satisfactory strength of feature which defied wrinkles, and was set off by a crown of white hair. She glided along gracefully, with a mischievous smile in her eyes as she observed the company. Her partner's young richness of tint against her flattened hues had an effect something like that of a fine flower against a lichenous branch. Grandcourt stood up with Lady Mallinger. It was agreed by onlookers that the heir to the estate could have had more hair, a fresher colour, and greater animation; but that Mr. Grandcourt could never be taken for anything but a born gentleman. Perhaps the person least well-disposed toward him at that moment was Lady Mallinger, to whom this country-dance with Grandcourt was a blazonment of herself as the unlucky wife who had produced nothing but daughters. One side of the quadrangle was used for dancing, and the opposite side for the supper-table; a third side was less brilliantly lit, and fitted with comfortable seats. Later in the evening Gwendolen was in one of these seats, and Grandcourt was standing near her. They were not talking to each other; and Deronda, observing this, went up to ask her if she had resolved not to dance any more. Having himself been doing hard duty at dancing with the guests, he thought he had earned the right to sink into the background, and he had spoken little to Gwendolen since their conversation at the piano the day before. Grandcourt's presence would make it the easier to show his friendly pleasure in talking to her, even about trivialities. Her face looked blank, but a smile beamed from it as she saw him coming, and she raised herself from her leaning posture. Grandcourt had been grumbling at the tedium of this stupid dance, and proposing that they should vanish: she had resisted on the ground of politeness, even though she was a little frightened that he was silently angry with her. She began to despair of the opportunity for which she had put the old necklace on her wrist. But now at last Deronda had come. "Yes; I shall not dance any more. Are you not glad that you need not ask me?" she said gaily. "I feel sure you have danced more than you like already." "I will not deny that," said Deronda, "since you have danced as much as you like." "But will you take trouble for me in another way, and fetch me a glass of water?" It was but a few steps that Deronda had to go for the water. Gwendolen was wrapped in the lightest of white woollen wraps, under which her hands were hidden. While he was gone she had drawn off her glove, and when she put up her hand to take the glass and drink, the necklace-bracelet, with its clumsy triple winding, was conspicuous. Grandcourt saw it, and saw that it was attracting Deronda's notice. "What is that hideous thing you have got on your wrist?" said the husband. "That?" said Gwendolen, composedly; "it is an old necklace I like to wear. I lost it once, and someone found it for me." With that she gave the glass again to Deronda, who carried it away, and on returning said, in order to banish any consciousness about the necklace- "It is worth going to look out of the windows on that side. You can see the finest possible moonlight on the stone pillars and carving." "I should like to see it. Will you go?" said Gwendolen to her husband. Saying, "No, Deronda will take you," he slowly walked away. Gwendolen's face showed a fleeting vexation at this show of indifference toward her. Deronda felt annoyed for her sake; and with a sense that it would relieve her to behave as if nothing unusual had occurred, he said, "Will you take my arm and go, while only servants are there?" He thought that he understood her action in drawing his attention to the necklace: she wished him to infer that she had submitted herself to rebuke, and that she felt no lingering resentment. Her evident confidence in his interpretation appealed to him. As they walked together, Gwendolen felt as if the previous annoyance had removed another veil of reserve from between them. She did not speak until they were at the window looking out on the moonlit court. She folded her hands in her wrap, and pressed her brow against the glass. He moved slightly away, abstaining from remarking on the scene, for fear that any indifferent words might jar on her: already the calm light and shadow, the ancient steadfast forms, had aloofness enough from her inward troubles. He judged aright: she would have been impatient of polite conversation. In a subdued voice, she said- "Suppose I had gambled again, and lost the necklace again, what should you have thought of me?" "Worse than I do now." "Then you are mistaken about me. You wanted me not to make gain out of another's loss in that way - and I have done a great deal worse." "I can imagine temptations," said Deronda. "And at least I understand self-reproach." He was almost alarmed at her sudden confidence toward him, in contrast with her habitual concealment. "What should you do if you were like me - feeling that you were wrong and miserable, and dreading everything to come?" It seemed that she was hurrying to make the utmost use of this opportunity to speak. "That is not to be amended by doing one thing only - but many," said Deronda, decisively. "What?" said Gwendolen, moving away from the glass and looking at him. He looked full at her in return, with some severity. He felt he must not let himself be tender. "I mean there are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it." She turned to the window again, and said impatiently, "You must tell me then what to think and what to do; else why did you not let me go on gambling? I might have won again, and I might not have to care for anything else. You would not let me do that. Why shouldn't I do as I like, and not mind? Other people do." Poor Gwendolen's speech expressed nothing very clearly except her irritation. "I don't believe you would ever get not to mind," said Deronda, with deep-toned decision. "Idiots escape pain; but you can't be an idiot. Some may do wrong to another without remorse; but suppose one does feel remorse? I believe you could never lead an injurious life without feeling remorse." "Then tell me what better I can do," said Gwendolen, insistently. "Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot." For an instant or two Gwendolen was mute. Then she said- "You mean that I am selfish and ignorant." He met her fixed look in silence before he answered firmly- "You will not go on being selfish and ignorant." She did not turn away her glance, but a subtle change came over her face: the subsidence of self-assertion. "Shall I lead you back?" said Deronda, gently offering her his arm. She took it silently, and that way they came in sight of Grandcourt. Gwendolen went up to him and said, "I am ready to go now. Mr. Deronda will excuse us to Lady Mallinger." "Certainly," said Deronda. Grandcourt gave his arm in silent compliance, nodding over his shoulder to Deronda, and Gwendolen half turned to bow and say, "Thanks." The husband and wife left the gallery and paced the corridors in silence. When the door had closed on them in the boudoir, Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, "Sit down." She, already expecting something unpleasant, had nervously thrown off her shawl, and immediately obeyed. He began- "Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play." "What do you mean?" said Gwendolen. "I suppose there is some understanding between you and Deronda about that thing you have on your wrist. If you have anything to say to him, say it. But don't carry on a telegraphing which other people are supposed not to see. It's damnably vulgar." "You can know all about the necklace," said Gwendolen, her angry pride resisting the nightmare of fear. "I don't want to know. Keep to yourself whatever you like." Grandcourt paused between each sentence, and in each his speech seemed to become more distinct in its inward tones. "What I care to know I shall know without your telling me. Only you will behave as becomes my wife, and not make a spectacle of yourself." "Do you object to my talking to Mr. Deronda?" "I don't care two straws about Deronda, or any other hanger-on. You may talk to him as much as you like. He is not going to take my place. You are my wife. And you will either fill your place properly or you will go to the devil." "I never intended anything but to fill my place properly," said Gwendolen, with bitterest mortification in her soul. "You put that thing on your wrist, and hid it from me till you wanted him to see it. Only fools go into that deaf and dumb talk, and think they're secret. You will understand that you are not to compromise yourself. Behave with dignity. That's all I have to say." With that last word Grandcourt turned his back to the fire and looked down on her. She was mute. There was no reproach that she dared to fling back at him. She dreaded making a fool of herself and being compromised. It was futile to try and explain that Deronda had only been a monitor. Grandcourt was contemptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain of her subjection. Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that closed around her. She sat in her splendid attire, a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even throw up her arms, as she would have done in her maiden days. The sense of his scorn kept her still. "Shall I ring?" he said, after what seemed to her a long while. She moved her head in assent, and after ringing he went to his dressing-room. Certain words were gnawing within her. "The wrong you have done me will be your own curse." As he closed the door, the bitter tears rose, and the gnawing words provoked a whispered answer: "Why did you put your fangs into me and not into him?" She pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, and checked her tendency to sob. The next day, recovered from the shuddering fit of this evening scene, she determined to use the charter which Grandcourt had scornfully given her to talk as much as she liked with Deronda; but no opportunities occurred, and she dared not devise any for the sake of her pride and dignity. Although she did not think that Deronda would misunderstand her openness, others might. But when the last morning came, still she had never been able to take up the dropped thread of their talk. She and Grandcourt were to leave at three o'clock. It was too irritating that after a walk in the grounds had been planned in Deronda's hearing, he did not join in it. Grandcourt had gone out with Sir Hugo; other gentlemen were shooting; she was condemned to go and see the waterfowl, and everything else that she least wanted to see, with the ladies and Mr. Vandernoodt. The irritation became too strong for her; without premeditation, she took advantage of the winding road to linger out of sight, and then set off back to the house, almost running when she was safe from observation. She entered by a side door, near the library. Deronda, she knew, was often there; why might she not enter? She had been taken there expressly to see the family tree - what more natural than that she should like to look in again? The door was ajar. She pushed it gently, and looked round it. Deronda was there, writing at a distant table, with his back toward the door (Sir Hugo had asked him to answer some constituents' letters). An enormous log fire warmed the great room. It seemed too daring to go in - too rude to interrupt him; yet she went in on the noiseless carpet, and stood still for two or three minutes, till Deronda, having finished a letter, pushed it aside. He sat back to consider whether he could walk out for the chance of meeting the party which included Gwendolen, when he heard her voice saying, "Mr. Deronda." He rose hastily, and turned with a strong expression of surprise. "Am I wrong to come in?" said Gwendolen. "I thought you were on your walk," he said. "I turned back." "Do you intend to go out again? I could join you now." "No; I want to say something, and I can't stay long," said Gwendolen, speaking quickly and quietly, while she walked forward and rested her arms on the back of a chair. "I want to tell you that it is so - I can't help feeling remorse for having injured others. That was what I meant when I said that I had done worse than gamble again. And I can't alter it. I am punished, but I can't alter it. You said I could do many things. Tell me again. What should you do - what should you feel if you were in my place?" The hurried directness with which she spoke - the absence of all her little airs - made her appeal unspeakably touching. Deronda said- "I should feel what you feel: deep sorrow." "But what would you try to do?" said Gwendolen urgently. "Order my life so as to make any possible amends, and keep away from doing any injury again," said Deronda. "But I can't - I can't; I must go on," said Gwendolen, in a passionate loud whisper. "I have made my gain out of others' loss - tried to make it. And I must go on. I can't alter it." It was impossible to answer this instantaneously. Her words had confirmed his guess, and the situation rose in swift images before him. He felt for those who had been thrust out, yet his heart was full of pity for her. He answered- "It is bitter to bear our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to incurable disease? If you made the wrong a reason for more effort toward good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may make us long to save other lives from being spoiled." "But you have not wronged anyone, or spoiled their lives," said Gwendolen, hastily. "It is only others who have wronged you. You were right - I am selfish. I have never thought much of anyone's feelings, except my mother's. I have not been fond of people. But what can I do? I must get up in the morning and do what everyone else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. I am tired and sick of it. And the world is all confusion to me" - she made a gesture of disgust. "You say I am ignorant. But what is the good of trying to know more, unless life were worth more?" "Life would be worth more to you," said Deronda with indignant severity, which he encouraged as his own safeguard, "if some real knowledge were to give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life - forgive me - of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas to make a larger home for it. Is there any occupation of mind that you care about with delight or interest?" Deronda paused, but Gwendolen, looking startled and thrilled as by an electric shock, said nothing, and he went on- "I take what you said of music for a small example: you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction? The refuge you need from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region which we reach by knowledge." The remonstrance in Deronda's voice came from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. She was roused into self-judgment, like a child shaken out of its wailing into awe, and she said humbly- "I will try. I will think." They both stood silent for a minute, as if some third presence had halted them - for Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure which comes when our own winged words seem to be hovering around us - till Gwendolen began again. "You said affection was the best thing, and I have none about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible. Things have changed in such a short time. What I used not to like I long for now. I think I am almost fond of the old things now they are gone." Her lip trembled. "Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light," said Deronda, more gently. "You are conscious of more beyond yourself. You are learning the way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours. I don't think you could have escaped the painful process in some form or other." "But it is a very cruel form," said Gwendolen, beating her foot on the ground with agitation. "I am frightened at everything. When my blood is fired I can do daring things - take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself." Deronda said, with quick comprehension- "Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. When we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard, like quickness of hearing, that can warn you of consequences. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as a faculty, like vision." Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger. "Yes, I know; I understand what you mean," said Gwendolen. "But if feelings rose - hatred and anger - how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer-" She broke off, agitated, and looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of seeing his urgings as mere pallid words before the outburst of her emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compassion in his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before. In a changed and imploring tone she said- "I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You can help me. I will think of everything. I will try. You will not mind that I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when you rebuked me." She said this with a melancholy smile, but added more entreatingly, "It will not be a pain to you?" "Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come," said Deronda strongly; "otherwise, it will be a lasting pain." "No - no - it shall not be. It shall be better with me because I have known you." She turned immediately, and quitted the room. When she was on the staircase, Sir Hugo crossed the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. When the baronet entered, Deronda was standing in his usual attitude, grasping his coat-collar, with that indefinable expression of a man still in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved, and began to arrange the letters. "Has Mrs. Grandcourt been here?" said Sir Hugo. "Yes, she has." "Where are the others?" "I believe she left them somewhere in the grounds." After a moment's silence, Sir Hugo said, "I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan - you understand me?" "I believe I do, sir," said Deronda, with some repressed anger. "But there is no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching." Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then said, "So much the better. For, between ourselves, I fancy there may be some hidden gunpowder in that marriage."

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 36

"Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow. As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe." --WALT WHITMAN. "Now my cousins are at Diplow," said Grandcourt, "will you go there?--to-morrow? The carriage shall come for Mrs. Davilow. You can tell me what you would like done in the rooms. Things must be put in decent order while we are away at Ryelands. And to-morrow is the only day." He was sitting sideways on a sofa in the drawing-room at Offendene, one hand and elbow resting on the back, and the other hand thrust between his crossed knees--in the attitude of a man who is much interested in watching the person next to him. Gwendolen, who had always disliked needlework, had taken to it with apparent zeal since her engagement, and now held a piece of white embroidery which, on examination, would have shown many false stitches. During the last eight or nine days their hours had been chiefly spent on horseback, but some margin had always been left for this more difficult sort of companionship, which, however, Gwendolen had not found disagreeable. She was very well satisfied with Grandcourt. His answers to her lively questions about what he had seen and done in his life, bore drawling very well. From the first she had noticed that he knew what to say; and she was constantly feeling not only that he had nothing of the fool in his composition, but that by some subtle means he communicated to her the impression that all the folly lay with other people, who did what he did not care to do. A man who seems to have been able to command the best, has a sovereign power of depreciation. Then Grandcourt's behavior as a lover had hardly at all passed the limit of an amorous homage which was inobtrusive as a wafted odor of roses, and spent all its effects in a gratified vanity. One day, indeed, he had kissed not her cheek but her neck a little below her ear; and Gwendolen, taken by surprise, had started up with a marked agitation which made him rise too and say, "I beg your pardon--did I annoy you?" "Oh, it was nothing," said Gwendolen, rather afraid of herself, "only I cannot bear--to be kissed under my ear." She sat down again with a little playful laugh, but all the while she felt her heart beating with a vague fear: she was no longer at liberty to flout him as she had flouted poor Rex. Her agitation seemed not uncomplimentary, and he had been contented not to transgress again. To-day a slight rain hindered riding; but to compensate, a package had come from London, and Mrs. Davilow had just left the room after bringing in for admiration the beautiful things (of Grandcourt's ordering) which lay scattered about on the tables. Gwendolen was just then enjoying the scenery of her life. She let her hands fall on her lap, and said with a pretty air of perversity, "Why is to-morrow the only day?" "Because the next day is the first with the hounds," said Grandcourt. "And after that?" "After that I must go away for a couple of days--it's a bore--but I shall go one day and come back the next." Grandcourt noticed a change in her face, and releasing his hand from under his knees, he laid it on hers, and said, "You object to my going away?" "It's no use objecting," said Gwendolen, coldly. She was resisting to the utmost her temptation to tell him that she suspected to whom he was going--the temptation to make a clean breast, speaking without restraint. "Yes it is," said Grandcourt, enfolding her hand. "I will put off going. And I will travel at night, so as only to be away one day." He thought that he knew the reason of what he inwardly called this bit of temper, and she was particularly fascinating to him at this moment. "Then don't put off going, but travel at night," said Gwendolen, feeling that she could command him, and finding in this peremptoriness a small outlet for her irritation. "Then you will go to Diplow to-morrow?" "Oh, yes, if you wish it," said Gwendolen, in a high tone of careless assent. Her concentration in other feelings had really hindered her from taking notice that her hand was being held. "How you treat us poor devils of men!" said Grandcourt, lowering his tone. "We are always getting the worst of it." "_Are_ you?" said Gwendolen, in a tone of inquiry, looking at him more navely than usual. She longed to believe this commonplace _badinage_ as the serious truth about her lover: in that case, she too was justified. If she knew everything, Mrs. Glasher would appear more blamable than Grandcourt. "_Are_ you always getting the worst?" "Yes. Are you as kind to me as I am to you?" said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes with his narrow gaze. Gwendolen felt herself stricken. She was conscious of having received so much, that her sense of command was checked, and sank away in the perception that, look around her as she might, she could not turn back: it was as if she had consented to mount a chariot where another held the reins; and it was not in her nature to leap out in the eyes of the world. She had not consented in ignorance, and all she could say now would be a confession that she had not been ignorant. Her right to explanation was gone. All she had to do now was to adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude. There had been a little pause, during which she had not turned away her eyes; and with a sudden break into a smile, she said, "If I were as kind to you as you are to me, that would spoil your generosity: it would no longer be as great as it could be--and it is that now." "Then I am not to ask for one kiss," said Grandcourt, contented to pay a large price for this new kind of love-making, which introduced marriage by the finest contrast. "Not one?" said Gwendolen, getting saucy, and nodding at him defiantly. He lifted her little left hand to his lips, and then released it respectfully. Clearly it was faint praise to say of him that he was not disgusting: he was almost charming; and she felt at this moment that it was not likely she could ever have loved another man better than this one. His reticence gave her some inexplicable, delightful consciousness. "Apropos," she said, taking up her work again, "is there any one besides Captain and Mrs. Torrington at Diplow?--or do you leave them _tete--tete_? I suppose he converses in cigars, and she answers with her chignon." "She has a sister with her," said Grandcourt, with his shadow of a smile, "and there are two men besides--one of them you know, I believe." "Ah, then, I have a poor opinion of him," said Gwendolen, shaking her head. "You saw him at Leubronn--young Deronda--a young fellow with the Mallingers." Gwendolen felt as if her heart were making a sudden gambol, and her fingers, which tried to keep a firm hold on her work, got cold. "I never spoke to him," she said, dreading any discernible change in herself. "Is he not disagreeable?" "No, not particularly," said Grandcourt, in his most languid way. "He thinks a little too much of himself. I thought he had been introduced to you." "No. Some one told me his name the evening before I came away. That was all. What is he?" "A sort of ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger's. Nothing of any consequence." "Oh, poor creature! How very unpleasant for him!" said Gwendolen, speaking from the lip, and not meaning any sarcasm. "I wonder if it has left off raining!" she added, rising and going to look out of the window. Happily it did not rain the next day, and Gwendolen rode to Diplow on Criterion as she had done on that former day when she returned with her mother in the carriage. She always felt the more daring for being in her riding-dress; besides having the agreeable belief that she looked as well as possible in it--a sustaining consciousness in any meeting which seems formidable. Her anger toward Deronda had changed into a superstitious dread--due, perhaps, to the coercion he had exercised over her thought--lest the first interference of his in her life might foreshadow some future influence. It is of such stuff that superstitions are commonly made: an intense feeling about ourselves which makes the evening star shine at us with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar encourage us. And superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding. The time before luncheon was taken up for Gwendolen by going over the rooms with Mrs. Torrington and Mrs. Davilow; and she thought it likely that if she saw Deronda, there would hardly be need for more than a bow between them. She meant to notice him as little as possible. And after all she found herself under an inward compulsion too strong for her pride. From the first moment of their being in the room together, she seemed to herself to be doing nothing but notice him; everything else was automatic performance of an habitual part. When he took his place at lunch, Grandcourt had said, "Deronda, Miss Harleth tells me you were not introduced to her at Leubronn?" "Miss Harleth hardly remembers me, I imagine," said Deronda, looking at her quite simply, as they bowed. "She was intensely occupied when I saw her." Now, did he suppose that she had not suspected him of being the person who redeemed her necklace? "On the contrary. I remember you very well," said Gwendolen, feeling rather nervous, but governing herself and looking at him in return with new examination. "You did not approve of my playing at roulette." "How did you come to that conclusion?" said Deronda, gravely. "Oh, you cast an evil eye on my play," said Gwendolen, with a turn of her head and a smile. "I began to lose as soon as you came to look on. I had always been winning till then." "Roulette in such a kennel as Leubronn is a horrid bore," said Grandcourt. "_I_ found it a bore when I began to lose," said Gwendolen. Her face was turned toward Grandcourt as she smiled and spoke, but she gave a sidelong glance at Deronda, and saw his eyes fixed on her with a look so gravely penetrating that it had a keener edge for her than his ironical smile at her losses--a keener edge than Klesmer's judgment. She wheeled her neck round as if she wanted to listen to what was being said by the rest, while she was only thinking of Deronda. His face had that disturbing kind of form and expression which threatens to affect opinion--as if one's standard was somehow wrong. (Who has not seen men with faces of this corrective power till they frustrated it by speech or action?) His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much of himself:--a favorite way of explaining a superiority that humiliates. However the talk turned on the rinderpest and Jamaica, and no more was said about roulette. Grandcourt held that the Jamaica negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song; Mrs. Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds. While this polite pea-shooting was going on, Gwendolen trifled with her jelly, and looked at every speaker in turn that she might feel at ease in looking at Deronda. "I wonder what he thinks of me, really? He must have felt interested in me, else he would not have sent me my necklace. I wonder what he thinks of my marriage? What notions has he to make him so grave about things? Why is he come to Diplow?" These questions ran in her mind as the voice of an uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda with unmixed admiration--a longing which had had its seed in her first resentment at his critical glance. Why did she care so much about the opinion of this man who was "nothing of any consequence"? She had no time to find the reason--she was too much engaged in caring. In the drawing-room, when something had called Grandcourt away, she went quite unpremeditatedly up to Deronda, who was standing at a table apart, turning over some prints, and said to him, "Shall you hunt to-morrow, Mr. Deronda?" "Yes, I believe so." "You don't object to hunting, then?" "I find excuses for it. It is a sin I am inclined to--when I can't get boating or cricketing." "Do you object to my hunting?" said Gwendolen, with a saucy movement of the chin. "I have no right to object to anything you choose to do." "You thought you had a right to object to my gambling," persisted Gwendolen. "I was sorry for it. I am not aware that I told you of my objection," said Deronda, with his usual directness of gaze--a large-eyed gravity, innocent of any intention. His eyes had a peculiarity which has drawn many men into trouble; they were of a dark yet mild intensity which seemed to express a special interest in every one on whom he fixed them, and might easily help to bring on him those claims which ardently sympathetic people are often creating in the minds of those who need help. In mendicant fashion we make the goodness of others a reason for exorbitant demands on them. That sort of effect was penetrating Gwendolen. "You hindered me from gambling again," she answered. But she had no sooner spoken than she blushed over face and neck; and Deronda blushed, too, conscious that in the little affair of the necklace he had taken a questionable freedom. It was impossible to speak further; and she turned away to a window, feeling that she had stupidly said what she had not meant to say, and yet being rather happy that she had plunged into this mutual understanding. Deronda also did not dislike it. Gwendolen seemed more decidedly attractive than before; and certainly there had been changes going on within her since that time at Leubronn: the struggle of mind attending a conscious error had wakened something like a new soul, which had better, but also worse, possibilities than her former poise of crude self-confidence: among the forces she had come to dread was something within her that troubled satisfaction. That evening Mrs. Davilow said, "Was it really so, or only a joke of yours, about Mr. Deronda's spoiling your play, Gwen?" Her curiosity had been excited, and she could venture to ask a question that did not concern Mr. Grandcourt. "Oh, it merely happened that he was looking on when I began to lose," said Gwendolen, carelessly. "I noticed him." "I don't wonder at that: he is a striking young man. He puts me in mind of Italian paintings. One would guess, without being told, that there was foreign blood in his veins." "Is there?" said Gwendolen. "Mrs. Torrington says so. I asked particularly who he was, and she told me that his mother was some foreigner of high rank." "His mother?" said Gwendolen, rather sharply. "Then who was his father?" "Well--every one says he is the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, who brought him up; though he passes for a ward. She says, if Sir Hugo Mallinger could have done as he liked with his estates, he would have left them to this Mr. Deronda, since he has no legitimate son." Gwendolen was silent; but her mother observed so marked an effect in her face that she was angry with herself for having repeated Mrs. Torrington's gossip. It seemed, on reflection, unsuited to the ear of her daughter, for whom Mrs. Davilow disliked what is called knowledge of the world; and indeed she wished that she herself had not had any of it thrust upon her. An image which had immediately arisen in Gwendolen's mind was that of the unknown mother--no doubt a dark-eyed woman--probably sad. Hardly any face could be less like Deronda's than that represented as Sir Hugo's in a crayon portrait at Diplow. A dark-eyed woman, no longer young, had become "stuff o' the conscience" to Gwendolen. That night when she had got into her little bed, and only a dim light was burning, she said, "Mamma, have men generally children before they are married?" "No, dear, no," said Mrs. Davilow. "Why do you ask such a question?" (But she began to think that she saw the why.) "If it were so, I ought to know," said Gwendolen, with some indignation. "You are thinking of what I said about Mr. Deronda and Sir Hugo Mallinger. That is a very unusual case, dear." "Does Lady Mallinger know?" "She knows enough to satisfy her. That is quite clear, because Mr. Deronda has lived with them." "And people think no worse of him?" "Well, of course he is under some disadvantage: it is not as if he were Lady Mallinger's son. He does not inherit the property, and he is not of any consequence in the world. But people are not obliged to know anything about his birth; you see, he is very well received." "I wonder whether he knows about it; and whether he is angry with his father?" "My dear child, why should you think of that?" "Why?" said Gwendolen, impetuously, sitting up in her bed. "Haven't children reason to be angry with their parents? How can they help their parents marrying or not marrying?" But a consciousness rushed upon her, which made her fall back again on her pillow. It was not only what she would have felt months before--that she might seem to be reproaching her mother for that second marriage of hers; what she chiefly felt now was that she had been led on to a condemnation which seemed to make her own marriage a forbidden thing. There was no further talk, and till sleep came over her Gwendolen lay struggling with the reasons against that marriage--reasons which pressed upon her newly now that they were unexpectedly mirrored in the story of a man whose slight relations with her had, by some hidden affinity, bitten themselves into the most permanent layers of feeling. It was characteristic that, with all her debating, she was never troubled by the question whether the indefensibleness of her marriage did not include the fact that she had accepted Grandcourt solely as a man whom it was convenient for her to marry, not in the least as one to whom she would be binding herself in duty. Gwendolen's ideas were pitiably crude; but many grand difficulties of life are apt to force themselves on us in our crudity. And to judge wisely, I suppose we must know how things appear to the unwise; that kind of appearance making the larger part of the world's history. In the morning there was a double excitement for her. She was going to hunt, from which scruples about propriety had threatened to hinder her, until it was found that Mrs. Torrington was horsewoman enough to accompany her--going to hunt for the first time since her escapade with Rex; and she was going again to see Deronda, in whom, since last night, her interest had so gathered that she expected, as people do about revealed celebrities, to see something in his appearance which she had missed before. What was he going to be? What sort of life had he before him--he being nothing of any consequence? And with only a little difference in events he might have been as important as Grandcourt, nay--her imagination inevitably went into that direction--might have held the very estates which Grandcourt was to have. But now, Deronda would probably some day see her mistress of the Abbey at Topping, see her bearing the title which would have been his own wife's. These obvious, futile thoughts of what might have been, made a new epoch for Gwendolen. She, whose unquestionable habit it had been to take the best that came to her for less than her own claim, had now to see the position which tempted her in a new light, as a hard, unfair exclusion of others. What she had now heard about Deronda seemed to her imagination to throw him into one group with Mrs. Glasher and her children; before whom she felt herself in an attitude of apology--she who had hitherto been surrounded by a group that in her opinion had need be apologetic to her. Perhaps Deronda himself was thinking of these things. Could he know of Mrs. Glasher? If he knew that she knew, he would despise her; but he could have no such knowledge. Would he, without that, despise her for marrying Grandcourt? His possible judgment of her actions was telling on her as importunately as Klesmer's judgment of her powers; but she found larger room for resistance to a disapproval of her marriage, because it is easier to make our conduct seem justifiable to ourselves than to make our ability strike others. "How can I help it?" is not our favorite apology for incompetency. But Gwendolen felt some strength in saying, "How can I help what other people have done? Things would not come right if I were to turn round now and declare that I would not marry Mr. Grandcourt." And such turning round was out of the question. The horses in the chariot she had mounted were going at full speed. This mood of youthful, elated desperation had a tidal recurrence. She could dare anything that lay before her sooner than she could choose to go backward, into humiliation; and it was even soothing to think that there would now be as much ill-doing in the one as in the other. But the immediate delightful fact was the hunt, where she would see Deronda, and where he would see her; for always lurking ready to obtrude before other thoughts about him was the impression that he was very much interested in her. But to-day she was resolved not to repeat her folly of yesterday, as if she were anxious to say anything to him. Indeed, the hunt would be too absorbing. And so it was for a long while. Deronda was there, and within her sight very often; but this only added to the stimulus of a pleasure which Gwendolen had only once before tasted, and which seemed likely always to give a delight independent of any crosses, except such as took away the chance of riding. No accident happened to throw them together; the run took them within convenient reach of home, and the agreeable sombreness of the gray November afternoon, with a long stratum of yellow light in the west, Gwendolen was returning with the company from Diplow, who were attending her on the way to Offendene. Now the sense of glorious excitement was over and gone, she was getting irritably disappointed that she had had no opportunity of speaking to Deronda, whom she would not see again, since he was to go away in a couple of days. What was she going to say? That was not quite certain. She wanted to speak to him. Grandcourt was by her side; Mrs. Torrington, her husband, and another gentleman in advance; and Deronda's horse she could hear behind. The wish to speak to him and have him speaking to her was becoming imperious; and there was no chance of it unless she simply asserted her will and defied everything. Where the order of things could give way to Miss Gwendolen, it must be made to do so. They had lately emerged from a wood of pines and beeches, where the twilight stillness had a repressing effect, which increased her impatience. The horse-hoofs again heard behind at some little distance were a growing irritation. She reined in her horse and looked behind her; Grandcourt after a few paces, also paused; but she, waving her whip and nodding sideways with playful imperiousness, said, "Go on! I want to speak to Mr. Deronda." Grandcourt hesitated; but that he would have done after any proposition. It was an awkward situation for him. No gentleman, before marriage, could give the emphasis of refusal to a command delivered in this playful way. He rode on slowly, and she waited till Deronda came up. He looked at her with tacit inquiry, and she said at once, letting her horse go alongside of his, "Mr. Deronda, you must enlighten my ignorance. I want to know why you thought it wrong for me to gamble. Is it because I am a woman?" "Not altogether; but I regretted it the more because you were a woman," said Deronda, with an irrepressible smile. Apparently it must be understood between them now that it was he who sent the necklace. "I think it would be better for men not to gamble. It is a besotting kind of taste, likely to turn into a disease. And, besides, there is something revolting to me in raking a heap of money together, and internally chuckling over it, when others are feeling the loss of it. I should even call it base, if it were more than an exceptional lapse. There are enough inevitable turns of fortune which force us to see that our gain is another's loss:--that is one of the ugly aspects of life. One would like to reduce it as much as one could, not get amusement out of exaggerating it." Deronda's voice had gathered some indignation while he was speaking. "But you do admit that we can't help things," said Gwendolen, with a drop in her tone. The answer had not been anything like what she had expected. "I mean that things are so in spite of us; we can't always help it that our gain is another's loss." "Clearly. Because of that, we should help it where we can." Gwendolen, biting her lip inside, paused a moment, and then forcing herself to speak with an air of playfulness again, said, "But why should you regret it more because I am a woman?" "Perhaps because we need that you should be better than we are." "But suppose _we_ need that men should be better than we are," said Gwendolen with a little air of "check!" "That is rather a difficulty," said Deronda, smiling. "I suppose I should have said, we each of us think it would be better for the other to be good." "You see, I needed you to be better than I was--and you thought so," said Gwendolen, nodding and laughing, while she put her horse forward and joined Grandcourt, who made no observation. "Don't you want to know what I had to say to Mr. Deronda?" said Gwendolen, whose own pride required her to account for her conduct. "A--no," said Grandcourt, coldly. "Now that is the first impolite word you have spoken--that you don't wish to hear what I had to say," said Gwendolen, playing at a pout. "I wish to hear what you say to me--not to other men," said Grandcourt. "Then you wish to hear this. I wanted to make him tell me why he objected to my gambling, and he gave me a little sermon." "Yes--but excuse me the sermon." If Gwendolen imagined that Grandcourt cared about her speaking to Deronda, he wished her to understand that she was mistaken. But he was not fond of being told to ride on. She saw he was piqued, but did not mind. She had accomplished her object of speaking again to Deronda before he raised his hat and turned with the rest toward Diplow, while her lover attended her to Offendene, where he was to bid farewell before a whole day's absence on the unspecified journey. Grandcourt had spoken truth in calling the journey a bore: he was going by train to Gadsmere.

"Now my cousins are at Diplow," said Grandcourt, "will you go there? The carriage shall come for Mrs. Davilow. You can tell me what you would like done in the rooms. Things must be put in decent order while we are away at Ryelands. And tomorrow is the only day." He was sitting on a sofa in the drawing-room at Offendene, one elbow resting on the back, in the attitude of a man who is much interested in watching the person next to him. Gwendolen, who had always disliked needlework, had taken to it with apparent zeal since her engagement, and now held a piece of white embroidery which, on examination, would have shown many false stitches. During the last eight or nine days their hours had been chiefly spent on horseback, but some time had been left for this more difficult sort of companionship, which, however, Gwendolen had not found disagreeable. She was very well satisfied with Grandcourt. His answers to her lively questions about what he had seen and done in his life, bore drawling very well. She felt not only that he had nothing of the fool in his composition, but that by some subtle means he gave the impression that all the folly lay with other people. And then Grandcourt's behaviour as a lover had hardly passed the limit of an unobtrusive homage. One day, indeed, he had kissed her neck, below her ear; and Gwendolen, taken by surprise, had started up with a marked agitation which made him say, "I beg your pardon - did I annoy you?" "Oh, it was nothing," said Gwendolen, rather afraid of herself, "only I cannot bear - to be kissed under my ear." She sat down again with a little playful laugh, but felt her heart beating with a vague fear: she was no longer at liberty to flout him as she had flouted poor Rex. Her agitation seemed to him to be a compliment, and he was content not to transgress again. Today rain hindered riding; but to compensate, a package had come from London, and beautiful things (of Grandcourt's ordering) lay scattered about on the tables for Gwendolen to enjoy. She said with a pretty air of perversity- "Why is tomorrow the only day?" "Because the next day is the first with the hounds," said Grandcourt. "And after that I must go away for a couple of days - it's a bore - but I shall go one day and come back the next." He noticed a change in her face, and laying his hand on hers, he said, "You object to my going away?" "It's no use objecting," said Gwendolen, coldly. She was resisting the temptation to tell him that she suspected to whom he was going. Grandcourt said, enfolding her hand, "I will travel at night, so as only to be away one day." He thought that he knew the reason of what he inwardly called this bit of temper, and she was particularly fascinating to him at this moment. "You will go to Diplow tomorrow?" "Oh, yes, if you wish it," said Gwendolen, in a high tone of careless assent. Her concentration on other feelings had prevented her from noticing that her hand was being held. "How you treat us poor devils of men!" said Grandcourt. "We are always getting the worst of it." "Are you?" said Gwendolen. She longed to believe this commonplace statement was the truth: in that case, Mrs. Glasher would appear more blameable than Grandcourt. "Are you always getting the worst?" "Yes. Are you as kind to me as I am to you?" said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes with his narrow gaze. Gwendolen felt herself stricken. She was conscious of having received so much, that her sense of command was checked. She could not turn back: it was as if she had consented to mount a chariot where another held the reins. All she could do was to adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not gall her. With a sort of inward shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude, and smiling suddenly, she said- "If I were as kind to you as you are to me, that would spoil your generosity: it would no longer be as great as it is." "Then I am not to ask for one kiss," said Grandcourt, contented to pay a large price for this new kind of love-making, which introduced marriage by the finest contrast. "Not one!" said Gwendolen, getting saucy. He lifted her little left hand to his lips, and then released it respectfully. Indeed, he was almost charming; and she felt at this moment that it was not likely she could ever have loved another man better than this one. His reticence gave her some inexplicable, delightful consciousness. "Is there anyone besides the Torringtons at Diplow?" she said, taking up her work again. "She has a sister with her," said Grandcourt, "and there are two men - one of them you know, I believe. You saw him at Leubronn - young Deronda - with the Mallingers." Gwendolen felt as if her heart made a sudden jump. "I never spoke to him," she said, dreading to show any change. "Is he not disagreeable?" "Not particularly," said Grandcourt languidly. "He thinks a little too much of himself. I thought he had been introduced to you." "No. Some one told me his name before I came away, that's all. What is he?" "A ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger's. Nothing of any consequence." "Oh, poor creature! How very unpleasant for him!" said Gwendolen, speaking from the lip, and not meaning any sarcasm. "I wonder if it has left off raining!" she added, rising to look out of the window. Happily it did not rain the next day, and Gwendolen rode to Diplow on Criterion. She always felt more daring in her riding-dress; besides having the fortifying belief that she looked as well as possible in it. Her anger toward Deronda had changed to superstitious dread lest his first interference in her life might foreshadow some future influence. It is of such stuff that superstitions are made; and they carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding. She did not see Deronda until lunchtime. But from the first moment of their being in the room together, she seemed to herself to be doing nothing but notice him. When he took his place at lunch, Grandcourt said, "Deronda, Miss Harleth tells me you were not introduced to her at Leubronn?" "Miss Harleth hardly remembers me, I imagine," said Deronda, looking at her as they bowed. "She was intensely occupied when I saw her." Now, did he suppose that she had not suspected him of being the person who redeemed her necklace? "On the contrary. I remember you very well," said Gwendolen, feeling rather nervous, but governing herself. "You did not approve of my playing at roulette." "How did you come to that conclusion?" said Deronda, gravely. "Oh, you cast an evil eye on my play," said Gwendolen, with a turn of her head and a smile. "I began to lose as soon as you came to look on. I had been winning till then." "Roulette in such a kennel as Leubronn is a horrid bore," said Grandcourt. "I found it a bore when I began to lose," said Gwendolen. Her face was turned toward Grandcourt as she smiled and spoke, but she gave a sidelong glance at Deronda, and saw his eyes fixed on her with a gravely penetrating look. She wheeled her neck round as if she wanted to listen to what was being said by the rest, while she was only thinking of Deronda. His face had that disturbing expression which threatens to affect one's opinion - as if one's standard was somehow wrong. His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl as the deep notes of a cello to the broken discourse of poultry. Grandcourt, she decided, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much of himself: a favourite way of explaining a superiority that humiliates. The talk turned on the West Indies, and no more was said about roulette. Gwendolen trifled with her jelly, and looked at every speaker in turn that she might feel at ease in looking at Deronda. "I wonder what he thinks of me, really? He must have felt interested in me, else he would not have sent me my necklace. I wonder what he thinks of my marriage? Why is he so grave? Why has he come to Diplow?" These questions ran in her mind, and she felt an uneasy longing to be admired by Deronda - a longing which sprang from her first resentment at his critical glance. Why did she care so much about the opinion of this man who was "nothing of any consequence"? She had no time to find the reason: she was too much engaged in caring. In the drawing-room, when something had called Grandcourt away, she went up to Deronda, and said- "Shall you hunt tomorrow, Mr. Deronda?" "Yes, I believe so." "You don't object to hunting, then?" "It is a sin I am inclined to, when I can't get boating or cricket." "Do you object to my hunting?" said Gwendolen, with a saucy movement of the chin. "I have no right to object to anything you choose to do." "You thought you had a right to object to my gambling," persisted Gwendolen. "I was sorry for it. I am not aware that I told you of my objection," said Deronda, with his usual directness of gaze - a large-eyed gravity, innocent of any intention. His eyes had an intensity which seemed to express a special interest in everyone on whom he fixed them, and which might easily encourage them to ask for his help and sympathy. "You hindered me from gambling again," she answered. But she had no sooner spoken than she blushed over face and neck; and Deronda blushed, too, conscious that in the little affair of the necklace he had taken a questionable freedom. It was impossible to speak further; and she turned away to a window, feeling that she had stupidly said what she had not meant to say, and yet being rather happy that she had plunged into this mutual understanding. Deronda also did not dislike it. Gwendolen seemed more decidedly attractive than before; and certainly she had changed since Leubronn: she showed the consciousness of error rather than her former crude self-confidence. That evening Mrs. Davilow said, "Did Mr. Deronda really spoil your play, Gwen?" "Oh, it merely happened that he was looking on when I began to lose," said Gwendolen, carelessly. "I noticed him." "I don't wonder: he is a striking young man. He puts me in mind of Italian paintings. One would guess, without being told, that there was foreign blood in his veins." "Is there?" "Mrs. Torrington says so. She told me that his mother was some foreigner of high rank." "His mother?" said Gwendolen, rather sharply. "Then who was his father?" "Well - everyone says he is the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, who brought him up; though he passes for a ward. She says, if Sir Hugo could have done as he liked with his estates, he would have left them to this Mr. Deronda, since he has no legitimate son." Gwendolen was silent; but her mother saw so marked an effect in her face that she was angry with herself for having repeated Mrs. Torrington's gossip. It seemed, on reflection, unsuited to her daughter's ear. An image of the sad, dark-eyed, unknown mother had immediately arisen in Gwendolen's mind. A dark-eyed woman, no longer young, had become "stuff o' the conscience" to her. That night when she was in her little bed, and only a dim light was burning, she said- "Mamma, have men generally children before they are married?" "No, dear," said Mrs. Davilow. "If it were so, I ought to know," said Gwendolen indignantly. "You are thinking of what I said about Mr. Deronda and Sir Hugo Mallinger. That is a very unusual case, dear." "Does Lady Mallinger know?" "She knows enough to satisfy her. That is quite clear, because Mr. Deronda has lived with them." "And people think no worse of him?" "Well, of course he does not inherit the property. But people are not obliged to know anything about his birth; he is very well received." "I wonder whether he knows about it; and is angry with his father?" "My dear child, why should you think of that?" "Why?" said Gwendolen, impetuously, sitting up in her bed. "Haven't children reason to be angry with their parents? How can they help their parents marrying or not marrying?" But a consciousness rushed upon her, which made her fall back again on her pillow. It was not only that she might seem to reproach her mother for her second marriage; but she had been led to a condemnation which made her own marriage a forbidden thing. There was no further talk, and till sleep came Gwendolen lay struggling with the reasons against that marriage - reasons which pressed upon her newly, now that they were unexpectedly mirrored in the story of Deronda, whose relations with her had bitten themselves into the most permanent layers of feeling. But for all her debating, she was never troubled by the question whether it was defensible of her to marry Grandcourt solely for convenience, without seeing him as one to whom she was to bind herself in duty. In the morning there was a double excitement for her. She was going to hunt; and she was going again to see Deronda, in whom her interest had grown. What sort of life and career had he before him? With only a little difference in events he might have been as important as Grandcourt, nay, might have held the very estates which Grandcourt was to have. But now, Deronda would probably some day see her bearing the title which would have been his own wife's. She had now to see her marriage in a new light, as a hard, unfair exclusion of others. What she had heard about Deronda seemed to throw him into one group with Mrs. Glasher and her children. Perhaps Deronda himself was thinking of these things. Could he know of Mrs. Glasher? If he knew that she knew, he would despise her; but he could have no such knowledge. Would he, without that, despise her for marrying Grandcourt? His possible judgment of her actions was telling on her as strongly as Klesmer's judgment of her powers; but she felt some strength in saying- "How can I help what other people have done? Things would not come right if I were to turn round now and declare that I would not marry Mr. Grandcourt." And such turning round was out of the question. The horses in the chariot she had mounted were going at full speed. And the immediate delightful fact was the hunt, where she would see Deronda, and where he would see her; for always lurking in her thoughts about him was the impression that he was very much interested in her. But today she was resolved not to repeat her folly of yesterday, as if she were anxious to say anything to him. Indeed, the hunt would be too absorbing. So it was for a long while. Deronda was there, and within her sight; but this only added to the pleasure of the hunt. No accident happened to throw them together; and once they were within reach of home, and Gwendolen was returning with the company to Offendene, the sense of glorious excitement had gone. She was irritably disappointed that she had had no opportunity of speaking to Deronda, whom she would not see again, since he was to go away in a couple of days. What was she going to say? That was not quite certain. She wanted to speak to him. Grandcourt was by her side, and Deronda's horse she could hear behind. The wish to speak to him was becoming imperious; and there was no chance of it unless she simply asserted her will and defied everything. Where the order of things could give way to Miss Gwendolen, it must be made to do so. The horse-hoofs heard behind her were a growing irritation. She reined in her horse and looked back; Grandcourt also paused; but she, waving her whip with playful imperiousness, said, "Go on! I want to speak to Mr. Deronda." Grandcourt hesitated; it was an awkward situation for him. No gentleman, before marriage, could refuse a command delivered in this playful way. He rode on slowly, and she waited till Deronda came up. He looked at her with tacit inquiry, and she said at once, riding alongside him- "Mr. Deronda, you must enlighten me. Why did you think it wrong for me to gamble? Is it because I am a woman?" "Not altogether; but I regretted it the more because you were a woman," said Deronda, with an irrepressible smile. Apparently it must be understood between them now that it was he who sent the necklace. "I think it would be better for men not to gamble. It is a taste likely to turn into a disease. And, besides, there is something revolting to me in raking a heap of money together, and chuckling over it, when others are feeling the loss of it. There are enough events where our gain is another's loss: that is one of the ugly aspects of life. One should not get amusement out of exaggerating it." Deronda's voice had gathered some indignation. "But you do admit that we can't help things," said Gwendolen. The answer had not been anything like what she had expected. "We can't always help it that our gain is another's loss." "Clearly. But we should help it where we can." Gwendolen, biting her lip, paused, and then forcing herself to speak playfully again, said- "But why should you regret it more because I am a woman?" "Perhaps because we need you to be better than us." "But suppose we need men to be better than us," said Gwendolen with a little air of "check!" "That is rather a difficulty," said Deronda, smiling. "I suppose I should have said, we each of us think it would be better for the other to be good." "You see, I needed you to be better than I was - and you thought so," said Gwendolen, laughing, while she put her horse forward and joined Grandcourt, who made no observation. "Don't you want to know what I had to say to Mr. Deronda?" said Gwendolen, whose pride required her to account for her conduct. "Ah - no," said Grandcourt, coldly. "Now that is the first impolite word you have spoken - that you don't wish to hear what I had to say," said Gwendolen, playing at a pout. "I wish to hear what you say to me, not to other men," said Grandcourt. "I wanted to make him tell me why he objected to my gambling, and he gave me a little sermon." "Excuse me the sermon." If Gwendolen imagined that Grandcourt cared about her speaking to Deronda, he wished her to know that she was mistaken. But he was not fond of being told to ride on. She saw he was piqued, but did not mind. She had accomplished her object of speaking again to Deronda before he turned with the rest toward Diplow, while her lover attended her to Offendene, where he was to bid farewell before his absence on the unspecified journey. Grandcourt was going by train to Gadsmere.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 29

"This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: 'It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.'" --ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_. Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda's given not only to feel strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview with Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the adventure might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his thoughts; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual reaction of his intellect he began to examine the grounds of his emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance. The consciousness that he was half dominated by Mordecai's energetic certitude, and still more by his fervent trust, roused his alarm. It was his characteristic bias to shrink from the moral stupidity of valuing lightly what had come close to him, and of missing blindly in his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognized as momentous and sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read of this incident as having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied with his neutral life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more special duty to give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it would have appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created a deep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would have been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us through its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too seriously?--that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From such cowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he also shrank from having his course determined by mere contagion, without consent of reason; or from allowing a reverential pity for spiritual struggle to hurry him along a dimly-seen path. What, after all, had really happened? He knew quite accurately the answer Sir Hugo would have given: "A consumptive Jew, possessed by a fanaticism which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda as the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of wedded hope and despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd, exceptional in its form, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism was not so common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was abundant enough. While Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the fulfillment of his visions, another man was convinced that he had the mathematical key of the universe which would supersede Newton, and regarded all known physicists as conspiring to stifle his discovery and keep the universe locked; another, that he had the metaphysical key, with just that hair's-breadth of difference from the old wards which would make it fit exactly. Scattered here and there in every direction you might find a terrible person, with more or less power of speech, and with an eye either glittering or preternaturally dull, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or if printed to get read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such monomaniacs; he was more poetical than a social reformer with colored views of the new moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in sewage; still he came under the same class. It would be only right and kind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was practicable; but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort of value he ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think beforehand. And as to Mordecai's conviction that he had found a new executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst of disappointments--that which presents itself as final." Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated them distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most pressing occasion on which he had had to face this question of the family likeness among the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or dreamers of dreams, whether the "Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers," or the devotees of phantasmal discovery--from the first believer in his own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque and parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of test. If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is convinced, and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to hinder us from scanning any deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Let the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are the beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just judgments in separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must have stayed in the mind of James Watt. This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved him from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories (which also have their kinship and likeness). And Deronda's conscience included sensibilities beyond the common, enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively into the experience of others. What was the claim this eager soul made upon him?--"You must believe my beliefs--be moved by my reasons--hope my hopes--see the vision I point to--behold a glory where I behold it!" To take such a demand in the light of an obligation in any direct sense would have been preposterous--to have seemed to admit it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda, looking on the agitation of those moments, felt thankful that in the midst of his compassion he had preserved himself from the bondage of false concessions. The claim hung, too, on a supposition which might be--nay, probably was--in discordance with the full fact: the supposition that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood. Was there ever a more hypothetic appeal? But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the deepest experience of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely, that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypothesis which had been the source of passionate struggle within him; by its light he had been accustomed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. He had been well used to find a motive in a conception which might be disproved; and he had been also used to think of some revelation that might influence his view of the particular duties belonging to him. To be in a state of suspense, which was also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a familiar attitude of his conscience. And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and that extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actual discovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that Mordecai's ideas made a real conquest over Deronda's conviction? Nay, it was conceivable that as Mordecai needed and believed that, he had found an active replenishment of himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai's mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty and citizenship which lay in his own thought like sculptured fragments certifying some beauty yearned after but not traceable by divination. As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware that it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the influence he imagined himself submitting to had been that of some honored professor, some authority in a seat of learning, some philosopher who had been accepted as a voice of the age, would a thorough receptiveness toward direction have been ridiculed? Only by those who hold it a sign of weakness to be obliged for an idea, and prefer to hint that they have implicitly held in a more correct form whatever others have stated with a sadly short-coming explicitness. After all, what was there but vulgarity in taking the fact that Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he was to be met perhaps on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand and Banner_ as a reason for determining beforehand that there was not some spiritual force within him that might have a determining effect on a white-handed gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian, that having heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the ruler of the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but quickly released them on observing that they had the hands of work-people--being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who stood waiting at the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi were wrong in their trust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are no sign of inspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but they have gone with it in some remarkable cases. And to regard discipleship as out of the question because of them, would be mere dullness of imagination. A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question was the strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his wishes into overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts as fulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise estimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error, even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rare conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that forecasting ardor which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its preconception that surmounts many failures of experiment. And in relation to human motives and actions, passionate belief has a fuller efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity of proof, and happening in one soul, give the type of what will one day be general. At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's visionary excitability was hardly a reason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to except for pity's sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be--the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had some impressions about himself which we call superstitions, and used some arguments which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physical conceptions, and he had the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuously about those who were deaf to Columbus. "My contempt for them binds me to see that I don't adopt their mistake on a small scale," said Deronda, "and make myself deaf with the assumption that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew and me, simply because he has clad it in illusory notions. What I can be to him, or he to me, may not at all depend on his persuasion about the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is probable that I should not have begun to be specially interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone on that loitering search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram's book-shop and ask the price of _Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and he saw me by their light; I corresponded well enough with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of his race. Suppose that his impression--the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have something like it--suppose in spite of all presumptions to the contrary, that his impression should somehow be proved true, and that I should come actually to share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This is the only question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on my life. "But if the issue should be quite different?--well, there will be something painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be an active cause of that poor fellow's crushing disappointment. Perhaps this issue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear that no tenderness of mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the alternative--that I should not disappoint him--be less painful to me?" Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately been at work within him which had very much modified the reluctance he would formerly have had to think of himself as probably a Jew. And, if you like, he was romantic. That young energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create the world-wide legions of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a like track --all the more because the track was one of thought as well as action. "The bare possibility." He could not admit it to be more. The belief that his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak assaults of unwarranted doubt. And that a moment should ever come in which that belief was declared a delusion, was something of which Deronda would not say, "I should be glad." His life-long affection for Sir Hugo, stronger than all his resentment, made him shrink from admitting that wish. Which way soever the truth might lie, he repeated to himself what he had said to Mordecai--that he could not without farther reasons undertake to hasten its discovery. Nay, he was tempted now to regard his uncertainty as a condition to be cherished for the present. If further intercourse revealed nothing but illusions as what he was expected to share in, the want of any valid evidence that he was a Jew might save Mordecai the worst shock in the refusal of fraternity. It might even be justifiable to use the uncertainty on this point in keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept those offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him. These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of four days before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra Cohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as to put the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.

Imagine the conflict in a responsive and questioning mind like Deronda's, after the interview with Mordecai. The adventure might have moved a much duller young man; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with his usual reaction of his intellect he began to examine his emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance. The consciousness that he was dominated by Mordecai's certainty and trust alarmed him. He shrank from undervaluing an experience simply because it had come close to him, when in an historical context he would recognise it as a momentous event. If he had read of this incident as having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, or Asia Minor, to some young man dissatisfied with life, and wanting a special fellowship or duty to inspire him with passion for his work, it would have seemed quite natural that the meeting should have created a deep impression on him. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his seriousness in the matter? But Deronda also shrank from having his course determined without the consent of reason; or from allowing his pity to hurry him along a dimly-seen path. What, after all, had really happened? He knew what Sir Hugo would have said: "A consumptive, fanatical Jew has fixed on Deronda as the embodiment of some visionary image born of his fanatical beliefs and his despair of his own life. Fanaticism is not rare. The world is full of fanatics convinced they hold the key to unique knowledge. Scattered in every direction you might find a terrible person with a glittering eye, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had volumes which he could not get printed or read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more passionate speech than most; but still he came under the same class. It would be only right and kind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was practicable; but how likely was it that his ideas had any value? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think beforehand. As to Mordecai's conviction that he had found a new executive self, it might lead to the worst of disappointments." Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings. He knew that human passion invites burlesque and parody. Many martyrs have been sacrificed to error and folly. The grandest man can appear ridiculous if reduced to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts: to do him justice, we need to understand the subject-matter on which he is convinced, and to feel fellowship with his effort. Deronda was familiar enough with this track of thinking to be saved from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even without the peculiar claim made on him by the Jew. This claim, indeed, considered rationally, might seem preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern: they are as various as our memories. And Deronda's conscience was enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively into the experience of others. What was the claim this eager soul made upon him? "You must believe my beliefs - be moved by my reasons - hope my hopes - behold a glory where I behold it!" To see this as an obligation would have been preposterous - to have agreed to it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda felt thankful that in his compassion he had preserved himself from the bondage of false agreements. The claim hung, too, on a supposition which was probably not true: the supposition that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood. But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated his deepest affections with the assumption that Sir Hugo was his father. That theory had been the source of passionate struggle within him; by its light he had been accustomed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. He had been well used to find a motive in a belief which might be disproved; and he had been also used to imagine some revelation that might change his view of his duties. A state of scrupulous suspense was familiar to him. And now, suppose that belief in his Jewish birth, and that extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actual discovery: suppose that Mordecai's ideas made a real conquest over Deronda's conviction? It was possible that just as Mordecai believed he had found a renewal of himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai's mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty which lay in his own thought, like sculptured fragments indicating some beauty yearned after but without a foreseeable form. As he meditated on that possibility, he was aware that it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If Mordecai were some honoured professor or distinguished philosopher, would Deronda's receptiveness toward him be ridiculed? Because he was a poor Jewish workman, to be met in the Hand and Banner, was that a reason for deciding that there was no spiritual force within him? There is a legend that the Emperor Domitian, having heard that a ruler of the world was to spring from a Jewish family, sent for its members in alarm, but quickly released them on observing that they had the hands of work-people; in contrast to the Rabbi who stood waiting at the gate of Rome, sure that the Messiah would be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi were wrong to trust outward signs: poverty and poor clothes are no mark of inspiration, said Deronda to himself, but they have gone with it in some remarkable cases. A more plausible reason for rejecting discipleship was Mordecai's visionary excitement, which made him see events as fulfilment of his overwhelming wishes. Was he capable of judging consequences wisely in such a frame of mind? But perhaps Mordecai might able to combine wise judgment with that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. Even strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that ardour which feels the excitement of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its result that overcomes many failures of experiment. At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's visionary excitability was hardly a reason for assuming that he was not worth listening to. Are stricter reasoners free from false conclusions? The driest argument has its hallucinations; no formulas for thinking will save us imperfect mortals from mistake in our thought. We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift nature of our human thinking. Columbus was superstitious; but he had also some sound ideas, and the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on mankind. The world is rather contemptuous about those who were deaf to Columbus. "I must not adopt their mistake on a small scale," said Deronda, "and assume that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew and me, simply because of his visionary ideas. What I can be to him, or he to me, may not depend on his belief about the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, I should not have begun to be interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone on that search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram's book-shop. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and I corresponded with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of his race. The elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have the same impression. Suppose that this should somehow be proved true, and that I should come to share the ideas he is devoted to? This is the only question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on my life. "But if the result should be quite different? - well, there will be pain and crushing disappointment for the poor fellow. I had better prepare myself for that. No tenderness of mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the alternative - that I should not disappoint him - be less painful to me?" Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately been at work within him which had very much modified the reluctance with which he would formerly have thought of himself as a Jew. And he was romantic. His young energy and spirit of adventure gave him a certain quivering interest in the track he might enter - especially when the track was one of thought as well as action. But his Jewishness was no more than a bare possibility. The belief that his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak assaults of unwarranted doubt. And Deronda's life-long affection for Sir Hugo made him shrink from admitting that wish. Whatever the truth about his birth might be, he decided that he would not hasten its discovery. Rather, he cherished his present uncertainty. It might even be justifiable to use it in keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept the friendly help that Deronda longed to urge on him. These were the thoughts that busied Deronda in the four days before he could call on Mordecai again: Sir Hugo's demands on him continued so late as to put a trip to Holborn out of the question.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 41

What name doth Joy most borrow When life is fair? "To-morrow." What name doth best fit Sorrow In young despair? "To-morrow." There was a much more lasting trouble at the rectory. Rex arrived there only to throw himself on his bed in a state of apparent apathy, unbroken till the next day, when it began to be interrupted by more positive signs of illness. Nothing could be said about his going to Southampton: instead of that, the chief thought of his mother and Anna was how to tend this patient who did not want to be well, and from being the brightest, most grateful spirit in the household, was metamorphosed into an irresponsive, dull-eyed creature who met all affectionate attempts with a murmur of "Let me alone." His father looked beyond the crisis, and believed it to be the shortest way out of an unlucky affair; but he was sorry for the inevitable suffering, and went now and then to sit by him in silence for a few minutes, parting with a gentle pressure of his hand on Rex's blank brow, and a "God bless you, my boy." Warham and the younger children used to peep round the edge of the door to see this incredible thing of their lively brother being laid low; but fingers were immediately shaken at them to drive them back. The guardian who was always there was Anna, and her little hand was allowed to rest within her brother's, though he never gave it a welcoming pressure. Her soul was divided between anguish for Rex and reproach of Gwendolen. "Perhaps it is wicked of me, but I think I never _can_ love her again," came as the recurrent burden of poor little Anna's inward monody. And even Mrs. Gascoigne had an angry feeling toward her niece which she could not refrain from expressing (apologetically) to her husband. "I know of course it is better, and we ought to be thankful that she is not in love with the poor boy; but really. Henry, I think she is hard; she has the heart of a coquette. I can not help thinking that she must have made him believe something, or the disappointment would not have taken hold of him in that way. And some blame attaches to poor Fanny; she is quite blind about that girl." Mr. Gascoigne answered imperatively: "The less said on that point the better, Nancy. I ought to have been more awake myself. As to the boy, be thankful if nothing worse ever happens to him. Let the thing die out as quickly as possible; and especially with regard to Gwendolen--let it be as if it had never been." The rector's dominant feeling was that there had been a great escape. Gwendolen in love with Rex in return would have made a much harder problem, the solution of which might have been taken out of his hands. But he had to go through some further difficulty. One fine morning Rex asked for his bath, and made his toilet as usual. Anna, full of excitement at this change, could do nothing but listen for his coming down, and at last hearing his step, ran to the foot of the stairs to meet him. For the first time he gave her a faint smile, but it looked so melancholy on his pale face that she could hardly help crying. "Nannie!" he said gently, taking her hand and leading her slowly along with him to the drawing-room. His mother was there, and when she came to kiss him, he said: "What a plague I am!" Then he sat still and looked out of the bow-window on the lawn and shrubs covered with hoar-frost, across which the sun was sending faint occasional gleams:--something like that sad smile on Rex's face, Anna thought. He felt as if he had had a resurrection into a new world, and did not know what to do with himself there, the old interests being left behind. Anna sat near him, pretending to work, but really watching him with yearning looks. Beyond the garden hedge there was a road where wagons and carts sometimes went on field-work: a railed opening was made in the hedge, because the upland with its bordering wood and clump of ash-trees against the sky was a pretty sight. Presently there came along a wagon laden with timber; the horses were straining their grand muscles, and the driver having cracked his whip, ran along anxiously to guide the leader's head, fearing a swerve. Rex seemed to be shaken into attention, rose and looked till the last quivering trunk of the timber had disappeared, and then walked once or twice along the room. Mrs. Gascoigne was no longer there, and when he came to sit down again, Anna, seeing a return of speech in her brother's eyes, could not resist the impulse to bring a little stool and seat herself against his knee, looking up at him with an expression which seemed to say, "Do speak to me." And he spoke. "I'll tell you what I'm thinking of, Nannie. I will go to Canada, or somewhere of that sort." (Rex had not studied the character of our colonial possessions.) "Oh, Rex, not for always!" "Yes, to get my bread there. I should like to build a hut, and work hard at clearing, and have everything wild about me, and a great wide quiet." "And not take me with you?" said Anna, the big tears coming fast. "How could I?" "I should like it better than anything; and settlers go with their families. I would sooner go there than stay here in England. I could make the fires, and mend the clothes, and cook the food; and I could learn how to make the bread before we went. It would be nicer than anything--like playing at life over again, as we used to do when we made our tent with the drugget, and had our little plates and dishes." "Father and mother would not let you go." "Yes, I think they would, when I explained everything. It would save money; and papa would have more to bring up the boys with." There was further talk of the same practical kind at intervals, and it ended in Rex's being obliged to consent that Anna should go with him when he spoke to his father on the subject. Of course it was when the rector was alone in his study. Their mother would become reconciled to whatever he decided on, but mentioned to her first, the question would have distressed her. "Well, my children!" said Mr. Gascoigne, cheerfully, as they entered. It was a comfort to see Rex about again. "May we sit down with you a little, papa?" said Anna. "Rex has something to say." "With all my heart." It was a noticeable group that these three creatures made, each of them with a face of the same structural type--the straight brow, the nose suddenly straightened from an intention of being aquiline, the short upper lip, the short but strong and well-hung chin: there was even the same tone of complexion and set of the eye. The gray-haired father was at once massive and keen-looking; there was a perpendicular line in his brow which when he spoke with any force of interest deepened; and the habit of ruling gave him an air of reserved authoritativeness. Rex would have seemed a vision of his father's youth, if it had been possible to imagine Mr. Gascoigne without distinct plans and without command, smitten with a heart sorrow, and having no more notion of concealment than a sick animal; and Anna was a tiny copy of Rex, with hair drawn back and knotted, her face following his in its changes of expression, as if they had one soul between them. "You know all about what has upset me, father," Rex began, and Mr. Gascoigne nodded. "I am quite done up for life in this part of the world. I am sure it will be no use my going back to Oxford. I couldn't do any reading. I should fail, and cause you expense for nothing. I want to have your consent to take another course, sir." Mr. Gascoigne nodded more slowly, the perpendicular line on his brow deepened, and Anna's trembling increased. "If you would allow me a small outfit, I should like to go to the colonies and work on the land there." Rex thought the vagueness of the phrase prudential; "the colonies" necessarily embracing more advantages, and being less capable of being rebutted on a single ground than any particular settlement. "Oh, and with me, papa," said Anna, not bearing to be left out from the proposal even temporarily. "Rex would want some one to take care of him, you know--some one to keep house. And we shall never, either of us, be married. And I should cost nothing, and I should be so happy. I know it would be hard to leave you and mamma; but there are all the others to bring up, and we two should be no trouble to you any more." Anna had risen from her seat, and used the feminine argument of going closer to her papa as she spoke. He did not smile, but he drew her on his knee and held her there, as if to put her gently out of the question while he spoke to Rex. "You will admit that my experience gives me some power of judging for you, and that I can probably guide you in practical matters better than you can guide yourself?" Rex was obliged to say, "Yes, sir." "And perhaps you will admit--though I don't wish to press that point--that you are bound in duty to consider my judgment and wishes?" "I have never yet placed myself in opposition to you, sir." Rex in his secret soul could not feel that he was bound not to go to the colonies, but to go to Oxford again--which was the point in question. "But you will do so if you persist in setting your mind toward a rash and foolish procedure, and deafening yourself to considerations which my experience of life assures me of. You think, I suppose, that you have had a shock which has changed all your inclinations, stupefied your brains, unfitted you for anything but manual labor, and given you a dislike to society? Is that what you believe?" "Something like that. I shall never be up to the sort of work I must do to live in this part of the world. I have not the spirit for it. I shall never be the same again. And without any disrespect to you, father, I think a young fellow should be allowed to choose his way of life, if he does nobody any harm. There are plenty to stay at home, and those who like might be allowed to go where there are empty places." "But suppose I am convinced on good evidence--as I am--that this state of mind of yours is transient, and that if you went off as you propose, you would by-and-by repent, and feel that you had let yourself slip back from the point you have been gaining by your education till now? Have you not strength of mind enough to see that you had better act on my assurance for a time, and test it? In my opinion, so far from agreeing with you that you should be free to turn yourself into a colonist and work in your shirt-sleeves with spade and hatchet--in my opinion you have no right whatever to expatriate yourself until you have honestly endeavored to turn to account the education you have received here. I say nothing of the grief to your mother and me." "I'm very sorry; but what can I do? I can't study--that's certain," said Rex. "Not just now, perhaps. You will have to miss a term. I have made arrangements for you--how you are to spend the next two months. But I confess I am disappointed in you, Rex. I thought you had more sense than to take up such ideas--to suppose that because you have fallen into a very common trouble, such as most men have to go through, you are loosened from all bonds of duty--just as if your brain had softened and you were no longer a responsible being." What could Rex say? Inwardly he was in a state of rebellion, but he had no arguments to meet his father's; and while he was feeling, in spite of any thing that might be said, that he should like to go off to "the colonies" to-morrow, it lay in a deep fold of his consciousness that he ought to feel--if he had been a better fellow he would have felt--more about his old ties. This is the sort of faith we live by in our soul sicknesses. Rex got up from his seat, as if he held the conference to be at an end. "You assent to my arrangement, then?" said Mr. Gascoigne, with that distinct resolution of tone which seems to hold one in a vise. There was a little pause before Rex answered, "I'll try what I can do, sir. I can't promise." His thought was, that trying would be of no use. Her father kept Anna, holding her fast, though she wanted to follow Rex. "Oh, papa," she said, the tears coming with her words when the door had closed; "it is very hard for him. Doesn't he look ill?" "Yes, but he will soon be better; it will all blow over. And now, Anna, be as quiet as a mouse about it all. Never let it be mentioned when he is gone." "No, papa. But I would not be like Gwendolen for any thing--to have people fall in love with me so. It is very dreadful." Anna dared not say that she was disappointed at not being allowed to go to the colonies with Rex; but that was her secret feeling, and she often afterward went inwardly over the whole affair, saying to herself, "I should have done with going out, and gloves, and crinoline, and having to talk when I am taken to dinner--and all that!" I like to mark the time, and connect the course of individual lives with the historic stream, for all classes of thinkers. This was the period when the broadening of gauge in crinolines seemed to demand an agitation for the general enlargement of churches, ball-rooms, and vehicles. But Anna Gascoigne's figure would only allow the size of skirt manufactured for young ladies of fourteen.

There was a much more lasting trouble at the rectory. Rex threw himself on his bed in a state of apathy, which the next day began to be interrupted by signs of illness. Nothing could be said about his going to Southampton: instead, the chief thought of his mother and Anna was how to tend this patient who did not want to be well, and from being the brightest, most grateful spirit in the household, was changed into a dull-eyed creature who met all affectionate attempts with a murmur of "Let me alone." His father was sorry for his suffering, and sat with him now and then, parting with a "God bless you, my boy." Anna was always there, and was allowed to hold his unresponding hand. Her soul was divided between anguish for Rex and reproach of Gwendolen. And even Mrs. Gascoigne had an angry feeling toward her niece which she could not refrain from expressing to her husband. "Really, Henry, I think she is hard; she has the heart of a coquette. And some blame attaches to poor Fanny; she is quite blind about that girl." Mr. Gascoigne answered: "I ought to have been more awake myself. Rex may be thankful if nothing worse ever happens to him." The rector felt that there had been a great escape. Gwendolen in love with Rex would have made a much harder problem to solve. But he had further difficulty to come. One fine morning Rex asked for his bath, and dressed himself. Anna, excited at this change, listened for his coming down, and on hearing his step, ran to meet him. For the first time he gave her a faint smile, but such a melancholy one that she could hardly help crying. "Nannie!" he said gently, taking her hand and leading her slowly to the drawing-room. His mother was there, and when she came to kiss him, he said: "What a plague I am!" Then he sat still and looked out of the bow-window on the lawn and shrubs covered with hoar-frost. He felt as if he had had a resurrection into a new world, and did not know what to do with himself there. Anna sat near him, pretending to work, but really watching him. After a while, she could not resist the impulse to bring a little stool and seat herself against his knee, looking up at him with an expression which seemed to say, "Do speak to me." And he spoke. "Nannie, I think I will go to Canada, or somewhere of that sort." "Oh, Rex, not for always!" "Yes. I should like to build a hut, and work hard at clearing, and have everything wild about me, and a great wide quiet." "And not take me with you?" said Anna tearfully. "How could I?" "I should like it better than anything; and settlers go with their families. I could make the fires, and mend the clothes, and cook the food. It would be like playing at life as we used to do when we made our tent with the drugget, and had our little plates and dishes." "Father and mother would not let you go." "Yes, I think they would, when I explained everything. It would save money to bring up the boys with." The talk ended in Rex's consenting that Anna should go with him when he spoke to his father on the subject. They chose a time when the rector was alone in his study. "Well, my children!" said Mr. Gascoigne, cheerfully, as they entered. It was a comfort to see Rex about again. "May we sit down with you, papa?" said Anna. "Rex has something to say." "With all my heart." "You know all about what has upset me, father," Rex began, and Mr. Gascoigne nodded. "I am quite done up for life in this part of the world. I am sure it will be no use my going back to Oxford. I should fail, and cause you expense for nothing. I want to have your consent to take another course, sir." Mr. Gascoigne nodded more slowly, the line on his brow deepening. "I should like to go to the colonies and work on the land there." Rex thought the vagueness of "the colonies" less likely to be rebutted than any particular settlement. "Oh, and with me, papa," said Anna. "Rex would want someone to take care of him, you know, to keep house. And we shall never, either of us, be married. And I should cost nothing, and I should be so happy. I know it would be hard to leave you and mamma; but there are the others to bring up, and we two should be no trouble to you any more." Anna had gone closer to her papa as she spoke. He did not smile, but drew her on his knee and held her there, as if to put her gently out of the question while he spoke to Rex. "You will admit that my experience means that I can probably guide you in practical matters better than you can guide yourself?" Rex was obliged to say, "Yes, sir." "And perhaps you will admit that you are bound in duty to consider my judgment and wishes?" "I have never yet opposed you, sir." "But you will do so if you persist in following a rash and foolish course. You think, I suppose, that you have had a shock which has stupefied your brains, unfitted you for anything but manual labour, and given you a dislike to society? Is that what you believe?" "Something like that. I shall never be up to the sort of work I must do in this part of the world. I have not the spirit for it. I shall never be the same again. And I think a young fellow should be allowed to choose his way of life, if he harms nobody." "But suppose I am convinced on good evidence that this state of mind is transient, and that you would by-and-by repent, and feel that you had lost the chance of education? Have you not strength of mind enough to see that you had better act on my assurance for a time, and test it? In my opinion you have no right whatever to go abroad until you have honestly endeavoured to turn to account the education you have received here. I say nothing of the grief to your mother and me." "I'm very sorry; but what can I do? I can't study, that's certain," said Rex. "Not just now, perhaps. You will have to miss a term. I have made arrangements for you. But I confess I am disappointed in you, Rex. I thought you had more sense than to suppose that because you have fallen into a common trouble, such as most men have to go through, you are loosened from all bonds of duty - as if your brain had softened and you were no longer a responsible being." What could Rex say? Inwardly he rebelled, but he had no arguments to meet his father's; and it lay in a deep fold of his consciousness that he ought to feel more about his old ties. This is the sort of faith we live by in our soul sicknesses. He got up from his seat. "You assent to my arrangement, then?" said Mr. Gascoigne. There was a pause before Rex answered, "I'll try, sir. I can't promise." His thought was, that trying would be of no use. Her father held Anna, though she wanted to follow Rex out of the room. "Oh, papa," she said when the door had closed; "it is very hard for him. Doesn't he look ill?" "Yes, but he will soon be better; it will all blow over. And now, Anna, be as quiet as a mouse about it. Never let it be mentioned." "No, papa." Anna dared not say that she was disappointed at not being allowed to go to the colonies with Rex; but that was her secret feeling.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 8

Life is a various mother: now she dons Her plumes and brilliants, climbs the marble stairs With head aloft, nor ever turns her eyes On lackeys who attend her; now she dwells Grim-clad, up darksome alleys, breathes hot gin, And screams in pauper riot. But to these She came a frugal matron, neat and deft, With cheerful morning thoughts and quick device To find the much in little. Mrs. Meyrick's house was not noisy: the front parlor looked on the river, and the back on gardens, so that though she was reading aloud to her daughters, the window could be left open to freshen the air of the small double room where a lamp and two candles were burning. The candles were on a table apart for Kate, who was drawing illustrations for a publisher; the lamp was not only for the reader but for Amy and Mab, who were embroidering satin cushions for "the great world." Outside, the house looked very narrow and shabby, the bright light through the holland blind showing the heavy old-fashioned window-frame; but it is pleasant to know that many such grim-walled slices of space in our foggy London have been and still are the homes of a culture the more spotlessly free from vulgarity, because poverty has rendered everything like display an impersonal question, and all the grand shows of the world simply a spectacle which rouses petty rivalry or vain effort after possession. The Meyricks' was a home of that kind: and they all clung to this particular house in a row because its interior was filled with objects always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows. Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint of other matters that she might be able to keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world history in scenes and heads which the children had early learned by heart. The chairs and tables were also old friends preferred to new. But in these two little parlors with no furniture that a broker would have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicely-select life, opened to the highest things in music, painting and poetry. I am not sure that in the times of greatest scarcity, before Kate could get paid-work, these ladies had always had a servant to light their fires and sweep their rooms; yet they were fastidious in some points, and could not believe that the manners of ladies in the fashionable world were so full of coarse selfishness, petty quarreling, and slang as they are represented to be in what are called literary photographs. The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like medival houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks. But mother and daughters were all united by a triple bond--family love; admiration for the finest work, the best action; and habitual industry. Hans' desire to spend some of his money in making their lives more luxurious had been resisted by all of them, and both they and he had been thus saved from regrets at the threatened triumphs of his yearning for art over the attractions of secured income--a triumph that would by-and-by oblige him to give up his fellowship. They could all afford to laugh at his Gavarni-caricatures and to hold him blameless in following a natural bent which their unselfishness and independence had left without obstacle. It was enough for them to go on in their old way, only having a grand treat of opera-going (to the gallery) when Hans came home on a visit. Seeing the group they made this evening, one could hardly wish them to change their way of life. They were all alike small, and so in due proportion to their miniature rooms. Mrs. Meyrick was reading aloud from a French book; she was a lively little woman, half French, half Scotch, with a pretty articulateness of speech that seemed to make daylight in her hearer's understanding. Though she was not yet fifty, her rippling hair, covered by a quakerish net cap, was chiefly gray, but her eyebrows were brown as the bright eyes below them; her black dress, almost like a priest's cassock with its rows of buttons, suited a neat figure hardly five feet high. The daughters were to match the mother, except that Mab had Hans' light hair and complexion, with a bossy, irregular brow, and other quaintnesses that reminded one of him. Everything about them was compact, from the firm coils of their hair, fastened back _ la Chinoise_, to their gray skirts in Puritan nonconformity with the fashion, which at that time would have demanded that four feminine circumferences should fill all the free space in the front parlor. All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lady's traveling trunk. Their faces seemed full of speech, as if their minds had been shelled, after the manner of horse-chestnuts, and become brightly visible. The only large thing of its kind in the room was Hafiz, the Persian cat, comfortably poised on the brown leather back of a chair, and opening his large eyes now and then to see that the lower animals were not in any mischief. The book Mrs. Meyrick had before her was Erckmann-Chatrian's _Historie d'un Conscrit_. She had just finished reading it aloud, and Mab, who had let her work fall on the ground while she stretched her head forward and fixed her eyes on the reader, exclaimed, "I think that is the finest story in the world." "Of course, Mab!" said Amy, "it is the last you have heard. Everything that pleases you is the best in its turn." "It is hardly to be called a story," said Kate. "It is a bit of history brought near us with a strong telescope. We can see the soldiers' faces: no, it is more than that--we can hear everything--we can almost hear their hearts beat." "I don't care what you call it," said Mab, flirting away her thimble. "Call it a chapter in Revelations. It makes me want to do something good, something grand. It makes me so sorry for everybody. It makes me like Schiller--I want to take the world in my arms and kiss it. I must kiss you instead, little mother!" She threw her arms round her mother's neck. "Whenever you are in that mood, Mab, down goes your work," said Amy. "It would be doing something good to finish your cushion without soiling it." "Oh--oh--oh!" groaned Mab, as she stooped to pick up her work and thimble. "I wish I had three wounded conscripts to take care of." "You would spill their beef tea while you were talking," said Amy. "Poor Mab! don't be hard on her," said the mother. "Give me the embroidery now, child. You go on with your enthusiasm, and I will go on with the pink and white poppy." "Well, ma, I think you are more caustic than Amy," said Kate, while she drew her head back to look at her drawing. "Oh--oh--oh!" cried Mab again, rising and stretching her arms. "I wish something wonderful would happen. I feel like the deluge. The waters of the great deep are broken up, and the windows of heaven are opened. I must sit down and play the scales." Mab was opening the piano while the others were laughing at this climax, when a cab stopped before the house, and there forthwith came a quick rap of the knocker. "Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, starting up, "it is after ten, and Phoebe is gone to bed." She hastened out, leaving the parlor door open. "Mr. Deronda!" The girls could hear this exclamation from their mamma. Mab clasped her hands, saying in a loud whisper, "There now! something _is_ going to happen." Kate and Amy gave up their work in amazement. But Deronda's tone in reply was so low that they could not hear his words, and Mrs. Meyrick immediately closed the parlor door. "I know I am trusting to your goodness in a most extraordinary way," Deronda went on, after giving his brief narrative; "but you can imagine how helpless I feel with a young creature like this on my hands. I could not go with her among strangers, and in her nervous state I should dread taking her into a house full of servants. I have trusted to your mercy. I hope you will not think my act unwarrantable." "On the contrary. You have honored me by trusting me. I see your difficulty. Pray bring her in. I will go and prepare the girls." While Deronda went back to the cab, Mrs. Meyrick turned into the parlor again and said: "Here is somebody to take care of instead of your wounded conscripts, Mab: a poor girl who was going to drown herself in despair. Mr. Deronda found her only just in time to save her. He brought her along in his boat, and did not know what else it would be safe to do with her, so he has trusted us and brought her here. It seems she is a Jewess, but quite refined, he says--knowing Italian and music." The three girls, wondering and expectant, came forward and stood near each other in mute confidence that they were all feeling alike under this appeal to their compassion. Mab looked rather awe-stricken, as if this answer to her wish were something preternatural. Meanwhile Deronda going to the door of the cab where the pale face was now gazing out with roused observation, said, "I have brought you to some of the kindest people in the world: there are daughters like you. It is a happy home. Will you let me take you to them?" She stepped out obediently, putting her hand in his and forgetting her hat; and when Deronda led her into the full light of the parlor where the four little women stood awaiting her, she made a picture that would have stirred much duller sensibilities than theirs. At first she was a little dazed by the sudden light, and before she had concentrated her glance he had put her hand into the mother's. He was inwardly rejoicing that the Meyricks were so small: the dark-curled head was the highest among them. The poor wanderer could not be afraid of these gentle faces so near hers: and now she was looking at each of them in turn while the mother said, "You must be weary, poor child." "We will take care of you--we will comfort you--we will love you," cried Mab, no longer able to restrain herself, and taking the small right hand caressingly between both her own. This gentle welcoming warmth was penetrating the bewildered one: she hung back just enough to see better the four faces in front of her, whose good will was being reflected in hers, not in any smile, but in that undefinable change which tells us that anxiety is passing in contentment. For an instant she looked up at Deronda, as if she were referring all this mercy to him, and then again turning to Mrs. Meyrick, said with more collectedness in her sweet tones than he had heard before, "I am a stranger. I am a Jewess. You might have thought I was wicked." "No, we are sure you are good," burst out Mab. "We think no evil of you, poor child. You shall be safe with us," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Come now and sit down. You must have some food, and then you must go to rest." The stranger looked up again at Deronda, who said, "You will have no more fears with these friends? You will rest to-night?" "Oh, I should not fear. I should rest. I think these are the ministering angels." Mrs. Meyrick wanted to lead her to seat, but again hanging back gently, the poor weary thing spoke as if with a scruple at being received without a further account of herself. "My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way, all the way from Prague by myself. I made my escape. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when I was little, but I thought I could find her again. I had trouble--the houses were all gone--I could not find her. It has been a long while, and I had not much money. That is why I am in distress." "Our mother will be good to you," cried Mab. "See what a nice little mother she is!" "Do sit down now," said Kate, moving a chair forward, while Amy ran to get some tea. Mirah resisted no longer, but seated herself with perfect grace, crossing her little feet, laying her hands one over the other on her lap, and looking at her friends with placid reverence; whereupon Hafiz, who had been watching the scene restlessly came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles. Deronda felt it time to go. "Will you allow me to come again and inquire--perhaps at five to-morrow?" he said to Mrs. Meyrick. "Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then." "Good-bye," said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his hand. She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both strongly the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched hand. She lifted her eyes to his and said with reverential fervor, "The God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me. I did not believe there was any man so good. None before have thought me worthy of the best. You found me poor and miserable, yet you have given me the best." Deronda could not speak, but with silent adieux to the Meyricks, hurried away.

Mrs. Meyrick's house was not noisy: the front parlour looked on the river, and the back on gardens, so that though she was reading aloud to her daughters, the window could be left open to freshen the air of the small double room where a lamp and two candles were burning. The candles were on a table for Kate, who was drawing illustrations for a publisher; Amy and Mab were embroidering satin cushions for "the great world." Outside, the house looked very narrow and shabby, but many such grim-walled slices of our foggy London are the homes of a culture where poverty has put anything like vulgar display out of the question. The Meyricks' was a home of that kind: its interior was filled with objects which, for the mother, held memories of her marriage, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars. Mrs. Meyrick had stinted on other things so that she might keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world history which the children had early learned by heart. The chairs and tables were also old friends. But in these two little parlours with cheap furniture, there was space for a wide-glancing life, opened to the highest things in music, painting and poetry. The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings. But mother and daughters were all united by a triple bond - family love; admiration for the finest work; and industry. Hans's desire to spend his money in making their lives more luxurious had been resisted by all of them, saving him from regrets over his yearning for art that would by-and-by oblige him to give up his fellowship. It was enough for them to have only a grand treat of opera-going (to the gallery) when Hans came home on a visit. They were all small, and so in due proportion to their miniature rooms. Mrs. Meyrick was reading aloud from a French book; she was a lively little woman, half French, half Scotch, with a pretty articulateness of speech. Though she was not yet fifty, her rippling hair, covered by a quakerish net cap, was grey; her black dress suited a neat figure hardly five feet high. The daughters matched the mother. Everything about them was compact, from the firm coils of their hair, to their grey skirts in Puritan nonconformity with the fashion, which at that time would have demanded that four feminine circumferences should fill all the free space in the front parlour. The only large thing of its kind in the room was Hafiz, the Persian cat, comfortably poised on a chair, and opening his eyes now and then to see that the lower animals were not in any mischief. The book Mrs. Meyrick had before her was Erckmann-Chatrian's Historie d'un Conscrit. She had just finished reading aloud, and Mab exclaimed- "I think that is the finest story in the world." "Of course, Mab!" said Amy, "it is the last you have heard. Everything that pleases you is the best in its turn." "It is hardly to be called a story," said Kate. "It is a bit of history brought near us with a strong telescope, so that we can see the soldiers' faces." "I don't care what you call it," said Mab. "It makes me want to do something good, something grand. I want to take the world in my arms and kiss it. I must kiss you instead, little mother!" She threw her arms round her mother's neck. "Whenever you are in that mood, Mab, down goes your work," said Amy. "Oh!" groaned Mab, stooping to pick it up. "I wish I had three wounded conscripts to take care of." "You would spill their beef-tea while you were talking," said Amy. "Poor Mab! don't be hard on her," said the mother. "Give me the embroidery now, child." "Oh!" cried Mab again, rising and stretching her arms. "I wish something wonderful would happen. I feel like the deluge. The waters of the great deep are broken up, and the windows of heaven are opened. I must sit down and play the scales." Mab was opening the piano when a cab stopped before the house, and there came a rap of the knocker. "Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, "it is after ten!" She hastened out, leaving the parlour door open. "Mr. Deronda!" the girls heard her exclaim. Mab clasped her hands, saying in a whisper, "There now! Something is going to happen." But they could not hear Deronda's low reply, and Mrs. Meyrick immediately closed the parlour door. "I know I am trusting to your goodness in an extraordinary way," Deronda was saying, after giving his brief narrative; "but you can imagine how helpless I feel with this young creature on my hands. I could not take her among strangers, and in her nervous state I should dread taking her into a house full of servants. I have trusted to your mercy." "You have honoured me by trusting me. I see your difficulty. Pray bring her in." While Deronda went back to the cab, Mrs. Meyrick turned into the parlour and said: "Here is somebody to take care of instead of your wounded conscripts, Mab: a poor girl who was going to drown herself in despair. Mr. Deronda found her just in time to save her. He did not know what else it would be safe to do with her, so he has trusted us and brought her here. It seems she is a Jewess, but quite refined, he says - knowing Italian and music." The three girls were wondering and expectant: Mab looked rather awe-stricken at this answer to her wish. Meanwhile Deronda, returning to the cab where the pale face was gazing out, said, "I have brought you to some of the kindest people in the world: there are daughters like you. It is a happy home. Will you let me take you to them?" She stepped out obediently, putting her hand in his and forgetting her hat; and when Deronda led her into the light of the parlour, she made a picture that would have stirred much duller sensibilities than the Meyricks'. He put her hand into the mother's, inwardly rejoicing that the Meyricks were so small: the dark-curled head was the highest among them. The poor wanderer could not be afraid of these gentle faces: and now she was looking at each of them in turn while the mother said, "You must be weary, poor child." "We will take care of you - we will comfort you," cried Mab, caressing the small hand with both her own. This welcoming warmth was penetrating the bewildered one: she said to Mrs. Meyrick, with more collectedness in her sweet tones than he had heard before- "I am a stranger. I am a Jewess. You might have thought I was wicked." "No, we are sure you are good," burst out Mab. "We think no evil of you, poor child. You shall be safe with us," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Come now and sit down. You must have some food, and then you must rest." The stranger looked up again at Deronda, who said- "You will have no more fears with these friends?" "Oh, I should not fear. I think these are the ministering angels." Mrs. Meyrick wanted to lead her to a seat, but hanging back gently, the poor weary thing spoke as if needing to give a further account of herself. "My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way, all the way from Prague by myself. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when I was little, but I thought I could find her again. But the houses were all gone - I could not find her. It has been a long while, and I had not much money. That is why I am in distress." "Our mother will be good to you," cried Mab. "See what a nice little mother she is!" "Do sit down now," said Kate, moving a chair forward, while Amy ran to get some tea. Mirah resisted no longer, but seated herself with perfect grace; whereupon Hafiz came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles. Deronda felt it was time to go. "Will you allow me to come and inquire - perhaps at five tomorrow?" he asked Mrs. Meyrick. "Yes; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then." "Good-bye," said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his hand. She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both strongly the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched hand. She said with reverential fervour, "The God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me. I did not believe there was any man so good. None before have thought me worthy of the best. You found me poor and miserable, yet you have given me the best." Deronda could not speak, but with silent adieux to the Meyricks, hurried away.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 18

"The human nature unto which I felt That I belonged, and reverenced with love, Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space, with aid derived Of evidence from monuments, erect, Prostrate, or leaning toward their common rest In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime Of vanished nations." --WORDSWORTH: _The Prelude_. Sir Hugo carried out his plan of spending part of the autumn at Diplow, and by the beginning of October his presence was spreading some cheerfulness in the neighborhood, among all ranks and persons concerned, from the stately home of Brackenshaw and Quetcham to the respectable shop-parlors in Wanchester. For Sir Hugo was a man who liked to show himself and be affable, a Liberal of good lineage, who confided entirely in reform as not likely to make any serious difference in English habits of feeling, one of which undoubtedly is the liking to behold society well fenced and adorned with hereditary rank. Hence he made Diplow a most agreeable house, extending his invitations to old Wanchester solicitors and young village curates, but also taking some care in the combination of the guests, and not feeding all the common poultry together, so that they should think their meal no particular compliment. Easy-going Lord Brackenshaw, for example, would not mind meeting Robinson the attorney, but Robinson would have been naturally piqued if he had been asked to meet a set of people who passed for his equals. On all these points Sir Hugo was well informed enough at once to gain popularity for himself and give pleasure to others--two results which eminently suited his disposition. The rector of Pennicote now found a reception at Diplow very different from the haughty tolerance he had undergone during the reign of Grandcourt. It was not that the baronet liked Mr. Gascoigne; it was that he desired to keep up a marked relation of friendliness with him on account of Mrs. Grandcourt, for whom Sir Hugo's chivalry had become more and more engaged. Why? The chief reason was one that he could not fully communicate, even to Lady Mallinger--for he would not tell what he thought one woman's secret to another, even though the other was his wife--which shows that his chivalry included a rare reticence. Deronda, after he had become engaged to Mirah, felt it right to make a full statement of his position and purposes to Sir Hugo, and he chose to make it by letter. He had more than a presentiment that his fatherly friend would feel some dissatisfaction, if not pain, at this turn of his destiny. In reading unwelcome news, instead of hearing it, there is the advantage that one avoids a hasty expression of impatience which may afterward be repented of. Deronda dreaded that verbal collision which makes otherwise pardonable feeling lastingly offensive. And Sir Hugo, though not altogether surprised, was thoroughly vexed. His immediate resource was to take the letter to Lady Mallinger, who would be sure to express an astonishment which her husband could argue against as unreasonable, and in this way divide the stress of his discontent. And in fact when she showed herself astonished and distressed that all Daniel's wonderful talents, and the comfort of having him in the house, should have ended in his going mad in this way about the Jews, the baronet could say, "Oh, nonsense, my dear! depend upon it, Dan will not make a fool of himself. He has large notions about Judaism--political views which you can't understand. No fear but Dan will keep himself head uppermost." But with regard to the prospective marriage she afforded him no counter-irritant. The gentle lady observed, without rancor, that she had little dreamed of what was coming when she had Mirah to sing at her musical party and give lessons to Amabel. After some hesitation, indeed, she confessed it _had_ passed through her mind that after a proper time Daniel might marry Mrs. Grandcourt--because it seemed so remarkable that he should be at Genoa just at that time--and although she herself was not fond of widows she could not help thinking that such a marriage would have been better than his going altogether with the Jews. But Sir Hugo was so strongly of the same opinion that he could not correct it as a feminine mistake; and his ill-humor at the disproof of his disagreeable conclusions on behalf of Gwendolen was left without vent. He desired Lady Mallinger not to breathe a word about the affair till further notice, saying to himself, "If it is an unkind cut to the poor thing (meaning Gwendolen), the longer she is without knowing it the better, in her present nervous state. And she will best learn it from Dan himself." Sir Hugo's conjectures had worked so industriously with his knowledge, that he fancied himself well informed concerning the whole situation. Meanwhile his residence with his family at Diplow enabled him to continue his fatherly attentions to Gwendolen; and in these Lady Mallinger, notwithstanding her small liking for widows, was quite willing to second him. The plan of removal to Offendene had been carried out; and Gwendolen, in settling there, maintained a calm beyond her mother's hopes. She was experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from the renunciation of demands for self, and from taking the ordinary good of existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above expectation. Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening--still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness--as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. Those who have a self-knowledge prompting such self-accusation as Hamlet's, can understand this habitual feeling of rescue. And it was felt by Gwendolen as she lived through and through again the terrible history of her temptations, from their first form of illusory self-pleasing when she struggled away from the hold of conscience, to their latest form of an urgent hatred dragging her toward its satisfaction, while she prayed and cried for the help of that conscience which she had once forsaken. She was now dwelling on every word of Deronda's that pointed to her past deliverance from the worst evil in herself, and the worst infliction of it on others, and on every word that carried a force to resist self-despair. But she was also upborne by the prospect of soon seeing him again: she did not imagine him otherwise than always within her reach, her supreme need of him blinding her to the separateness of his life, the whole scene of which she filled with his relation to her--no unique preoccupation of Gwendolen's, for we are all apt to fall into this passionate egoism of imagination, not only toward our fellow-men, but toward God. And the future which she turned her face to with a willing step was one where she would be continually assimilating herself to some type that he would hold before her. Had he not first risen on her vision as a corrective presence which she had recognized in the beginning with resentment, and at last with entire love and trust? She could not spontaneously think of an end to that reliance, which had become to her imagination like the firmness of the earth, the only condition of her walking. And Deronda was not long before he came to Diplow, which was a more convenient distance from town than the Abbey. He had wished to carry out a plan for taking Ezra and Mirah to a mild spot on the coast, while he prepared another home which Mirah might enter as his bride, and where they might unitedly watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not to be removed, unless it were to go with them to the East. All outward solicitations were becoming more and more of a burden to him; but his mind dwelt on the possibility of this voyage with a visionary joy. Deronda, in his preparations for the marriage, which he hoped might not be deferred beyond a couple of months, wished to have fuller consultation as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo, and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he thought quite as much of another reason--his promise to Gwendolen. The sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. It was no treason to Mirah, but a part of that full nature which made his love for her the more worthy, that his joy in her could hold by its side the care for another. For what is love itself, for the one we love best?--an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love. Deronda came twice to Diplow, and saw Gwendolen twice--and yet he went back to town without having told her anything about the change in his lot and prospects. He blamed himself; but in all momentous communication likely to give pain we feel dependent on some preparatory turn of words or associations, some agreement of the other's mood with the probable effect of what we have to impart. In the first interview Gwendolen was so absorbed in what she had to say to him, so full of questions which he must answer, about the arrangement of her life, what she could do to make herself less ignorant, how she could be kindest to everybody, and make amends for her selfishness and try to be rid of it, that Deronda utterly shrank from waiving her immediate wants in order to speak of himself, nay, from inflicting a wound on her in these moments when she was leaning on him for help in her path. In the second interview, when he went with new resolve to command the conversation into some preparatory track, he found her in a state of deep depression, overmastered by some distasteful miserable memories which forced themselves on her as something more real and ample than any new material out of which she could mould her future. She cried hysterically, and said that he would always despise her. He could only seek words of soothing and encouragement: and when she gradually revived under them, with that pathetic look of renewed childlike interest which we see in eyes where the lashes are still beaded with tears, it was impossible to lay another burden on her. But time went on, and he felt it a pressing duty to make the difficult disclosure. Gwendolen, it was true, never recognized his having any affairs; and it had never even occurred to her to ask him why he happened to be at Genoa. But this unconsciousness of hers would make a sudden revelation of affairs that were determining his course in life all the heavier blow to her; and if he left the revelation to be made by different persons, she would feel that he had treated her with cruel inconsiderateness. He could not make the communication in writing: his tenderness could not bear to think of her reading his virtual farewell in solitude, and perhaps feeling his words full of a hard gladness for himself and indifference for her. He went down to Diplow again, feeling that every other peril was to be incurred rather than that of returning and leaving her still in ignorance. On this third visit Deronda found Hans Meyrick installed with his easel at Diplow, beginning his picture of the three daughters sitting on a bank, "in the Gainsborough style," and varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of a lady's bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily persistent (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet appeared among the advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration for Deronda, Hans could not help a certain irritation against him, such as extremely incautious, open natures are apt to feel when the breaking of a friend's reserve discloses a state of things not merely unsuspected but the reverse of what had been hoped and ingeniously conjectured. It is true that poor Hans had always cared chiefly to confide in Deronda, and had been quite incurious as to any confidence that might have been given in return; but what outpourer of his own affairs is not tempted to think any hint of his friend's affairs is an egotistic irrelevance? That was no reason why it was not rather a sore reflection to Hans that while he had been all along naively opening his heart about Mirah, Deronda had kept secret a feeling of rivalry which now revealed itself as the important determining fact. Moreover, it is always at their peril that our friends turn out to be something more than we were aware of. Hans must be excused for these promptings of bruised sensibility, since he had not allowed them to govern his substantial conduct: he had the consciousness of having done right by his fortunate friend; or, as he told himself, "his metal had given a better ring than he would have sworn to beforehand." For Hans had always said that in point of virtue he was a _dilettante_: which meant that he was very fond of it in other people, but if he meddled with it himself he cut a poor figure. Perhaps in reward of his good behavior he gave his tongue the more freedom; and he was too fully possessed by the notion of Deronda's happiness to have a conception of what he was feeling about Gwendolen, so that he spoke of her without hesitation. "When did you come down, Hans?" said Deronda, joining him in the grounds where he was making a study of the requisite bank and trees. "Oh, ten days ago; before the time Sir Hugo fixed. I ran down with Rex Gascoigne and stayed at the rectory a day or two. I'm up in all the gossip of these parts; I know the state of the wheelwright's interior, and have assisted at an infant school examination. Sister Anna, with the good upper lip, escorted me, else I should have been mobbed by three urchins and an idiot, because of my long hair and a general appearance which departs from the Pennicote type of the beautiful. Altogether, the village is idyllic. Its only fault is a dark curate with broad shoulders and broad trousers who ought to have gone into the heavy drapery line. The Gascoignes are perfect--besides being related to the Vandyke duchess. I caught a glimpse of her in her black robes at a distance, though she doesn't show to visitors." "She was not staying at the rectory?" said Deronda. "No; but I was taken to Offendene to see the old house, and as a consequence I saw the duchess' family. I suppose you have been there and know all about them?" "Yes, I have been there," said Deronda, quietly. "A fine old place. An excellent setting for a widow with romantic fortunes. And she seems to have had several romances. I think I have found out that there was one between her and my friend Rex." "Not long before her marriage, then?" said Deronda, really interested, "for they had only been a year at Offendene. How came you to know anything of it?" "Oh--not ignorant of what it is to be a miserable devil, I learn to gloat on the signs of misery in others. I found out that Rex never goes to Offendene, and has never seen the duchess since she came back; and Miss Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about charade-acting--for I went through some of my nonsense to please the young ones--something that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin close enough to get singed. I don't know what was her part in the affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. That is always the way when an exceptionally worthy young man forms an attachment. I understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and remaining a bachelor. But these are green resolves. Since the duke did not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my friend Rex's sake. Who knows?" "Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?" said Deronda, ready to add that Hans's success in constructing her fortunes hitherto had not been enough to warrant a new attempt. "You monster!" retorted Hans, "do you want her to wear weeds for _you_ all her life--burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and merry?" Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so much annoyed that Hans turned the current of his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his shoulders a little over the thought that there really had been some stronger feeling between Deronda and the duchess than Mirah would like to know of. "Why didn't she fall in love with me?" thought Hans, laughing at himself. "She would have had no rivals. No woman ever wanted to discuss theology with me." No wonder that Deronda winced under that sort of joking with a whip-lash. It touched sensibilities that were already quivering with the anticipation of witnessing some of that pain to which even Hans's light words seemed to give more reality:--any sort of recognition by another giving emphasis to the subject of our anxiety. And now he had come down with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He had sent word that he intended to call and to ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he found her awaiting him in the old drawing-room where some chief crises of her life had happened. She seemed less sad than he had seen her since her husband's death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found her. She was all the more alive to the sadness perceptible in Deronda; and they were no sooner seated--he at a little distance opposite to her--than she said: "You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief and despair the last time. But I am not so today. I have been sorry ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain about me." There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen's tone and look as she uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer a beginning of the task. "I _am_ in some trouble to-day," he said, looking at her rather mournfully; "but it is because I have things to tell you which you will almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of before. They are things affecting my own life--my own future. I shall seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in me--never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter into subjects which at the moment were really less pressing to me than the trials you have been going through." There was a sort of timid tenderness in Deronda's deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look, as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her scenes of beseeching and confession. A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir Hugo's property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda's way of asking her pardon, "You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?" "It will perhaps astonish you," said Deronda, "that I have only quite lately known who were my parents." Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without check. "The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to learn that--in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my father's death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill, and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained. Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew." "_A Jew_!" Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system. Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if remonstrating against the mother's conduct, "What difference need that have made?" "It has made a great difference to me that I have known it," said Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily--the distance between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language, making him uncertain what force his words would carry. Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, "I hope there is nothing to make you mind. _You_ are just the same as if you were not a Jew." She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding. "The discovery was far from being painful to me," he said, "I had been gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my life to some effort at giving them effect." Again Gwendolen seemed shaken--again there was a look of frustration, but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired her with a dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it could reach Deronda's. Great ideas in general which she had attributed to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure. "That is an object," he said, after a moment, "which will by-and-by force me to leave England for some time--for some years. I have purposes which will take me to the East." Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating. Gwendolen's lips began to tremble. "But you will come back?" she said, tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them. Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against the corner of the mantel-piece, at a different angle from her face. But when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned and looked up at him, awaiting an answer. "If I live," said Deronda--"_some time_." They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating something that she had to say. "What are you going to do?" she asked, at last, very mildly. "Can I understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?" "I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there," said Deronda, gently--anxious to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of their separateness from each other. "The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own." There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of unrelenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation. That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen's small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her, and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been roused in her relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy--something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all her anger into self-humiliation. There had been a long silence. Deronda had stood still, even thankful for an interval before he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat like a statue with her wrists lying over each other and her eyes fixed--the intensity of her mental action arresting all other excitation. At length something occurred to her that made her turn her face to Deronda and say in a trembling voice, "Is that all you can tell me?" The question was like a dart to him. "The Jew whom I mentioned just now," he answered, not without a certain tremor in his tones too, "the remarkable man who has greatly influenced my mind, has not perhaps been totally unheard of by you. He is the brother of Miss Lapidoth, whom you have often heard sing." A great wave of remembrance passed through Gwendolen and spread as a deep, painful flush over neck and face. It had come first at the scene of that morning when she had called on Mirah, and heard Deronda's voice reading, and been told, without then heeding it, that he was reading Hebrew with Mirah's brother. "He is very ill--very near death now," Deronda went on, nervously, and then stopped short. He felt that he must wait. Would she divine the rest? "Did she tell you that I went to her?" said Gwendolen, abruptly, looking up at him. "No," said Deronda. "I don't understand you." She turned away her eyes again, and sat thinking. Slowly the color dried out of face and neck, and she was as pale as before--with that almost withered paleness which is seen after a painful flush. At last she said--without turning toward him--in a low, measured voice, as if she were only thinking aloud in preparation for future speech, "But _can_ you marry?" "Yes," said Deronda, also in a low voice. "I am going to marry." At first there was no change in Gwendolen's attitude: she only began to tremble visibly; then she looked before her with dilated eyes, as at something lying in front of her, till she stretched her arms out straight, and cried with a smothered voice, "I said I should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And I am forsaken." Deronda's anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her feet. She was the victim of his happiness. "I am cruel, too, I am cruel," he repeated, with a sort of groan, looking up at her imploringly. His presence and touch seemed to dispel a horrible vision, and she met his upward look of sorrow with something like the return of consciousness after fainting. Then she dwelt on it with that growing pathetic movement of the brow which accompanies the revival of some tender recollection. The look of sorrow brought back what seemed a very far-off moment--the first time she had ever seen it, in the library at the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. Deronda would not let her hands go--held them still with one of his, and himself pressed her handkerchief against her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child, making an effort to speak, which was hindered by struggling sobs. At last she succeeded in saying, brokenly, "I said--I said--it should be better--better with me--for having known you." His eyes too were larger with tears. She wrested one of her hands from his, and returned his action, pressing his tears away. "We shall not be quite parted," he said. "I will write to you always, when I can, and you will answer?" He waited till she said in a whisper, "I will try." "I shall be more with you than I used to be," Deronda said with gentle urgency, releasing her hands and rising from his kneeling posture. "If we had been much together before, we should have felt our differences more, and seemed to get farther apart. Now we can perhaps never see each other again. But our minds may get nearer." Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look of grief, such as the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn up after the burial of life's joy, made him hate his own words: they seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was like a dreadful whisper in her ear, which dulled all other consciousness; and she had not known that she was rising. Deronda could not speak again. He thought that they must part in silence, but it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him. He advanced to put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers within it, she said what her mind had been laboring with, "You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will try--try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only harm. Don't let me be harm to _you_. It shall be the better for me--" She could not finish. It was not that she was sobbing, but that the intense effort with which she spoke made her too tremulous. The burden of that difficult rectitude toward him was a weight her frame tottered under. She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned away. When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting motionless. "Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill," she said, bending over her and touching her cold hands. "Yes, mamma. But don't be afraid. I am going to live," said Gwendolen, bursting out hysterically. Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the day and half the night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, but cried in the midst of them to her mother, "Don't be afraid. I shall live. I mean to live." After all, she slept; and when she waked in the morning light, she looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, "Ah, poor mamma! You have been sitting up with me. Don't be unhappy. I shall live. I shall be better."

Sir Hugo carried out his plan of spending part of the autumn at Diplow. He extended invitations to old Wanchester solicitors and young village curates, taking such care in the combination of guests that he both gained popularity for himself and gave pleasure to others. The rector of Pennicote now found a reception at Diplow very different from Grandcourt's haughtiness. Sir Hugo desired to keep up a marked friendliness with him on account of Mrs. Grandcourt, for whom he secretly thought Deronda had a preference. But Deronda, after he became engaged to Mirah, wrote a full statement of his position and purposes to Sir Hugo. He feared that his fatherly friend would feel some dissatisfaction, if not pain, at this turn of his destiny, and thought a letter would avoid any hasty response which might afterward be repented of. And Sir Hugo, though not altogether surprised, was thoroughly vexed. He took the letter to Lady Mallinger, who professed herself astonished, observing without rancour that she had little dreamed of what was coming when she had Mirah to sing at her musical party. Indeed, she confessed it had passed through her mind that Daniel might marry Mrs. Grandcourt. Sir Hugo desired his wife not to breathe a word about the affair till further notice, saying to himself, "If it is an unkind cut to poor Gwendolen, the longer she is without knowing it the better, in her present nervous state. And she will best learn it from Dan himself." The plan of removal to Offendene had been carried out; and Gwendolen maintained a calm beyond her mother's hopes. She was experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from taking the ordinary good of existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above expectation. Does one who has been lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our daily life as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening as a salvation. This feeling of rescue came to Gwendolen as she lived through and through again the terrible history of her temptations, from her first illusory self-pleasing to her final hatred dragging her toward its satisfaction, while she prayed and cried for the help of that conscience which she had once forsaken. She was now dwelling on every word of Deronda's that pointed to her deliverance from the worst evil in herself, and on every word that carried a force to resist self-despair. But she was also upborne by the prospect of soon seeing him again: she imagined him always within her reach, her supreme need of him blinding her to the separateness of his life, which she filled with his relation to her. We are all apt to fall into this passionate egoism, not only toward our fellow-men, but toward God. And she looked to a future where she would be guided by him. Had she not seen him first as a corrective presence which she had recognized in the beginning with resentment, and at last with entire love and trust? She could not imagine an end to that reliance. And soon Deronda came to Diplow. He had wished to take Ezra and Mirah to a mild spot on the coast, while he prepared another home which Mirah might enter as his bride, and where they might watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not to be removed, unless it were to go with them to the East: his mind dwelt on the possibility of this voyage with a visionary joy. Deronda, in his preparations for the marriage, which he hoped not to defer beyond a couple of months, wished to consult Sir Hugo about his affairs. But he had another reason to visit Diplow - his promise to Gwendolen. His sense of blessedness in his own lot had an aching anxiety at its heart: it was no treason to Mirah, but a part of that full nature which, along with his joy in her, could hold by its side the care for another. Deronda came twice to Diplow, and saw Gwendolen twice - and yet he went back to town without having told her anything about the change in his prospects. He blamed himself; but in the first interview Gwendolen was so absorbed in what she had to say to him, so full of questions which he must answer about the arrangement of her life, how she could make herself less ignorant and selfish, that Deronda shrank from brushing her wants aside in order to speak of himself, nay, from inflicting a wound on her when she was leaning on him for help. In the second interview, he found her in a state of deep depression, overmastered by miserable memories. She cried hysterically, and said that he would always despise her. He could only seek words of soothing encouragement: and when she gradually revived under them, with a pathetic look of renewed childlike interest, it was impossible to lay another burden on her. But he felt it a pressing duty to make the difficult disclosure. Gwendolen, it was true, never recognized his having any affairs; and it had never even occurred to her to ask him why he happened to be at Genoa. But this unconsciousness would make a sudden revelation all the heavier a blow to her; and it would be cruel to let her hear of it from others. He could not tell her in writing: his tenderness could not bear to think of her reading his virtual farewell in solitude, and perhaps feeling him indifferent to her. So he made a third visit. This time, he found Hans Meyrick installed with his easel at Diplow, beginning his picture of the three daughters "in the Gainsborough style," and varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to see the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but Deronda detected some artificiality in it. With all his admiration for Deronda, Hans could not help a certain irritation against him, for keeping the true state of his feelings hidden. It is true that poor Hans had confided in Deronda without any curiosity as to confidences that might have been given in return; but he must be excused for his bruised sensibility, since he had the consciousness of having done right by his fortunate friend. Perhaps in reward of his good behaviour he gave his tongue more freedom; and he was too convinced of Deronda's happiness to have any idea of what he was feeling about Gwendolen, so that he spoke of her without hesitation. "When did you come down, Hans?" said Deronda, joining him in the grounds where he was sketching. "Oh, ten days ago; I ran down with Rex Gascoigne and stayed at the rectory a day or two. I'm up in all the gossip of these parts, and have assisted at an infant school to which sister Anna escorted me. The village is idyllic, and the Gascoignes are perfect - besides being related to the Vandyke duchess. I caught a glimpse of her in her black robes at a distance when I was taken to Offendene to see the old house. I suppose you have been there? A fine old place. An excellent setting for a widow with romantic fortunes. And she seems to have had several romances. I think there was one between her and my friend Rex." "Not long before her marriage, then?" said Deronda, interested. "How came you to know of it?" "Oh - I found out that Rex never goes to Offendene, and has never seen the duchess since she came back; and Anna let slip something that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin close enough to get singed. I don't know what was her part in the affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. I understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and remaining a bachelor. But since the duke did not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my friend Rex's. Who knows?" "Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?" said Deronda. "You monster!" retorted Hans, "do you want her to wear mourning clothes for you all her life?" Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so annoyed that Hans changed the subject. No wonder that Deronda winced. The joke touched sensibilities that were already quivering with the anticipation of witnessing Gwendolen's pain. But he had come with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the trial, and the next day he rode to Offendene. He found Gwendolen awaiting him in the drawing-room. She seemed less sad than he had seen her since her husband's death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found her. She noticed Deronda's sadness; and they were no sooner seated than she said: "You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of despair last time. But I have been sorry ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain about me." There was an unusual sweetness in Gwendolen's tone that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty into his task. But he felt obliged to begin. "I am in some trouble to-day," he said, looking at her rather mournfully; "because I have things to tell you which you will think I should have spoken of before. They are things affecting my own future. I shall seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in me - never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter into less pressing subjects than the trials you were going through." There was a sort of timid, pleading tenderness in Deronda's deep tones. A thrill of surprise was visible in Gwendolen, but she did not feel any fear. Her mind flew at once of some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir Hugo's property. She said- "You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me." "It will perhaps astonish you," said Deronda, "that I have only quite lately known who were my parents." Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her expectations were right. Deronda went on. "I went to Italy to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my father's death, when I was a baby. But she is now very ill, and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained. Her chief reason for it had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew." "A Jew!" Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system. Deronda coloured, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her answer. Looking up, she said- "What difference need that have made?" "It has made a great difference to me that I have known it," said Deronda, emphatically, but uncertain what force his words would carry. Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, "I hope there is nothing to make you mind. You are just the same as if you were not a Jew." She meant to reassure him that nothing of that external sort could affect the way in which she regarded him. "The discovery was far from being painful to me," he said. "I was glad of it. I had been prepared for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas have attracted me so much that I think of devoting my life to them." Again Gwendolen seemed shaken - this time frustration was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with lips childishly parted. She had a dreadful foreboding of mountainous travel for her mind before it could reach Deronda's. "That is an object," he said, "which will by-and-by force me to leave England for some time - for some years. I have purposes which will take me to the East." Gwendolen's lips began to tremble. "But you will come back?" she said, tasting her own tears as they fell. Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to the mantelpiece. "If I live," he said- "some time." They were both silent. "What are you going to do?" she asked at last, very mildly. "Can I understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?" "I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there," said Deronda, gently, and anxious to expand on impersonal reasons. "The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, though they are scattered over the face of the globe. I am resolved to devote my life to that task." There was a long silence. The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. Before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes, she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain neglected in newspapers, enter like an earthquake into their own lives. That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen's small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving. All her troubles had still left her with the impression that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her, and it was because of this that no jealousy had been roused in her relation to Deronda: she could not think of him as rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy - something spiritual and tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled her into self-humiliation. Gwendolen sat like a statue in the intensity of her thought. At length something occurred to her that made her turn to Deronda and say in a trembling voice- "Is that everything?" The question was like a dart to him. "The Jew whom I mentioned just now," he answered, with a tremor in his tones too, "is the brother of Miss Lapidoth, whom you have often heard sing." A great wave of remembrance passed through Gwendolen and spread as a deep, painful flush over neck and face. She recalled that morning when she had called on Mirah, and heard Deronda's voice reading, and had been told that he was reading Hebrew with Mirah's brother. "He is very ill - very near death," Deronda went on nervously, and then stopped short. Would she divine the rest? "Did she tell you that I went to her?" said Gwendolen, abruptly. "No," said Deronda. "I don't understand you." She turned away her eyes again, and sat thinking, until at last she said- "But can you marry?" "Yes," said Deronda. "I am going to marry." Gwendolen began to tremble visibly; then she looked before her with dilated eyes, stretched out her arms, and cried with a smothered voice- "I said I should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And I am forsaken." Deronda's anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized her outstretched hands, and kneeled at her feet. She was the victim of his happiness. "I am cruel, too, I am cruel," he repeated, with a sort of groan. His presence and touch seemed to dispel a horrible vision, and she felt something like the return of consciousness after fainting. She dwelt on his face with tender recollection: his look of sorrow brought back a very far-off moment in the library, at the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. Deronda held her hands still with one of his, and himself pressed her handkerchief against her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child, her effort to speak hindered by struggling sobs. At last she said, brokenly- "I said - it should be better - better with me - for having known you." His eyes too were large with tears. She pulled one of her hands from his, and returned his action, pressing his tears away. "We shall not be quite parted," he said. "I will write to you always, when I can, and you will answer?" He waited till she said in a whisper, "I will try." "I shall be more with you than I used to be," Deronda said, releasing her hands and rising from his knees. "Perhaps we can never see each other again. But our minds may get nearer." Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look of grief made him hate his own words: they seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was like a dreadful whisper in her ear. Deronda could not speak again: yet it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him. He put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers within it, she said what her mind had been labouring with- "You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will try - try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only harm. Don't let me be harm to you. It shall be the better for me-" She could not finish for the intense effort of speaking. The burden of that difficult rectitude was a weight her frame tottered under. She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned away. When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting motionless. "Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill," she said, touching her cold hands. "Yes, mamma. But don't be afraid. I am going to live," said Gwendolen, bursting out hysterically. Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the day and half the night she fell into fits of shrieking, but cried in the midst of them to her mother, "Don't be afraid. I shall live. I mean to live." After all, she slept; and when she waked, she looked up at her mother and said tenderly, "Ah, poor mamma! You have been sitting up with me. Don't be unhappy. I shall live. I shall be better."

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 69

In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields. Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy. Deronda's love for Mirah was strongly imbued with that blessed protectiveness. Even with infantine feet she had begun to tread among thorns; and the first time he had beheld her face it had seemed to him the girlish image of despair. But now she was glowing like a dark-tipped yet delicate ivory-tinted flower in the warm sunlight of content, thinking of any possible grief as part of that life with Deronda, which she could call by no other name than good. And he watched the sober gladness which gave new beauty to her movements; and her habitual attitudes of repose, with a delight which made him say to himself that it was enough of personal joy for him to save her from pain. She knew nothing of Hans's struggle or of Gwendolen's pang; for after the assurance that Deronda's hidden love had been for her, she easily explained Gwendolen's eager solicitude about him as part of a grateful dependence on his goodness, such as she herself had known. And all Deronda's words about Mrs. Grandcourt confirmed that view of their relation, though he never touched on it except in the most distant manner. Mirah was ready to believe that he had been a rescuing angel to many besides herself. The only wonder was, that she among them all was to have the bliss of being continually by his side. So, when the bridal veil was around Mirah it hid no doubtful tremors--only a thrill of awe at the acceptance of a great gift which required great uses. And the velvet canopy never covered a more goodly bride and bridegroom, to whom their people might more wisely wish offspring; more truthful lips never touched the sacrament marriage-wine; the marriage-blessing never gathered stronger promise of fulfillment than in the integrity of their mutual pledge. Naturally, they were married according to the Jewish rite. And since no religion seems yet to have demanded that when we make a feast we should invite only the highest rank of our acquaintances, few, it is to be hoped, will be offended to learn that among the guests at Deronda's little wedding-feast was the entire Cohen family, with the one exception of the baby who carried on her teething intelligently at home. How could Mordecai have borne that those friends of his adversity should have been shut out from rejoicing in common with him? Mrs. Meyrick so fully understood this that she had quite reconciled herself to meeting the Jewish pawnbroker, and was there with her three daughters--all of them enjoying the consciousness that Mirah's marriage to Deronda crowned a romance which would always make a sweet memory to them. For which of them, mother or girls, had not had a generous part in it--giving their best in feeling and in act to her who needed? If Hans could have been there, it would have been better; but Mab had already observed that men must suffer for being so inconvenient; suppose she, Kate, and Amy had all fallen in love with Mr. Deronda?--but being women they were not so ridiculous. The Meyricks were rewarded for conquering their prejudices by hearing a speech from Mr. Cohen, which had the rare quality among speeches of not being quite after the usual pattern. Jacob ate beyond his years, and contributed several small whinnying laughs as a free accompaniment of his father's speech, not irreverently, but from a lively sense that his family was distinguishing itself; while Adelaide Rebekah, in a new Sabbath frock, maintained throughout a grave air of responsibility. Mordecai's brilliant eyes, sunken in their large sockets, dwelt on the scene with the cherishing benignancy of a spirit already lifted into an aloofness which nullified only selfish requirements and left sympathy alive. But continually, after his gaze had been traveling round on the others, it returned to dwell on Deronda with a fresh gleam of trusting affection. The wedding-feast was humble, but Mirah was not without splendid wedding-gifts. As soon as the betrothal had been known, there were friends who had entertained graceful devices. Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger had taken trouble to provide a complete equipment for Eastern travel, as well as a precious locket containing an inscription--"_To the bride of our dear Daniel Deronda all blessings. H. and L. M._" The Klesmers sent a perfect watch, also with a pretty inscription. But something more precious than gold and gems came to Deronda from the neighborhood of Diplow on the morning of his marriage. It was a letter containing these words: Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words--that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better--it shall be better with me because I have known you. GWENDOLEN GRANDCOURT. The preparations for the departure of all three to the East began at once; for Deronda could not deny Ezra's wish that they should set out on the voyage forthwith, so that he might go with them, instead of detaining them to watch over him. He had no belief that Ezra's life would last through the voyage, for there were symptoms which seemed to show that the last stage of his malady had set in. But Ezra himself had said, "Never mind where I die, so that I am with you." He did not set out with them. One morning early he said to Deronda, "Do not quit me to-day. I shall die before it is ended." He chose to be dressed and sit up in his easy chair as usual, Deronda and Mirah on each side of him, and for some hours he was unusually silent, not even making the effort to speak, but looking at them occasionally with eyes full of some restful meaning, as if to assure them that while this remnant of breathing-time was difficult, he felt an ocean of peace beneath him. It was not till late in the afternoon, when the light was falling, that he took a hand of each in his and said, looking at Deronda, "Death is coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and reunion--which takes me from your bodily eyes and gives me full presence in your soul. Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together." He paused, and Deronda waited, thinking that there might be another word for him. But slowly and with effort Ezra, pressing on their hands, raised himself and uttered in Hebrew the confession of the divine Unity, which long for generations has been on the lips of the dying Israelite. He sank back gently into his chair, and did not speak again. But it was some hours before he had ceased to breathe, with Mirah's and Deronda's arms around him. "Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble."

Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that we can bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy. Deronda's love for Mirah was strongly imbued with that blessed protectiveness. Since infancy she had trod among thorns; and the first time he had beheld her face it had seemed the image of despair. But now she was glowing like a dark-tipped delicate flower in the sunlight of content, thinking of any possible grief as part of her life with Deronda. He watched the sober gladness which gave new beauty to her movements, with a delight which made him say to himself that it was enough of personal joy for him to save her from pain. She knew nothing of Hans's struggle or of Gwendolen's pang; for after the assurance that Deronda's hidden love had been for her, she easily explained Gwendolen's interest in him as part of a grateful dependence on his goodness, such as she herself had known. All Deronda's words about Mrs. Grandcourt confirmed that view, though he never touched on it except in the most distant manner. Mirah was ready to believe that he had been a rescuing angel to many besides herself. The only wonder was, that she among them all was to have the bliss of being continually by his side. So, when the bridal veil was around Mirah it hid no doubtful tremors - only a thrill of awe at the acceptance of a great gift. And the velvet canopy never covered a more goodly bride and bridegroom; more truthful lips never touched the sacramental marriage-wine; the marriage-blessing never held a stronger promise of fulfilment than in the integrity of their mutual pledge. Naturally, they were married according to the Jewish rite. Among the guests at Deronda's little wedding-feast was the entire Cohen family; for how could Mordecai have borne that those friends of his adversity should be shut out from rejoicing with him? Mrs. Meyrick had quite reconciled herself to meeting the Jewish pawnbroker, and was there with her three daughters - all enjoying the consciousness that Mirah's marriage to Deronda crowned a romance which would always make a sweet memory to them. For which of them, mother or girls, had not had a generous part in it? If Hans could have been there, it would have been better; but Mab observed that men must suffer for being so inconvenient; suppose she, Kate, and Amy had all fallen in love with Mr. Deronda?- but being women they were not so ridiculous. Mr. Cohen gave a speech; Jacob ate beyond his years; while Adelaide Rebekah, in a new Sabbath frock, maintained throughout a grave air of responsibility. Mordecai's brilliant eyes, sunken in their large sockets, dwelt on the scene with the benignancy of a spirit already lifted into an aloofness which nullified selfish needs and left sympathy alive. But his gaze always returned to dwell on Deronda with a fresh gleam of trusting affection. The wedding-feast was humble, but Mirah was not without splendid wedding-gifts. Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger had provided a complete equipment for Eastern travel, as well as a precious locket. The Klesmers sent a perfect watch, with a pretty inscription. But something more precious than gold and gems came to Deronda from the neighbourhood of Diplow on the morning of his marriage. It was a letter containing these words:- 'Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words - that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you. 'GWENDOLEN GRANDCOURT.' The preparations for the departure of all three to the East began at once; for Deronda could not deny Ezra's wish that they should set out on the journey forthwith, so that he might go with them. He had no belief that Ezra's life would last through the voyage, for there were symptoms which seemed to show that the last stage of his malady had set in. But Ezra himself had said, "Never mind where I die, so that I am with you." He did not set out with them. One morning early he said to Deronda, "Do not quit me to-day. I shall die before it is ended." He chose to be dressed and sit up in his easy chair as usual, Deronda and Mirah on each side of him, and for some hours he was unusually silent, not even making the effort to speak, but looking at them occasionally with eyes full of some restful meaning, as if to assure them that while this remnant of breathing-time was difficult, he felt an ocean of peace beneath him. It was not till late in the afternoon, when the light was falling, that he took a hand of each in his and said, looking at Deronda, "Death is coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and reunion - which takes me from your bodily eyes and gives me full presence in your soul. Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together." He paused, and Deronda waited, thinking that there might be another word for him. But slowly and with effort Ezra, pressing on their hands, raised himself and uttered in Hebrew the confession of the divine Unity, which for generations has been on the lips of the dying Israelite. He sank back gently into his chair, and did not speak again. But it was some hours before he had ceased to breathe, with Mirah's and Deronda's arms around him. "Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble."

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 70

"La mme fermet qui sert rsister l'amour sert aussi le rendre violent et durable; et les personnes faibles qui sont toujours agites des passions n'en sont presque jamais vritablement remplies." --LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. Among Deronda's letters the next morning was one from Hans Meyrick of four quarto pages, in the small, beautiful handwriting which ran in the Meyrick family. MY DEAR DERONDA,--In return for your sketch of Italian movements and your view of the world's affairs generally, I may say that here at home the most judicious opinion going as to the effects of present causes is that "time will show." As to the present causes of past effects, it is now seen that the late swindling telegrams account for the last year's cattle plague--which is a refutation of philosophy falsely so called, and justifies the compensation to the farmers. My own idea that a murrain will shortly break out in the commercial class, and that the cause will subsequently disclose itself in the ready sale of all rejected pictures, has been called an unsound use of analogy; but there are minds that will not hesitate to rob even the neglected painter of his solace. To my feeling there is great beauty in the conception that some bad judge might give a high price for my Berenice series, and that the men in the city would have already been punished for my ill-merited luck. Meanwhile I am consoling myself for your absence by finding my advantage in it--shining like Hesperus when Hyperion has departed; sitting with our Hebrew prophet, and making a study of his head, in the hours when he used to be occupied with you--getting credit with him as a learned young Gentile, who would have been a Jew if he could --and agreeing with him in the general principle, that whatever is best is for that reason Jewish. I never held it my _forte_ to be a severe reasoner, but I can see that if whatever is best is A, and B happens to be best, B must be A, however little you might have expected it beforehand. On that principle I could see the force of a pamphlet I once read to prove that all good art was Protestant. However, our prophet is an uncommonly interesting sitter--a better model than Rembrandt had for his Rabbi--and I never come away from him without a new discovery. For one thing, it is a constant wonder to me that, with all his fiery feeling for his race and their traditions, he is no straight-laced Jew, spitting after the word Christian, and enjoying the prospect that the Gentile mouth will water in vain for a slice of the roasted Leviathan, while Israel will be sending up plates for more, _ad libitum_, (You perceive that my studies had taught me what to expect from the orthodox Jew.) I confess that I have always held lightly by your account of Mordecai, as apologetic, and merely part of your disposition to make an antedeluvian point of view lest you should do injustice to the megatherium. But now I have given ear to him in his proper person, I find him really a sort of philosophical-allegorical-mystical believer, and yet with a sharp dialectic point, so that any argumentative rattler of peas in a bladder might soon be pricked in silence by him. The mixture may be one of the Jewish prerogatives, for what I know. In fact, his mind seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite commodiously, and how they are to be brought into agreement with the vast remainder is his affair, not mine. I leave it to him to settle our basis, never yet having seen a basis which is not a world-supporting elephant, more or less powerful and expensive to keep. My means will not allow me to keep a private elephant. I go into mystery instead, as cheaper and more lasting--a sort of gas which is likely to be continually supplied by the decomposition of the elephants. And if I like the look of an opinion, I treat it civilly, without suspicious inquiries. I have quite a friendly feeling toward Mordecai's notion that a whole Christian is three-fourths a Jew, and that from the Alexandrian time downward the most comprehensive minds have been Jewish; for I think of pointing out to Mirah that, Arabic and other incidents of life apart, there is really little difference between me and--Maimonides. But I have lately been finding out that it is your shallow lover who can't help making a declaration. If Mirah's ways were less distracting, and it were less of a heaven to be in her presence and watch her, I must long ago have flung myself at her feet, and requested her to tell me, with less indirectness, whether she wished me to blow my brains out. I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the temptation of turning it into certainty, which may spoil all. My Hope wanders among the orchard blossoms, feels the warm snow falling on it through the sunshine, and is in doubt of nothing; but, catching sight of Certainty in the distance, sees an ugly Janus-faced deity, with a dubious wink on the hither side of him, and turns quickly away. But you, with your supreme reasonableness, and self-nullification, and preparation for the worst--you know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation. (You observe my new vein of allegory?) Seriously, however, I must be permitted to allege that truth will prevail, that prejudice will melt before it, that diversity, accompanied by merit, will make itself felt as fascination, and that no virtuous aspiration will be frustrated--all which, if I mistake not, are doctrines of the schools, and they imply that the Jewess I prefer will prefer me. Any blockhead can cite generalities, but the mind-master discerns the particular cases they represent. I am less convinced that my society makes amends to Mordecai for your absence, but another substitute occasionally comes in the form of Jacob Cohen. It is worth while to catch our prophet's expression when he has that remarkable type of young Israel on his knee, and pours forth some Semitic inspiration with a sublime look of melancholy patience and devoutness. Sometimes it occurs to Jacob that Hebrew will be more edifying to him if he stops his ears with his palms, and imitates the venerable sounds as heard through that muffled medium. When Mordecai gently draws down the little fists and holds them fast, Jacob's features all take on an extraordinary activity, very much as if he was walking through a menagerie and trying to imitate every animal in turn, succeeding best with the owl and the peccary. But I dare say you have seen something of this. He treats me with the easiest familiarity, and seems in general to look at me as a second-hand Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on my disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts of future purchase. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if Mirah happens to come in. He turns child suddenly--his age usually strikes one as being like the Israelitish garments in the desert, perhaps near forty, yet with an air of recent production. But, with Mirah, he reminds me of the dogs that have been brought up by women, and remain manageable by them only. Still, the dog is fond of Mordecai too, and brings sugar-plums to share with him, filling his own mouth to rather an embarrassing extent, and watching how Mordecai deals with a smaller supply. Judging from this modern Jacob at the age of six, my astonishment is that his race has not bought us all up long ago, and pocketed our feebler generations in the form of stock and scrip, as so much slave property. There is one Jewess I should not mind being slave to. But I wish I did not imagine that Mirah gets a little sadder, and tries all the while to hide it. It is natural enough, of course, while she has to watch the slow death of this brother, whom she has taken to worshipping with such looks of loving devoutness that I am ready to wish myself in his place. For the rest, we are a little merrier than usual. Rex Gascoigne--you remember a head you admired among my sketches, a fellow with a good upper lip, reading law--has got some rooms in town now not far off us, and has had a neat sister (upper lip also good) staying with him the last fortnight. I have introduced them both to my mother and the girls, who have found out from Miss Gascoigne that she is cousin to your Vandyke duchess!!! I put the notes of exclamation to mark the surprise that the information at first produced on my feeble understanding. On reflection I discovered that there was not the least ground for surprise, unless I had beforehand believed that nobody could be anybody's cousin without my knowing it. This sort of surprise, I take it, depends on a liveliness of the spine, with a more or less constant nullity of brain. There was a fellow I used to meet at Rome who was in an effervescence of surprise at contact with the simplest information. Tell him what you would--that you were fond of easy boots--he would always say, "No! are you?" with the same energy of wonder: the very fellow of whom pastoral Browne wrote prophetically, "A wretch so empty that if e'er there be In nature found the least vacuity 'Twill be in him." I have accounted for it all--he had a lively spine. However, this cousinship with the duchess came out by chance one day that Mirah was with them at home and they were talking about the Mallingers. _Apropos_; I am getting so important that I have rival invitations. Gascoigne wants me to go down with him to his father's rectory in August and see the country round there. But I think self-interest well understood will take me to Topping Abbey, for Sir Hugo has invited me, and proposes--God bless him for his rashness! --that I should make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a bank--as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the other day and recommended me to apply myself to portrait. Of course I know what that means.--"My good fellow, your attempts at the historic and poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a successful portrait-painter--it has a little truth and a great facility in falsehood--your idealism will never do for gods and goddesses and heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery. Fate, my friend, has made you the hinder wheel--_rota posterior curras, et in axe secundo_--run behind, because you can't help it." --What great effort it evidently costs our friends to give us these candid opinions! I have even known a man to take the trouble to call, in order to tell me that I had irretrievably exposed my want of judgment in treating my subject, and that if I had asked him we would have lent me his own judgment. Such was my ingratitude and my readiness at composition, that even while he was speaking I inwardly sketched a Last Judgment with that candid friend's physiognomy on the left. But all this is away from Sir Hugo, whose manner of implying that one's gifts are not of the highest order is so exceedingly good-natured and comfortable that I begin to feel it an advantage not to be among those poor fellows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me tastes all the better because it comes out of his love for you, old boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me that your Vandyke duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the Mediterranean. I bethink me that it is possible to land from a yacht, or to be taken on to a yacht from the land. Shall you by chance have an opportunity of continuing your theological discussion with the fair Supralapsarian--I think you said her tenets were of that complexion? Is Duke Alphonso also theological?--perhaps an Arian who objects to triplicity. (Stage direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn gathers in his face till at the last word he flings down the letter, grasps his coat-collar in a statuesque attitude and so remains with a look generally tremendous, throughout the following soliloquy, "O night, O blackness, etc., etc.") Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used to more from me than a bare statement of facts, without comment or digression. One fact I have omitted--that the Klesmers on the eve of departure have behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be expected from the planets of genius and fortune in conjunction. Mirah is rich with their oriental gifts. What luck it will be if you come back and present yourself at the Abbey while I am there! I am going to behave with consummate discretion and win golden opinions, But I shall run up to town now and then, just for a peep into Gad Eden. You see how far I have got in Hebrew lore--up with my Lord Bolingbroke, who knew no Hebrew, but "understood that sort of learning and what is writ about it." If Mirah commanded, I would go to a depth below the tri-literal roots. Already it makes no difference to me whether the points are there or not. But while her brother's life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a lover, even one whose "hair is like a flock of goats on Mount Gilead"--and I flatter myself that few heads would bear that trying comparison better than mine. So I stay with my hope among the orchard-blossoms. Your devoted, HANS MEYRICK. Some months before, this letter from Hans would have divided Deronda's thoughts irritatingly: its romancing, about Mirah would have had an unpleasant edge, scarcely anointed with any commiseration for his friend's probable disappointment. But things had altered since March. Mirah was no longer so critically placed with regard to the Meyricks, and Deronda's own position had been undergoing a change which had just been crowned by the revelation of his birth. The new opening toward the future, though he would not trust in any definite visions, inevitably shed new lights, and influenced his mood toward past and present; hence, what Hans called his hope now seemed to Deronda, not a mischievous unreasonableness which roused his indignation, but an unusually persistent bird-dance of an extravagant fancy, and he would have felt quite able to pity any consequent suffering of his friend's, if he had believed in the suffering as probable. But some of the busy thought filling that long day, which passed without his receiving any new summons from his mother, was given to the argument that Hans Meyrick's nature was not one in which love could strike the deep roots that turn disappointment into sorrow: it was too restless, too readily excitable by novelty, too ready to turn itself into imaginative material, and wear its grief as a fantastic costume. "Already he is beginning to play at love: he is taking the whole affair as a comedy," said Deronda to himself; "he knows very well that there is no chance for him. Just like him--never opening his eyes on any possible objection I could have to receive his outpourings about Mirah. Poor old Hans! If we were under a fiery hail together he would howl like a Greek, and if I did not howl too it would never occur to him that I was as badly off as he. And yet he is tender-hearted and affectionate in intention, and I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes on in other people--but then he always imagines it to fit his own inclination." With this touch of causticity Deronda got rid of the slight heat at present raised by Hans's naive expansiveness. The nonsense about Gwendolen, conveying the fact that she was gone yachting with her husband, only suggested a disturbing sequel to his own strange parting with her. But there was one sentence in the letter which raised a more immediate, active anxiety. Hans's suspicion of a hidden sadness in Mirah was not in the direction of his wishes, and hence, instead of distrusting his observation here, Deronda began to conceive a cause for the sadness. Was it some event that had occurred during his absence, or only the growing fear of some event? Was it something, perhaps alterable, in the new position which had been made for her? Or--had Mordecai, against his habitual resolve, communicated to her those peculiar cherished hopes about him, Deronda, and had her quickly sensitive nature been hurt by the discovery that her brother's will or tenacity of visionary conviction had acted coercively on their friendship--been hurt by the fear that there was more of pitying self-suppression than of equal regard in Deronda's relation to him? For amidst all Mirah's quiet renunciation, the evident thirst of soul with which she received the tribute of equality implied a corresponding pain if she found that what she had taken for a purely reverential regard toward her brother had its mixture of condescension. In this last conjecture of Deronda's he was not wrong as to the quality in Mirah's nature on which he was founding--the latent protest against the treatment she had all her life being subject to until she met him. For that gratitude which would not let her pass by any notice of their acquaintance without insisting on the depth of her debt to him, took half its fervor from the keen comparison with what others had thought enough to render to her. Deronda's affinity in feeling enabled him to penetrate such secrets. But he was not near the truth in admitting the idea that Mordecai had broken his characteristic reticence. To no soul but Deronda himself had he yet breathed the history of their relation to each other, or his confidence about his friend's origin: it was not only that these subjects were for him too sacred to be spoken of without weighty reason, but that he had discerned Deronda's shrinking at any mention of his birth; and the severity of reserve which had hindered Mordecai from answering a question on a private affair of the Cohen family told yet more strongly here. "Ezra, how is it?" Mirah one day said to him--"I am continually going to speak to Mr. Deronda as if he were a Jew?" He smiled at her quietly, and said, "I suppose it is because he treats us as if he were our brother. But he loves not to have the difference of birth dwelt upon." "He has never lived with his parents, Mr. Hans, says," continued Mirah, to whom this was necessarily a question of interest about every one for whom she had a regard. "Seek not to know such things from Mr. Hans," said Mordecai, gravely, laying his hand on her curls, as he was wont. "What Daniel Deronda wishes us to know about himself is for him to tell us." And Mirah felt herself rebuked, as Deronda had done. But to be rebuked in this way by Mordecai made her rather proud. "I see no one so great as my brother," she said to Mrs. Meyrick one day that she called at the Chelsea house on her way home, and, according to her hope, found the little mother alone. "It is difficult to think that he belongs to the same world as those people I used to live amongst. I told you once that they made life seem like a madhouse; but when I am with Ezra he makes me feel that his life is a great good, though he has suffered so much; not like me, who wanted to die because I had suffered a little, and only for a little while. His soul is so full, it is impossible for him to wish for death as I did. I get the same sort of feeling from him that I got yesterday, when I was tired, and came home through the park after the sweet rain had fallen and the sunshine lay on the grass and flowers. Everything in the sky and under the sky looked so pure and beautiful that the weariness and trouble and folly seemed only a small part of what is, and I became more patient and hopeful." A dove-like note of melancholy in this speech caused Mrs. Meyrick to look at Mirah with new examination. After laying down her hat and pushing her curls flat, with an air of fatigue, she placed herself on a chair opposite her friend in her habitual attitude, her feet and hands just crossed; and at a distance she might have seemed a colored statue of serenity. But Mrs. Meyrick discerned a new look of suppressed suffering in her face, which corresponded to the hint that to be patient and hopeful required some extra influence. "Is there any fresh trouble on your mind, my dear?" said Mrs. Meyrick, giving up her needlework as a sign of concentrated attention. Mirah hesitated before she said, "I am too ready to speak of troubles, I think. It seems unkind to put anything painful into other people's minds, unless one were sure it would hinder something worse. And perhaps I am too hasty and fearful." "Oh, my dear, mothers are made to like pain and trouble for the sake of their children. Is it because the singing lessons are so few, and are likely to fall off when the season comes to an end? Success in these things can't come all at once." Mrs. Meyrick did not believe that she was touching the real grief; but a guess that could be corrected would make an easier channel for confidence. "No, not that," said Mirah, shaking her head gently. "I have been a little disappointed because so many ladies said they wanted me to give them or their daughters lessons, and then I never heard of them again, But perhaps after the holidays I shall teach in some schools. Besides, you know, I am as rich as a princess now. I have not touched the hundred pounds that Mrs. Klesmer gave me; and I should never be afraid that Ezra would be in want of anything, because there Mr. Deronda," and he said, 'It is the chief honor of my life that your brother will share anything with me.' Oh, no! Ezra and I can have no fears for each other about such things as food and clothing." "But there is some other fear on your mind," said Mrs. Meyrick not without divination--"a fear of something that may disturb your peace. Don't be forecasting evil, dear child, unless it is what you can guard against. Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a defense. But there's no defense against all the things that might be. Have you any more reason for being anxious now than you had a month ago?" "Yes, I have," said Mirah. "I have kept it from Ezra. I have not dared to tell him. Pray forgive me that I can't do without telling you. I _have_ more reason for being anxious. It is five days ago now. I am quite sure I saw my father." Mrs. Meyrick shrank into a smaller space, packing her arms across her chest and leaning forward--to hinder herself from pelting that father with her worst epithets. "The year has changed him," Mirah went on. "He had already been much altered and worn in the time before I left him. You remember I said how he used sometimes to cry. He was always excited one way or the other. I have told Ezra everything that I told you, and he says that my father had taken to gambling, which makes people easily distressed, and then again exalted. And now--it was only a moment that I saw him--his face was more haggard, and his clothes were shabby. He was with a much worse-looking man, who carried something, and they were hurrying along after an omnibus." "Well, child, he did not see you, I hope?" "No. I had just come from Mrs. Raymond's, and I was waiting to cross near the Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and gone out of sight. It was a dreadful moment. My old life seemed to have come back again, and it was worse than it had ever been before. And I could not help feeling it a new deliverance that he was gone out of sight without knowing that I was there. And yet it hurt me that I was feeling so--it seemed hateful in me--almost like words I once had to speak in a play, that 'I had warmed my hands in the blood of my kindred.' For where might my father be going? What may become of him? And his having a daughter who would own him in spite of all, might have hindered the worst. Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things in life turned into the worst? All those opposite feelings were meeting and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within. I don't know how I called a cab. I only remember that I was in it when I began to think, 'I cannot tell Ezra; he must not know.'" "You are afraid of grieving him?" Mrs. Meyrick asked, when Mirah had paused a little. "Yes--and there is something more," said Mirah, hesitatingly, as if she were examining her feeling before she would venture to speak of it. "I want to tell you; I cannot tell any one else. I could not have told my own mother: I should have closed it up before her. I feel shame for my father, and it is perhaps strange--but the shame is greater before Ezra than before any one else in the world. He desired me to tell him all about my life, and I obeyed him. But it is always like a smart to me to know that those things about my father are in Ezra's mind. And--can you believe it? when the thought haunts me how it would be if my father were to come and show himself before us both, what seems as if it would scorch me most is seeing my father shrinking before Ezra. That is the truth. I don't know whether it is a right feeling. But I can't help thinking that I would rather try to maintain my father in secret, and bear a great deal in that way, if I could hinder him from meeting my brother." "You must not encourage that feeling, Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick, hastily. "It would be very dangerous; it would be wrong. You must not have concealment of that sort." "But ought I now to tell Ezra that I have seen my father?" said Mirah, with deprecation in her tone. "No," Mrs. Meyrick answered, dubitatively. "I don't know that it is necessary to do that. Your father may go away with the birds. It is not clear that he came after you; you may never see him again. And then your brother will have been spared a useless anxiety. But promise me that if your father sees you--gets hold of you in any way again--and you will let us all know. Promise me that solemnly, Mirah. I have a right to ask it." Mirah reflected a little, then leaned forward to put her hands in Mrs. Meyrick's, and said, "Since you ask it, I do promise. I will bear this feeling of shame. I have been so long used to think that I must bear that sort of inward pain. But the shame for my father burns me more when I think of his meeting Ezra." She was silent a moment or two, and then said, in a new tone of yearning compassion, "And we are his children--and he was once young like us--and my mother loved him. Oh! I cannot help seeing it all close, and it hurts me like a cruelty." Mirah shed no tears: the discipline of her whole life had been against indulgence in such manifestation, which soon falls under the control of strong motives; but it seemed that the more intense expression of sorrow had entered into her voice. Mrs. Meyrick, with all her quickness and loving insight, did not quite understand that filial feeling in Mirah which had active roots deep below her indignation for the worst offenses. She could conceive that a mother would have a clinging pity and shame for a reprobate son, but she was out of patience with what she held an exaggerated susceptibility on behalf of this father, whose reappearance inclined her to wish him under the care of a turnkey. Mirah's promise, however, was some security against her weakness. That incident was the only reason that Mirah herself could have stated for the hidden sadness which Hans had divined. Of one element in her changed mood she could have given no definite account: it was something as dim as the sense of approaching weather-change, and had extremely slight external promptings, such as we are often ashamed to find all we can allege in support of the busy constructions that go on within us, not only without effort, but even against it, under the influence of any blind emotional stirring. Perhaps the first leaven of uneasiness was laid by Gwendolen's behavior on that visit which was entirely superfluous as a means of engaging Mirah to sing, and could have no other motive than the excited and strange questioning about Deronda. Mirah had instinctively kept the visit a secret, but the active remembrance of it had raised a new susceptibility in her, and made her alive as she had never been before to the relations Deronda must have with that society which she herself was getting frequent glimpses of without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education had produced in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness, with knowledge of the world's evil, and even this knowledge was a strange blending of direct observation with the effects of reading and theatrical study. Her memory was furnished with abundant passionate situation and intrigue, which she never made emotionally her own, but felt a repelled aloofness from, as she had done from the actual life around her. Some of that imaginative knowledge began now to weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt; and though Mirah would admit no position likely to affect her reverence for Deronda, she could not avoid a new painfully vivid association of his general life with a world away from her own, where there might be some involvement of his feeling and action with a woman like Gwendolen, who was increasingly repugnant to her--increasingly, even after she had ceased to see her; for liking and disliking can grow in meditation as fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. Any disquietude consciously due to the idea that Deronda's deepest care might be for something remote not only from herself but even from his friendship for her brother, she would have checked with rebuking questions:--What was she but one who had shared his generous kindness with many others? and his attachment to her brother, was it not begun late to be soon ended? Other ties had come before, and others would remain after this had been cut by swift-coming death. But her uneasiness had not reached that point of self-recognition in which she would have been ashamed of it as an indirect, presumptuous claim on Deronda's feeling. That she or any one else should think of him as her possible lover was a conception which had never entered her mind; indeed it was equally out of the question with Mrs. Meyrick and the girls, who with Mirah herself regarded his intervention in her life as something exceptional, and were so impressed by his mission as her deliverer and guardian that they would have held it an offense to him at his holding any other relation toward her: a point of view which Hans also had readily adopted. It is a little hard upon some men that they appear to sink for us in becoming lovers. But precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks was owing the disturbance of Mirah's unconsciousness. The first occasion could hardly have been more trivial, but it prepared her emotive nature for a deeper effect from what happened afterward. It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the Meyricks; was led to speak of her cousinship with Gwendolen. The visit had been arranged that Anna might see Mirah; the three girls were at home with their mother, and there was naturally a flux of talk among six feminine creatures, free from the presence of a distorting male standard. Anna Gascoigne felt herself much at home with the Meyrick girls, who knew what it was to have a brother, and to be generally regarded as of minor importance in the world; and she had told Rex that she thought the University very nice, because brothers made friends there whose families were not rich and grand, and yet (like the University) were very nice. The Meyricks seemed to her almost alarmingly clever, and she consulted them much on the best mode of teaching Lotta, confiding to them that she herself was the least clever of her family. Mirah had lately come in, and there was a complete bouquet of young faces around the tea-table--Hafiz, seated a little aloft with large eyes on the alert, regarding the whole scene as an apparatus for supplying his allowance of milk. "Think of our surprise, Mirah," said Kate. "We were speaking of Mr. Deronda and the Mallingers, and it turns out that Miss Gascoigne knows them." "I only knew about them," said Anna, a little flushed with excitement, what she had heard and now saw of the lovely Jewess being an almost startling novelty to her. "I have not even seen them. But some months ago, my cousin married Sir Hugo Mallinger's nephew, Mr. Grandcourt, who lived in Sir Hugo's place at Diplow, near us." "There!" exclaimed Mab, clasping her hands. "Something must come of that. Mrs. Grandcourt, the Vandyke duchess, is your cousin?" "Oh, yes; I was her bridesmaid," said Anna. "Her mamma and mine are sisters. My aunt was much richer before last year, but then she and mamma lost all their fortune. Papa is a clergyman, you know, so it makes very little difference to us, except that we keep no carriage, and have no dinner parties--and I like it better. But it was very sad for poor Aunt Davilow, for she could not live with us, because she has four daughters besides Gwendolen; but then, when she married Mr. Grandcourt, it did not signify so much, because of his being so rich." "Oh, this finding out relationships is delightful!" said Mab. "It is like a Chinese puzzle that one has to fit together. I feel sure something wonderful may be made of it, but I can't tell what." "Dear me, Mab," said Amy, "relationships must branch out. The only difference is, that we happen to know some of the people concerned. Such things are going on every day." "And pray, Amy, why do you insist on the number nine being so wonderful?" said Mab. "I am sure that is happening every day. Never mind, Miss Gascoigne; please go on. And Mr. Deronda?--have you never seen Mr. Deronda? You _must_ bring him in." "No, I have not seen him," said Anna; "but he was at Diplow before my cousin was married, and I have heard my aunt speaking of him to papa. She said what you have been saying about him--only not so much: I mean, about Mr. Deronda living with Sir Hugo Mallinger, and being so nice, she thought. We talk a great deal about every one who comes near Pennicote, because it is so seldom there is any one new. But I remember, when I asked Gwendolen what she thought of Mr. Deronda, she said, 'Don't mention it, Anna: but I think his hair is dark.' That was her droll way of answering: she was always so lively. It is really rather wonderful that I should come to hear so much about him, all through Mr. Hans knowing Rex, and then my having the pleasure of knowing you," Anna ended, looking at Mrs. Meyrick with a shy grace. "The pleasure is on our side too; but the wonder would have been, if you had come to this house without hearing of Mr. Deronda--wouldn't it, Mirah?" said Mrs. Meyrick. Mirah smiled acquiescently, but had nothing to say. A confused discontent took possession of her at the mingling of names and images to which she had been listening. "My son calls Mrs. Grandcourt the Vandyke duchess," continued Mrs. Meyrick, turning again to Anna; "he thinks her so striking and picturesque." "Yes," said Anna. "Gwendolen was always so beautiful--people fell dreadfully in love with her. I thought it a pity, because it made them unhappy." "And how do you like Mr. Grandcourt, the happy lover?" said Mrs. Meyrick, who, in her way, was as much interested as Mab in the hints she had been hearing of vicissitude in the life of a widow with daughters. "Papa approved of Gwendolen's accepting him, and my aunt says he is very generous," said Anna, beginning with a virtuous intention of repressing her own sentiments; but then, unable to resist a rare occasion for speaking them freely, she went on--"else I should have thought he was not very nice--rather proud, and not at all lively, like Gwendolen. I should have thought some one younger and more lively would have suited her better. But, perhaps, having a brother who seems to us better than any one makes us think worse of others." "Wait till you see Mr. Deronda," said Mab, nodding significantly. "Nobody's brother will do after him." "Our brothers _must_ do for people's husbands," said Kate, curtly, "because they will not get Mr. Deronda. No woman will do for him to marry." "No woman ought to want him to marry him," said Mab, with indignation. "_I_ never should. Fancy finding out that he had a tailor's bill, and used boot-hooks, like Hans. Who ever thought of his marrying?" "I have," said Kate. "When I drew a wedding for a frontispiece to 'Hearts and Diamonds,' I made a sort of likeness to him for the bridegroom, and I went about looking for a grand woman who would do for his countess, but I saw none that would not be poor creatures by the side of him." "You should have seen this Mrs. Grandcourt then," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Hans says that she and Mr. Deronda set each other off when they are side by side. She is tall and fair. But you know her, Mirah--you can always say something descriptive. What do _you_ think of Mrs. Grandcourt?" "I think she is the _Princess of Eboli_ in _Don Carlos_," said Mirah, with a quick intensity. She was pursuing an association in her own mind not intelligible to her hearers--an association with a certain actress as well as the part she represented. "Your comparison is a riddle for me, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling. "You said that Mrs. Grandcourt was tall and fair," continued Mirah, slightly paler. "That is quite true." Mrs. Meyrick's quick eye and ear detected something unusual, but immediately explained it to herself. Fine ladies had often wounded Mirah by caprices of manner and intention. "Mrs. Grandcourt had thought of having lessons of Mirah," she said turning to Anna. "But many have talked of having lessons, and then have found no time. Fashionable ladies have too much work to do." And the chat went on without further insistence on the _Princess of Eboli_. That comparison escaped Mirah's lips under the urgency of a pang unlike anything she had felt before. The conversation from the beginning had revived unpleasant impressions, and Mrs. Meyrick's suggestion of Gwendolen's figure by the side of Deronda's had the stinging effect of a voice outside her, confirming her secret conviction that this tall and fair woman had some hold on his lot. For a long while afterward she felt as if she had had a jarring shock through her frame. In the evening, putting her cheek against her brother's shoulder as she was sitting by him, while he sat propped up in bed under a new difficulty of breathing, she said, "Ezra, does it ever hurt your love for Mr. Deronda that so much of his life was all hidden away from you--that he is amongst persons and cares about persons who are all so unlike us--I mean unlike you?" "No, assuredly no," said Mordecai. "Rather it is a precious thought to me that he has a preparation which I lacked, and is an accomplished Egyptian." Then, recollecting that his words had reference which his sister must not yet understand, he added, "I have the more to give him, since his treasure differs from mine. That is a blessedness in friendship." Mirah mused a little. "Still," she said, "it would be a trial to your love for him if that other part of his life were like a crowd in which he had got entangled, so that he was carried away from you--I mean in his thoughts, and not merely carried out of sight as he is now--and not merely for a little while, but continually. How should you bear that! Our religion commands us to bear. But how should you bear it?" "Not well, my sister--not well; but it will never happen," said Mordecai, looking at her with a tender smile. He thought that her heart needed comfort on his account. Mirah said no more. She mused over the difference between her own state of mind and her brother's, and felt her comparative pettiness. Why could she not be completely satisfied with what satisfied his larger judgment? She gave herself no fuller reason than a painful sense of unfitness--in what? Airy possibilities to which she could give no outline, but to which one name and one figure gave the wandering persistency of a blot in her vision. Here lay the vaguer source of the hidden sadness rendered noticeable to Hans by some diminution of that sweet ease, that ready joyousness of response in her speech and smile, which had come with the new sense of freedom and safety, and had made her presence like the freshly-opened daisies and clear bird-notes after the rain. She herself regarded her uneasiness as a sort of ingratitude and dullness of sensibility toward the great things that had been given her in her new life; and whenever she threw more energy than usual into her singing, it was the energy of indignation against the shallowness of her own content. In that mood she once said, "Shall I tell you what is the difference between you and me, Ezra? You are a spring in the drought, and I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill me, but the least little shake leaves me empty." "Why, what has shaken thee?" said Mordecai. He fell into this antique form of speech habitually in talking to his sister and to the Cohen children. "Thoughts," said Mirah; "thoughts that come like the breeze and shake me--bad people, wrong things, misery--and how they might touch our life." "We must take our portion, Mirah. It is there. On whose shoulder would we lay it, that we might be free?" The one voluntary sign she made of her inward care was this distant allusion.

Among Deronda's letters the next morning was one from Hans Meyrick, in the small, beautiful handwriting which ran in the Meyrick family. 'MY DEAR DERONDA, I am consoling myself for your absence by finding my advantage in it - shining like Hesperus when Hyperion has departed; sitting with our Hebrew prophet, and making a study of his head, in the hours when he used to be occupied with you - getting credit with him as a learned young Gentile, and agreeing with him in the general principle, that whatever is best is for that reason Jewish. Our prophet is an uncommonly interesting sitter - a better model than Rembrandt had for his Rabbi - and I never come away from him without a new discovery. 'For one thing, it is a constant wonder to me that, with all his fiery feeling for his race and their traditions, he is no strait-laced Jew, spitting after the word Christian. I confess that I have always held lightly by your account of Mordecai; but now I have given ear to him in person, I find him really a sort of philosophical-allegorical-mystical believer, and yet so sharp that any argumentative rattler of peas in a bladder might soon be pricked into silence by him. In fact, his mind seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite commodiously. If I like the look of an opinion, I treat it civilly, without suspicious inquiries. I have quite a friendly feeling toward Mordecai's notion that a whole Christian is three-fourths a Jew, and that from the Alexandrian time downward the most comprehensive minds have been Jewish; for I think of pointing out to Mirah that there is really little difference between me and Maimonides. If Mirah's ways were less distracting, and it were less of a heaven to be in her presence, I must long ago have flung myself at her feet, and requested her to tell me whether she wished me to blow my brains out. My Hope wanders among the orchard blossoms, feels the warm snow falling on it through the sunshine, and is in doubt of nothing; but, catching sight of Certainty in the distance, sees an ugly Janus-faced deity, and turns quickly away. 'But you, with your supreme reasonableness, and self-nullification - you know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty. (You observe my new vein of allegory?) Seriously, however, I must be permitted to allege that truth will prevail, that prejudice will melt before it, that no virtuous aspiration will be frustrated - all of which implies that the Jewess I prefer will prefer me. 'I am less convinced that my society makes amends to Mordecai for your absence, but another substitute occasionally comes in the form of Jacob Cohen. It is worth while to catch our prophet's expression when he has that remarkable young man on his knee, and pours forth some Semitic inspiration with a sublime look of melancholy devoutness. Sometimes it occurs to Jacob that Hebrew will be more edifying if he stops his ears with his palms, and imitates the venerable sounds as heard through that muffled medium. When Mordecai gently draws down the little fists, Jacob's features take on an extraordinary activity, as if he was walking through a menagerie and trying to imitate every animal in turn, succeeding best with the owl and the peccary. He looks at me as a second-hand Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on my disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts of future purchase. He brings sugar-plums to share with Mordecai, filling his own mouth to rather an embarrassing extent, and watching how Mordecai deals with a smaller supply. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if Mirah comes in. He turns child suddenly - his age usually strikes one as being near forty. But I wish I did not imagine that Mirah gets a little sadder, and tries to hide it. It is natural enough, of course, while she has to watch the slow death of this brother, whom she worships with such loving devoutness that I am ready to wish myself in his place. 'For the rest, we are a little merrier than usual. Rex Gascoigne - you remember a head you admired among my sketches, good upper lip - has got some rooms in town not far off, and has had a neat sister (upper lip also good) staying with him the last fortnight. I have introduced them to my mother and the girls, who have found out from Miss Gascoigne that she is cousin to your Vandyke duchess!!! I put the notes of exclamation to mark the surprise that the information at first produced on my feeble understanding. On reflection I discovered that there was not the least ground for surprise, unless I believed that nobody could be anybody's cousin without my knowing it. Gascoigne wants me to go down with him to his father's rectory in August. But I think self-interest will take me to Topping Abbey, for Sir Hugo has invited me to make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a bank - as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the other day and recommended me to apply myself to portraits, meaning, of course that my attempts at the historic and poetic are simply pitiable. But Sir Hugo's manner of implying that one's gifts are not of the highest order is so exceedingly good-natured that I begin to feel it an advantage not to be among those poor fellows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me tastes all the better because it comes out of his love for you, old boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me that your Vandyke duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the Mediterranean. Shall you by chance have an opportunity of continuing your theological discussion with the fair duchess? (Stage direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn gathers in his face till at the last word he flings down the letter, grasps his coat-collar in a statuesque attitude and so remains with a look generally tremendous.) 'One fact I have omitted - that the Klesmers on the eve of their departure have behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be expected from the planets of genius and fortune. Mirah is rich with their oriental gifts. 'What luck it will be if you come back to the Abbey while I am there! I am going to behave with consummate discretion and win golden opinions. But I shall run up to town now and then, just for a peep into Gan Eden. You see how far I have got in Hebrew lore. If Mirah commanded, I would go to a greater depth. But while her brother's life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a lover, even one whose "hair is like a flock of goats on Mount Gilead" - and I flatter myself that few heads bear that comparison better than mine. So I stay with my hope among the orchard-blossoms. 'Your devoted, HANS MEYRICK.' Some months before, this letter from Hans would have irritated Deronda, with its romancing about Mirah. But things had altered since March. Mirah was no longer so critically placed with regard to the Meyricks, and Deronda's own position had been undergoing a change. The revelation about his birth shed new lights, and influenced his mood toward past and present; hence, what Hans called his hope now seemed to Deronda, not a mischievous unreasonableness, but an unusually persistent bird-dance of extravagant fancy, and he would have pitied any consequent suffering of his friend's, if he had believed he would suffer. But he thought that Hans Meyrick's nature was not one in which love or disappointment could strike deep roots: it was too restless, too excited by novelty, too theatrical. "He is playing at love: he is taking the whole affair as a comedy," said Deronda to himself; "he knows very well that there is no chance for him. Just like him - never imagining any objection I could have to his outpourings about Mirah. Poor old Hans! And yet he is affectionate, and active enough in imagining what goes on in other people - but he always imagines it to fit his own inclination." The news about Gwendolen suggested a disturbing sequel to his own strange parting with her. But there was one sentence in the letter which raised a more immediate anxiety. Hans's suspicion of a hidden sadness in Mirah was not likely to be in his imagination, and Deronda wondered about its cause. Was it some event that had occurred during his absence, or only the growing fear of some event? Was it something in the new position which had been made for her? Or had Mordecai told her of those cherished hopes about Deronda, and had her sensitive nature been hurt by the idea that he had been coerced into friendship - been hurt by the fear that Deronda pitied Mordecai rather than regarding him as an equal? She would be pained to think that Deronda condescended to her brother. In this last conjecture Deronda was not wrong about how much Mirah valued being treated with equality. Her gratitude to him was all the greater because of the contrast of his behaviour with the treatment she had been used to in her former life. But he was not near the truth in guessing that Mordecai had broken his characteristic reticence. To no soul but Deronda had he yet breathed the story of their relation to each other, or his confidence that his friend was born a Jew. "Ezra, how is it?" Mirah one day said to him - "I am continually going to speak to Mr. Deronda as if he were a Jew?" He smiled quietly, and said, "I suppose it is because he treats us as if he were our brother. But he loves not to have his birth dwelt upon." "He has never lived with his parents, Mr. Hans says," continued Mirah. "Seek not to know such things from Mr. Hans," said Mordecai, gravely, laying his hand on her curls. "What Daniel Deronda wishes us to know about himself is for him to tell us." Mirah felt herself rebuked; but to be rebuked in this way by Mordecai made her rather proud. "I see no one so great as my brother," she said to Mrs. Meyrick one day when she called at the Chelsea house, and found the little mother alone. "It is difficult to think that he belongs to the same world as those people I used to live amongst. They made life seem like a madhouse; but Ezra makes me feel that his life is a great good, though he has suffered so much; not like me, who wanted to die because I had suffered a little. His soul is so full, it is impossible for him to wish for death as I did. I get the same sort of feeling from him as I do from sunlit grass and flowers after the sweet rain has fallen, and everything looks so pure and beautiful." A note of melancholy in this speech caused Mrs. Meyrick to examine Mirah. She sat opposite her friend in her habitual attitude, feet and hands crossed, in apparent serenity. But Mrs. Meyrick discerned a new look of suppressed suffering in her face. "Is there any fresh trouble on your mind, my dear?" she said. Mirah hesitated before she said, "I am too ready to speak of troubles, I think. Perhaps I am too hasty and fearful." "Oh, my dear, mothers are made to like trouble for their children's sake. Is it because the singing lessons are so few? Success in these things can't come all at once." Mrs. Meyrick did not believe that she was touching the real grief; but a guess that could be corrected would make an easier channel for confidence. "No, not that," said Mirah. "I have been a little disappointed because so many ladies said they wanted me to give their daughters lessons, and then I never heard of them again. But perhaps after the holidays I shall teach in some schools. Besides, you know, I am as rich as a princess now, with the hundred pounds that Mrs. Klesmer gave me; and I should never be afraid that Ezra would be in want, because Mr. Deronda said, 'It is the chief honour of my life that your brother will share anything with me.'" "But there is some other fear on your mind," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Have you any more reason for being anxious now than you had a month ago?" "Yes, I have," said Mirah. "I have kept it from Ezra. I have not dared to tell him. It is five days ago now. I am quite sure I saw my father." Mrs. Meyrick shrank into a smaller space, inwardly pelting that father with her worst epithets. "The year has changed him," Mirah went on. "He had already been much altered in the time before I left him. He sometimes used to cry. He was always excited one way or the other. Ezra said that my father had taken to gambling, which makes people easily distressed, and then exalted. And now - it was only a moment that I saw him - his face was more haggard, and his clothes were shabby. He was with a much worse-looking man, and they were hurrying after an omnibus." "He did not see you, I hope?" "No. I was waiting to cross near the Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and out of sight. It was a dreadful moment. My old life seemed to have come back again, worse than ever. I could not help feeling glad that he was gone without knowing that I was there. And yet it hurt me that I felt so. For where might my father be going? What may become of him? I felt weak - I don't know how I called a cab. Then I began to think, 'Ezra must not know.'" "You are afraid of grieving him?" Mrs. Meyrick asked. "Yes - and there is something more," said Mirah, hesitatingly. "I want to tell you; I cannot tell anyone else. I feel shame for my father, and it is strange, but the shame is greatest before Ezra. I told him all about my life, but it hurts to know that those things about my father are in Ezra's mind. And when the thought haunts me that my father might reappear, what seems to scorch me most is seeing my father shrinking before Ezra. I can't help thinking that I would rather try to maintain my father in secret, if I could prevent him from meeting my brother." "You must not encourage that feeling, Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick, hastily. "It would be very dangerous; it would be wrong. You must not have that concealment." "But ought I to tell Ezra that I have seen my father?" "No," Mrs. Meyrick answered, doubtfully. "I don't think that is necessary. Your father may go away with the birds: you may never see him again. And then your brother will be spared a useless anxiety. But promise me that if your father finds you, you will let us know. Promise me that solemnly, Mirah." Mirah reflected, then put her hands in Mrs. Meyrick's, saying, "I promise. But shame for my father burns me when I think of his meeting Ezra." She was silent a moment, and then said, with yearning compassion, "And we are his children - and he was once young - and my mother loved him. Oh! it is cruel." Sorrow filled her voice. Mrs. Meyrick, with all her loving insight, did not quite understand her. She could conceive that a mother would have a clinging pity for a reprobate son, but had no patience with Mirah's feeling on behalf of this father, whom she would prefer to see locked up. This was the only reason that Mirah could have stated for her hidden sadness. Of another reason she could have given no definite account: it was as dim as the sense of an approaching weather-change. Perhaps the first uneasiness was caused by Gwendolen's behaviour on that visit which could have no other motive than the strange questioning about Deronda. The memory of that visit made Mirah aware of Deronda's relations with a society which she glimpsed frequently without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education had produced in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness and knowledge of the world's evil, which was supplemented by her theatrical study. Some of that imaginative knowledge began now to weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt; and though Mirah would allow nothing to affect her reverence for Deronda, she could not avoid a new, painfully vivid association of his life with a different world, where he might become involved with a woman like Gwendolen, who was increasingly repugnant to her. If she had felt any unease that Deronda's deepest care might not be for her, nor even for her brother, she would have rebuked herself by telling herself that she was only one person who had shared his kindness; and his attachment to Mordecai would be short, and surely others would follow. But her uneasiness had not reached that point of self-recognition in which she thought of him as her possible lover. That had never entered her mind. Likewise, Mrs. Meyrick and the girls were so impressed by his mission as her deliverer that they would have held it an offence for him to have any other relation toward her. But Mirah's disturbance was owing precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks. The first occasion could hardly have been more trivial, but it prepared her for what happened afterward. It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the Meyricks, was led to speak of Gwendolen. The visit had been arranged so that Anna might see Mirah; the three girls were at home with their mother, and there was naturally much talk among six feminine creatures. Anna Gascoigne felt herself at home with the Meyrick girls, who knew what it was to have a brother, and to be regarded as of minor importance in the world, although they seemed to her alarmingly clever. Mirah had lately come in, and there was a complete bouquet of young faces around the tea-table. Hafiz, seated aloft with large eyes on the alert, regarded the whole scene as an apparatus for supplying his allowance of milk. "Think of our surprise, Mirah," said Kate. "We were speaking of Mr. Deronda and the Mallingers, and it turns out that Miss Gascoigne knows them." "I have not seen them," said Anna, a little flushed. "But some months ago, my cousin married Sir Hugo Mallinger's nephew, Mr. Grandcourt, who lived near us." "There!" exclaimed Mab, clasping her hands. "Mrs. Grandcourt, the Vandyke duchess, is your cousin?" "Oh, yes; I was her bridesmaid," said Anna. "Her mamma and mine are sisters. My aunt was much richer before last year, but then she and mamma lost all their fortune. Papa is a clergyman, you know, so it makes very little difference to us. But it was very sad for poor Aunt Davilow, who has four daughters besides Gwendolen; but then, when Gwendolen married Mr. Grandcourt, it did not signify so much, because of his being so rich." "Oh, this finding out relationships is delightful!" said Mab. "It is like a Chinese puzzle. And Mr. Deronda? - have you never seen Mr. Deronda?" "No," said Anna; "but I have heard my aunt speaking of him to papa, about him living with Sir Hugo Mallinger, and being so nice. But I remember, when I asked Gwendolen what she thought of Mr. Deronda, she said, 'Don't mention it, Anna: but I think his hair is dark.' That was her droll way of answering. It is really rather wonderful that Mr. Hans should know Rex, and I have the pleasure of knowing you," Anna ended, with shy grace. "The pleasure is on our side too; but the wonder would have been, if you had come to this house without hearing of Mr. Deronda - wouldn't it, Mirah?" said Mrs. Meyrick. Mirah smiled but said nothing, feeling a confused discontent. "My son calls Mrs. Grandcourt the Vandyke duchess," continued Mrs. Meyrick to Anna; "he thinks her so striking." "Yes, Gwendolen was always beautiful - people fell dreadfully in love with her. I thought it a pity, because it made them unhappy." "And how do you like Mr. Grandcourt?" said Mrs. Meyrick. "Papa approved of Gwendolen's accepting him, and my aunt says he is very generous," said Anna, with a virtuous intention of repressing her own feelings; but then, unable to resist a rare occasion for speaking freely, she went on - "else I should have thought he was not very nice - rather proud, and not lively, like Gwendolen. But, perhaps, having a brother who seems to us better than anyone makes us think worse of others." "Wait till you see Mr. Deronda," said Mab, nodding significantly. "Nobody's brother will do after him. Who would ever think of his marrying?" "I have," said Kate. "When I drew a wedding for a frontispiece, I made a likeness of him for the bridegroom, and I looked for a grand woman who would do for his countess, but I saw none that would match him." "You should have seen this Mrs. Grandcourt then," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Hans says that she and Mr. Deronda set each other off when they are side by side. She is tall and fair. But you know her, Mirah - what do you think of Mrs. Grandcourt?" "I think she is the Princess of Eboli in Don Carlos," said Mirah, thinking of an association unintelligible to her hearers. "Your comparison is a riddle, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling. "You said that Mrs. Grandcourt was tall and fair," continued Mirah, slightly paler. "That is quite true." Mrs. Meyrick's quick eye and ear detected something unusual, but immediately explained it to herself. "Mrs. Grandcourt had thought of having lessons of Mirah," she told Anna. "But many have talked of having lessons, and then have found no time. Fashionable ladies have too much work to do." And the chat went on without further mention of the Princess of Eboli. That comparison escaped Mirah's lips under the urgency of a pang unlike anything she had felt before. The conversation had confirmed her secret conviction that this woman had some hold on Deronda's lot. For a long while afterward she felt as if she had had a jarring shock through her frame. In the evening, putting her cheek against her brother's shoulder as she was sitting by him, while he sat propped up under a new difficulty of breathing, she said- "Ezra, does it ever hurt your love for Mr. Deronda that so much of his life was hidden from you - that he cares for persons so unlike us?" "Assuredly no," said Mordecai. "Rather it is a precious thought to me that he has a preparation which I lacked." Mirah mused a little. "Still," she said, "it would try your love for him if he became entangled in that other part of his life, and were carried away from you. How should you bear that?" "Not well, my sister - but it will never happen," said Mordecai, with a tender smile. Mirah said no more. She felt petty compared to her brother. Why could she not be satisfied with what satisfied his larger judgment? She felt a painful sense of unfitness - but in what? One name and one figure had the wandering persistency of a blot in her vision. Here lay the vaguer source of the hidden sadness noted by Hans, some diminution of that ready joy which had come with her new sense of freedom and safety. She thought herself ungrateful, and threw all the more energy into her singing - the energy of indignation against herself. In that mood she said, "Shall I tell you the difference between you and me, Ezra? You are a spring in the drought, and I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill me, but the least little shake leaves me empty." "Why, what has shaken thee?" said Mordecai. "Thoughts," said Mirah; "thoughts that come like the breeze and shake me." This was the only voluntary sign she made of her inward care.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 52

"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 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 taking 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 insistence 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.

After a few minutes the stillness penetrated Mordecai's consciousness, and he looked up at Deronda with a gaze full of satisfaction. He began to speak quietly, as if he were thinking aloud. "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 room for new souls to be born. It is the 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, and has spoken truth, though only in parable. When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will be perfected." Deronda tried to answer truthfully: "Everything I can do to make your life effective I will do." "I know it," said Mordecai with quiet certainty. "You are by my side on the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfilment which others deny." After a moment he went on meditatively- "You will take up my life where it was broken. I feel myself back in that day. The bright morning sun was on the quay at Trieste - the boats were pushing off - the Greek vessel that would land us at Beirut 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 labour; I had the endurance of youth. My heart exulted as if it had been the heart of Moses ben Maimon; and standing on the quay, where the ground 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 existence seemed to melt. 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; who came and said: 'Ezra, here is your letter.'" "Ezra!" exclaimed Deronda. "Ezra," repeated Mordecai, engrossed in memory. "I was expecting a letter from my mother. And that sound of my name recalled me to my body. I opened the letter; and the name came again as a cry that made me yearn to reach where that sorrow was - 'Ezra, my son!'" Mordecai paused again. Deronda's mind was breathlessly suspended on what was coming. A strange possibility had suddenly presented itself. Mordecai went on- "She was a mother whom her children would call blessed. 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 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.'" Here Mordecai 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. My mother was desolate and destitute. I turned back, and travelled with hardship, to save the scant money which she would need. I left the sunshine, and travelled into freezing cold. I spent a night exposed to cold and snow. And that was the beginning of this slow death." Mordecai let his eyes wander and removed his hand. Deronda resolutely repressed his urgent questions. While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, he could not ask: nay, he felt a kindred emotion which made him dread his own speech as too momentous. "But I worked. We were destitute, and she was ill. 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 night I heard her crying for her child. Then I rose, and we prayed together. 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. "Did you say Mirah?" "That was my little sister's name. After we had prayed for her, my mother would rest. It lasted four years, and in the minute she died, we were praying the same prayer. Her soul went out upon its wings." "Have you never since heard of your sister?" said Deronda. "Never. Never have I heard whether she was delivered. I know not, I know not. 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 blessing that I was alone in the winters of suffering. But now" - here Mordecai again rested his hand on Deronda's arm, and looked at him with joy - "now there is nothing to bewail in the withering of my body. The work will be the better done. I shall live in you." His grasp became convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as never before in his certainty that this was Mirah's brother, felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai's state of exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to utter a word about Mirah. Instead, he laid his firm, gentle hand on Mordecai's, which relaxed its grasp, and turned upward. As the two palms pressed each other Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings, and said- "Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer." They parted at Cohen's door without exchanging words - merely another pressure of hands. Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy of finding in Mirah's brother a nature 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. Then there was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements he would need to make beforehand. He wished to remove any jarring outwards conditions for their first meeting. Notwithstanding the Cohens' good nature, he resolved to keep them in the background until Mirah might want to thank them for the kindness they had shown her brother. Deronda wished also to give Mordecai surroundings more suited to his frail bodily condition, and to the prospect of Mirah's making her home with her brother, and tending him through the precious remnant of his life. He thought this task would be difficult and delicate, especially in persuading Mordecai to change his abode. Concerning Mirah's feeling, he had no doubt: Mirah would understand her brother's greatness. Yes, greatness: that was the word which Deronda now deliberately chose to use. He said to himself, perhaps rather defiantly, that this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, had the elements of greatness; a mind energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of tenderness for those nearby; capable of conceiving and choosing a life's task, yet capable too of the unapplauded heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the call of nearer duty. Deronda felt that the brief remnant of this fervid life had become his charge. He had been particularly affected by the friendly indifference which Mordecai had met with at the club. He had experience of the small space that ardour finds in ordinary minds; and this had resulted in a reserve - a dislike of appearing unusual or of risking an ineffective insistence on his own opinion. But now, for the first time, he 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 speech is no more than a long passionate soliloquy. Deronda's imagination was moving in the direction of Mordecai's desires. For all his latent objection to vague schemes, he felt at one with this man who had chosen him. He had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning for the obligation of filial and social ties. So he set about his new task ungrudgingly; and again 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 how to bring the lost together. Then he must find a healthy lodging for Mordecai, and give it some faint likeness to a refined home, by dismantling his own chambers of his best old books, 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 can delight as much as her sweet voice? Here is one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes from Mordecai's having fixed his imagination on me. He has recovered a perfect sister, whose affection is waiting for him.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 43

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy "Let there not be," and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having a practiced vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled--like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp--precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction? It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth, after her gloomy journey from Leubronn, arrived at the station from which she must drive to Offendene. No carriage or friend was awaiting her, for in the telegram she had sent from Dover she had mentioned a later train, and in her impatience of lingering at a London station she had set off without picturing what it would be to arrive unannounced at half an hour's drive from home--at one of those stations which have been fixed on not as near anywhere, but as equidistant from everywhere. Deposited as a _femme sole_ with her large trunks, and having to wait while a vehicle was being got from the large-sized lantern called the Railway Inn, Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting-room, the dusty decanter of flat water, and the texts in large letters calling on her to repent and be converted, were part of the dreary prospect opened by her family troubles; and she hurried away to the outer door looking toward the lane and fields. But here the very gleams of sunshine seemed melancholy, for the autumnal leaves and grass were shivering, and the wind was turning up the feathers of a cock and two croaking hens which had doubtless parted with their grown-up offspring and did not know what to do with themselves. The railway official also seemed without resources, and his innocent demeanor in observing Gwendolen and her trunks was rendered intolerable by the cast in his eye; especially since, being a new man, he did not know her, and must conclude that she was not very high in the world. The vehicle--a dirty old barouche--was within sight, and was being slowly prepared by an elderly laborer. Contemptible details these, to make part of a history; yet the turn of most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them. They are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not quite free from such determining influences; and to be dropped solitary at an ugly, irrelevant-looking spot, with a sense of no income on the mind, might well prompt a man to discouraging speculation on the origin of things and the reason of a world where a subtle thinker found himself so badly off. How much more might such trifles tell on a young lady equipped for society with a fastidious taste, an Indian shawl over her arm, some twenty cubic feet of trunks by her side, and a mortal dislike to the new consciousness of poverty which was stimulating her imagination of disagreeables? At any rate they told heavily on poor Gwendolen, and helped to quell her resistant spirit. What was the good of living in the midst of hardships, ugliness, and humiliation? This was the beginning of being at home again, and it was a sample of what she had to expect. Here was the theme on which her discontent rung its sad changes during her slow drive in the uneasy barouche, with one great trunk squeezing the meek driver, and the other fastened with a rope on the seat in front of her. Her ruling vision all the way from Leubronn had been that the family would go abroad again; for of course there must be some little income left--her mamma did not mean that they would have literally nothing. To go to a dull place abroad and live poorly, was the dismal future that threatened her: she had seen plenty of poor English people abroad and imagined herself plunged in the despised dullness of their ill-plenished lives, with Alice, Bertha, Fanny and Isabel all growing up in tediousness around her, while she advanced toward thirty and her mamma got more and more melancholy. But she did not mean to submit, and let misfortune do what it would with her: she had not yet quite believed in the misfortune; but weariness and disgust with this wretched arrival had begun to affect her like an uncomfortable waking, worse than the uneasy dreams which had gone before. The self-delight with which she had kissed her image in the glass had faded before the sense of futility in being anything whatever--charming, clever, resolute--what was the good of it all? Events might turn out anyhow, and men were hateful. Yes, men were hateful. But in these last hours, a certain change had come over their meaning. It is one thing to hate stolen goods, and another thing to hate them the more because their being stolen hinders us from making use of them. Gwendolen had begun to be angry with Grandcourt for being what had hindered her from marrying him, angry with him as the cause of her present dreary lot. But the slow drive was nearly at an end, and the lumbering vehicle coming up the avenue was within sight of the windows. A figure appearing under the portico brought a rush of new and less selfish feeling in Gwendolen, and when springing from the carriage she saw the dear beautiful face with fresh lines of sadness in it, she threw her arms round her mother's neck, and for the moment felt all sorrows only in relation to her mother's feeling about them. Behind, of course, were the sad faces of the four superfluous girls, each, poor thing--like those other many thousand sisters of us all--having her peculiar world which was of no importance to any one else, but all of them feeling Gwendolen's presence to be somehow a relenting of misfortune: where Gwendolen was, something interesting would happen; even her hurried submission to their kisses, and "Now go away, girls," carried the sort of comfort which all weakness finds in decision and authoritativeness. Good Miss Merry, whose air of meek depression, hitherto held unaccountable in a governess affectionately attached to the family, was now at the general level of circumstances, did not expect any greeting, but busied herself with the trunks and the coachman's pay; while Mrs. Davilow and Gwendolen hastened up-stairs and shut themselves in the black and yellow bedroom. "Never mind, mamma dear," said Gwendolen, tenderly pressing her handkerchief against the tears that were rolling down Mrs. Davilow's cheeks. "Never mind. I don't mind. I will do something. I will be something. Things will come right. It seemed worse because I was away. Come now! you must be glad because I am here." Gwendolen felt every word of that speech. A rush of compassionate tenderness stirred all her capability of generous resolution; and the self-confident projects which had vaguely glanced before her during her journey sprang instantaneously into new definiteness. Suddenly she seemed to perceive how she could be "something." It was one of her best moments, and the fond mother, forgetting everything below that tide mark, looked at her with a sort of adoration. She said, "Bless you, my good, good darling! I can be happy, if you can!" But later in the day there was an ebb; the old slippery rocks, the old weedy places reappeared. Naturally, there was a shrinking of courage as misfortune ceased to be a mere announcement, and began to disclose itself as a grievous tyrannical inmate. At first--that ugly drive at an end--it was still Offendene that Gwendolen had come home to, and all surroundings of immediate consequence to her were still there to secure her personal ease; the roomy stillness of the large solid house while she rested; all the luxuries of her toilet cared for without trouble to her; and a little tray with her favorite food brought to her in private. For she had said, "Keep them all away from us to-day, mamma. Let you and me be alone together." When Gwendolen came down into the drawing-room, fresh as a newly-dipped swan, and sat leaning against the cushions of the settee beside her mamma, their misfortune had not yet turned its face and breath upon her. She felt prepared to hear everything, and began in a tone of deliberate intention, "What have you thought of doing, exactly, mamma?" "Oh, my dear, the next thing to be done is to move away from this house. Mr. Haynes most fortunately is as glad to have it now as he would have been when we took it. Lord Brackenshaw's agent is to arrange everything with him to the best advantage for us: Bazley, you know; not at all an ill-natured man." "I cannot help thinking that Lord Brackenshaw would let you stay here rent-free, mamma," said Gwendolen, whose talents had not been applied to business so much as to discernment of the admiration excited by her charms. "My dear child, Lord Brackenshaw is in Scotland, and knows nothing about us. Neither your uncle nor I would choose to apply to him. Besides, what could we do in this house without servants, and without money to warm it? The sooner we are out the better. We have nothing to carry but our clothes, you know?" "I suppose you mean to go abroad, then?" said Gwendolen. After all, this is what she had familiarized her mind with. "Oh, no, dear, no. How could we travel? You never did learn anything about income and expenses," said Mrs. Davilow, trying to smile, and putting her hand on Gwendolen's as she added, mournfully, "that makes it so much harder for you, my pet." "But where are we to go?" said Gwendolen, with a trace of sharpness in her tone. She felt a new current of fear passing through her. "It is all decided. A little furniture is to be got in from the rectory--all that can be spared." Mrs. Davilow hesitated. She dreaded the reality for herself less than the shock she must give to Gwendolen, who looked at her with tense expectancy, but was silent. "It is Sawyer's Cottage we are to go to." At first, Gwendolen remained silent, paling with anger--justifiable anger, in her opinion. Then she said with haughtiness, "That is impossible. Something else than that ought to have been thought of. My uncle ought not to allow that. I will not submit to it." "My sweet child, what else could have been thought of? Your uncle, I am sure, is as kind as he can be: but he is suffering himself; he has his family to bring up. And do you quite understand? You must remember--we have nothing. We shall have absolutely nothing except what he and my sister give us. They have been as wise and active as possible, and we must try to earn something. I and the girls are going to work a table-cloth border for the Ladies' Charity at Winchester, and a communion cloth that the parishioners are to present to Pennicote Church." Mrs. Davilow went into these details timidly: but how else was she to bring the fact of their position home to this poor child who, alas! must submit at present, whatever might be in the background for her? and she herself had a superstition that there must be something better in the background. "But surely somewhere else than Sawyer's Cottage might have been found," Gwendolen persisted--taken hold of (as if in a nightmare) by the image of this house where an exciseman had lived. "No, indeed, dear. You know houses are scarce, and we may be thankful to get anything so private. It is not so very bad. There are two little parlors and four bedrooms. You shall sit alone whenever you like." The ebb of sympathetic care for her mamma had gone so low just now, that Gwendolen took no notice of these deprecatory words. "I cannot conceive that all your property is gone at once, mamma. How can you be sure in so short a time? It is not a week since you wrote to me." "The first news came much earlier, dear. But I would not spoil your pleasure till it was quite necessary." "Oh, how vexatious!" said Gwendolen, coloring with fresh anger. "If I had known, I could have brought home the money I had won: and for want of knowing, I stayed and lost it. I had nearly two hundred pounds, and it would have done for us to live on a little while, till I could carry out some plan." She paused an instant and then added more impetuously, "Everything has gone against me. People have come near me only to blight me." Among the "people" she was including Deronda. If he had not interfered in her life she would have gone to the gaming-table again with a few napoleons, and might have won back her losses. "We must resign ourselves to the will of Providence, my child," said poor Mrs. Davilow, startled by this revelation of the gambling, but not daring to say more. She felt sure that "people" meant Grandcourt, about whom her lips were sealed. And Gwendolen answered immediately, "But I don't resign myself. I shall do what I can against it. What is the good of calling the people's wickedness Providence? You said in your letter it was Mr. Lassman's fault we had lost our money. Has he run away with it all?" "No, dear, you don't understand. There were great speculations: he meant to gain. It was all about mines and things of that sort. He risked too much." "I don't call that Providence: it was his improvidence with our money, and he ought to be punished. Can't we go to law and recover our fortune? My uncle ought to take measures, and not sit down by such wrongs. We ought to go to law." "My dear child, law can never bring back money lost in that way. Your uncle says it is milk spilled upon the ground. Besides, one must have a fortune to get any law: there is no law for people who are ruined. And our money has only gone along with other people's. We are not the only sufferers: others have to resign themselves besides us." "But I don't resign myself to live at Sawyer's Cottage and see you working for sixpences and shillings because of that. I shall not do it. I shall do what is more befitting our rank and education." "I am sure your uncle and all of us will approve of that, dear, and admire you the more for it," said Mrs. Davilow, glad of an unexpected opening for speaking on a difficult subject. "I didn't mean that you should resign yourself to worse when anything better offered itself. Both your uncle and aunt have felt that your abilities and education were a fortune for you, and they have already heard of something within your reach." "What is that, mamma?" some of Gwendolen's anger gave way to interest, and she was not without romantic conjectures. "There are two situations that offer themselves. One is in a bishop's family, where there are three daughters, and the other is in quite a high class of school; and in both, your French, and music, and dancing--and then your manners and habits as a lady, are exactly what is wanted. Each is a hundred a year--and--just for the present,"--Mrs. Davilow had become frightened and hesitating,--"to save you from the petty, common way of living that we must go to--you would perhaps accept one of the two." "What! be like Miss Graves at Madame Meunier's? No." "I think, myself, that Dr. Monpert's would be more suitable. There could be no hardship in a bishop's family." "Excuse me, mamma. There are hardships everywhere for a governess. And I don't see that it would be pleasanter to be looked down on in a bishop's family than in any other. Besides, you know very well I hate teaching. Fancy me shut up with three awkward girls something like Alice! I would rather emigrate than be a governess." What it precisely was to emigrate, Gwendolen was not called on to explain. Mrs. Davilow was mute, seeing no outlet, and thinking with dread of the collision that might happen when Gwendolen had to meet her uncle and aunt. There was an air of reticence in Gwendolen's haughty, resistant speeches which implied that she had a definite plan in reserve; and her practical ignorance continually exhibited, could not nullify the mother's belief in the effectiveness of that forcible will and daring which had held mastery over herself. "I have some ornaments, mamma, and I could sell them," said Gwendolen. "They would make a sum: I want a little sum--just to go on with. I dare say Marshall, at Wanchester, would take them: I know he showed me some bracelets once that he said he had bought from a lady. Jocosa might go and ask him. Jocosa is going to leave us, of course. But she might do that first." "She would do anything she could, poor, dear soul. I have not told you yet--she wanted me to take all her savings--her three hundred pounds. I tell her to set up a little school. It will be hard for her to go into a new family now she has been so long with us." "Oh, recommend her for the bishop's daughters," said Gwendolen, with a sudden gleam of laughter in her face. "I am sure she will do better than I should." "Do take care not to say such things to your uncle," said Mrs. Davilow. "He will be hurt at your despising what he has exerted himself about. But I dare say you have something else in your mind that he might not disapprove, if you consulted him." "There is some one else I want to consult first. Are the Arrowpoints at Quetcham still, and is Herr Klesmer there? But I daresay you know nothing about it, poor, dear mamma. Can Jeffries go on horseback with a note?" "Oh, my dear, Jeffries is not here, and the dealer has taken the horses. But some one could go for us from Leek's farm. The Arrowpoints are at Quetcham, I know. Miss Arrowpoint left her card the other day: I could not see her. But I don't know about Herr Klesmer. Do you want to send before to-morrow?" "Yes, as soon as possible. I will write a note," said Gwendolen, rising. "What can you be thinking of, Gwen?" said Mrs. Davilow, relieved in the midst of her wonderment by signs of alacrity and better humor. "Don't mind what, there's a dear, good mamma," said Gwendolen, reseating herself a moment to give atoning caresses. "I mean to do something. Never mind what until it is all settled. And then you shall be comforted. The dear face!--it is ten years older in these three weeks. Now, now, now! don't cry"--Gwendolen, holding her mamma's head with both hands, kissed the trembling eyelids. "But mind you don't contradict me or put hindrances in my way. I must decide for myself. I cannot be dictated to by my uncle or any one else. My life is my own affair. And I think"--here her tone took an edge of scorn--"I think I can do better for you than let you live in Sawyer's Cottage." In uttering this last sentence Gwendolen again rose, and went to a desk where she wrote the following note to Klesmer:, Miss Harleth presents her compliments to Herr Klesmer, and ventures to request of him the very great favor that he will call upon her, if possible, to-morrow. Her reason for presuming so far on his kindness is of a very serious nature. Unfortunate family circumstances have obliged her to take a course in which she can only turn for advice to the great knowledge and judgment of Herr Klesmer. "Pray get this sent to Quetcham at once, mamma," said Gwendolen, as she addressed the letter. "The man must be told to wait for an answer. Let no time be lost." For the moment, the absorbing purpose was to get the letter dispatched; but when she had been assured on this point, another anxiety arose and kept her in a state of uneasy excitement. If Klesmer happened not to be at Quetcham, what could she do next? Gwendolen's belief in her star, so to speak, had had some bruises. Things had gone against her. A splendid marriage which presented itself within reach had shown a hideous flaw. The chances of roulette had not adjusted themselves to her claims; and a man of whom she knew nothing had thrust himself between her and her intentions. The conduct of those uninteresting people who managed the business of the world had been culpable just in the points most injurious to her in particular. Gwendolen Harleth, with all her beauty and conscious force, felt the close threats of humiliation: for the first time the conditions of this world seemed to her like a hurrying roaring crowd in which she had got astray, no more cared for and protected than a myriad of other girls, in spite of its being a peculiar hardship to her. If Klesmer were not at Quetcham--that would be all of a piece with the rest: the unwelcome negative urged itself as a probability, and set her brain working at desperate alternatives which might deliver her from Sawyer's Cottage or the ultimate necessity of "taking a situation," a phrase that summed up for her the disagreeables most wounding to her pride, most irksome to her tastes; at least so far as her experience enabled her to imagine disagreeables. Still Klesmer might be there, and Gwendolen thought of the result in that case with a hopefulness which even cast a satisfactory light over her peculiar troubles, as what might well enter into the biography of celebrities and remarkable persons. And if she had heard her immediate acquaintances cross-examined as to whether they thought her remarkable, the first who said "No" would have surprised her.

It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth, after her gloomy journey from Leubronn, arrived at the station near Offendene. No one was awaiting her, for in her impatience she had set off on an earlier train than the one her telegraph had mentioned to her family. Deposited alone on the platform with her trunks, and waiting while a vehicle was being got from the Railway Inn, Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting-room matched the dreary prospect opened by her family troubles. The vehicle was a shabby old barouche: such trifles must tell on a fastidious lady with an Indian shawl over her arm, some twenty cubic feet of trunks, and a mortal dislike of her new consciousness of poverty. This ugliness and humiliation was the beginning of being at home again, and a sample of what she must expect. On this theme her discontent rung its sad changes during her slow drive in the uneasy barouche. She imagined that the family would go abroad again; for of course there must be some little income left - her mamma did not mean that they would have literally nothing. To go to a dull place abroad and live poorly, was the dismal future that threatened her: she imagined herself plunged into dullness with her tedious sisters. But she did not mean to submit to her misfortune. She had not yet quite believed in it, but now it began to affect her like an uncomfortable waking. The self-delight with which she had kissed her image in the glass had faded before the sense of futility in being anything - charming, clever, resolute - what was the good of it all? Events might turn out anyhow, and men were hateful. Gwendolen had begun to be angry with Grandcourt for being what had hindered her from marrying him, and causing her present dreary lot. But now the house was in sight. A figure appearing under the portico brought a rush of new, less selfish feeling, and when she saw the dear beautiful face with fresh lines of sadness, she threw her arms round her mother's neck, and for the moment felt only her mother's sorrow. Behind were the sad faces of the four superfluous girls, each having her own world which was of no importance to anyone else, but all of them feeling Gwendolen's presence to be somehow a relenting of misfortune: where Gwendolen was, something interesting would happen. Even her hurried submission to their kisses, and "Now go away, girls," carried the comfort which weakness finds in decision and authoritativeness. Miss Merry busied herself with the trunks, while Mrs. Davilow and Gwendolen hastened upstairs and shut themselves in the bedroom. "Never mind, mamma dear," said Gwendolen, tenderly pressing her handkerchief against Mrs. Davilow's tearful cheeks. "Never mind. I don't mind. I will do something. I will be something. Things will come right. It seemed worse because I was away. Come now! you must be glad because I am here." Gwendolen felt every word of that speech. A rush of tenderness stirred her into generous resolution; and the self-confident projects which had vaguely occurred to her during her journey acquired new definiteness. She seemed to perceive how she could be "something." Her fond mother looked at her with adoration, saying, "Bless you, my good darling! I can be happy, if you can!" But later in the day there was an ebb; the old slippery rocks reappeared as Gwendolen's courage shrank. At first, her surroundings still ensured her personal ease: the roomy stillness of the house while she rested; her little luxuries supplied without trouble to her; and a tray of her favourite food brought to her in private. For she had said, "Keep them all away from us today, mamma. Let you and me be alone together." When Gwendolen came down into the drawing-room, fresh as a newly-dipped swan, she sat on the settee beside her mamma, prepared to hear everything, and began- "What have you thought of doing, exactly, mamma?" "Oh, my dear, we must leave this house. Mr. Haynes most fortunately is glad to rent it. Lord Brackenshaw's agent is to arrange everything." "I cannot help thinking that Lord Brackenshaw would let you stay here rent-free, mamma," said Gwendolen, who had paid less attention to business than to the admiration excited by her charms. "My dear child, Lord Brackenshaw is in Scotland, and knows nothing about us. Neither your uncle nor I would choose to apply to him. Besides, what could we do in this house without servants, and without money to warm it? The sooner we are out the better." "I suppose you mean to go abroad, then?" "Oh, no, dear, no. How could we travel? You never did learn anything about income and expenses," said Mrs. Davilow, trying to smile. "But where are we to go?" said Gwendolen, with a trace of sharpness and fear. "It is all decided. A little furniture is to be got from the rectory - all that can be spared." Mrs. Davilow hesitated, dreading the shock she must give to Gwendolen. "It is Sawyer's Cottage we are to go to." Gwendolen was silent, paling with anger. Then she said haughtily, "That is impossible. My uncle ought not to allow that. I will not submit to it." "My sweet child, your uncle is as kind as he can be: but he is suffering with losses himself; he has his family to bring up. You must remember - we have absolutely nothing except what he and my sister give us. They have been as wise and active as possible, and we must try to earn something. I and the girls are going to work a table-cloth border for the Ladies' Charity at Winchester." Mrs. Davilow said this timidly. "But surely somewhere else than Sawyer's Cottage might have been found," Gwendolen persisted. "No, indeed, dear. Houses are scarce. It is not so very bad. There are two little parlours and four bedrooms. You shall sit alone whenever you like." The ebb of sympathy for her mamma had gone so low just now, that Gwendolen took no notice of these words. "I cannot conceive that all your property is gone at once, mamma. How can you be sure in so short a time? It is not a week since you wrote to me." "The first news came much earlier, dear. But I would not spoil your pleasure till it was quite necessary." "Oh, how vexatious!" said Gwendolen, colouring with fresh anger. "If I had known, I could have brought home the money I had won, instead of staying to lose it. I had nearly two hundred pounds, and we could have lived on it a little while, till I could carry out some plan. Everything has gone against me. People have come near me only to blight me." Among "people" she was including Deronda. If he had not interfered in her life she would have gone to the gaming-table again, and might have won back her losses. "We must resign ourselves to the will of Providence, my child," said poor Mrs. Davilow, startled by this revelation of gambling, but not daring to say more. She felt sure that "people" meant Grandcourt, about whom her lips were sealed. "I don't call other people's wickedness Providence. Can't we go to law and recover our fortune? My uncle ought to take action. We ought to go to law." "My dear child, law can never bring back money lost in speculation in that way. Your uncle says it is milk spilled upon the ground. Besides, one must have a fortune to get any law. And we are not the only sufferers: others have to resign themselves besides us." "But I don't resign myself to live at Sawyer's Cottage and see you working for sixpences. I shall not do it. I shall do what is more befitting our rank and education." "I am sure your uncle will approve of that, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, glad of an unexpected opening for speaking on a difficult subject. "Your uncle and aunt have already heard of something that, with your education, is within your reach." "What is that, mamma?" Gwendolen's anger gave way to interest and romantic conjectures. "Two situations offer themselves. One is in a bishop's family, where there are three daughters, and the other is in quite a high class of school; and in both, your French, and music, and dancing - and your manners as a lady, are exactly what is wanted. Each is a hundred a year - and - just for the present," Mrs. Davilow had become frightened and hesitating- "perhaps you would accept one of the two." "What! be a teacher? No." "I think, myself, that Dr. Monpert's would be more suitable. There could be no hardship in a bishop's family." "Excuse me, mamma. There are hardships everywhere for a governess. I don't see that it would be pleasanter to be looked down on in a bishop's family than anywhere else. Besides, you know I hate teaching. Fancy me shut up with three awkward girls like Alice! I would rather emigrate." What it precisely was to emigrate, Gwendolen was not called on to explain. Mrs. Davilow was mute, thinking with dread of the collision that might happen when Gwendolen met her aunt and uncle. Her daughter's haughty, resistant speeches implied that she had a plan in reserve, and Mrs. Davilow could not help believing in the force of her will. "I could sell some ornaments, mamma," said Gwendolen. "I want a little sum - just to go on with. I dare say Marshall, at Wanchester, would take them: Jocosa might go and ask him. Jocosa is going to leave us, of course. But she might do that first." "She would do anything she could, poor, dear soul. She wanted me to take all her savings - her three hundred pounds. I told her to set up a little school with it." "Oh, recommend her for the bishop's daughters," said Gwendolen, with a sudden laugh. "I am sure she will do better than I should." "Do not say such things to your uncle," said Mrs. Davilow. "He will be hurt at your despising the post he has found. But I dare say you have something else in your mind that he might not disapprove, if you consulted him." "There is some one else I want to consult first. Are the Arrowpoints at Quetcham still, and is Herr Klesmer there?" "The Arrowpoints are at Quetcham. But I don't know about Herr Klesmer." "I will write a note," said Gwendolen, rising. "What can you be thinking of, Gwen?" said Mrs. Davilow, relieved by signs of her better humour. "Don't mind what, there's a dear, good mamma, until it is all settled. And then you shall be comforted. Now, now! don't cry." Gwendolen kissed the trembling eyelids. "But don't hinder me. I cannot be dictated to. My life is my own affair. And I think" - her tone took an edge of scorn - "I think I can do better for you than Sawyer's Cottage." With this, Gwendolen went to a desk where she wrote this note to Klesmer: 'Miss Harleth presents her compliments to Herr Klesmer, and ventures to request that he will call upon her tomorrow. Unfortunate family circumstances have obliged her to take a course in which she can only turn for advice to the great knowledge of Herr Klesmer.' "Pray get this sent to Quetcham at once, mamma," said Gwendolen. She was in a state of uneasy excitement. If Klesmer was not at Quetcham, what could she do next? Gwendolen's belief in her star had had some bruises. Things had gone against her. A prospective splendid marriage had shown a hideous flaw. The chances of roulette had not adjusted themselves to her claims; and a strange man had thrust himself between her and her intentions. Gwendolen Harleth, with all her beauty and conscious force, felt the threats of humiliation. If Klesmer were not at Quetcham, that would be all of a piece with the rest. Still Klesmer might be there, and Gwendolen thought of the result in that case with hope, as if her present troubles were only such as might enter the biography of celebrities and remarkable people. And if she had heard her acquaintances being asked whether they thought her remarkable, a "No" would have surprised her.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 21

"I question things but do not find One that will answer to my mind: And all the world appears unkind." --WORDSWORTH. Gwendolen was glad that she had got through her interview with Klesmer before meeting her uncle and aunt. She had made up her mind now that there were only disagreeables before her, and she felt able to maintain a dogged calm in the face of any humiliation that might be proposed. The meeting did not happen until the Monday, when Gwendolen went to the rectory with her mamma. They had called at Sawyer's Cottage by the way, and had seen every cranny of the narrow rooms in a mid-day light, unsoftened by blinds and curtains; for the furnishing to be done by gleanings from the rectory had not yet begun. "How _shall_ you endure it, mamma?" said Gwendolen, as they walked away. She had not opened her lips while they were looking round at the bare walls and floors, and the little garden with the cabbage-stalks, and the yew arbor all dust and cobwebs within. "You and the four girls all in that closet of a room, with the green and yellow paper pressing on your eyes? And without me?" "It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear." "If it were not that I must get some money, I would rather be there than go to be a governess." "Don't set yourself against it beforehand, Gwendolen. If you go to the palace you will have every luxury about you. And you know how much you have always cared for that. You will not find it so hard as going up and down those steep narrow stairs, and hearing the crockery rattle through the house, and the dear girls talking." "It is like a bad dream," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "I cannot believe that my uncle will let you go to such a place. He ought to have taken some other steps." "Don't be unreasonable, dear child. What could he have done?" "That was for him to find out. It seems to me a very extraordinary world if people in our position must sink in this way all at once," said Gwendolen, the other worlds with which she was conversant being constructed with a sense of fitness that arranged her own future agreeably. It was her temper that framed her sentences under this entirely new pressure of evils: she could have spoken more suitably on the vicissitudes in other people's lives, though it was never her aspiration to express herself virtuously so much as cleverly--a point to be remembered in extenuation of her words, which were usually worse than she was. And, notwithstanding the keen sense of her own bruises, she was capable of some compunction when her uncle and aunt received her with a more affectionate kindness than they had ever shown before. She could not but be struck by the dignified cheerfulness with which they talked of the necessary economies in their way of living, and in the education of the boys. Mr. Gascoigne's worth of character, a little obscured by worldly opportunities--as the poetic beauty of women is obscured by the demands of fashionable dressing--showed itself to great advantage under this sudden reduction of fortune. Prompt and methodical, he had set himself not only to put down his carriage, but to reconsider his worn suits of clothes, to leave off meat for breakfast, to do without periodicals, to get Edwy from school and arrange hours of study for all the boys under himself, and to order the whole establishment on the sparest footing possible. For all healthy people economy has its pleasures; and the rector's spirit had spread through the household. Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna, who always made papa their model, really did not miss anything they cared about for themselves, and in all sincerity felt that the saddest part of the family losses was the change for Mrs. Davilow and her children. Anna for the first time could merge her resentment on behalf of Rex in her sympathy with Gwendolen; and Mrs. Gascoigne was disposed to hope that trouble would have a salutary effect on her niece, without thinking it her duty to add any bitters by way of increasing the salutariness. They had both been busy devising how to get blinds and curtains for the cottage out of the household stores; but with delicate feeling they left these matters in the back-ground, and talked at first of Gwendolen's journey, and the comfort it was to her mamma to have her at home again. In fact there was nothing for Gwendolen to take as a justification for extending her discontent with events to the persons immediately around her, and she felt shaken into a more alert attention, as if by a call to drill that everybody else was obeying, when her uncle began in a voice of firm kindness to talk to her of the efforts he had been making to get her a situation which would offer her as many advantages as possible. Mr. Gascoigne had not forgotten Grandcourt, but the possibility of further advances from that quarter was something too vague for a man of his good sense to be determined by it: uncertainties of that kind must not now slacken his action in doing the best he could for his niece under actual conditions. "I felt that there was no time to be lost, Gwendolen; for a position in a good family where you will have some consideration is not to be had at a moment's notice. And however long we waited we could hardly find one where you would be better off than at Bishop Mompert's. I am known to both him and Mrs. Mompert, and that of course is an advantage to you. Our correspondence has gone on favorably; but I cannot be surprised that Mrs. Mompert wishes to see you before making an absolute engagement. She thinks of arranging for you to meet her at Wanchester when she is on her way to town. I dare say you will feel the interview rather trying for you, my dear; but you will have a little time to prepare your mind." "Do you know _why_ she wants to see me, uncle?" said Gwendolen, whose mind had quickly gone over various reasons that an imaginary Mrs. Mompert with three daughters might be supposed to entertain, reasons all of a disagreeable kind to the person presenting herself for inspection. The rector smiled. "Don't be alarmed, my dear. She would like to have a more precise idea of you than my report can give. And a mother is naturally scrupulous about a companion for her daughters. I have told her you are very young. But she herself exercises a close supervision over her daughters' education, and that makes her less anxious as to age. She is a woman of taste and also of strict principle, and objects to having a French person in the house. I feel sure that she will think your manners and accomplishments as good as she is likely to find; and over the religious and moral tone of the education she, and indeed the bishop himself, will preside." Gwendolen dared not answer, but the repression of her decided dislike to the whole prospect sent an unusually deep flush over her face and neck, subsiding as quickly as it came. Anna, full of tender fears, put her little hand into her cousin's, and Mr. Gascoigne was too kind a man not to conceive something of the trial which this sudden change must be for a girl like Gwendolen. Bent on giving a cheerful view of things, he went on, in an easy tone of remark, not as if answering supposed objections, "I think so highly of the position, that I should have been tempted to try and get it for Anna, if she had been at all likely to meet Mrs. Mompert's wants. It is really a home, with a continuance of education in the highest sense: 'governess' is a misnomer. The bishop's views are of a more decidedly Low Church color than my own--he is a close friend of Lord Grampian's; but, though privately strict, he is not by any means narrow in public matters. Indeed, he has created as little dislike in his diocese as any bishop on the bench. He has always remained friendly to me, though before his promotion, when he was an incumbent of this diocese, we had a little controversy about the Bible Society." The rector's words were too pregnant with satisfactory meaning to himself for him to imagine the effect they produced in the mind of his niece. "Continuance of education"--"bishop's views"--"privately strict"--"Bible Society,"--it was as if he had introduced a few snakes at large for the instruction of ladies who regarded them as all alike furnished with poison-bags, and, biting or stinging, according to convenience. To Gwendolen, already shrinking from the prospect open to her, such phrases came like the growing heat of a burning glass--not at all as the links of persuasive reflection which they formed for the good uncle. She began, desperately, to seek an alternative. "There was another situation, I think, mamma spoke of?" she said, with determined self-mastery. '"Yes," said the rector, in rather a depreciatory tone; "but that is in a school. I should not have the same satisfaction in your taking that. It would be much harder work, you are aware, and not so good in any other respect. Besides, you have not an equal chance of getting it." "Oh dear no," said Mrs. Gascoigne, "it would be much harder for you, my dear--it would be much less appropriate. You might not have a bedroom to yourself." And Gwendolen's memories of school suggested other particulars which forced her to admit to herself that this alternative would be no relief. She turned to her uncle again and said, apparently in acceptance of his ideas, "When is Mrs. Mompert likely to send for me?" "That is rather uncertain, but she has promised not to entertain any other proposal till she has seen you. She has entered with much feeling into your position. It will be within the next fortnight, probably. But I must be off now. I am going to let part of my glebe uncommonly well." The rector ended very cheerfully, leaving the room with the satisfactory conviction that Gwendolen was going to adapt herself to circumstances like a girl of good sense. Having spoken appropriately, he naturally supposed that the effects would be appropriate; being accustomed, as a household and parish authority, to be asked to "speak to" refractory persons, with the understanding that the measure was morally coercive. "What a stay Henry is to us all!" said Mrs. Gascoigne, when her husband had left the room. "He is indeed," said Mrs. Davilow, cordially. "I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself. I wish I had it." "And Rex is just like him," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "I must tell you the comfort we have had in a letter from him. I must read you a little bit," she added, taking the letter from her pocket, while Anna looked rather frightened--she did not know why, except that it had been a rule with her not to mention Rex before Gwendolen. The proud mother ran her eyes over the letter, seeking for sentences to read aloud. But apparently she had found it sown with what might seem to be closer allusions than she desired to the recent past, for she looked up, folding the letter, and saying, "However, he tells us that our trouble has made a man of him; he sees a reason for any amount of work: he means to get a fellowship, to take pupils, to set one of his brothers going, to be everything that is most remarkable. The letter is full of fun--just like him. He says, 'Tell mother she has put out an advertisement for a jolly good hard-working son, in time to hinder me from taking ship; and I offer myself for the place.' The letter came on Friday. I never saw my husband so much moved by anything since Rex was born. It seemed a gain to balance our loss." This letter, in fact, was what had helped both Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna to show Gwendolen an unmixed kindliness; and she herself felt very amiably about it, smiling at Anna, and pinching her chin, as much as to say, "Nothing is wrong with you now, is it?" She had no gratuitously ill-natured feeling, or egoistic pleasure in making men miserable. She only had an intense objection to their making her miserable. But when the talk turned on furniture for the cottage Gwendolen was not roused to show even a languid interest. She thought that she had done as much as could be expected of her this morning, and indeed felt at an heroic pitch in keeping to herself the struggle that was going on within her. The recoil of her mind from the only definite prospect allowed her, was stronger than even she had imagined beforehand. The idea of presenting herself before Mrs. Mompert in the first instance, to be approved or disapproved, came as pressure on an already painful bruise; even as a governess, it appeared she was to be tested and was liable to rejection. After she had done herself the violence to accept the bishop and his wife, they were still to consider whether they would accept her; it was at her peril that she was to look, speak, or be silent. And even when she had entered on her dismal task of self-constraint in the society of three girls whom she was bound incessantly to edify, the same process of inspection was to go on: there was always to be Mrs. Mompert's supervision; always something or other would be expected of her to which she had not the slightest inclination; and perhaps the bishop would examine her on serious topics. Gwendolen, lately used to the social successes of a handsome girl, whose lively venturesomeness of talk has the effect of wit, and who six weeks before would have pitied the dullness of the bishop rather than have been embarrassed by him, saw the life before her as an entrance into a penitentiary. Wild thoughts of running away to be an actress, in spite of Klesmer, came to her with the lure of freedom; but his words still hung heavily on her soul; they had alarmed her pride and even her maidenly dignity: dimly she conceived herself getting amongst vulgar people who would treat her with rude familiarity--odious men, whose grins and smirks would not be seen through the strong grating of polite society. Gwendolen's daring was not in the least that of the adventuress; the demand to be held a lady was in her very marrow; and when she had dreamed that she might be the heroine of the gaming-table, it was with the understanding that no one should treat her with the less consideration, or presume to look at her with irony as Deronda had done. To be protected and petted, and to have her susceptibilities consulted in every detail, had gone along with her food and clothing as matters of course in her life: even without any such warning as Klesmer's she could not have thought it an attractive freedom to be thrown in solitary dependence on the doubtful civility of strangers. The endurance of the episcopal penitentiary was less repulsive than that; though here too she would certainly never be petted or have her susceptibilities consulted. Her rebellion against this hard necessity which had come just to her of all people in the world--to her whom all circumstances had concurred in preparing for something quite different--was exaggerated instead of diminished as one hour followed another, with the imagination of what she might have expected in her lot and what it was actually to be. The family troubles, she thought, were easier for every one than for her--even for poor dear mamma, because she had always used herself to not enjoying. As to hoping that if she went to the Momperts' and was patient a little while, things might get better--it would be stupid to entertain hopes for herself after all that had happened: her talents, it appeared, would never be recognized as anything remarkable, and there was not a single direction in which probability seemed to flatter her wishes. Some beautiful girls who, like her, had read romances where even plain governesses are centres of attraction and are sought in marriage, might have solaced themselves a little by transporting such pictures into their own future; but even if Gwendolen's experience had led her to dwell on love-making and marriage as her elysium, her heart was too much oppressed by what was near to her, in both the past and the future, for her to project her anticipations very far off. She had a world-nausea upon her, and saw no reason all through her life why she should wish to live. No religious view of trouble helped her: her troubles had in her opinion all been caused by other people's disagreeable or wicked conduct; and there was really nothing pleasant to be counted on in the world: that was her feeling; everything else she had heard said about trouble was mere phrase-making not attractive enough for her to have caught it up and repeated it. As to the sweetness of labor and fulfilled claims; the interest of inward and outward activity; the impersonal delights of life as a perpetual discovery; the dues of courage, fortitude, industry, which it is mere baseness not to pay toward the common burden; the supreme worth of the teacher's vocation;--these, even if they had been eloquently preached to her, could have been no more than faintly apprehended doctrines: the fact which wrought upon her was her invariable observation that for a lady to become a governess--to "take a situation"--was to descend in life and to be treated at best with a compassionate patronage. And poor Gwendolen had never dissociated happiness from personal pre-eminence and _clat_. That where these threatened to forsake her, she should take life to be hardly worth the having, cannot make her so unlike the rest of us, men or women, that we should cast her out of our compassion; our moments of temptation to a mean opinion of things in general being usually dependent on some susceptibility about ourselves and some dullness to subjects which every one else would consider more important. Surely a young creature is pitiable who has the labyrinth of life before her and no clue--to whom distrust in herself and her good fortune has come as a sudden shock, like a rent across the path that she was treading carelessly. In spite of her healthy frame, her irreconcilable repugnance affected her even physically; she felt a sort of numbness and could set about nothing; the least urgency, even that she should take her meals, was an irritation to her; the speech of others on any subject seemed unreasonable, because it did not include her feeling and was an ignorant claim on her. It was not in her nature to busy herself with the fancies of suicide to which disappointed young people are prone: what occupied and exasperated her was the sense that there was nothing for her but to live in a way she hated. She avoided going to the rectory again: it was too intolerable to have to look and talk as if she were compliant; and she could not exert herself to show interest about the furniture of that horrible cottage. Miss Merry was staying on purpose to help, and such people as Jocosa liked that sort of thing. Her mother had to make excuses for her not appearing, even when Anna came to see her. For that calm which Gwendolen had promised herself to maintain had changed into sick motivelessness: she thought, "I suppose I shall begin to pretend by-and-by, but why should I do it now?" Her mother watched her with silent distress; and, lapsing into the habit of indulgent tenderness, she began to think what she imagined that Gwendolen was thinking, and to wish that everything should give way to the possibility of making her darling less miserable. One day when she was in the black and yellow bedroom and her mother was lingering there under the pretext of considering and arranging Gwendolen's articles of dress, she suddenly roused herself to fetch the casket which contained the ornaments. "Mamma," she began, glancing over the upper layer, "I had forgotten these things. Why didn't you remind me of them? Do see about getting them sold. You will not mind about parting with them. You gave them all to me long ago." She lifted the upper tray and looked below. "If we can do without them, darling, I would rather keep them for you," said Mrs. Davilow, seating herself beside Gwendolen with a feeling of relief that she was beginning to talk about something. The usual relation between them had become reversed. It was now the mother who tried to cheer the daughter. "Why, how came you to put that pocket handkerchief in here?" It was the handkerchief with the corner torn off which Gwendolen had thrust in with the turquoise necklace. "It happened to be with the necklace--I was in a hurry," said Gwendolen, taking the handkerchief away and putting it in her pocket. "Don't sell the necklace, mamma," she added, a new feeling having come over her about that rescue of it which had formerly been so offensive. "No, dear, no; it was made out of your dear father's chain. And I should prefer not selling the other things. None of them are of any great value. All my best ornaments were taken from me long ago." Mrs. Davilow colored. She usually avoided any reference to such facts about Gwendolen's step-father as that he had carried off his wife's jewelry and disposed of it. After a moment's pause she went on, "And these things have not been reckoned on for any expenses. Carry them with you." "That would be quite useless, mamma," said Gwendolen, coldly. "Governesses don't wear ornaments. You had better get me a gray frieze livery and a straw poke, such as my aunt's charity children wear." "No, dear, no; don't take that view of it. I feel sure the Momperts will like you the better for being graceful and elegant." "I am not at all sure what the Momperts will like me to be. It is enough that I am expected to be what they like," said Gwendolen bitterly. "If there is anything you would object to less--anything that could be done--instead of your going to the bishop's, do say so, Gwendolen. Tell me what is in your heart. I will try for anything you wish," said the mother, beseechingly. "Don't keep things away from me. Let us bear them together." "Oh, mamma, there is nothing to tell. I can't do anything better. I must think myself fortunate if they will have me. I shall get some money for you. That is the only thing I have to think of. I shall not spend any money this year: you will have all the eighty pounds. I don't know how far that will go in housekeeping; but you need not stitch your poor fingers to the bone, and stare away all the sight that the tears have left in your dear eyes." Gwendolen did not give any caresses with her words as she had been used to do. She did not even look at her mother, but was looking at the turquoise necklace as she turned it over her fingers. "Bless you for your tenderness, my good darling!" said Mrs. Davilow, with tears in her eyes. "Don't despair because there are clouds now. You are so young. There may be great happiness in store for you yet." "I don't see any reason for expecting it, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a hard tone; and Mrs. Davilow was silent, thinking as she had often thought before--"What did happen between her and Mr. Grandcourt?" "I _will_ keep this necklace, mamma," said Gwendolen, laying it apart and then closing the casket. "But do get the other things sold, even if they will not bring much. Ask my uncle what to do with them. I shall certainly not use them again. I am going to take the veil. I wonder if all the poor wretches who have ever taken it felt as I do." "Don't exaggerate evils, dear." "How can any one know that I exaggerate, when I am speaking of my own feeling? I did not say what any one else felt." She took out the torn handkerchief from her pocket again, and wrapped it deliberately round the necklace. Mrs. Davilow observed the action with some surprise, but the tone of her last words discouraged her from asking any question. The "feeling" Gwendolen spoke of with an air of tragedy was not to be explained by the mere fact that she was going to be a governess: she was possessed by a spirit of general disappointment. It was not simply that she had a distaste for what she was called on to do: the distaste spread itself over the world outside her penitentiary, since she saw nothing very pleasant in it that seemed attainable by her even if she were free. Naturally her grievances did not seem to her smaller than some of her male contemporaries held theirs to be when they felt a profession too narrow for their powers, and had an _ priori_ conviction that it was not worth while to put forth their latent abilities. Because her education had been less expensive than theirs, it did not follow that she should have wider emotions or a keener intellectual vision. Her griefs were feminine; but to her as a woman they were not the less hard to bear, and she felt an equal right to the Promethean tone. But the movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, to fold it up in the handkerchief, and rise to put it in her _ncessaire_, where she had first placed it when it had been returned to her, was more peculiar, and what would be called less reasonable. It came from that streak of superstition in her which attached itself both to her confidence and her terror--a superstition which lingers in an intense personality even in spite of theory and science; any dread or hope for self being stronger than all reasons for or against it. Why she should suddenly determine not to part with the necklace was not much clearer to her than why she should sometimes have been frightened to find herself in the fields alone: she had a confused state of emotion about Deronda--was it wounded pride and resentment, or a certain awe and exceptional trust? It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to this action about the necklace. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Gwendolen was glad that she had got through her interview with Klesmer before meeting her uncle and aunt. She had decided that there were only disagreeables before her, and she felt able to maintain a dogged calm in the face of any humiliation that might be proposed. She went to the rectory with her mamma. They called at Sawyer's Cottage on the way, and saw the narrow rooms unsoftened by blinds and curtains; for the furnishing to be done by gleanings from the rectory had not yet begun. "How shall you endure it, mamma?" said Gwendolen, as they walked away. She had been silent as they looked round at the bare rooms, the little garden with the cabbage-stalks, and the dusty yew arbour. "You and the four girls in that closet of a room? And without me?" "It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear." "I would rather be there than be a governess." "Don't set yourself against it beforehand, Gwendolen. At the bishop's palace you will have every luxury about you, and you have always cared for that. You will not find it so hard as going up and down those narrow stairs, with the noise carrying through the house." "It is like a bad dream," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "I cannot believe that my uncle will let you go there. He ought to have taken some other steps." "What could he have done?" "That was for him to find out. It seems to me a very extraordinary world if people in our position must sink in this way all at once," said Gwendolen. But despite the keen sense of her own bruises, she felt some compunction when her uncle and aunt received her with affection and kindness. She was struck by the dignified cheerfulness with which they talked of the economies they must make. Mr. Gascoigne's worth of character showed itself to great advantage under this sudden reduction of fortune. Prompt and methodical, he had decided not only to put down his carriage, but to reconsider his worn suits of clothes, to leave off meat for breakfast, to do without periodicals, to teach his boys himself, and to order his establishment on the sparest footing possible. The rector's spirit had spread through the household. Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna did not miss anything they cared about, and sincerely felt that the saddest part of the family losses was the change for Mrs. Davilow and her children. Anna submerged her resentment on behalf of Rex in her sympathy with Gwendolen; and Mrs. Gascoigne hoped privately that trouble would have a salutary effect on her niece. They had both been busy devising how to get curtains for the cottage out of the household stores; but with delicate feeling they left these matters in the background, and talked at first of Gwendolen's journey, and the comfort it was to her mamma to have her at home again. Her uncle then began to tell her of his efforts to get her a situation with as many advantages as possible. "I felt that there was no time to be lost, Gwendolen; for a position in a good family is not to be had at a moment's notice. And you would hardly find a better one than at Bishop Mompert's. I am known to both him and Mrs. Mompert; she wishes to see you before making an absolute engagement. She thinks of arranging for you to meet her at Wanchester." "Do you know why she wants to see me, uncle?" said Gwendolen, whose mind had quickly gone over various disagreeable reasons. The rector smiled. "Don't be alarmed, my dear. She would like to have a more precise idea of you than my report can give. A mother is naturally scrupulous about a companion for her daughters. She is a woman of taste and also of strict principle, and closely supervises her daughters' education. I feel sure that she will think your manners and accomplishments as good as she is likely to find." Gwendolen dared not answer, but her dislike to the whole prospect made her flush deeply. Anna tenderly put her hand into her cousin's, and Mr. Gascoigne was too kind not to understand what a trial this sudden change must be. Bent on cheerfulness, he went on- "I should have been tempted to try and get the position for Anna, if she had been likely to meet Mrs. Mompert's wants. It is really a home, with a continuance of education in the highest sense. The bishop's views are more decidedly Low Church than my own; but though privately strict, he is not by any means narrow in public matters. He has always been friendly to me, though before his promotion, we had a little controversy about the Bible Society." The rector's words were too full of satisfactory meaning to himself for him to imagine the effect they produced on his niece. "Bishop's views" - "privately strict" - "Bible Society," - it was as if he had introduced a few snakes into the conversation. Gwendolen, shrinking from the prospect, began desperately to seek an alternative. "There was another situation, I think, mamma spoke of?" "Yes," said the rector, in rather a depreciatory tone; "but that is in a school. It would be much harder work, and not so good in other respects." "Oh dear no," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "You might not have a bedroom to yourself." Gwendolen said, apparently in acceptance, "When is Mrs. Mompert likely to send for me?" "Within the next fortnight, probably. But I must be off now." The rector left the room with the cheerful conviction that Gwendolen was going to act like a girl of good sense. "What a prop Henry is to us all!" said Mrs. Gascoigne. "And Rex is just like him. We have had such comfort in a letter from him. I must read you a little bit." She took the letter from her pocket, while Anna looked rather frightened, as she never mentioned Rex before Gwendolen. But her mother apparently found no sentences to read aloud that were free from difficult allusions, for she folded up the letter, saying- "He tells us that our trouble has made a man of him; he means to work for a fellowship, to take pupils, and to set one of his brothers going. The letter is full of fun, just like him. He says, 'Tell mother she has put out an advertisement for a jolly good hard-working son, and I offer myself for the place.' I never saw my husband so much moved by anything as this letter. It seemed a gain to balance our loss." This letter, in fact, was what had helped both Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna to show Gwendolen an unmixed kindliness; and she herself felt glad. She had no egoistic pleasure in making men miserable. She only had an intense objection to their making her miserable. But when the talk turned on furniture for the cottage, Gwendolen could not show even a languid interest. She thought that she had done as much as could be expected of her this morning, and indeed felt heroic in keeping her internal struggle to herself. She recoiled from the prospect of meeting Mrs. Mompert; even as a governess, she was to be tested and was liable to rejection. After she had done herself the violence to accept the bishop and his wife, they were still to consider whether they would accept her. And when she had entered on her dismal task of edifying the three girls, there was always to be Mrs. Mompert's supervision. Gwendolen, used to the social successes of a handsome girl, whose lively, venturesome talk has the effect of wit, saw the life before her as an entrance into a penitentiary. She felt a growing rebellion against this hard necessity which had come just to her of all people in the world - to her, who was meant for something quite different. The family troubles, she thought, were easier for everyone than for her. If she went to the Momperts', her talents would never be recognized as anything remarkable. Some girls, who had read romances where even plain governesses are sought in marriage, might have solaced themselves a little by such pictures; but even if Gwendolen was inclined to dwell on love-making as her elysium, her heart was too much oppressed. She saw no reason why she should wish to live. No religious view of trouble helped her: her troubles had in her opinion all been caused by other people's conduct; and there was really nothing pleasant to be counted on in the world. As to the sweetness of labour, the interest of activity, the impersonal delights of life as a perpetual discovery, the dues of fortitude and industry, the supreme worth of the teacher's vocation;- these doctrines could have barely touched her: the only fact that mattered was that for a lady to become a governess was to descend in life. We should pity a young creature who has the labyrinth of life before her and no clue as to how to navigate it. In spite of her healthy frame, she felt a sort of numbness and could set about nothing; the least urgency was an irritation to her; the speech of others on any subject seemed unreasonable, because it did not include her feeling. It was not in her nature to busy herself with fancies of suicide: what exasperated her was the sense that there was nothing for her but to live in a way she hated. She could not exert herself to visit the Gascoignes or to show interest about the furniture of the horrible cottage. Miss Merry was staying to help; such people as Jocosa liked that sort of thing. Her mother had to make excuses for her. The calm which Gwendolen had promised herself to maintain had changed into sick motivelessness: she thought, "I suppose I shall begin to pretend by-and-by, but why should I do it now?" Her mother watched her with silent distress, wishing only that she could make her darling less miserable. One day when Gwendolen was in the bedroom with her mother, she suddenly roused herself to fetch the casket which contained the ornaments. "Mamma," she began, "I had forgotten these things. Do see about getting them sold." "I would rather keep them for you, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, relieved that Gwendolen was beginning to talk about something. "Why, how came you to put that handkerchief in here?" It was the handkerchief with the corner torn off which Gwendolen had thrust in with the turquoise necklace. "It happened to be with the necklace - I was in a hurry. Don't sell the necklace, mamma," she said, a new feeling coming over her about that rescue of it which had formerly been so offensive. "No, dear. And I should prefer not selling the other things. None of them are valuable. All my best ornaments were taken from me long ago." Mrs. Davilow coloured, for she usually avoided any such reference to Gwendolen's step-father, who had disposed of his wife's jewellery. "Take these things with you," she said. "That would be quite useless, mamma," said Gwendolen, coldly. "Governesses don't wear ornaments. You had better get me a straw poke hat, such as charity children wear." "No, dear, don't take that view. I feel sure the Momperts will like you to be graceful and elegant." "I am not at all sure what the Momperts will like me to be. It is enough that I am expected to be what they like," said Gwendolen bitterly. "If there is anything you would object to less than going to the bishop's, do tell me, Gwendolen. I will try for anything you wish," beseeched her mother. "Oh, mamma, there is nothing to tell. I must think myself fortunate if they will have me. I shall get some money for you, at least. I shall not spend any money this year: you will have all the eighty pounds. I don't know how far that will go in housekeeping; but you need not stitch your poor fingers to the bone." Gwendolen did not even look at her mother, but at the turquoise necklace as she turned it over her fingers. "Bless you, my good darling!" said Mrs. Davilow, with tears in her eyes. "Don't despair. There may be great happiness in store for you yet." "I don't see any reason for expecting it, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a hard tone; and Mrs. Davilow was silent, thinking as she had often thought before - "What did happen between her and Mr. Grandcourt?" "I will keep this necklace, mamma," said Gwendolen, laying it aside. "But do get the other things sold, even if they will not bring much." She wrapped the torn handkerchief around the necklace. Mrs. Davilow observed this with surprise, but felt unable to ask any question. Gwendolen was possessed by a spirit of general disappointment. It was not simply that she had a distaste for what she was called on to do: the distaste spread itself over the world. But the movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, folded up in the handkerchief, was more peculiar. It came from that streak of superstition in her which attached itself both to her confidence and her terror - a superstition which lingers in an intense personality in spite of science. Why she should suddenly determine not to part with the necklace was not clear to her: she had a confused state of emotion about Deronda. Was it wounded pride and resentment, or a certain awe and trust? It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to this action.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 24

"The pang, the curse with which they died, Had never passed away: I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor lift them up to pray." --COLERIDGE. Deronda did not take off his clothes that night. Gwendolen, after insisting on seeing him again before she would consent to be undressed, had been perfectly quiet, and had only asked him, with a whispering, repressed eagerness, to promise that he would come to her when she sent for him in the morning. Still, the possibility that a change might come over her, the danger of a supervening feverish condition, and the suspicion that something in the late catastrophe was having an effect which might betray itself in excited words, acted as a foreboding within him. He mentioned to her attendant that he should keep himself ready to be called if there were any alarming change of symptoms, making it understood by all concerned that he was in communication with her friends in England, and felt bound meanwhile to take all care on her behalf--a position which it was the easier for him to assume, because he was well known to Grandcourt's valet, the only old servant who had come on the late voyage. But when fatigue from the strangely various emotion of the day at last sent Deronda to sleep, he remained undisturbed except by the morning dreams, which came as a tangled web of yesterday's events, and finally waked him, with an image drawn by his pressing anxiety. Still, it was morning, and there had been no summons--an augury which cheered him while he made his toilet, and reflected that it was too early to send inquiries. Later, he learned that she had passed a too wakeful night, but had shown no violent signs of agitation, and was at last sleeping. He wondered at the force that dwelt in this creature, so alive to dread; for he had an irresistible impression that even under the effects of a severe physical shock she was mastering herself with a determination of concealment. For his own part, he thought that his sensibilities had been blunted by what he had been going through in the meeting with his mother: he seemed to himself now to be only fulfilling claims, and his more passionate sympathy was in abeyance. He had lately been living so keenly in an experience quite apart from Gwendolen's lot, that his present cares for her were like a revisiting of scenes familiar in the past, and there was not yet a complete revival of the inward response to them. Meanwhile he employed himself in getting a formal, legally recognized statement from the fishermen who had rescued Gwendolen. Few details came to light. The boat in which Grandcourt had gone out had been found drifting with its sail loose, and had been towed in. The fishermen thought it likely that he had been knocked overboard by the flapping of the sail while putting about, and that he had not known how to swim; but, though they were near, their attention had been first arrested by a cry which seemed like that of a man in distress, and while they were hastening with their oars, they heard a shriek from the lady, and saw her jump in. On re-entering the hotel, Deronda was told that Gwendolen had risen, and was desiring to see him. He was shown into a room darkened by blinds and curtains, where she was seated with a white shawl wrapped round her, looking toward the opening door like one waiting uneasily. But her long hair was gathered up and coiled carefully, and, through all, the blue stars in her ears had kept their place: as she started impulsively to her full height, sheathed in her white shawl, her face and neck not less white, except for a purple line under her eyes, her lips a little apart with the peculiar expression of one accused and helpless, she looked like the unhappy ghost of that Gwendolen Harleth whom Deronda had seen turning with firm lips and proud self-possession from her losses at the gaming table. The sight pierced him with pity, and the effects of all their past relations began to revive within him. "I beseech you to rest--not to stand," said Deronda, as he approached her; and she obeyed, falling back into her chair again. "Will you sit down near me?" she said. "I want to speak very low." She was in a large arm-chair, and he drew a small one near to her side. The action seemed to touch her peculiarly: turning her pale face full upon his, which was very near, she said, in the lowest audible tone, "You know I am a guilty woman?" Deronda himself turned paler as he said, "I know nothing." He did not dare to say more. "He is dead." She uttered this with the same undertoned decision. "Yes," said Deronda, in a mournful suspense which made him reluctant to speak. "His face will not be seen above the water again," said Gwendolen, in a tone that was not louder, but of a suppressed eagerness, while she held both her hands clenched. "No." "Not by any one else--only by me--a dead face--I shall never get away from it." It was with an inward voice of desperate self-repression that she spoke these last words, while she looked away from Deronda toward something at a distance from her on the floor. She was seeing the whole event--her own acts included--through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror? Was she in a state of delirium into which there entered a sense of concealment and necessity for self-repression? Such thoughts glanced through Deronda as a sort of hope. But imagine the conflict of feeling that kept him silent. She was bent on confession, and he dreaded hearing her confession. Against his better will he shrank from the task that was laid on him: he wished, and yet rebuked the wish as cowardly, that she could bury her secrets in her own bosom. He was not a priest. He dreaded the weight of this woman's soul flung upon his own with imploring dependence. But she spoke again, hurriedly, looking at him, "You will not say that I ought to tell the world? you will not say that I ought to be disgraced? I could not do it. I could not bear it. I cannot have my mother know. Not if I were dead. I could not have her know. I must tell you; but you will not say that any one else should know." "I can say nothing in my ignorance," said Deronda, mournfully, "except that I desire to help you." "I told you from the beginning--as soon as I could--I told you I was afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil spirit--contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came into my mind; and it got worse--all things got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything. And _he_ came in." She paused, while a shudder passed through her; but soon went on. "I will tell you everything now. Do you think a woman who cried, and prayed, and struggled to be saved from herself, could be a murderess?" "Great God!" said Deronda, in a deep, shaken voice, "don't torture me needlessly. You have not murdered him. You threw yourself into the water with the impulse to save him. Tell me the rest afterward. This death was an accident that you could not have hindered." "Don't be impatient with me." The tremor, the childlike beseeching in these words compelled Deronda to turn his head and look at her face. The poor quivering lips went on. "You said--you used to say--you felt more for those who had done something wicked and were miserable; you said they might get better--they might be scourged into something better. If you had not spoken in that way, everything would have been worse. I _did_ remember all you said to me. It came to me always. It came to me at the very last--that was the reason why I--But now, if you cannot bear with me when I tell you everything--if you turn away from me and forsake me, what shall I do? Am I worse than I was when you found me and wanted to make me better? All the wrong I have done was in me then--and more--and more--if you had not come and been patient with me. And now--will you forsake me?" Her hands, which had been so tightly clenched some minutes before, were now helplessly relaxed and trembling on the arm of her chair. Her quivering lips remained parted as she ceased speaking. Deronda could not answer; he was obliged to look away. He took one of her hands, and clasped it as if they were going to walk together like two children: it was the only way in which he could answer, "I will not forsake you." And all the while he felt as if he were putting his name to a blank paper which might be filled up terribly. Their attitude, his adverted face with its expression of a suffering which he was solemnly resolved to undergo, might have told half the truth of the situation to a beholder who had suddenly entered. That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she had never before had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had needed, and she interpreted its powerful effect on her into a promise of inexhaustible patience and constancy. The stream of renewed strength made it possible for her to go on as she had begun--with that fitful, wandering confession where the sameness of experience seems to nullify the sense of time or of order in events. She began again in a fragmentary way, "All sorts of contrivances in my mind--but all so difficult. And I fought against them--I was terrified at them--I saw his dead face"--here her voice sank almost to a whisper close to Deronda's ear--"ever so long ago I saw it and I wished him to be dead. And yet it terrified me. I was like two creatures. I could not speak--I wanted to kill--it was as strong as thirst--and then directly--I felt beforehand I had done something dreadful, unalterable--that would make me like an evil spirit. And it came--it came." She was silent a moment or two, as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest. "It had all been in my mind when I first spoke to you--when we were at the Abbey. I had done something then. I could not tell you that. It was the only thing I did toward carrying out my thoughts. They went about over everything; but they all remained like dreadful dreams--all but one. I did one act--and I never undid it--it is there still--as long ago as when we were at Ryelands. There it was--something my fingers longed for among the beautiful toys in the cabinet in my boudoir--small and sharp like a long willow leaf in a silver sheath. I locked it in the drawer of my dressing-case. I was continually haunted with it and how I should use it. I fancied myself putting it under my pillow. But I never did. I never looked at it again. I dared not unlock the drawer: it had a key all to itself; and not long ago, when we were in the yacht, I dropped the key into the deep water. It was my wish to drop it and deliver myself. After that I began to think how I could open the drawer without the key: and when I found we were to stay at Genoa, it came into my mind that I could get it opened privately at the hotel. But then, when we were going up the stairs, I met you; and I thought I should talk to you alone and tell you this--everything I could not tell you in town; and then I was forced to go out in the boat." A sob had for the first time risen with the last words, and she sank back in her chair. The memory of that acute disappointment seemed for the moment to efface what had come since. Deronda did not look at her, but he said, insistently, "And it has all remained in your imagination. It has gone on only in your thought. To the last the evil temptation has been resisted?" There was silence. The tears had rolled down her cheeks. She pressed her handkerchief against them and sat upright. She was summoning her resolution; and again, leaning a little toward Deronda's ear, she began in a whisper, "No, no; I will tell you everything as God knows it. I will tell you no falsehood; I will tell you the exact truth. What should I do else? I used to think I could never be wicked. I thought of wicked people as if they were a long way off me. Since then I have been wicked. I have felt wicked. And everything has been a punishment to me--all the things I used to wish for--it is as if they had been made red-hot. The very daylight has often been a punishment to me. Because--you know--I ought not to have married. That was the beginning of it. I wronged some one else. I broke my promise. I meant to get pleasure for myself, and it all turned to misery. I wanted to make my gain out of another's loss--you remember?--it was like roulette--and the money burned into me. And I could not complain. It was as if I had prayed that another should lose and I should win. And I had won, I knew it all--I knew I was guilty. When we were on the sea, and I lay awake at night in the cabin, I sometimes felt that everything I had done lay open without excuse--nothing was hidden--how could anything be known to me only?--it was not my own knowledge, it was God's that had entered into me, and even the stillness--everything held a punishment for me--everything but you. I always thought that you would not want me to be punished--you would have tried and helped me to be better. And only thinking of that helped me. You will not change--you will not want to punish me now?" Again a sob had risen. "God forbid!" groaned Deronda. But he sat motionless. This long wandering with the conscious-stricken one over her past was difficult to bear, but he dared not again urge her with a question. He must let her mind follow its own need. She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said and what she had only an inward vision of. Her next words came after such an interval. "That all made it so hard when I was forced to go in the boat. Because when I saw you it was an unexpected joy, and I thought I could tell you everything--about the locked-up drawer and what I had not told you before. And if I had told you, and knew it was in your mind, it would have less power over me. I hoped and trusted in that. For after all my struggles and my crying, the hatred and rage, the temptation that frightened me, the longing, the thirst for what I dreaded, always came back. And that disappointment--when I was quite shut out from speaking to you, and was driven to go in the boat--brought all the evil back, as if I had been locked in a prison with it and no escape. Oh, it seems so long ago now since I stepped into that boat! I could have given up everything in that moment, to have the forked lightning for a weapon to strike him dead." Some of the compressed fierceness that she was recalling seemed to find its way into her undertoned utterance. After a little silence she said, with agitated hurry, "If he were here again, what should I do? I cannot wish him here--and yet I cannot bear his dead face. I was a coward. I ought to have borne contempt. I ought to have gone away--gone and wandered like a beggar rather than stay to feel like a fiend. But turn where I would there was something I could not bear. Sometimes I thought he would kill _me_ if I resisted his will. But now--his dead face is there, and I cannot bear it." Suddenly loosing Deronda's hand, she started up, stretching her arms to their full length upward, and said with a sort of moan, "I have been a cruel woman! What can _I_ do but cry for help? _I_ am sinking. Die--die--you are forsaken--go down, go down into darkness. Forsaken--no pity--_I_ shall be forsaken." She sank in her chair again and broke into sobs. Even Deronda had no place in her consciousness at that moment. He was completely unmanned. Instead of finding, as he had imagined, that his late experience had dulled his susceptibility to fresh emotion, it seemed that the lot of this young creature, whose swift travel from her bright rash girlhood into this agony of remorse he had had to behold in helplessness, pierced him the deeper because it came close upon another sad revelation of spiritual conflict: he was in one of those moments when the very anguish of passionate pity makes us ready to choose that we will know pleasure no more, and live only for the stricken and afflicted. He had risen from his seat while he watched that terrible outburst--which seemed the more awful to him because, even in this supreme agitation, she kept the suppressed voice of one who confesses in secret. At last he felt impelled to turn his back toward her and walk to a distance. But presently there was stillness. Her mind had opened to the sense that he had gone away from her. When Deronda turned round to approach her again, he saw her face bent toward him, her eyes dilated, her lips parted. She was an image of timid forlorn beseeching--too timid to entreat in words while he kept himself aloof from her. Was she forsaken by him--now--already? But his eyes met hers sorrowfully--met hers for the first time fully since she had said, "You know I am a guilty woman," and that full glance in its intense mournfulness seemed to say, "I know it, but I shall all the less forsake you." He sat down by her side again in the same attitude--without turning his face toward her and without again taking her hand. Once more Gwendolen was pierced, as she had been by his face of sorrow at the Abbey, with a compunction less egoistic than that which urged her to confess, and she said, in a tone of loving regret, "I make you very unhappy." Deronda gave an indistinct "Oh," just shrinking together and changing his attitude a little. Then he had gathered resolution enough to say clearly, "There is no question of being happy or unhappy. What I most desire at this moment is what will most help you. Tell me all you feel it a relief to tell." Devoted as these words were, they widened his spiritual distance from her, and she felt it more difficult to speak: she had a vague need of getting nearer to that compassion which seemed to be regarding her from a halo of superiority, and the need turned into an impulse to humble herself more. She was ready to throw herself on her knees before him; but no--her wonderfully mixed consciousness held checks on that impulse, and she was kept silent and motionless by the pressure of opposing needs. Her stillness made Deronda at last say, "Perhaps you are too weary. Shall I go away, and come again whenever you wish it?" "No, no," said Gwendolen--the dread of his leaving her bringing back her power of speech. She went on with her low-toned eagerness, "I want to tell you what it was that came over me in that boat. I was full of rage at being obliged to go--full of rage--and I could do nothing but sit there like a galley slave. And then we got away--out of the port--into the deep--and everything was still--and we never looked at each other, only he spoke to order me--and the very light about me seemed to hold me a prisoner and force me to sit as I did. It came over me that when I was a child I used to fancy sailing away into a world where people were not forced to live with any one they did not like--I did not like my father-in-law to come home. And now, I thought, just the opposite had come to me. I had stepped into a boat, and my life was a sailing and sailing away--gliding on and no help--always into solitude with _him_, away from deliverance. And because I felt more helpless than ever, my thoughts went out over worse things--I longed for worse things--I had cruel wishes--I fancied impossible ways of--I did not want to die myself; I was afraid of our being drowned together. If it had been any use I should have prayed--I should have prayed that something might befall him. I should have prayed that he might sink out of my sight and leave me alone. I knew no way of killing him there, but I did, I did kill him in my thoughts." She sank into silence for a minute, submerged by the weight of memory which no words could represent. "But yet, all the while I felt that I was getting more wicked. And what had been with me so much, came to me just then--what you once said--about dreading to increase my wrong-doing and my remorse--I should hope for nothing then. It was all like a writing of fire within me. Getting wicked was misery--being shut out forever from knowing what you--what better lives were. That had always been coming back to me then--but yet with a despair--a feeling that it was no use--evil wishes were too strong. I remember then letting go the tiller and saying 'God help me!' But then I was forced to take it again and go on; and the evil longings, the evil prayers came again and blotted everything else dim, till, in the midst of them--I don't know how it was--he was turning the sail--there was a gust--he was struck--I know nothing--I only know that I saw my wish outside me." She began to speak more hurriedly, and in more of a whisper. "I saw him sink, and my heart gave a leap as if it were going out of me. I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight. It was long enough for me to be glad, and yet to think it was no use--he would come up again. And he _was_ come--farther off--the boat had moved. It was all like lightning. 'The rope!' he called out in a voice--not his own--I hear it now--and I stooped for the rope--I felt I must--I felt sure he could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him. That was in my mind--he would come back. But he was gone down again, and I had the rope in my hand--no, there he was again--his face above the water--and he cried again--and I held my hand, and my heart said, 'Die!'--and he sank; and I felt 'It is done--I am wicked, I am lost!--and I had the rope in my hand--I don't know what I thought--I was leaping away from myself--I would have saved him then. I was leaping from my crime, and there it was--close to me as I fell--there was the dead face--dead, dead. It can never be altered. That was what happened. That was what I did. You know it all. It can never be altered." She sank back in her chair, exhausted with the agitation of memory and speech. Deronda felt the burden on his spirit less heavy than the foregoing dread. The word "guilty" had held a possibility of interpretations worse than the fact; and Gwendolen's confession, for the very reason that her conscience made her dwell on the determining power of her evil thoughts, convinced him the more that there had been throughout a counterbalancing struggle of her better will. It seemed almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward effect--that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable. Still, a question as to the outward effectiveness of a criminal desire dominant enough to impel even a momentary act, cannot alter our judgment of the desire; and Deronda shrank from putting that question forward in the first instance. He held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggravated her inward guilt, and that she gave the character of decisive action to what had been an inappreciably instantaneous glance of desire. But her remorse was the precious sign of a recoverable nature; it was the culmination of that self-disapproval which had been the awakening of a new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self--that thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of the sorrowful better, suffering because of the worse. All this mingled thought and feeling kept him silent; speech was too momentous to be ventured on rashly. There were no words of comfort that did not carry some sacrilege. If he had opened his lips to speak, he could only have echoed, "It can never be altered--it remains unaltered, to alter other things." But he was silent and motionless--he did not know how long--before he turned to look at her, and saw her sunk back with closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm-beaten white doe, unable to rise and pursue its unguided way. He rose and stood before her. The movement touched her consciousness, and she opened her eyes with a slight quivering that seemed like fear. "You must rest now. Try to rest: try to sleep. And may I see you again this evening--to-morrow--when you have had some rest? Let us say no more now." The tears came, and she could not answer except by a slight movement of the head. Deronda rang for attendance, spoke urgently of the necessity that she should be got to rest, and then left her.

Deronda did not take off his clothes that night. Gwendolen, after insisting on seeing him again, had been perfectly quiet, and had only asked him, with a whispering eagerness, to promise to come to her in the morning. Fearing a fever, he told her attendant that he was ready to be called if there were any alarming change of symptoms, making it understood that he was in communication with her friends in England. He felt bound to take care of her - a position which was easy for him to assume, because he was well known to Grandcourt's valet. When fatigue at last sent Deronda to sleep, his dreams came as a tangled web of yesterday's events, and finally waked him. Still, it was morning, and there had been no summons - an augury which cheered him while he dressed. On sending enquiries, he learned that Gwendolen had passed a wakeful night, but had shown no violent agitation, and was at last sleeping. He wondered at her strength; for he had an impression that even under the effects of a severe physical shock she was mastering herself with a determination of concealment. For his own part, he thought that his sensibilities had been blunted by his meetings with his mother: his passionate sympathy was lacking. He had lately been living so keenly in his own world that his cares for Gwendolen were like a revisiting of past scenes, and his response to her was not yet revived. Meanwhile he got a formal, legal statement from the fishermen who had rescued Gwendolen. Few details came to light. Grandcourt's boat had been found drifting with its sail loose, and had been towed in. The fishermen thought it likely that he had been knocked overboard by the sail while putting about, and that he had not known how to swim; but their attention had been first arrested by his cry of distress, and while they were hastening with their oars, they heard a shriek from the lady, and saw her jump in. On re-entering the hotel, Deronda was told that Gwendolen had risen, and desired to see him. He was shown into a darkened room, where she was sitting wrapped in a white shawl, her long hair carefully coiled and her little ear-rings still in place. As she stood, he saw a purple line under her eyes. With the expression of one accused and helpless, she looked like the unhappy ghost of that proud Gwendolen Harleth whom he had seen at the gaming table. The sight pierced him with pity, and his sympathy began to revive. "I beseech you not to stand," he said. She fell back into her chair, and he drew up another chair close by. She said, in the lowest audible tone, "You know I am a guilty woman?" Deronda turned paler. "I know nothing." "He is dead." She uttered this in the same undertone. "Yes," said Deronda, in suspense and reluctant to speak. "His face will not be seen above the water again," said Gwendolen, clenching her hands. "No." "Only by me - a dead face - I shall never get away from it." She spoke these words with quiet, desperate self-repression, looking away from Deronda. Was she exaggerating her own part in the event through horror? Was she in a state of delirium, which made her think some concealment was necessary? Deronda, his feelings torn between hope and fear, kept silent. She was bent on confession, and he dreaded hearing her confess: he wished, and yet rebuked the wish as cowardly, that she could bury her secrets in her own bosom. He was not a priest. But she spoke again, hurriedly- "You will not say that I ought to tell the world? and be disgraced? I could not bear it. I cannot have my mother know. I must tell you; but you will not say that anyone else should know." "I can say nothing in my ignorance," said Deronda, mournfully, "except that I desire to help you." "I told you from the beginning that I was afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur. Deronda could not look at her. "I felt hatred like an evil spirit. Every way I could free myself came into my mind; and it got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you, but I could not tell everything. And he came in." She paused, shuddering; but soon went on. "I will tell you everything now. Do you think a woman who cried, and prayed, and struggled to be saved from herself, could be a murderess?" "Great God!" said Deronda, in a deep, shaken voice, "don't torture me. You have not murdered him. You threw yourself into the water to save him. This death was an accident that you could not have hindered." "Don't be impatient with me." The childlike beseeching in these words compelled Deronda to look at her face. She went on. "You said you felt for those who had done something wicked and were miserable; you said they might become better. I remembered all you said to me. It came to me at the very last - that was the reason why I - but now, if you turn away and forsake me, what shall I do? Am I worse than I was when you wanted to make me better? All the wrong I have done was in me then - and more - if you had not been patient with me. And now - will you forsake me?" Her hands, which had been so tightly clenched before, were now trembling on the arm of her chair. Deronda took one of them, and clasped it as if they were going to walk together like two children: it was the only way in which he could answer, "I will not forsake you." And all the while he felt as if he were putting his name to a blank paper which might be filled up terribly. That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she had never before had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had needed, and she interpreted it as a promise of inexhaustible patience and constancy. This made it possible for her to go on. "All sorts of contrivances in my mind - I fought against them - I was terrified at them - I saw his dead face" - her voice sank almost to a whisper - "long ago I saw it and I wished him to be dead. And yet it terrified me. I wanted to kill - it was as strong as thirst - and then directly - I felt beforehand I had done something unalterable - that would make me like an evil spirit. And it came - it came." She was silent for a moment. "It had been in my mind when I first spoke to you at the Abbey. I had done something then. It was the only thing I did toward carrying out my thoughts. They remained like dreadful dreams - all but one. I did one act - and I never undid it - when we were at Ryelands. There was something in the cabinet in my boudoir - small and sharp like a long willow leaf in a silver sheath. I locked it in my dressing-case. I was haunted with how I should use it. But I never looked at it again. I dared not unlock the drawer: it had a key, and when we were in the yacht, I dropped the key into the deep water, to deliver myself. After that I began to think how I could open the drawer without the key: but when I met you in Genoa, I thought I would talk to you and tell you this - everything I could not tell you in town; and then I was forced to go out in the boat." A sob rose, and she sank back in her chair. Deronda said, insistently- "And it has all remained in your imagination. To the last the evil temptation has been resisted?" There was silence. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She pressed her handkerchief against them and sat upright, summoning her resolution; and began again in a whisper- "No, no; I will tell you everything as God knows it. I will tell you no falsehood. I used to think I could never be wicked. I thought of wicked people as if they were a long way off from me. Since then I have felt wicked. And everything has been a punishment - all the things I used to wish for - as if they were red-hot. Because I ought not to have married. I wronged some one else. I broke my promise. I wanted to make my gain out of another's loss - like roulette - and the money burned into me. And I could not complain. I knew I was guilty. When we were on the sea, and I lay awake at night, I sometimes felt that everything I had done lay open without excuse - everything held a punishment for me - everything but you. I thought that you would not want me punished - you would have helped me to be better. And only thinking of that helped me. You will not want to punish me now?" Again a sob had risen. "God forbid!" groaned Deronda. But he sat motionless. This long wandering over her past was difficult to bear, but he dared not again urge her with a question. After an interval she continued. "That made it so hard when I was forced to go in the boat. Because when I saw you it was an unexpected joy, and I thought I could tell you everything, and then it would have less power over me. I hoped and trusted in that. For after all my struggles and my crying, the hatred and the temptation and the thirst for what I dreaded, always came back. And that disappointment - when I had to go in the boat - brought the evil back. There was no escape. Oh, it seems so long ago now since I stepped into that boat! I could have given up everything in that moment, for lightning to strike him dead." She spoke with compressed fierceness. "If he were here again, what should I do? I cannot wish him here - and yet I cannot bear his dead face. I was a coward. I ought to have gone away and wandered like a beggar rather than stay. Sometimes I thought he would kill me if I resisted his will. But now - his dead face is there, and I cannot bear it." Suddenly loosing Deronda's hand, she started up, stretching out her arms, and said with a moan- "I have been a cruel woman! Die, die - you are forsaken - go down, go down into darkness. Forsaken - I shall be forsaken." She sank in her chair again and broke into sobs, forgetting even Deronda's presence. He was completely unmanned. This young creature's agony of remorse pierced him with passionate pity. He rose from his seat, impelled to turn his back toward her and walk to a distance. But presently she was still. When Deronda turned round, he saw her eyes were dilated, her lips parted, in an image of forlorn beseeching - too timid to entreat in words. Was she forsaken by him now, already? But his eyes met hers sorrowfully, and seemed to say, "I know you are guilty, but I shall not forsake you." He sat down by her side again. Gwendolen was pierced with compunction, and she said, in a tone of loving regret- "I make you very unhappy." Deronda gave an indistinct "Oh." Then, gathering resolution, he said, "There is no question of being happy or unhappy. What I most desire is what will most help you. Tell me all you feel it a relief to tell." Devoted as these words were, they widened his spiritual distance from her, and made it more difficult for her to speak: she felt an impulse to humble herself before him. But she stayed silent, until her stillness made Deronda say- "Perhaps you are too weary. Shall I go away, and come again whenever you wish it?" "No, no," said Gwendolen, the dread of his leaving her bringing back her power of speech. "I want to tell you what came over me in that boat. I was full of rage - and I could do nothing but sit there like a galley slave. And then we went out of the port - into the deep - and everything was still - he only spoke to order me - and the very light about me seemed to hold me prisoner. When I was a child I used to fancy sailing away into a world where there would be nobody I did not like, such as my step-father. And now just the opposite had come to me. I had stepped into a boat, and my life was sailing away into solitude with him, away from deliverance. And because I felt more helpless than ever, I had cruel wishes - I fancied impossible ways of - I did not want to die myself; I was afraid of our being drowned together. If it had been any use, I should have prayed that something might befall him; that he might sink out of my sight and leave me alone. I knew no way of killing him there, but I did, I did kill him in my thoughts." She sank into silence for a minute, submerged by the weight of memory. "But all the while I felt that I was getting more wicked. And it came to me just then - what you once said - about dreading to increase my wrong-doing and my remorse. It was like a writing of fire within me. Getting wicked was misery - being shut out forever from better lives. I felt despair that it was no use - evil wishes were too strong. I remember then letting go the tiller and saying 'God help me!' But then I was forced to take it again and go on; and the evil prayers came again and blotted out everything else, till, in the midst of them - I don't know how it was - he was turning the sail - there was a gust - he was struck - I know nothing - I only know that I saw my wish outside me." She began to whisper hurriedly. "I saw him sink, and my heart gave a leap. I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight. It was long enough for me to be glad, and yet to think he would come up again. And he did come up - farther off - the boat had moved. 'The rope!' he called out, in a voice not his own - I hear it now - and I stooped for the rope - I felt I must - I felt sure he could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him. But he was gone down again, and I had the rope in my hand - no, there he was again - his face above the water - and he cried again - and my heart said, 'Die!' - and he sank; and I felt 'I am wicked, I am lost! - and I had the rope in my hand - I don't know what I thought - I was leaping away from myself - I would have saved him then. I was leaping from my crime, and there it was - close to me as I fell - there was the dead face - dead, dead. It can never be altered. That was what happened. You know it all." She sank back in her chair, exhausted. Deronda felt the burden on his spirit lighten. The word "guilty" had held possibilities worse than the fact; and Gwendolen's confession convinced him that there had been throughout a counterbalancing struggle of her better will. It seemed almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward effect - that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable. He held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggravated her inward guilt, and that she gave the character of decisive action to what had been an instantaneous desire. But her remorse was the precious sign of a recoverable nature, and the awakening of a new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self. All this mingled thought and feeling kept him silent. He did not know how long it was before he turned to look at her, and saw her sunk back with closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm-beaten white doe. He rose, and she opened her eyes with a slight quivering that seemed like fear. "You must rest now. Try to sleep. And may I see you again when you have rested? Let us say no more now." The tears came, and she could not answer except by a slight movement of the head. Deronda urged her again to rest, and left her.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 56

"Philistia, be thou glad of me!" Grandcourt having made up his mind to marry Miss Harleth, showed a power of adapting means to ends. During the next fortnight there was hardly a day on which by some arrangement or other he did not see her, or prove by emphatic attentions that she occupied his thoughts. His cousin, Mrs. Torrington, was now doing the honors of his house, so that Mrs. Davilow and Gwendolen could be invited to a large party at Diplow in which there were many witnesses how the host distinguished the dowerless beauty, and showed no solicitude about the heiress. The world--I mean Mr. Gascoigne and all the families worth speaking of within visiting distance of Pennicote--felt an assurance on the subject which in the rector's mind converted itself into a resolution to do his duty by his niece and see that the settlements were adequate. Indeed the wonder to him and Mrs. Davilow was that the offer for which so many suitable occasions presented themselves had not been already made; and in this wonder Grandcourt himself was not without a share. When he had told his resolution to Lush he had thought that the affair would be concluded more quickly, and to his own surprise he had repeatedly promised himself in a morning that he would to-day give Gwendolen the opportunity of accepting him, and had found in the evening that the necessary formality was still unaccomplished. This remarkable fact served to heighten his determination on another day. He had never admitted to himself that Gwendolen might refuse him, but--heaven help us all!--we are often unable to act on our certainties; our objection to a contrary issue (were it possible) is so strong that it rises like a spectral illusion between us and our certainty; we are rationally sure that the blind worm can not bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a biting look--we decline to handle it. He had asked leave to have a beautiful horse of his brought for Gwendolen to ride. Mrs. Davilow was to accompany her in the carriage, and they were to go to Diplow to lunch, Grandcourt conducting them. It was a fine mid-harvest time, not too warm for a noonday ride of five miles to be delightful; the poppies glowed on the borders of the fields, there was enough breeze to move gently like a social spirit among the ears of uncut corn, and to wing the shadow of a cloud across the soft gray downs; here the sheaves were standing, there the horses were straining their muscles under the last load from a wide space of stubble, but everywhere the green pasture made a broader setting for the corn-fields, and the cattle took their rest under wide branches. The road lay through a bit of country where the dairy-farms looked much as they did in the days of our forefathers--where peace and permanence seemed to find a home away from the busy change that sent the railway train flying in the distance. But the spirit of peace and permanence did not penetrate poor Mrs. Davilow's mind so as to overcome her habit of uneasy foreboding. Gwendolen and Grandcourt cantering in front of her, and then slackening their pace to a conversational walk till the carriage came up with them again, made a gratifying sight; but it served chiefly to keep up the conflict of hopes and fears about her daughter's lot. Here was an irresistible opportunity for a lover to speak and put an end to all uncertainties, and Mrs. Davilow could only hope with trembling that Gwendolen's decision would be favorable. Certainly if Rex's love had been repugnant to her, Mr. Grandcourt had the advantage of being in complete contrast with Rex; and that he had produced some quite novel impression on her seemed evident in her marked abstinence from satirical observations, nay, her total silence about his characteristics, a silence which Mrs. Davilow did not dare to break. "Is he a man she would be happy with?"--was a question that inevitably arose in the mother's mind. "Well, perhaps as happy as she would be with any one else--or as most other women are"--was the answer with which she tried to quiet herself; for she could not imagine Gwendolen under the influence of any feeling which would make her satisfied in what we traditionally call "mean circumstances." Grandcourt's own thought was looking in the same direction: he wanted to have done with the uncertainty that belonged to his not having spoken. As to any further uncertainty--well, it was something without any reasonable basis, some quality in the air which acted as an irritant to his wishes. Gwendolen enjoyed the riding, but her pleasure did not break forth in girlish unpremeditated chat and laughter as it did on that morning with Rex. She spoke a little, and even laughed, but with a lightness as of a far-off echo: for her too there was some peculiar quality in the air--not, she was sure, any subjugation of her will by Mr. Grandcourt, and the splendid prospects he meant to offer her; for Gwendolen desired every one, that dignified gentleman himself included, to understand that she was going to do just as she liked, and that they had better not calculate on her pleasing them. If she chose to take this husband, she would have him know that she was not going to renounce her freedom, or according to her favorite formula, "not going to do as other women did." Grandcourt's speeches this morning were, as usual, all of that brief sort which never fails to make a conversational figure when the speaker is held important in his circle. Stopping so soon, they give signs of a suppressed and formidable ability so say more, and have also the meritorious quality of allowing lengthiness to others. "How do you like Criterion's paces?" he said, after they had entered the park and were slacking from a canter to a walk. "He is delightful to ride. I should like to have a leap with him, if it would not frighten mamma. There was a good wide channel we passed five minutes ago. I should like to have a gallop back and take it." "Pray do. We can take it together." "No, thanks. Mamma is so timid--if she saw me it might make her ill." "Let me go and explain. Criterion would take it without fail." "No--indeed--you are very kind--but it would alarm her too much. I dare take any leap when she is not by; but I do it and don't tell her about it." "We can let the carriage pass and then set off." "No, no, pray don't think of it any more: I spoke quite randomly," said Gwendolen; she began to feel a new objection to carrying out her own proposition. "But Mrs. Davilow knows I shall take care of you." "Yes, but she would think of you as having to take care of my broken neck." There was a considerable pause before Grandcourt said, looking toward her, "I should like to have the right always to take care of you." Gwendolen did not turn her eyes on him; it seemed to her a long while that she was first blushing, and then turning pale, but to Grandcourt's rate of judgment she answered soon enough, with the lightest flute-tone and a careless movement of the head, "Oh, I am not sure that I want to be taken care of: if I chose to risk breaking my neck, I should like to be at liberty to do it." She checked her horse as she spoke, and turned in her saddle, looking toward the advancing carriage. Her eyes swept across Grandcourt as she made this movement, but there was no language in them to correct the carelessness of her reply. At that very moment she was aware that she was risking something--not her neck, but the possibility of finally checking Grandcourt's advances, and she did not feel contented with the possibility. "Damn her!" thought Grandcourt, as he too checked his horse. He was not a wordy thinker, and this explosive phrase stood for mixed impressions which eloquent interpreters might have expanded into some sentences full of an irritated sense that he was being mystified, and a determination that this girl should not make a fool of him. Did she want him to throw himself at her feet and declare that he was dying for her? It was not by that gate that she could enter on the privileges he could give her. Or did she expect him to write his proposals? Equally a delusion. He would not make his offer in any way that could place him definitely in the position of being rejected. But as to her accepting him, she had done it already in accepting his marked attentions: and anything which happened to break them off would be understood to her disadvantage. She was merely coquetting, then? However, the carriage came up, and no further _tete--tete_ could well occur before their arrival at the house, where there was abundant company, to whom Gwendolen, clad in riding-dress, with her hat laid aside, clad also in the repute of being chosen by Mr. Grandcourt, was naturally a centre of observation; and since the objectionable Mr. Lush was not there to look at her, this stimulus of admiring attention heightened her spirits, and dispersed, for the time, the uneasy consciousness of divided impulses which threatened her with repentance of her own acts. Whether Grandcourt had been offended or not there was no judging: his manners were unchanged, but Gwendolen's acuteness had not gone deeper than to discern that his manners were no clue for her, and because these were unchanged she was not the less afraid of him. She had not been at Diplow before except to dine; and since certain points of view from the windows and the garden were worth showing, Lady Flora Hollis proposed after luncheon, when some of the guests had dispersed, and the sun was sloping toward four o'clock, that the remaining party should make a little exploration. Here came frequent opportunities when Grandcourt might have retained Gwendolen apart, and have spoken to her unheard. But no! He indeed spoke to no one else, but what he said was nothing more eager or intimate than it had been in their first interview. He looked at her not less than usual; and some of her defiant spirit having come back, she looked full at him in return, not caring--rather preferring--that his eyes had no expression in them. But at last it seemed as if he entertained some contrivance. After they had nearly made the tour of the grounds, the whole party stopped by the pool to be amused with Fetch's accomplishment of bringing a water lily to the bank like Cowper's spaniel Beau, and having been disappointed in his first attempt insisted on his trying again. Here Grandcourt, who stood with Gwendolen outside the group, turned deliberately, and fixing his eyes on a knoll planted with American shrubs, and having a winding path up it, said languidly, "This is a bore. Shall we go up there?" "Oh, certainly--since we are exploring," said Gwendolen. She was rather pleased, and yet afraid. The path was too narrow for him to offer his arm, and they walked up in silence. When they were on the bit of platform at the summit, Grandcourt said, "There is nothing to be seen here: the thing was not worth climbing." How was it that Gwendolen did not laugh? She was perfectly silent, holding up the folds of her robe like a statue, and giving a harder grasp to the handle of her whip, which she had snatched up automatically with her hat when they had first set off. "What sort of a place do you prefer?" said Grandcourt. "Different places are agreeable in their way. On the whole, I think, I prefer places that are open and cheerful. I am not fond of anything sombre." "Your place of Offendene is too sombre....". "It is, rather." "You will not remain there long, I hope." "Oh, yes, I think so. Mamma likes to be near her sister." Silence for a short space. "It is not to be supposed that _you_ will always live there, though Mrs. Davilow may." "I don't know. We women can't go in search of adventures--to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants; they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous. What do you think?" Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her. "I quite agree. Most things are bores," said Grandcourt, his mind having been pushed into an easy current, away from its intended track. But, after a moment's pause, he continued in his broken, refined drawl, "But a woman can be married." "Some women can." "You, certainly, unless you are obstinately cruel." "I am not sure that I am not both cruel and obstinate." Here Gwendolen suddenly turned her head and looked full at Grandcourt, whose eyes she had felt to be upon her throughout their conversation. She was wondering what the effect of looking at him would be on herself rather than on him. He stood perfectly still, half a yard or more away from her; and it flashed through her mind what a sort of lotus-eater's stupor had begun in him and was taking possession of her. Then he said, "Are you as uncertain about yourself as you make others about you?" "I am quite uncertain about myself; I don't know how uncertain others may be." "And you wish them to understand that you don't care?" said Grandcourt, with a touch of new hardness in his tone. "I did not say that," Gwendolen replied, hesitatingly, and turning her eyes away whipped the rhododendron bush again. She wished she were on horseback that she might set off on a canter. It was impossible to set off running down the knoll. "You do care, then," said Grandcourt, not more quickly, but with a softened drawl. "Ha! my whip!" said Gwendolen, in a little scream of distress. She had let it go--what could be more natural in a slight agitation?--and--but this seemed less natural in a gold-handled whip which had been left altogether to itself--it had gone with some force over the immediate shrubs, and had lodged itself in the branches of an azalea half-way down the knoll. She could run down now, laughing prettily, and Grandcourt was obliged to follow; but she was beforehand with him in rescuing the whip, and continued on her way to the level ground, when she paused and looked at Grandcourt with an exasperating brightness in her glance and a heightened color, as if she had carried a triumph, and these indications were still noticeable to Mrs. Davilow when Gwendolen and Grandcourt joined the rest of the party. "It is all coquetting," thought Grandcourt; "the next time I beckon she will come down." It seemed to him likely that this final beckoning might happen the very next day, when there was to be a picnic archery meeting in Cardell Chase, according to the plan projected on the evening of the ball. Even in Gwendolen's mind that result was one of two likelihoods that presented themselves alternately, one of two decisions toward which she was being precipitated, as if they were two sides of a boundary-line, and she did not know on which she should fall. This subjection to a possible self, a self not to be absolutely predicted about, caused her some astonishment and terror; her favorite key of life--doing as she liked--seemed to fail her, and she could not foresee what at a given moment she might like to do. The prospect of marrying Grandcourt really seemed more attractive to her than she had believed beforehand that any marriage could be: the dignities, the luxuries, the power of doing a great deal of what she liked to do, which had now come close to her, and within her choice to secure or to lose, took hold of her nature as if it had been the strong odor of what she had only imagined and longed for before. And Grandcourt himself? He seemed as little of a flaw in his fortunes as a lover and husband could possibly be. Gwendolen wished to mount the chariot and drive the plunging horses herself, with a spouse by her side who would fold his arms and give her his countenance without looking ridiculous. Certainly, with all her perspicacity, and all the reading which seemed to her mamma dangerously instructive, her judgment was consciously a little at fault before Grandcourt. He was adorably quiet and free from absurdities--he would be a husband to suit with the best appearance a woman could make. But what else was he? He had been everywhere, and seen everything. _That_ was desirable, and especially gratifying as a preamble to his supreme preference for Gwendolen Harleth. He did not appear to enjoy anything much. That was not necessary: and the less he had of particular tastes, or desires, the more freedom his wife was likely to have in following hers. Gwendolen conceived that after marriage she would most probably be able to manage him thoroughly. How was it that he caused her unusual constraint now?--that she was less daring and playful in her talk with him than with any other admirer she had known? That absence of demonstrativeness which she was glad of, acted as a charm in more senses than one, and was slightly benumbing. Grandcourt after all was formidable--a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind. But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities. This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary? Her acquaintance with Grandcourt was such that no accomplishment suddenly revealed in him would have surprised her. And he was so little suggestive of drama, that it hardly occurred to her to think with any detail how his life of thirty-six years had been passed: in general, she imagined him always cold and dignified, not likely ever to have committed himself. He had hunted the tiger--had he ever been in love or made love? The one experience and the other seemed alike remote in Gwendolen's fancy from the Mr. Grandcourt who had come to Diplow in order apparently to make a chief epoch in her destiny--perhaps by introducing her to that state of marriage which she had resolved to make a state of greater freedom than her girlhood. And on the whole she wished to marry him; he suited her purpose; her prevailing, deliberate intention was, to accept him. But was she going to fulfill her deliberate intention? She began to be afraid of herself, and to find out a certain difficulty in doing as she liked. Already her assertion of independence in evading his advances had been carried farther than was necessary, and she was thinking with some anxiety what she might do on the next occasion. Seated according to her habit with her back to the horses on their drive homeward, she was completely under the observation of her mamma, who took the excitement and changefulness in the expression of her eyes, her unwonted absence of mind and total silence, as unmistakable signs that something unprecedented had occurred between her and Grandcourt. Mrs. Davilow's uneasiness determined her to risk some speech on the subject: the Gascoignes were to dine at Offendene, and in what had occurred this morning there might be some reason for consulting the rector; not that she expected him anymore than herself to influence Gwendolen, but that her anxious mind wanted to be disburdened. "Something has happened, dear?" she began, in a tender tone of question. Gwendolen looked round, and seeming to be roused to the consciousness of her physical self, took off her gloves and then her hat, that the soft breeze might blow on her head. They were in a retired bit of the road, where the long afternoon shadows from the bordering trees fell across it and no observers were within sight. Her eyes continued to meet her mother's, but she did not speak. "Mr. Grandcourt has been saying something?--Tell me, dear." The last words were uttered beseechingly. "What am I to tell you, mamma?" was the perverse answer. "I am sure something has agitated you. You ought to confide in me, Gwen. You ought not to leave me in doubt and anxiety." Mrs. Davilow's eyes filled with tears. "Mamma, dear, please don't be miserable," said Gwendolen, with pettish remonstrance. "It only makes me more so. I am in doubt myself." "About Mr. Grandcourt's intentions?" said Mrs. Davilow, gathering determination from her alarms. "No; not at all," said Gwendolen, with some curtness, and a pretty little toss of the head as she put on her hat again. "About whether you will accept him, then?" "Precisely." "Have you given him a doubtful answer?" "I have given him no answer at all." "He _has_ spoken so that you could not misunderstand him?" "As far as I would let him speak." "You expect him to persevere?" Mrs. Davilow put this question rather anxiously, and receiving no answer, asked another: "You don't consider that you have discouraged him?" "I dare say not." "I thought you liked him, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, timidly. "So I do, mamma, as liking goes. There is less to dislike about him than about most men. He is quiet and _distingu_." Gwendolen so far spoke with a pouting sort of gravity; but suddenly she recovered some of her mischievousness, and her face broke into a smile as she added--"Indeed he has all the qualities that would make a husband tolerable--battlement, veranda, stable, etc., no grins and no glass in his eye." "Do be serious with me for a moment, dear. Am I to understand that you mean to accept him?" "Oh, pray, mamma, leave me to myself," said Gwendolen, with a pettish distress in her voice. And Mrs. Davilow said no more. When they got home Gwendolen declared that she would not dine. She was tired, and would come down in the evening after she had taken some rest. The probability that her uncle would hear what had passed did not trouble her. She was convinced that whatever he might say would be on the side of her accepting Grandcourt, and she wished to accept him if she could. At this moment she would willingly have had weights hung on her own caprice. Mr. Gascoigne did hear--not Gwendolen's answers repeated verbatim, but a softened generalized account of them. The mother conveyed as vaguely as the keen rector's questions would let her the impression that Gwendolen was in some uncertainty about her own mind, but inclined on the whole to acceptance. The result was that the uncle felt himself called on to interfere; he did not conceive that he should do his duty in witholding direction from his niece in a momentous crisis of this kind. Mrs. Davilow ventured a hesitating opinion that perhaps it would be safer to say nothing--Gwendolen was so sensitive (she did not like to say willful). But the rector's was a firm mind, grasping its first judgments tenaciously and acting on them promptly, whence counter-judgments were no more for him than shadows fleeting across the solid ground to which he adjusted himself. This match with Grandcourt presented itself to him as a sort of public affair; perhaps there were ways in which it might even strengthen the establishment. To the rector, whose father (nobody would have suspected it, and nobody was told) had risen to be a provincial corn-dealer, aristocratic heirship resembled regal heirship in excepting its possessor from the ordinary standard of moral judgments, Grandcourt, the almost certain baronet, the probable peer, was to be ranged with public personages, and was a match to be accepted on broad general grounds national and ecclesiastical. Such public personages, it is true, are often in the nature of giants which an ancient community may have felt pride and safety in possessing, though, regarded privately, these born eminences must often have been inconvenient and even noisome. But of the future husband personally Mr. Gascoigne was disposed to think the best. Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. But if Grandcourt had really made any deeper or more unfortunate experiments in folly than were common in young men of high prospects, he was of an age to have finished them. All accounts can be suitably wound up when a man has not ruined himself, and the expense may be taken as an insurance against future error. This was the view of practical wisdom; with reference to higher views, repentance had a supreme moral and religious value. There was every reason to believe that a woman of well-regulated mind would be happy with Grandcourt. It was no surprise to Gwendolen on coming down to tea to be told that her uncle wished to see her in the dining-room. He threw aside the paper as she entered and greeted her with his usual kindness. As his wife had remarked, he always "made much" of Gwendolen, and her importance had risen of late. "My dear," he said, in a fatherly way, moving a chair for her as he held her hand, "I want to speak to you on a subject which is more momentous than any other with regard to your welfare. You will guess what I mean. But I shall speak to you with perfect directness: in such matters I consider myself bound to act as your father. You have no objection, I hope?" "Oh dear, no, uncle. You have always been very kind to me," said Gwendolen, frankly. This evening she was willing, if it were possible, to be a little fortified against her troublesome self, and her resistant temper was in abeyance. The rector's mode of speech always conveyed a thrill of authority, as of a word of command: it seemed to take for granted that there could be no wavering in the audience, and that every one was going to be rationally obedient. "It is naturally a satisfaction to me that the prospect of a marriage for you--advantageous in the highest degree--has presented itself so early. I do not know exactly what has passed between you and Mr. Grandcourt, but I presume there can be little doubt, from the way in which he has distinguished you, that he desires to make you his wife." Gwendolen did not speak immediately, and her uncle said with more emphasis, "Have you any doubt of that yourself, my dear?" "I suppose that is what he has been thinking of. But he may have changed his mind to-morrow," said Gwendolen. "Why to-morrow? Has he made advances which you have discouraged?" "I think he meant--he began to make advances--but I did not encourage them. I turned the conversation." "Will you confide in me so far as to tell me your reasons?" "I am not sure that I had any reasons, uncle." Gwendolen laughed rather artificially. "You are quite capable of reflecting, Gwendolen. You are aware that this is not a trivial occasion, and it concerns your establishment for life under circumstances which may not occur again. You have a duty here both to yourself and your family. I wish to understand whether you have any ground for hesitating as to your acceptance of Mr. Grandcourt." "I suppose I hesitate without grounds." Gwendolen spoke rather poutingly, and her uncle grew suspicious. "Is he disagreeable to you personally?" "No." "Have you heard anything of him which has affected you disagreeably?" The rector thought it impossible that Gwendolen could have heard the gossip he had heard, but in any case he must endeavor to put all things in the right light for her. "I have heard nothing about him except that he is a great match," said Gwendolen, with some sauciness; "and that affects me very agreeably." "Then, my dear Gwendolen, I have nothing further to say than this: you hold your fortune in your own hands--a fortune such as rarely happens to a girl in your circumstances--a fortune in fact which almost takes the question out of the range of mere personal feeling, and makes your acceptance of it a duty. If Providence offers you power and position--especially when unclogged by any conditions that are repugnant to you--your course is one of responsibility, into which caprice must not enter. A man does not like to have his attachment trifled with: he may not be at once repelled--these things are matters of individual disposition. But the trifling may be carried too far. And I must point out to you that in case Mr. Grandcourt were repelled without your having refused him--without your having intended ultimately to refuse him, your situation would be a humiliating and painful one. I, for my part, should regard you with severe disapprobation, as the victim of nothing else than your own coquetry and folly." Gwendolen became pallid as she listened to this admonitory speech. The ideas it raised had the force of sensations. Her resistant courage would not help her here, because her uncle was not urging her against her own resolve; he was pressing upon her the motives of dread which she already felt; he was making her more conscious of the risks that lay within herself. She was silent, and the rector observed that he had produced some strong effect. "I mean this in kindness, my dear." His tone had softened. "I am aware of that, uncle," said Gwendolen, rising and shaking her head back, as if to rouse herself out of painful passivity. "I am not foolish. I know that I must be married some time--before it is too late. And I don't see how I could do better than marry Mr. Grandcourt. I mean to accept him, if possible." She felt as if she were reinforcing herself by speaking with this decisiveness to her uncle. But the rector was a little startled by so bare a version of his own meaning from those young lips. He wished that in her mind his advice should be taken in an infusion of sentiments proper to a girl, and such as are presupposed in the advice of a clergyman, although he may not consider them always appropriate to be put forward. He wished his niece parks, carriages, a title--everything that would make this world a pleasant abode; but he wished her not to be cynical--to be, on the contrary, religiously dutiful, and have warm domestic affections. "My dear Gwendolen," he said, rising also, and speaking with benignant gravity, "I trust that you will find in marriage a new fountain of duty and affection. Marriage is the only true and satisfactory sphere of a woman, and if your marriage with Mr. Grandcourt should be happily decided upon, you will have, probably, an increasing power, both of rank and wealth, which may be used for the benefit of others. These considerations are something higher than romance! You are fitted by natural gifts for a position which, considering your birth and early prospects, could hardly be looked forward to as in the ordinary course of things; and I trust that you will grace it, not only by those personal gifts, but by a good and consistent life." "I hope mamma will be the happier," said Gwendolen, in a more cheerful way, lifting her hands backward to her neck and moving toward the door. She wanted to waive those higher considerations. Mr. Gascoigne felt that he had come to a satisfactory understanding with his niece, and had furthered her happy settlement in life by furthering her engagement to Grandcourt. Meanwhile there was another person to whom the contemplation of that issue had been a motive for some activity, and who believed that he, too, on this particular day had done something toward bringing about a favorable decision in _his_ sense--which happened to be the reverse of the rector's. Mr. Lush's absence from Diplow during Gwendolen's visit had been due, not to any fear on his part of meeting that supercilious young lady, or of being abashed by her frank dislike, but to an engagement from which he expected important consequences. He was gone, in fact, to the Wanchester station to meet a lady, accompanied by a maid and two children, whom he put into a fly, and afterward followed to the hotel of the Golden Keys, in that town. An impressive woman, whom many would turn to look at again in passing; her figure was slim and sufficiently tall, her face rather emaciated, so that its sculpturesque beauty was the more pronounced, her crisp hair perfectly black, and her large, anxious eyes what we call black. Her dress was soberly correct, her age, perhaps, physically more advanced than the number of years would imply, but hardly less than seven-and-thirty. An uneasy-looking woman: her glance seemed to presuppose that the people and things were going to be unfavorable to her, while she was, nevertheless, ready to meet them with resolution. The children were lovely--a dark-haired girl of six or more, a fairer boy of five. When Lush incautiously expressed some surprise at her having brought the children, she said, with a sharp-toned intonation, "Did you suppose I should come wandering about here by myself? Why should I not bring all four if I liked?" "Oh, certainly," said Lush, with his usual fluent _nonchalance_. He stayed an hour or so in conference with her, and rode back to Diplow in a state of mind that was at once hopeful and busily anxious as to the execution of the little plan on which his hopefulness was based. Grandcourt's marriage to Gwendolen Harleth would not, he believed, be much of a good to either of them, and it would plainly be fraught with disagreeables to himself. But now he felt confident enough to say inwardly, "I will take, nay, I will lay odds that the marriage will never happen."

Grandcourt, having made up his mind to marry Miss Harleth, let hardly a day go by in the next fortnight without seeing her by some arrangement or other. Mrs. Davilow and Gwendolen were invited to a large party at Diplow where many witnessed how the host distinguished the dowerless beauty, and showed no care for the heiress. Indeed the wonder to Mr. Gascoigne and Mrs. Davilow was that Grandcourt's offer had not been already made; and in this wonder Grandcourt had a share himself. When he had told his resolution to Lush he had thought that the affair would be concluded quickly, and to his own surprise he had repeatedly promised himself in a morning that he would today give Gwendolen the opportunity of accepting him, and found in the evening that it was still unaccomplished. He had never admitted to himself that Gwendolen might refuse him, but we are often unable to act on our assumptions; our objection to a contrary result is so strong that it rises like a spectre between us and our certainty. He had arranged to have a beautiful horse of his brought for Gwendolen to ride. Mrs. Davilow was to accompany her in the carriage, and they were to go to Diplow for lunch. It was a fine mid-harvest time; the poppies glowed on the borders of the fields, the breeze moved gently among the ears of uncut corn, and winged the shadow of a cloud across the soft grey downs. The green pasture and the corn-fields made a setting of peace and permanence, where the cattle took their rest under wide branches. But the spirit of peace did not overcome Mrs. Davilow's uneasy foreboding. Gwendolen and Grandcourt riding together in front of her made a gratifying sight; but it served chiefly to keep up the conflict of hopes and fears about her daughter's lot. Here was an irresistible opportunity for a lover to speak, and Mrs. Davilow could only hope with trembling that Gwendolen would be favourable. That Mr. Grandcourt had produced some quite novel impression on her daughter was shown by her marked abstinence from satirical observations, nay, her total silence about him, a silence which Mrs. Davilow did not dare to break. "Would she be happy with him?" was a question that inevitably arose in the mother's mind. "Well, perhaps as happy as she would be with anyone, or as most women are," was the answer with which she tried to quiet herself. Grandcourt too wanted an end to the uncertainty that came from his not having spoken. As to any uncertainty about her answer - well, it was without any reasonable basis. Gwendolen enjoyed the riding, but her pleasure did not break forth in chat and laughter as it had with Rex. She spoke a little, and even laughed, but with a lightness as of a far-off echo: for her too there was some peculiar quality in the air - not due to any subjugation of her will by Mr. Grandcourt, for Gwendolen desired everyone to understand that she was going to do just as she liked. If she chose to take this husband, she was not going to renounce her freedom: "she would not do as other women did." Grandcourt's speeches this morning were of his usual brief sort, always giving signs of a suppressed and formidable ability to say more. "How do you like Criterion's paces?" he said, after they had entered the park. "He is delightful to ride. I should like to have a leap with him, if it would not frighten mamma. There was a good wide channel we passed five minutes ago. I should like to have a gallop back and take it." "Pray do. We can take it together." "No, thanks. Mamma is so timid - it would alarm her too much. I dare take any leap when she is not near; but I do it and don't tell her about it." "We can let the carriage pass and then set off." "No, no, pray don't think of it any more: I spoke quite randomly," said Gwendolen; she began to feel a new objection to carrying out her own proposition. "But Mrs. Davilow knows I shall take care of you." "Yes, but she would think of you as having to take care of my broken neck." There was a considerable pause before Grandcourt said, looking toward her, "I should like to have the right always to take care of you." Gwendolen did not turn her eyes on him; it seemed to her a long while that she was first blushing, and then turning pale, before she answered, with the lightest flute-tone and a careless movement of the head, "Oh, I am not sure that I want to be taken care of: if I chose to risk breaking my neck, I should like to be free to do it." She slowed her horse as she spoke, looking toward the advancing carriage. She was aware that she was risking something - not her neck, but the possibility of finally stopping Grandcourt's advances, and she did not feel contented with the possibility. "Damn her!" thought Grandcourt, as he too checked his horse. He was not a wordy thinker, and this explosive phrase stood for mixed impressions: that he was being mystified, and was determined that this girl should not make a fool of him. Did she want him to throw himself at her feet and declare that he was dying for her? That would not happen. Or did she expect him to write his proposals? Equally a delusion. He would not make his offer in any way that could place him definitely in the position of being rejected. But as to her accepting him, she had done it already in accepting his marked attentions. She was merely coquetting, then? However, the carriage came up, and no further tte--tte could occur before their arrival at the house, where there was abundant company, to whom Gwendolen was naturally a centre of observation. Since the objectionable Mr. Lush was not there to look at her, this admiring attention heightened her spirits, and dispersed some of her uneasiness at her own indecision. Grandcourt's manners were unchanged, but Gwendolen had learnt that his manners were no clue for her, and she was not the less afraid of him. She had not been at Diplow before except to dine; and since certain views from the windows and the garden were worth showing, it was proposed after luncheon that the party should make a little exploration. Here came frequent opportunities when Grandcourt might have kept Gwendolen apart, and have spoken to her unheard. But no! He indeed spoke to no one else, but his words were no more eager or intimate than in their first interview. He looked at her as much as usual; and some of her defiance returning, she looked full at him, not caring - rather preferring - that his eyes had no expression in them. But at last it seemed he planned to speak. After the tour of the grounds, the whole party stopped by the pool to be amused by Fetch's bringing a water lily to the bank. Here Grandcourt, who stood with Gwendolen outside the group, turned deliberately, and fixing his eyes on a knoll with a winding path up it, said languidly- "This is a bore. Shall we go up there?" "Oh, certainly - since we are exploring," said Gwendolen. She was rather pleased, and yet afraid. The path was too narrow for him to offer his arm, and they walked up in silence. When they were at the summit, Grandcourt said- "There is nothing to be seen here: the thing was not worth climbing." How was it that Gwendolen did not laugh? She was perfectly silent, holding up her robe like a statue, and grasping the handle of her whip, which she had snatched up automatically when they had first set off. "What sort of a place do you prefer?" said Grandcourt. "I think I prefer places that are open and cheerful. I am not fond of anything sombre." "Your place at Offendene is too sombre." "It is, rather." "You will not remain there long, I hope." "Oh, yes, I think so. Mamma likes to be near her sister." Silence for a short space. "It is not to be supposed that you will always live there, though Mrs. Davilow may." "I don't know. We women can't go in search of adventures - to find the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, like flowers, brought up to look pretty, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about plants; they are often bored, and that is why some of them become poisonous. What do you think?" Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her. "I quite agree. Most things are bores," said Grandcourt. After a moment's pause, he continued in his refined drawl- "But a woman can be married." "Some women can." "You, certainly, unless you are obstinately cruel." "I am not sure that I am not both cruel and obstinate." Here Gwendolen suddenly turned her head and looked full at Grandcourt. She was wondering what the effect of looking at him would be on herself, rather than on him. He stood perfectly still; and it flashed through her mind what a sort of lotos-eater's stupor had begun in him and was taking possession of her. Then he said- "Are you as uncertain about yourself as you make others about you?" "I am quite uncertain about myself; I don't know how uncertain others may be." "And you wish them to understand that you don't care?" said Grandcourt, with a new hardness in his tone. "I did not say that," Gwendolen replied hesitatingly, and turning her eyes away whipped the rhododendron bush again. She wished she were on horseback that she might set off on a canter. It was impossible to set off running down the knoll. "You do care, then," said Grandcourt, with a softened drawl. "Ha! my whip!" said Gwendolen, in a little scream of distress. She had let it go - what could be more natural in a slight agitation? - and it had gone with some force over the immediate shrubs, and had lodged itself in some branches half-way down the knoll. She could run down now, laughing prettily, and Grandcourt was obliged to follow; but rescuing the whip, she continued on her way to level ground, where she paused and looked at him with an exasperating brightness in her glance and a heightened, triumphant colour, which Mrs. Davilow noticed when they rejoined the party. "It is all coquetting," thought Grandcourt; "the next time I beckon she will come down." He thought that this final beckoning might happen the very next day, when there was to be a picnic archery meeting in Cardell Chase, according to the plan suggested on the day of the ball. Gwendolen felt herself being hurried towards two alternative likelihoods; two decisions, like two sides of a boundary-line, and she did not know on which side she should fall. This powerlessness to predict her own behaviour caused her some astonishment and terror; her favourite idea of doing as she liked seemed to fail her, and she could not foresee what she might choose to do. The prospect of marrying Grandcourt really seemed attractive to her: the dignities, the luxuries, which had now come within her reach, took hold of her nature. And Grandcourt himself? He seemed to have as little flaw as a lover and husband could. Gwendolen wished to mount the chariot and drive the plunging horses herself, with a spouse by her side who would fold his arms and give her his countenance without looking ridiculous. Grandcourt was adorably quiet and free from absurdities. But what else was he? He had been everywhere, and seen everything. That was desirable, and a gratifying preamble to his supreme preference for Gwendolen Harleth. He did not appear to enjoy anything much. That was not necessary: the less he had of particular desires, the more freedom his wife was likely to have in following hers. Gwendolen conceived that after marriage she would most probably be able to manage him thoroughly. How was it that he caused her unusual constraint now? - that she was less daring and playful in her talk with him than with any other admirer she had known? His lack of demonstrativeness acted as a charm in more senses than one, and was slightly benumbing. Grandcourt after all was formidable: a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not the lively, darting kind. But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards. This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary? It hardly occurred to her to think how his life of thirty-six years had been passed: she imagined him always cold and dignified, not likely ever to have committed himself. He had hunted the tiger - had he ever been in love? Both experiences seemed remote from the Mr. Grandcourt who had come to Diplow in order to change her destiny. On the whole she wished to marry him; he suited her purpose; her prevailing, deliberate intention was to accept him. But was she going to fulfil her deliberate intention? She began to be afraid of herself. Already her assertion of independence in evading his advances had been carried farther than was necessary, and she was thinking with some anxiety of what she might do on the next occasion. On their drive homeward, she was observed by her mamma, who took the excitement in her eyes and her total silence as signs that something had occurred between her and Grandcourt. Mrs. Davilow's uneasiness determined her to risk a question. "Something has happened, dear?" she began. Gwendolen looked round, roused to consciousness of herself. She took off her gloves and then her hat, so that the soft breeze might blow on her head, but did not speak. "Mr. Grandcourt has been saying something?- Tell me, dear." "What am I to tell you, mamma?" was the perverse answer. "I am sure something has agitated you. You ought to confide in me, Gwen. You ought not to leave me in doubt and anxiety." Mrs. Davilow's eyes filled with tears. "Mamma, dear, please don't be miserable," said Gwendolen, with pettish remonstrance. "It only makes me more so. I am in doubt myself." "About Mr. Grandcourt's intentions?" "No; not at all," said Gwendolen, with a pretty toss of the head. "About whether you will accept him, then?" "Precisely." "Have you given him a doubtful answer?" "I have given him no answer at all." "He has spoken so that you could not misunderstand him?" "As far as I would let him speak." "You expect him to persevere?" Mrs. Davilow put this question rather anxiously. "You don't consider that you have discouraged him?" "I dare say not." "I thought you liked him, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, timidly. "So I do, mamma, as liking goes. There is less to dislike about him than about most men. He is quiet and distinguished." Gwendolen spoke with gravity; but suddenly added with a smile- "Indeed he has all the qualities that would make a husband tolerable - battlement, veranda, stable, etc., and no glass in his eye." "Do be serious, dear. Am I to understand that you mean to accept him?" "Oh, pray, mamma, leave me to myself," said Gwendolen, with pettish distress. Mrs. Davilow said no more. When they got home Gwendolen declared that she would not dine: she was tired, and would come down in the evening to see her uncle. Mr. Gascoigne heard a softened account of this conversation. The mother hinted that Gwendolen was in some uncertainty about her own mind, but inclined to acceptance. The result was that the uncle felt himself called on to interfere; his duty was to guide his niece in a momentous crisis of this kind. To the rector, aristocratic heirship excused its possessor from ordinary moral standards. Grandcourt, the almost certain baronet, the probable peer, was the sort of public personage an ancient community may feel proud of; though privately these great persons must often be inconvenient and even unpleasant. But Mr. Gascoigne was disposed to think the best, and set aside the gossip he had heard. If Grandcourt had really made any deeper experiments in folly than were common in young men of high prospects, he was of an age to have finished them. All accounts can be suitably wound up when a man has not ruined himself, and the expense may be taken as an insurance against future error. There was every reason to believe that a woman of well-regulated mind would be happy with Grandcourt. When Gwendolen came down to tea, her uncle greeted her with his usual kindness. "My dear," he said, in a fatherly way, "I want to speak to you on a momentous subject. You will guess what I mean. In such matters I consider myself bound to act as your father. You have no objection, I hope?" "Oh dear, no, uncle. You have always been very kind to me," said Gwendolen frankly. This evening she was willing to be fortified against her troublesome self. The rector always conveyed authority: he seemed to take for granted that his audience was going to be rationally obedient. "It is naturally a satisfaction to me that the prospect of an advantageous marriage for you has presented itself so early. I do not know exactly what has passed between you and Mr. Grandcourt, but I presume there can be little doubt, from the way in which he has distinguished you, that he desires to make you his wife. Have you any doubt of that yourself, my dear?" "I suppose that is what he has been thinking of. But he may have changed his mind tomorrow," said Gwendolen. "Why? Has he made advances which you have discouraged?" "I think he meant - he began to make advances - but I did not encourage them." "Will you confide in me so far as to tell me your reasons?" "I am not sure that I had any reasons, uncle." Gwendolen laughed rather artificially. "You are aware that this is not a trivial occasion, Gwendolen. It concerns your establishment for life under circumstances which may not occur again. You have a duty here both to yourself and your family. Have you any ground for hesitating as to your acceptance of Mr. Grandcourt?" "I suppose I hesitate without grounds." "Is he disagreeable to you personally?" "No." "Have you heard anything of him which has affected you disagreeably?" The rector thought it impossible that Gwendolen could be aware of the gossip he had heard, but in any case he must endeavour to put things in the right light for her. "I have heard nothing about him except that he is a great match," said Gwendolen, with some sauciness; "and that affects me very agreeably." "Then, my dear Gwendolen, I have nothing further to say than this: you hold your fortune in your own hands - a fortune such as rarely happens to a girl in your circumstances, and which makes your acceptance a duty. Your course is one of responsibility, into which caprice must not enter. A man does not like to have his attachment trifled with: he may not be at once repelled, but the trifling may be carried too far. And I must point out to you that if Mr. Grandcourt were repelled without your having intended to refuse him, your situation would be a humiliating and painful one." Gwendolen became pale as she listened to this warning, which made her more conscious of the risks that lay within herself. She was silent. "I mean this in kindness, my dear," said the rector, his tone softening. "I know that, uncle," said Gwendolen, rising. "I am not foolish. I know that I must be married some time - before it is too late; and I don't see how I could do better than marry Mr. Grandcourt. I mean to accept him, if possible." She felt as if she were reinforcing herself by speaking with this decisiveness to her uncle. But the rector was a little startled by so bare a version of his own meaning from those young lips. He wished his niece parks, carriages, and a title, but he also wished her not to be cynical: on the contrary, to be religiously dutiful, with warm domestic affections. "My dear Gwendolen," he said with benign gravity, "I trust that you will find in marriage a new fountain of duty and affection. Marriage is the only true and satisfactory sphere of a woman, and if you marry Mr. Grandcourt, you will have an increasing power of rank and wealth, which may be used for the benefit of others. I trust that you will grace your position, not only by your natural personal gifts, but by a good and consistent life." "I hope mamma will be happier," said Gwendolen, more cheerfully, moving toward the door. Mr. Gascoigne felt that he had come to a satisfactory understanding with his niece. Meanwhile there was another person who believed that he, too, had done something toward bringing about a favourable decision in his sense - which happened to be the reverse of the rector's. Mr. Lush's absence from Diplow during Gwendolen's visit had been due, not to any fear of meeting that supercilious young lady, but to an engagement from which he expected important consequences. He was gone, in fact, to the station to meet a lady, with a maid and two children, whom he took to a hotel. She was an impressive woman, who would turn heads; her figure was slim and tall, her face rather emaciated, so that its sculpturesque beauty was the more pronounced; her crisp hair was perfectly black, as were the large, anxious eyes that looked around uneasily. Her dress was soberly correct, her age about seven-and-thirty. The children were lovely - a dark-haired girl of six or more, a fairer boy of five. When Lush expressed surprise at their presence, she said sharply- "Why should I not bring all four if I liked?" "Oh, certainly," said Lush, with nonchalance. He stayed an hour or so in talk with her, and then rode back to Diplow, hopeful as to the execution of his little plan. Grandcourt's marriage to Gwendolen Harleth would not, he believed, be good for either of them, and it would plainly be disagreeable to himself. But now he felt confident enough to lay odds that the marriage would never happen.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 13

"But I shall say no more of this at this time; for this is to be felt and not to be talked of; and they who never touched it with their fingers may secretly perhaps laugh at it in their hearts and be never the wiser."--JEREMY TAYLOR. The Roman Emperor in the legend put to death ten learned Israelites to avenge the sale of Joseph by his brethren. And there have always been enough of his kidney, whose piety lies in punishing who can see the justice of grudges but not of gratitude. For you shall never convince the stronger feeling that it hath not the stronger reason, or incline him who hath no love to believe that there is good ground for loving. As we may learn from the order of word-making, wherein _love_ precedeth _lovable_. When Deronda presented his letter at the banking-house in the _Schuster Strasse_ at Mainz, and asked for Joseph Kalonymos, he was presently shown into an inner room, where, seated at a table arranging open letters, was the white-bearded man whom he had seen the year before in the synagogue at Frankfort. He wore his hat--it seemed to be the same old felt hat as before--and near him was a packed portmanteau with a wrap and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda enter he rose, but did not advance or put out his hand. Looking at him with small penetrating eyes which glittered like black gems in the midst of his yellowish face and white hair, he said in German, "Good! It is now you who seek me, young man." "Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend of my grandfather's," said Deronda, "and I am under an obligation to you for giving yourself much trouble on my account." He spoke without difficulty in that liberal German tongue which takes many strange accents to its maternal bosom. Kalonymos now put out his hand and said cordially, "So you are no longer angry at being something more than an Englishman?" "On the contrary. I thank you heartily for helping to save me from remaining in ignorance of my parentage, and for taking care of the chest that my grandfather left in trust for me." "Sit down, sit down," said Kalonymos, in a quick undertone, seating himself again, and pointing to a chair near him. Then deliberately laying aside his hat and showing a head thickly covered, with white hair, he stroked and clutched his beard while he looked examiningly at the young face before him. The moment wrought strongly on Deronda's imaginative susceptibility: in the presence of one linked still in zealous friendship with the grandfather whose hope had yearned toward him when he was unborn, and who, though dead, was yet to speak with him in those written memorials which, says Milton, "contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are," he seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain of his own ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a delighted awe, something like what one feels in the solemn commemoration of acts done long ago but still telling markedly on the life of to-day. Impossible for men of duller fibre--men whose affection is not ready to diffuse itself through the wide travel of imagination, to comprehend, perhaps even to credit this sensibility of Deronda's; but it subsisted, like their own dullness, notwithstanding their lack of belief in it--and it gave his face an expression which seemed very satisfactory to the observer. He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the fine hymns in the Hebrew liturgy, "As thy goodness has been great to the former generations, even so may it be to the latter." Then after pausing a little he began, "Young man, I rejoice that I was not yet set off again on my travels, and that you are come in time for me to see the image of my friend as he was in his youth--no longer perverted from the fellowship of your people--no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who seemed to be claiming you as a Jew. You come with thankfulness yourself to claim the kindred and heritage that wicked contrivance would have robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, 'I am the grandson of Daniel Charisi.' Is it not so?" "Assuredly it is," said Deronda. "But let me say that I should at no time have been inclined to treat a Jew with incivility simply because he was a Jew. You can understand that I shrank from saying to a stranger, 'I know nothing of my mother.'" "A sin, a sin!" said Kalonymos, putting up his hand and closing his eyes in disgust. "A robbery of our people--as when our youths and maidens were reared for the Roman Edom. But it is frustrated. I have frustrated it. When Daniel Charisi--may his Rock and his Redeemer guard him!--when Daniel Charisi was a stripling and I was a lad little above his shoulder, we made a solemn vow always to be friends. He said, 'Let us bind ourselves with duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.' That was his bent from first to last--as he said, to fortify his soul with bonds. It was a saying of his, 'Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.' So we bound ourselves. And though we were much apart in our later life, the bond has never been broken. When he was dead, they sought to rob him; but they could not rob him of me. I rescued that remainder of him which he had prized and preserved for his offspring. And I have restored to him the offspring they had robbed him of. I will bring you the chest forthwith." Kalonymos left the room for a few minutes, and returned with a clerk who carried the chest, set it down on the floor, drew off a leather cover, and went out again. It was not very large, but was made heavy by ornamental bracers and handles of gilt iron. The wood was beautifully incised with Arabic lettering. "So!" said Kalonymos, returning to his seat. "And here is the curious key," he added, taking it from a small leathern bag. "Bestow it carefully. I trust you are methodic and wary." He gave Deronda the monitory and slightly suspicious look with which age is apt to commit any object to the keeping of youth. "I shall be more careful of this than of any other property," said Deronda, smiling and putting the key in his breast-pocket. "I never before possessed anything that was a sign to me of so much cherished hope and effort. And I shall never forget that the effort was partly yours. Have you time to tell me more of my grandfather? Or shall I be trespassing in staying longer?" "Stay yet a while. In an hour and eighteen minutes I start for Trieste," said Kalonymos, looking at his watch, "and presently my sons will expect my attention. Will you let me make you known to them, so that they may have the pleasure of showing hospitality to my friend's grandson? They dwell here in ease and luxury, though I choose to be a wanderer." "I shall be glad if you will commend me to their acquaintance for some future opportunity," said Deronda. "There are pressing claims calling me to England--friends who may be much in need of my presence. I have been kept away from them too long by unexpected circumstances. But to know more of you and your family would be motive enough to bring me again to Mainz." "Good! Me you will hardly find, for I am beyond my threescore years and ten, and I am a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me. But my sons and their children dwell here in wealth and unity. The days are changed for us since Karl the Great fetched my ancestors from Italy to bring some tincture of knowledge to our rough German brethren. I and my contemporaries have had to fight for it too. Our youth fell on evil days; but this we have won; we increase our wealth in safety, and the learning of all Germany is fed and fattened by Jewish brains--though they keep not always their Jewish hearts. Have you been left altogether ignorant of your people's life, young man?" "No," said Deronda, "I have lately, before I had any true suspicion of my parentage, been led to study everything belonging to their history with more interest than any other subject. It turns out that I have been making myself ready to understand my grandfather a little." He was anxious less the time should be consumed before this circuitous course of talk could lead them back to the topic he most cared about. Age does not easily distinguish between what it needs to express and what youth needs to know--distance seeming to level the objects of memory; and keenly active as Joseph Kalonymos showed himself, an inkstand in the wrong place would have hindered his imagination from getting to Beyrout: he had been used to unite restless travel with punctilious observation. But Deronda's last sentence answered its purpose. "So--you would perhaps have been such a man as he if your education had not hindered; for you are like him in features:--yet not altogether, young man. He had an iron will in his face: it braced up everybody about him. When he was quite young he had already got one deep upright line in his brow. I see none of that in you. Daniel Charisi used to say, 'Better, a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.' What he despised most was indifference. He had longer reasons than I can give you." "Yet his knowledge was not narrow?" said Deronda, with a tacit reference to the usual excuse for indecision--that it comes from knowing too much. "Narrow? no," said Kalonymos, shaking his head with a compassionate smile "From his childhood upward, he drank in learning as easily as the plant sucks up water. But he early took to medicine and theories about life and health. He traveled to many countries, and spent much of his substance in seeing and knowing. What he used to insist on was that the strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness and communication, and he was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles; 'It's no better,' said he, 'than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.' He mingled all sorts of learning; and in that he was like our Arabic writers in the golden time. We studied together, but he went beyond me. Though we were bosom friends, and he poured himself out to me, we were as different as the inside and outside of the bowl. I stood up for two notions of my own: I took Charisi's sayings as I took the shape of the trees: they were there, not to be disputed about. It came to the same thing in both of us; we were both faithful Jews, thankful not to be Gentiles. And since I was a ripe man, I have been what I am now, for all but age--loving to wander, loving transactions, loving to behold all things, and caring nothing about hardship. Charisi thought continually of our people's future: he went with all his soul into that part of our religion: I, not. So we have freedom, I am content. Our people wandered before they were driven. Young man when I am in the East, I lie much on deck and watch the greater stars. The sight of them satisfies me. I know them as they rise, and hunger not to know more. Charisi was satisfied with no sight, but pieced it out with what had been before and what would come after. Yet we loved each other, and as he said, he bound our love with duty; we solemnly pledged ourselves to help and defend each other to the last. I have fulfilled my pledge." Here Kalonymos rose, and Deronda, rising also, said, "And in being faithful to him you have caused justice to be done to me. It would have been a robbery of me too that I should never have known of the inheritance he had prepared for me. I thank you with my whole soul." "Be worthy of him, young man. What is your vocation?" This question was put with a quick abruptness which embarrassed Deronda, who did not feel it quite honest to allege his law-reading as a vocation. He answered, "I cannot say that I have any." "Get one, get one. The Jew must be diligent. You will call yourself a Jew and profess the faith of your fathers?" said Kalonymos, putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder and looking sharply in his face. "I shall call myself a Jew," said Deronda, deliberately, becoming slightly paler under the piercing eyes of his questioner. "But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races. But I think I can maintain my grandfather's notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation." It happened to Deronda at that moment, as it has often happened to others, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve. His respect for the questioner would not let him decline to answer, and by the necessity to answer he found out the truth for himself. "Ah, you argue and you look forward--you are Daniel Charisi's grandson," said Kalonymos, adding a benediction in Hebrew. With that they parted; and almost as soon as Deronda was in London, the aged man was again on shipboard, greeting the friendly stars without any eager curiosity.

When Deronda presented his letter at the banking-house in Mainz, and asked for Joseph Kalonymos, he was shown into an inner room. There, seated at a table arranging letters, was the white-bearded man whom he had seen the year before in the synagogue at Frankfort. Near him was a packed suitcase with a wrap and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda enter, he rose, and looking at him with small penetrating eyes, he said in German- "Good! It is now you who seek me, young man." "Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend of my grandfather's," said Deronda, speaking in fluent German. Kalonymos put out his hand and said cordially, "So you are no longer angry at being something more than an Englishman?" "On the contrary. I thank you heartily for helping to save me from remaining in ignorance of my parentage, and for taking care of the chest that my grandfather left in trust for me." "Sit down, sit down," said Kalonymos. Laying aside his hat, he examined the young face before him. The presence of his grandfather's friend affected Deronda deeply; he seemed to be touching the electric chain of his own ancestry, and he bore the scrutiny of Kalonymos with delighted awe. This sensibility of Deronda's gave his face an expression which seemed very satisfactory to his observer. Kalonymos said in Hebrew, quoting from a hymn, "As thy goodness has been great to the former generations, even so may it be to the latter." Then he began, "Young man, I rejoice that you are come in time for me to see the image of my friend as he was in his youth - no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who seemed to claim you as a Jew. You come with thankfulness to claim the heritage that wicked contrivance would have robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, 'I am the grandson of Daniel Charisi.' Is it not so?" "Assuredly," said Deronda. "But let me say that I should never have been inclined to treat a Jew with incivility simply because he was a Jew. I shrank from saying to a stranger, 'I know nothing of my mother.'" "A sin, a sin!" said Kalonymos in disgust. "A robbery of our people - but it is frustrated. When Daniel Charisi was a stripling and I was a lad little above his shoulder, we made a solemn vow always to be friends. He said, 'Let us bind ourselves with duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.' So we bound ourselves. And though we were much apart in our later life, the bond has never been broken. When he was dead, they sought to rob him; but they could not rob him of me. I rescued that remainder of him which he had prized and preserved for his offspring. I will bring you the chest forthwith." Kalonymos left the room, and returned with a clerk who carried the chest and set it down on the floor. It was not very large, but was made heavy by ornamental bracers and handles of gilt iron. The wood was beautifully incised with Arabic lettering. "So!" said Kalonymos. "Here is the key," he added, taking it from a small leathern bag. "Bestow it carefully. I trust you are methodical and wary." He gave Deronda the slightly suspicious look with which age is apt to commit any object to the keeping of youth. "I shall be more careful of this than of any other property," said Deronda, smiling and putting the key in his breast-pocket. "I never before possessed anything that was a sign of so much cherished hope and effort. Have you time to tell me more of my grandfather?" "In an hour and eighteen minutes I start for Trieste," said Kalonymos, looking at his watch, "I am a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me. But my sons and their children dwell here in wealth and unity. The days are changed for us since Karl the Great fetched my ancestors from Italy to bring some knowledge to our rough German brethren. Our youth fell on evil days; but this we have won; we increase our wealth in safety, and the learning of all Germany is fed by Jewish brains. Have you been left altogether ignorant of your people's life, young man?" "No," said Deronda, "I have lately been led to study their history with interest. It turns out that I have been making myself ready to understand my grandfather." He was anxious to learn more about his grandfather, and his last sentence answered its purpose. "You would perhaps have been such a man as he if your education had not hindered it; for you are like him in features:- yet not altogether. He had an iron will in his face. I see none of that in you. Daniel Charisi used to say, 'Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a false belief than no belief at all.' What he despised most was indifference." "Yet his knowledge was not narrow?" said Deronda. "Narrow? no," said Kalonymos. "He drank in learning as easily as the plant sucks up water. But he early took to medicine and theories about life and health. He travelled to many countries, and he was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles; 'It's no better,' said he, 'than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.' He mingled all sorts of learning; and in that he was like our Arabic writers in the golden time. We studied together, but he went beyond me. Though we were bosom friends, we were as different as the inside and outside of the bowl. Charisi thought continually of our people's future: he went with all his soul into that part of our religion: I, not. If we have freedom, I am content. Our people wandered before they were driven. But Charisi was not satisfied with that, but thought of what would come after. Yet we loved each other, and bound our love with duty; we solemnly pledged to help and defend each other to the last. I have fulfilled my pledge." Here Kalonymos rose, and Deronda, rising also, said- "I thank you with my whole soul." "Be worthy of him, young man. What is your vocation?" This question embarrassed Deronda, who did not feel it honest to allege his law-reading as a vocation. He answered- "I cannot say that I have any." "Get one, get one. The Jew must be diligent. You will call yourself a Jew and profess the faith of your fathers?" said Kalonymos, looking sharply in his face. "I shall call myself a Jew," said Deronda, deliberately, becoming slightly paler under those piercing eyes. "But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation." It happened to Deronda at that moment, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve. By the necessity to answer he found out the truth for himself. "Ah, you argue and you look forward - you are Daniel Charisi's grandson," said Kalonymos, adding a benediction in Hebrew. With that they parted.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 60

"Er ist geheissen Israel. Ihn hat verwandelt Hexenspruch in einen Hund. * * * * * Aber jeden Freitag Abend, In der Dmm'rungstunde, pltzlich Weicht der Zauber, und der Hund Wird aufs Neu' ein menschlich Wesen." --HEINE: _Prinzessin Sabbath_. When Deronda arrived at five o'clock, the shop was closed and the door was opened for him by the Christian servant. When she showed him into the room behind the shop he was surprised at the prettiness of the scene. The house was old, and rather extensive at the back: probably the large room he now entered was gloomy by daylight, but now it was agreeably lit by a fine old brass lamp with seven oil-lights hanging above the snow-white cloth spread on the central table. The ceiling and walls were smoky, and all the surroundings were dark enough to throw into relief the human figures, which had a Venetian glow of coloring. The grandmother was arrayed in yellowish brown with a large gold chain in lieu of the necklace, and by this light her yellow face with its darkly-marked eyebrows and framing roll of gray hair looked as handsome as was necessary for picturesque effect. Young Mrs. Cohen was clad in red and black, with a string of large artificial pearls wound round and round her neck: the baby lay asleep in the cradle under a scarlet counterpane; Adelaide Rebekah was in braided amber, and Jacob Alexander was in black velveteen with scarlet stockings. As the four pairs of black eyes all glistened a welcome at Deronda, he was almost ashamed of the supercilious dislike these happy-looking creatures had raised in him by daylight. Nothing could be more cordial than the greeting he received, and both mother and grandmother seemed to gather more dignity from being seen on the private hearth, showing hospitality. He looked round with some wonder at the old furniture: the oaken bureau and high side-table must surely be mere matters of chance and economy, and not due to the family taste. A large dish of blue and yellow ware was set up on the side-table, and flanking it were two old silver vessels; in front of them a large volume in darkened vellum with a deep-ribbed back. In the corner at the farther end was an open door into an inner room, where there was also a light. Deronda took in these details by parenthetic glances while he met Jacob's pressing solicitude about the knife. He had taken the pains to buy one with the requisites of the hook and white handle, and produced it on demand, saying, "Is that the sort of thing you want, Jacob?" It was subjected to a severe scrutiny, the hook and blades were opened, and the article of barter with the cork-screw was drawn forth for comparison. "Why do you like a hook better than a cork-screw?" said Deronda. "'Caush I can get hold of things with a hook. A corkscrew won't go into anything but corks. But it's better for you, you can draw corks." "You agree to change, then?" said Deronda, observing that the grandmother was listening with delight. "What else have you got in your pockets?" said Jacob, with deliberative seriousness. "Hush, hush, Jacob, love," said the grandmother. And Deronda, mindful of discipline, answered, "I think I must not tell you that. Our business was with the knives." Jacob looked up into his face scanningly for a moment or two, and apparently arriving at his conclusions, said gravely, "I'll shwop," handing the cork-screw knife to Deronda, who pocketed it with corresponding gravity. Immediately the small son of Shem ran off into the next room, whence his voice was heard in rapid chat; and then ran back again--when, seeing his father enter, he seized a little velveteen hat which lay on a chair and put it on to approach him. Cohen kept on his own hat, and took no notice of the visitor, but stood still while the two children went up to him and clasped his knees: then he laid his hands on each in turn and uttered his Hebrew benediction; whereupon the wife, who had lately taken baby from the cradle, brought it up to her husband and held it under his outstretched hands, to be blessed in its sleep. For the moment, Deronda thought that this pawnbroker, proud of his vocation, was not utterly prosaic. "Well, sir, you found your welcome in my family, I think," said Cohen, putting down his hat and becoming his former self. "And you've been punctual. Nothing like a little stress here," he added, tapping his side pocket as he sat down. "It's good for us all in our turn. I've felt it when I've had to make up payments. I began to fit every sort of box. It's bracing to the mind. Now then! let us see, let us see." "That is the ring I spoke of," said Deronda, taking it from his finger. "I believe it cost a hundred pounds. It will be a sufficient pledge to you for fifty, I think. I shall probably redeem it in a month or so." Cohen's glistening eyes seemed to get a little nearer together as he met the ingenuous look of this crude young gentleman, who apparently supposed that redemption was a satisfaction to pawnbrokers. He took the ring, examined and returned it, saying with indifference, "Good, good. We'll talk of it after our meal. Perhaps you'll join us, if you've no objection. Me and my wife'll feel honored, and so will mother; won't you, mother?" The invitation was doubly echoed, and Deronda gladly accepted it. All now turned and stood round the table. No dish was at present seen except one covered with a napkin; and Mrs. Cohen had placed a china bowl near her husband that he might wash his hands in it. But after putting on his hat again, he paused, and called in a loud voice, "Mordecai!" Can this be part of the religious ceremony? thought Deronda, not knowing what might be expected of the ancient hero. But he heard a "Yes" from the next room, which made him look toward the open door; and there, to his astonishment, he saw the figure of the enigmatic Jew whom he had this morning met with in the book-shop. Their eyes met, and Mordecai looked as much surprised as Deronda--neither in his surprise making any sign of recognition. But when Mordecai was seating himself at the end of the table, he just bent his head to the guest in a cold and distant manner, as if the disappointment of the morning remained a disagreeable association with this new acquaintance. Cohen now washed his hands, pronouncing Hebrew words the while: afterward, he took off the napkin covering the dish and disclosed the two long flat loaves besprinkled with seed--the memorial of the manna that fed the wandering forefathers--and breaking off small pieces gave one to each of the family, including Adelaide Rebekah, who stood on the chair with her whole length exhibited in her amber-colored garment, her little Jewish nose lengthened by compression of the lip in the effort to make a suitable appearance. Cohen then uttered another Hebrew blessing, and after that, the male heads were uncovered, all seated themselves, and the meal went on without any peculiarity that interested Deronda. He was not very conscious of what dishes he ate from; being preoccupied with a desire to turn the conversation in a way that would enable him to ask some leading question; and also thinking of Mordecai, between whom and himself there was an exchange of fascinated, half-furtive glances. Mordecai had no handsome Sabbath garment, but instead of the threadbare rusty black coat of the morning he wore one of light drab, which looked as if it had once been a handsome loose paletot now shrunk with washing; and this change of clothing gave a still stronger accentuation to his dark-haired, eager face which might have belonged to the prophet Ezekiel--also probably not modish in the eyes of contemporaries. It was noticeable that the thin tails of the fried fish were given to Mordecai; and in general the sort of share assigned to a poor relation--no doubt a "survival" of prehistoric practice, not yet generally admitted to be superstitious. Mr. Cohen kept up the conversation with much liveliness, introducing as subjects always in taste (the Jew is proud of his loyalty) the Queen and the Royal Family, the Emperor and Empress of the French--into which both grandmother and wife entered with zest. Mrs. Cohen the younger showed an accurate memory of distinguished birthdays; and the elder assisted her son in informing the guest of what occurred when the Emperor and Empress were in England and visited the city ten years before. "I dare say you know all about it better than we do, sir," said Cohen, repeatedly, by way of preface to full information; and the interesting statements were kept up in a trio. "Our baby is named _Eu_genie Esther," said young Mrs. Cohen, vivaciously. "It's wonderful how the Emperor's like a cousin of mine in the face," said the grandmother; "it struck me like lightning when I caught sight of him. I couldn't have thought it." "Mother and me went to see the Emperor and Empress at the Crystal Palace," said Mr. Cohen. "I had a fine piece of work to take care of, mother; she might have been squeezed flat--though she was pretty near as lusty then as she is now. I said if I had a hundred mothers I'd never take one of 'em to see the Emperor and Empress at the Crystal Palace again; and you may think a man can't afford it when he's got but one mother--not if he'd ever so big an insurance on her." He stroked his mother's shoulder affectionately, and chuckled a little at his own humor. "Your mother has been a widow a long while, perhaps," said Deronda, seizing his opportunity. "That has made your care for her the more needful." "Ay, ay, it's a good many _yore-zeit_ since I had to manage for her and myself," said Cohen quickly. "I went early to it. It's that makes you a sharp knife." "What does--what makes a sharp knife, father?" said Jacob, his cheek very much swollen with sweet-cake. The father winked at his guest and said, "Having your nose put on the grindstone." Jacob slipped from his chair with the piece of sweet-cake in his hand, and going close up to Mordecai, who had been totally silent hitherto, said, "What does that mean--putting my nose to the grindstone?" "It means that you are to bear being hurt without making a noise," said Mordecai, turning his eyes benignantly on the small face close to his. Jacob put the corner of the cake into Mordecai's mouth as an invitation to bite, saying meanwhile, "I shan't though," and keeping his eyes on the cake to observe how much of it went in this act of generosity. Mordecai took a bite and smiled, evidently meaning to please the lad, and the little incident made them both look more lovable. Deronda, however, felt with some vexation that he had taken little by his question. "I fancy that is the right quarter for learning," said he, carrying on the subject that he might have an excuse for addressing Mordecai, to whom he turned and said, "You have been a great student, I imagine?" "I have studied," was the quiet answer. "And you?--You know German by the book you were buying." "Yes, I have studied in Germany. Are you generally engaged in bookselling?" said Deronda. "No; I only go to Mr. Ram's shop every day to keep it while he goes to meals," said Mordecai, who was now looking at Deronda with what seemed a revival of his original interest: it seemed as if the face had some attractive indication for him which now neutralized the former disappointment. After a slight pause, he said, "Perhaps you know Hebrew?" "I am sorry to say, not at all." Mordecai's countenance fell: he cast down his eyelids, looking at his hands, which lay crossed before him, and said no more. Deronda had now noticed more decisively than in their former interview a difficulty in breathing, which he thought must be a sign of consumption. "I've had something else to do than to get book-learning." said Mr. Cohen,--"I've had to make myself knowing about useful things. I know stones well,"--here he pointed to Deronda's ring. "I'm not afraid of taking that ring of yours at my own valuation. But now," he added, with a certain drop in his voice to a lower, more familiar nasal, "what do you want for it?" "Fifty or sixty pounds," Deronda answered, rather too carelessly. Cohen paused a little, thrust his hands into his pockets, fixed on Deronda a pair of glistening eyes that suggested a miraculous guinea-pig, and said, "Couldn't do you that. Happy to oblige, but couldn't go that lengths. Forty pound--say forty--I'll let you have forty on it." Deronda was aware that Mordecai had looked up again at the words implying a monetary affair, and was now examining him again, while he said, "Very well, I shall redeem it in a month or so." "Good. I'll make you out the ticket by-and-by," said Cohen, indifferently. Then he held up his finger as a sign that conversation must be deferred. He, Mordecai and Jacob put on their hats, and Cohen opened a thanksgiving, which was carried on by responses, till Mordecai delivered himself alone at some length, in a solemn chanting tone, with his chin slightly uplifted and his thin hands clasped easily before him. Not only in his accent and tone, but in his freedom from the self-consciousness which has reference to others' approbation, there could hardly have been a stronger contrast to the Jew at the other end of the table. It was an unaccountable conjunction--the presence among these common, prosperous, shopkeeping types, of a man who, in an emaciated threadbare condition, imposed a certain awe on Deronda, and an embarrassment at not meeting his expectations. No sooner had Mordecai finished his devotional strain, than rising, with a slight bend of his head to the stranger, he walked back into his room, and shut the door behind him. "That seems to be rather a remarkable man," said Deronda, turning to Cohen, who immediately set up his shoulders, put out his tongue slightly, and tapped his own brow. It was clearly to be understood that Mordecai did not come up to the standard of sanity which was set by Mr. Cohen's view of men and things. "Does he belong to your family?" said Deronda. This idea appeared to be rather ludicrous to the ladies as well as to Cohen, and the family interchanged looks of amusement. "No, no," said Cohen. "Charity! charity! he worked for me, and when he got weaker and weaker I took him in. He's an incumbrance; but he brings a blessing down, and he teaches the boy. Besides, he does the repairing at the watches and jewelry." Deronda hardly abstained from smiling at this mixture of kindliness and the desire to justify it in the light of a calculation; but his willingness to speak further of Mordecai, whose character was made the more enigmatically striking by these new details, was baffled. Mr. Cohen immediately dismissed the subject by reverting to the "accommodation," which was also an act of charity, and proceeded to make out the ticket, get the forty pounds, and present them both in exchange for the diamond ring. Deronda, feeling that it would be hardly delicate to protract his visit beyond the settlement of the business which was its pretext, had to take his leave, with no more decided result than the advance of forty pounds and the pawn-ticket in his breast-pocket, to make a reason for returning when he came up to town after Christmas. He was resolved that he would then endeavor to gain a little more insight into the character and history of Mordecai; from whom also he might gather something decisive about the Cohens--for example, the reason why it was forbidden to ask Mrs. Cohen the elder whether she had a daughter.

When Deronda arrived at five o'clock, the servant showed him into the room behind the closed shop. He was surprised at the prettiness of the scene. The house was old, and extensive at the back: the large room was lit by a fine old brass lamp with seven oil-lights hanging above the snow-white cloth spread on the central table. The dark surroundings threw into relief the human figures, with a Venetian glow of colouring. By this light, the grandmother's face with its darkly-marked eyebrows and framing roll of grey hair looked picturesquely handsome. Young Mrs. Cohen was clad in red and black, with a string of large artificial pearls wound round and round her neck: the baby lay asleep in the cradle; Adelaide Rebekah was in braided amber, and Jacob was in black velveteen with scarlet stockings. Deronda was almost ashamed of the supercilious dislike these happy-looking creatures had raised in him by daylight. Nothing could be more cordial than the greeting he received, and both mother and grandmother seemed more dignified in this setting. He looked round with some wonder at the old oak bureau and high side-table, where a large blue and yellow dish was set up between two old silver vessels; in front of them lay a large volume in darkened vellum. In the far corner was an open door into an inner room, where there was also a light. Deronda took in these details while he met Jacob's pressing solicitude about the knife. He had taken the pains to buy one with a hook and white handle, and produced it on demand, saying,- "Is that the sort of thing you want, Jacob?" It was subjected to a severe scrutiny, with Jacob's own knife being drawn forth for comparison. "Why do you like a hook better than a cork-screw?" said Deronda. "'Caush I can get hold of things with a hook. A corkscrew won't go into anything but corks. But it's better for you, you can draw corks." "You agree to change, then?" said Deronda, observing that the grandmother was listening with delight. "What else have you got in your pockets?" said Jacob. "Hush, Jacob, love," said the grandmother. And Deronda answered- "I think I must not tell you that. Our business was with the knives." Jacob scanned his face for a moment, before saying gravely- "I'll shwop," handing the cork-screw knife to Deronda, who pocketed it with equal gravity. Immediately Jacob ran off into the next room, whence his voice was heard in rapid chat; and then ran back again - when, seeing his father enter, he seized a little velveteen hat from a chair and put it on. Cohen kept on his own hat, and stood still while the two children went up to him and clasped his knees. Then he laid his hands on each in turn and uttered his Hebrew benediction; whereupon the wife lifted the baby and brought it to her husband to be blessed in its sleep. For the moment, Deronda thought that this pawnbroker was not utterly prosaic. "Welcome, sir," said Cohen, putting down his hat. "You've been punctual. Nothing like a little stress here," he added, tapping his side pocket as he sat down. "It's good for us all in our turn. It's bracing to the mind. Now then! let us see." "That is the ring I spoke of," said Deronda, taking it from his finger. "I believe it cost a hundred pounds. It will be a sufficient pledge to you for fifty, I think. I shall probably redeem it in a month or so." Cohen's glistening eyes seemed to get a little nearer together as met the innocent look of this young gentleman, who apparently supposed that redemption was a satisfaction to pawnbrokers. He examined the ring and returned it, saying with indifference, "Good, good. We'll talk of it after our meal. Perhaps you'll join us. Me and my wife'll feel honoured, and so will mother." Deronda gladly accepted. All now turned and stood round the table, which held no dish at present except one covered with a napkin; and Mrs. Cohen had placed a china bowl near her husband that he might wash his hands in it. But after putting on his hat again, he paused, and called in a loud voice, "Mordecai!" Deronda heard a "Yes" from the next room, and to his astonishment, from it stepped the figure of the enigmatic Jew whom he had met in the book-shop. Their eyes met, and Mordecai looked as much surprised as Deronda - though neither made any sign of recognition. But as Mordecai came to the table, he just bent his head to the guest in a cold and distant manner, as if still feeling the disappointment of the morning. Cohen now washed his hands, pronouncing Hebrew words: then he took off the napkin covering the dish and disclosed the two long flat loaves besprinkled with seed - the memorial of the manna that fed the wandering forefathers - and breaking off small pieces gave one to each of the family, including Adelaide Rebekah, who stood on the chair in her amber-coloured garment, trying to look suitably solemn. Cohen then uttered another Hebrew blessing, and after that, the male heads were uncovered, all seated themselves, and the meal went on without any peculiarity that interested Deronda. He was not very conscious of what dishes he ate; being preoccupied with a desire to turn the conversation in a way that would let him ask about Mirah; and also thinking of Mordecai, with whom he exchanged fascinated, furtive glances. Mordecai had no handsome Sabbath garment, but instead of the threadbare rusty black coat of the morning he wore a light one, which looked as if it had once been a handsome loose jacket, now shrunk with washing, which gave a stronger accentuation to his dark-haired, eager face. Deronda noticed that Mordecai was given the thin tails of the fried fish: the sort of share assigned to a poor relation. Mr. Cohen kept up the conversation with much liveliness, introducing as subjects the Queen and the Royal Family, and the French Emperor and Empress - into which both grandmother and wife entered with zest. "It's wonderful how the Emperor resembles a cousin of mine," said the grandmother; "it struck me like lightning when I saw him." "We went to see the Emperor and Empress at the Crystal Palace," said Mr. Cohen. "I had hard work to take care of mother; she might have been squeezed flat. If I had a hundred mothers I'd never take one of 'em to see the Emperor and Empress at the Crystal Palace again; a man can't afford it when he's got but one mother." He stroked his mother's shoulder affectionately. "Your mother has been a widow a long while, perhaps," said Deronda, seizing his opportunity. "That has made your care for her the more needful." "Ay, ay, it's a good many years since I had to manage for her and myself," said Cohen. "It's that makes you a sharp knife." "What makes a sharp knife, father?" said Jacob, his cheek swollen with cake. The father winked at his guest and said, "Having your nose put to the grindstone." Jacob slipped from his chair, cake in hand, and going to Mordecai, who had been silent hitherto, said, "What does that mean - putting my nose to the grindstone?" "It means that you are to bear being hurt without making a noise," said Mordecai, turning his eyes benignly on the small face close to his. Jacob put the corner of the cake into Mordecai's mouth as an invitation to bite, keeping his eyes on it to observe how much of it went in this act of generosity. Mordecai took a bite and smiled, and the little incident made them both look more lovable. Deronda, however, felt that he had gathered little by his question. Turning to Mordecai, he said, "You have been a great student, I imagine?" "I have studied," was the quiet answer. "And you? You know German by the book you were buying." "Yes, I have studied in Germany. Are you generally engaged in bookselling?" said Deronda. "No; I only go to Mr. Ram's shop every day to keep it while he goes to meals," said Mordecai, who was now looking at Deronda with a revival of his original interest. After a slight pause, he said, "Perhaps you know Hebrew?" "I am sorry to say, not at all." Mordecai's countenance fell: he cast down his eyelids and said no more. Deronda noticed a definite difficulty in the other man's breathing, which he thought must be a sign of consumption. "I've been too busy for book-learning." said Mr. Cohen. "I've had to learn about useful things. I know stones well," - here he pointed to Deronda's ring. "Now, what do you want for it?" "Fifty or sixty pounds," Deronda answered, rather too carelessly. Cohen paused a little, hands in his pockets, fixed on Deronda a pair of glistening eyes that suggested a miraculous guinea-pig, and said, "Couldn't do you that. Happy to oblige, but say forty pound - I'll let you have forty on it." Deronda was aware that Mordecai had looked up and was examining him again, while he said, "Very well, I shall redeem it in a month or so." "Good. I'll make you out the ticket by-and-by," said Cohen. Then he, Mordecai and Jacob put on their hats, and he began a thanksgiving, which was carried on by responses, till Mordecai spoke alone at some length, in a solemn chant, with his chin uplifted and his thin hands clasped. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast to the Jew at the other end of the table. It was unaccountable - the presence among these common, prosperous, shopkeeping types, of a man who, in an emaciated threadbare condition, imposed a certain awe on Deronda, and an embarrassment at not meeting his expectations. No sooner had Mordecai finished his prayer than he rose, and with a slight bend of his head to the stranger, walked back into his room, and shut the door behind him. "That seems to be rather a remarkable man," said Deronda, turning to Cohen, who tapped his own brow, indicating that Mordecai did not come up to his standard of sanity. "Does he belong to your family?" said Deronda. The family exchanged looks of amusement. "No, no," said Cohen. "Charity! he worked for me, and when he got weaker I took him in. He's an encumbrance; but he brings a blessing, and he teaches the boy. Besides, he repairs the watches and jewellery." Deronda smiled at this mixture of kindliness and the desire to justify it; but Mr. Cohen immediately dismissed the subject of Mordecai by reverting to business. He proceeded to make out the ticket, got the forty pounds, and presented them both in exchange for the diamond ring. Deronda, feeling he could protract his visit no longer, had to take his leave, with no more result than a pawn-ticket in his pocket to make a reason for returning after Christmas. He was resolved that he would then try to learn more about Mordecai; from whom also he might gather knowledge about the Cohens - for example, the reason why it was forbidden to ask Mrs. Cohen the elder whether she had a daughter.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 34

"A wild dedication of yourselves To unpath'd waters, undreamed shores." --SHAKESPEARE. On the day when Gwendolen Harleth was married and became Mrs. Grandcourt, the morning was clear and bright, and while the sun was low a slight frost crisped the leaves. The bridal party was worth seeing, and half Pennicote turned out to see it, lining the pathway up to the church. An old friend of the rector's performed the marriage ceremony, the rector himself acting as father, to the great advantage of the procession. Only two faces, it was remarked, showed signs of sadness--Mrs. Davilow's and Anna's. The mother's delicate eyelids were pink, as if she had been crying half the night; and no one was surprised that, splendid as the match was, she should feel the parting from a daughter who was the flower of her children and of her own life. It was less understood why Anna should be troubled when she was being so well set off by the bridesmaid's dress. Every one else seemed to reflect the brilliancy of the occasion--the bride most of all. Of her it was agreed that as to figure and carriage she was worthy to be a "lady o' title": as to face, perhaps it might be thought that a title required something more rosy; but the bridegroom himself not being fresh-colored--being indeed, as the miller's wife observed, very much of her own husband's complexion--the match was the more complete. Anyhow he must be very fond of her; and it was to be hoped that he would never cast it up to her that she had been going out to service as a governess, and her mother to live at Sawyer's Cottage--vicissitudes which had been much spoken of in the village. The miller's daughter of fourteen could not believe that high gentry behaved badly to their wives, but her mother instructed her--"Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness. I've heard my mother say Squire Pelton used to take his dogs and a long whip into his wife's room, and flog 'em there to frighten her; and my mother was lady's-maid there at the very time." "That's unlucky talk for a wedding, Mrs. Girdle," said the tailor. "A quarrel may end wi' the whip, but it begins wi' the tongue, and it's the women have got the most o' that." "The Lord gave it 'em to use, I suppose," said Mrs. Girdle. "_He_ never meant you to have it all your own way." "By what I can make out from the gentleman as attends to the grooming at Offendene," said the tailor, "this Mr. Grandcourt has wonderful little tongue. Everything must be done dummy-like without his ordering." "Then he's the more whip, I doubt," said Mrs. Girdle. "_She's_ got tongue enough, I warrant her. See, there they come out together!" "What wonderful long corners she's got to her eyes!" said the tailor. "She makes you feel comical when she looks at you." Gwendolen, in fact, never showed more elasticity in her bearing, more lustre in her long brown glance: she had the brilliancy of strong excitement, which will sometimes come even from pain. It was not pain, however, that she was feeling: she had wrought herself up to much the same condition as that in which she stood at the gambling-table when Deronda was looking at her, and she began to lose. There was an enjoyment in it: whatever uneasiness a growing conscience had created was disregarded as an ailment might have been, amidst the gratification of that ambitious vanity and desire for luxury within her which it would take a great deal of slow poisoning to kill. This morning she could not have said truly that she repented her acceptance of Grandcourt, or that any fears in hazy perspective could hinder the glowing effect of the immediate scene in which she was the central object. That she was doing something wrong--that a punishment might be hanging over her--that the woman to whom she had given a promise and broken it, was thinking of her in bitterness and misery with a just reproach--that Deronda with his way of looking into things very likely despised her for marrying Grandcourt, as he had despised her for gambling--above all, that the cord which united her with this lover and which she had heretofore held by the hand, was now being flung over her neck,--all this yeasty mingling of dimly understood facts with vague but deep impressions, and with images half real, half fantastic, had been disturbing her during the weeks of her engagement. Was that agitating experience nullified this morning? No: it was surmounted and thrust down with a sort of exulting defiance as she felt herself standing at the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring everything to win much--or if to lose, still with _clat_ and a sense of importance. But this morning a losing destiny for herself did not press upon her as a fear: she thought that she was entering on a fuller power of managing circumstances--with all the official strength of marriage, which some women made so poor a use of. That intoxication of youthful egoism out of which she had been shaken by trouble, humiliation, and a new sense of culpability, had returned upon her under a newly-fed strength of the old fumes. She did not in the least present the ideal of the tearful, tremulous bride. Poor Gwendolen, whom some had judged much too forward and instructed in the world's ways!--with her erect head and elastic footstep she was walking among illusions; and yet, too, there was an under-consciousness of her that she was a little intoxicated. "Thank God you bear it so well, my darling!" said Mrs. Davilow, when she had helped Gwendolen to doff her bridal white and put on her traveling dress. All the trembling had been done by the poor mother, and her agitation urged Gwendolen doubly to take the morning as if it were a triumph. "Why, you might have said that, if I had been going to Mrs. Mompert's, you dear, sad, incorrigible mamma!" said Gwendolen just putting her hands to her mother's cheeks with laughing tenderness--then retreating a little and spreading out her arms as if to exhibit herself: "Here am I--Mrs. Grandcourt! what else would you have me, but what I am sure to be? You know you were ready to die with vexation when you thought that I would not be Mrs. Grandcourt." "Hush, hush, my child, for heaven's sake!" said Mrs. Davilow, almost in a whisper. "How can I help feeling it when I am parting from you. But I can bear anything gladly if you are happy." "Not gladly, mamma, no!" said Gwendolen, shaking her head, with a bright smile. "Willingly you would bear it, but always sorrowfully. Sorrowing is your sauce; you can take nothing without it." Then, clasping her mother's shoulders and raining kisses first on one cheek and then on the other between her words, she said, gaily, "And you shall sorrow over my having everything at my beck---and enjoying everything glorious--splendid houses--and horses--and diamonds, I shall have diamonds--and going to court--and being Lady Certainly--and Lady Perhaps--and grand here--and tantivy there--and always loving you better than anybody else in the world." "My sweet child!--But I shall not be jealous if you love your husband better; and he will expect to be first." Gwendolen thrust out her lips and chin with a pretty grimace, saying, "Rather a ridiculous expectation. However, I don't mean to treat him ill, unless he deserves it." Then the two fell into a clinging embrace, and Gwendolen could not hinder a rising sob when she said, "I wish you were going with me, mamma." But the slight dew on her long eyelashes only made her the more charming when she gave her hand to Grandcourt to be led to the carriage. The rector looked in on her to give a final "Good-bye; God bless you; we shall see you again before long," and then returned to Mrs. Davilow, saying half cheerfully, half solemnly, "Let us be thankful, Fanny. She is in a position well suited to her, and beyond what I should have dared to hope for. And few women can have been chosen more entirely for their own sake. You should feel yourself a happy mother." * * * * * There was a railway journey of some fifty miles before the new husband and wife reached the station near Ryelands. The sky had veiled itself since the morning, and it was hardly more than twilight when they entered the park-gates, but still Gwendolen, looking out of the carriage-window as they drove rapidly along, could see the grand outlines and the nearer beauties of the scene--the long winding drive bordered with evergreens backed by huge gray stems: then the opening of wide grassy spaces and undulations studded with dark clumps; till at last came a wide level where the white house could be seen, with a hanging wood for a back-ground, and the rising and sinking balustrade of a terrace in front. Gwendolen had been at her liveliest during the journey, chatting incessantly, ignoring any change in their mutual position since yesterday; and Grandcourt had been rather ecstatically quiescent, while she turned his gentle seizure of her hand into a grasp of his hand by both hers, with an increased vivacity as of a kitten that will not sit quiet to be petted. She was really getting somewhat febrile in her excitement; and now in this drive through the park her usual susceptibility to changes of light and scenery helped to make her heart palpitate newly. Was it at the novelty simply, or the almost incredible fulfilment about to be given to her girlish dreams of being "somebody"--walking through her own furlong of corridor and under her own ceilings of an out-of-sight loftiness, where her own painted Spring was shedding painted flowers, and her own fore-shortened Zephyrs were blowing their trumpets over her; while her own servants, lackeys in clothing but men in bulk and shape, were as nought in her presence, and revered the propriety of her insolence to them:--being in short the heroine of an admired play without the pains of art? Was it alone the closeness of this fulfilment which made her heart flutter? or was it some dim forecast, the insistent penetration of suppressed experience, mixing the expectation of a triumph with the dread of a crisis? Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself. She fell silent in spite of herself as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, "Here we are at home!" and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it: it was no more than the passive acceptance of a greeting in the midst of an absorbing show. Was not all her hurrying life of the last three months a show, in which her consciousness was a wondering spectator? After the half-willful excitement of the day, a numbness had come over her personality. But there was a brilliant light in the hall--warmth, matting, carpets, full-length portraits, Olympian statues, assiduous servants. Not many servants, however: only a few from Diplow in addition to those constantly in charge of the house; and Gwendolen's new maid, who had come with her, was taken under guidance by the housekeeper. Gwendolen felt herself being led by Grandcourt along a subtly-scented corridor, into an ante-room where she saw an open doorway sending out a rich glow of light and color. "These are our dens," said Grandcourt. "You will like to be quiet here till dinner. We shall dine early." He pressed her hand to his lips and moved away, more in love than he had ever expected to be. Gwendolen, yielded up her hat and mantle, threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, and saw herself repeated in glass panels with all her faint-green satin surroundings. The housekeeper had passed into this boudoir from the adjoining dressing-room and seemed disposed to linger, Gwendolen thought, in order to look at the new mistress of Ryelands, who, however, being impatient for solitude said to her, "Will you tell Hudson when she has put out my dress to leave everything? I shall not want her again, unless I ring." The housekeeper, coming forward, said, "Here is a packet, madam, which I was ordered to give into nobody's hands but yours, when you were alone. The person who brought it said it was a present particularly ordered by Mr. Grandcourt; but he was not to know of its arrival till he saw you wear it. Excuse me, madam; I felt it right to obey orders." Gwendolen took the packet and let it lie on her lap till she heard the doors close. It came into her mind that the packet might contain the diamonds which Grandcourt had spoken of as being deposited somewhere and to be given to her on her marriage. In this moment of confused feeling and creeping luxurious languor she was glad of this diversion--glad of such an event as having her own diamonds to try on. Within all the sealed paper coverings was a box, but within the box there _was_ a jewel-case; and now she felt no doubt that she had the diamonds. But on opening the case, in the same instant that she saw them gleam she saw a letter lying above them. She knew the handwriting of the address. It was as if an adder had lain on them. Her heart gave a leap which seemed to have spent all her strength; and as she opened the bit of thin paper, it shook with the trembling of her hands. But it was legible as print, and thrust its words upon her. These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers. Perhaps you think of being happy, as she once was, and of having beautiful children such as hers, who will thrust hers aside. God is too just for that. The man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine: you could not take that from me when you took the rest. It is dead: but I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried as well as mine. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul. Will you give him this letter to set him against me and ruin us more--me and my children? Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse. It seemed at first as if Gwendolen's eyes were spell-bound in reading the horrible words of the letter over and over again as a doom of penance; but suddenly a new spasm of terror made her lean forward and stretch out the paper toward the fire, lest accusation and proof at once should meet all eyes. It flew like a feather from her trembling fingers and was caught up in a great draught of flame. In her movement the casket fell on the floor and the diamonds rolled out. She took no notice, but fell back in her chair again helpless. She could not see the reflections of herself then; they were like so many women petrified white; but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands. She sat so for a long while, knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves to her. Truly here were poisoned gems, and the poison had entered into this poor young creature. After that long while, there was a tap at the door and Grandcourt entered, dressed for dinner. The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence. He had expected to see her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor. Was it a fit of madness? In some form or other the furies had crossed his threshold.

On the day Gwendolen Harleth married Mr. Grandcourt, the morning was clear and bright, and a slight frost crisped the leaves. Half Pennicote turned out to see the bridal party, lining the pathway to the church. An old friend of the rector's performed the marriage ceremony, the rector himself acting as the father of the bride. Only two faces showed signs of sadness - Mrs. Davilow's and Anna's. The mother's delicate eyelids were pink, as if she had been crying half the night; and no one was surprised that, splendid as the match was, she should feel the parting from a daughter who was the flower of her children. It was less understood why Anna should be troubled. Everyone else seemed to reflect the brilliancy of the occasion - the bride most of all. It was agreed that as to figure she was worthy to be a "lady o' title": as to face, perhaps she might be a little more rosy, but she matched her husband's complexion. Anyhow he must be very fond of her; and it was to be hoped that he would never cast it up to her that she had been going out to service as a governess. Gwendolen, in fact, never showed more spring in her step, more lustre in her eyes: she had the brilliancy of strong excitement. She had wrought herself up to much the same condition as that in which she stood at the gambling-table when Deronda was looking at her, and she began to lose. There was an enjoyment in it: the uneasiness of her growing conscience was disregarded, amidst the gratification of her ambitious vanity and desire for luxury. This morning she could not have said truly that she repented her acceptance of Grandcourt, or that any hazy fears marred the glowing scene in which she was the central object. That she was doing something wrong - that a punishment might be hanging over her - that Deronda very likely despised her for marrying Grandcourt, as he had despised her for gambling - above all, that the cord which united her with this lover and which she had until now held by the hand, was now being flung over her neck - all these dimly understood facts and vague impressions had been disturbing her during the weeks of her engagement. But this morning that agitation was thrust down with exulting defiance as she felt herself standing at the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring everything to win - or if to lose, to lose with clat and importance. But this morning she did not fear a losing destiny: she thought that she was entering on a fuller power of managing circumstances. The youthful egoism out of which she had been shaken by trouble, humiliation, and a sense of culpability, had returned to her with newly-fed strength. She did not in the least appear a tearful, tremulous bride. With erect head and elastic footstep, she was walking among illusions; and yet, too, she was conscious that she was a little intoxicated. "Thank God you bear it so well, my darling!" said Mrs. Davilow, when she helped Gwendolen to doff her bridal white and put on her travelling dress. "Why, you might have said that, if I had been going to Mrs. Mompert's, you dear, sad, mamma!" said Gwendolen, putting her hands to her mother's cheeks with laughing tenderness. "Here am I - Mrs. Grandcourt! what else would you have me? You were ready to die with vexation when you thought that I would not be Mrs. Grandcourt." "Hush, my child, for heaven's sake!" said Mrs. Davilow. "How can I help feeling it when I am parting from you? But I can bear anything gladly if you are happy." "Not gladly, mamma, no!" said Gwendolen, shaking her head, and smiling. "Willingly you would bear it, but always sorrowfully. Sorrowing is your sauce; you can take nothing without it." Then, kissing her, she said, gaily, "And you shall sorrow over my having everything glorious - splendid houses, horses - and diamonds, I shall have diamonds - and being Lady Perhaps - and grand here - and tantivy there - and always loving you better than anybody else in the world." "My sweet child! But I shall not be jealous if you love your husband better; and he will expect to be first." Gwendolen thrust out her lips and chin with a pretty grimace, saying, "Rather a ridiculous expectation. However, I don't mean to treat him ill, unless he deserves it." Then the two fell into a clinging embrace, and Gwendolen could not hinder a rising sob when she said, "I wish you were going with me, mamma." But the slight dew on her long eyelashes only made her the more charming when she gave her hand to Grandcourt to be led to the carriage. * * * * * There was a railway journey of some fifty miles before the new husband and wife reached the station near Ryelands. It was hardly more than twilight when they entered the park-gates, but still Gwendolen, looking out of the carriage-window, could see the grand outlines of the scene - the long winding drive bordered with evergreens: then the opening of wide grassy spaces; till at last the white house appeared, with a wood for a background, and a terrace in front. Gwendolen had been at her liveliest during the journey, chatting incessantly, ignoring any change in their position since yesterday; and Grandcourt had been rather ecstatically quiescent, while she turned his gentle seizure of her hand into a grasp of his hand by both hers, vivacious as a kitten that will not sit quiet to be petted. She was really somewhat feverish in her excitement; and now in this drive through the park her heart palpitated newly. Was it at the novelty, or the almost incredible fulfilment about to be given to her girlish dreams of being "somebody" - walking through her own furlong of corridor, while her servants were as nought in her presence - being in short the heroine of an admired play without the pains of art? Was it the closeness of this fulfilment which made her heart flutter? or was it some dim forecast, the insistent penetration of suppressed experience, creating the dread of a crisis? She fell silent as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, "Here we are at home!" and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it: it was no more than the passive acceptance of a greeting in the midst of an absorbing show. Was not all her hurrying life of the last three months a show, in which her consciousness was a wondering spectator? After the excitement of the day, a numbness had come over her. But there was a brilliant light in the hall - warmth, carpets, full-length portraits, Olympian statues, assiduous servants. Not many servants, however: and Gwendolen's new maid, who had come with her, was taken under guidance by the housekeeper. Gwendolen was led by Grandcourt along a subtly-scented corridor, into an ante-room where she saw an open doorway sending out a rich glow of light and colour. "These are our dens," said Grandcourt. "You will like to be quiet here till dinner. We shall dine early." He pressed her hand to his lips and moved away, more in love than he had ever expected to be. Gwendolen took off her hat and cloak, threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, and saw herself repeated in glass panels with all her faint-green satin surroundings. The housekeeper had entered and seemed disposed to linger; from curiosity, Gwendolen thought, and she said, "Will you tell Hudson I shall not want her again, unless I ring?" Coming forward, the housekeeper said, "Here is a packet, madam, which I was ordered to give into nobody's hands but yours, when you were alone. The person who brought it said it was a present particularly ordered by Mr. Grandcourt; but he was not to know of its arrival till he saw you wear it. Excuse me, madam; I felt it right to obey orders." Gwendolen took the packet and let it lie on her lap till she heard the doors close. It came into her mind that the packet might contain the diamonds which Grandcourt had mentioned as being deposited somewhere and to be given to her on her marriage. In this moment of confused feeling and creeping luxurious languor she was glad of this diversion, of having her own diamonds to try on. Within the sealed paper coverings was a box: within the box there was a jewel-case; and now she felt no doubt that she had the diamonds. But on opening the case, she saw a letter lying above them. She knew the handwriting. It was as if an adder had lain on them. Her heart gave a leap; and as she opened the paper, it shook in her trembling hands. It thrust its words upon her. 'These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, so that you might possess what was hers. Perhaps you think of being happy; but the man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine. It is dead: but I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul. 'Will you give him this letter to set him against me and ruin us - me and my children? Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with your eyes open. The wrong you have done me will be your curse.' It seemed at first as if Gwendolen's eyes were spell-bound in reading the horrible words of the letter over and over again; but a sudden spasm of terror made her lean forward and stretch out the paper toward the fire. It flew like a feather from her trembling fingers and was caught up in a great draught of flame. The casket fell on the floor and the diamonds rolled out. She took no notice, but fell back in her chair again helpless. She sat so for a long while, knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves to her. Truly here were poisoned gems, and the poison had entered this poor young creature. After that long while, there was a tap at the door and Grandcourt entered, dressed for dinner. The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence. He had expected to see her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor. Was it a fit of madness? In some form or other the Furies had crossed his threshold.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 31

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame." --COLERIDGE. Deronda's eagerness to confess his love could hardly have had a stronger stimulus than Hans had given it in his assurance that Mirah needed relief from jealousy. He went on his next visit to Ezra with the determination to be resolute in using--nay, in requesting--an opportunity of private conversation with her. If she accepted his love, he felt courageous about all other consequences, and as her betrothed husband he would gain a protective authority which might be a desirable defense for her in future difficulties with her father. Deronda had not observed any signs of growing restlessness in Lapidoth, or of diminished desire to recommend himself; but he had forebodings of some future struggle, some mortification, or some intolerable increase of domestic disquietude in which he might save Ezra and Mirah from being helpless victims. His forebodings would have been strengthened if he had known what was going on in the father's mind. That amount of restlessness, that desultoriness of attention, which made a small torture to Ezra, was to Lapidoth an irksome submission to restraint, only made bearable by his thinking of it as a means of by-and-by securing a well-conditioned freedom. He began with the intention of awaiting some really good chance, such as an opening for getting a considerable sum from Deronda; but all the while he was looking about curiously, and trying to discover where Mirah deposited her money and her keys. The imperious gambling desire within him, which carried on its activity through every other occupation, and made a continuous web of imagination that held all else in its meshes, would hardly have been under the control of a contracted purpose, if he had been able to lay his hands on any sum worth capturing. But Mirah, with her practical clear-sightedness, guarded against any frustration of the promise she had given to Ezra, by confiding all money, except what she was immediately in want of, to Mrs. Meyrick's care, and Lapidoth felt himself under an irritating completeness of supply in kind as in a lunatic asylum where everything was made safe against him. To have opened a desk or drawer of Mirah's, and pocketed any bank-notes found there, would have been to his mind a sort of domestic appropriation which had no disgrace in it; the degrees of liberty a man allows himself with other people's property being often delicately drawn, even beyond the boundary where the law begins to lay its hold--which is the reason why spoons are a safer investment than mining shares. Lapidoth really felt himself injuriously treated by his daughter, and thought that he ought to have had what he wanted of her other earnings as he had of her apple-tart. But he remained submissive; indeed, the indiscretion that most tempted him, was not any insistence with Mirah, but some kind of appeal to Deronda. Clever persons who have nothing else to sell can often put a good price on their absence, and Lapidoth's difficult search for devices forced upon him the idea that his family would find themselves happier without him, and that Deronda would be willing to advance a considerable sum for the sake of getting rid of him. But, in spite of well-practiced hardihood, Lapidoth was still in some awe of Ezra's imposing friend, and deferred his purpose indefinitely. On this day, when Deronda had come full of a gladdened consciousness, which inevitably showed itself in his air and speech, Lapidoth was at a crisis of discontent and longing that made his mind busy with schemes of freedom, and Deronda's new amenity encouraged them. This pre-occupation was at last so strong as to interfere with his usual show of interest in what went forward, and his persistence in sitting by even when there was reading which he could not follow. After sitting a little while, he went out to smoke and walk in the square, and the two friends were all the easier. Mirah was not at home, but she was sure to be in again before Deronda left, and his eyes glowed with a secret anticipation: he thought that when he saw her again he should see some sweetness of recognition for himself to which his eyes had been sealed before. There was an additional playful affectionateness in his manner toward Ezra. "This little room is too close for you, Ezra," he said, breaking off his reading. "The week's heat we sometimes get here is worse than the heat in Genoa, where one sits in the shaded coolness of large rooms. You must have a better home now. I shall do as I like with you, being the stronger half." He smiled toward Ezra, who said, "I am straitened for nothing except breath. But you, who might be in a spacious palace, with the wide green country around you, find this a narrow prison. Nevertheless, I cannot say, 'Go.'" "Oh, the country would be a banishment while you are here," said Deronda, rising and walking round the double room, which yet offered no long promenade, while he made a great fan of his handkerchief. "This is the happiest room in the world to me. Besides, I will imagine myself in the East, since I am getting ready to go there some day. Only I will not wear a cravat and a heavy ring there," he ended emphatically, pausing to take off those superfluities and deposit them on a small table behind Ezra, who had the table in front of him covered with books and papers. "I have been wearing my memorable ring ever since I came home," he went on, as he reseated himself. "But I am such a Sybarite that I constantly put it off as a burden when I am doing anything. I understand why the Romans had summer rings--_if_ they had them. Now then, I shall get on better." They were soon absorbed in their work again. Deronda was reading a piece of rabbinical Hebrew under Ezra's correction and comment, and they took little notice when Lapidoth re-entered and took a seat somewhat in the background. His rambling eyes quickly alighted on the ring that sparkled on the bit of dark mahogany. During his walk, his mind had been occupied with the fiction of an advantageous opening for him abroad, only requiring a sum of ready money, which, on being communicated to Deronda in private, might immediately draw from him a question as to the amount of the required sum: and it was this part of his forecast that Lapidoth found the most debatable, there being a danger in asking too much, and a prospective regret in asking too little. His own desire gave him no limit, and he was quite without guidance as to the limit of Deronda's willingness. But now, in the midst of these airy conditions preparatory to a receipt which remained indefinite, this ring, which on Deronda's finger had become familiar to Lapidoth's envy, suddenly shone detached and within easy grasp. Its value was certainly below the smallest of the imaginary sums that his purpose fluctuated between; but then it was before him as a solid fact, and his desire at once leaped into the thought (not yet an intention) that if he were quietly to pocket that ring and walk away he would have the means of comfortable escape from present restraint, without trouble, and also without danger; for any property of Deronda's (available without his formal consent) was all one with his children's property, since their father would never be prosecuted for taking it. The details of this thinking followed each other so quickly that they seemed to rise before him as one picture. Lapidoth had never committed larceny; but larceny is a form of appropriation for which people are punished by law; and, take this ring from a virtual relation, who would have been willing to make a much heavier gift, would not come under the head of larceny. Still, the heavier gift was to be preferred, if Lapidoth could only make haste enough in asking for it, and the imaginary action of taking the ring, which kept repeating itself like an inward tune, sank into a rejected idea. He satisfied his urgent longing by resolving to go below, and watch for the moment of Deronda's departure, when he would ask leave to join him in his walk and boldly carry out his meditated plan. He rose and stood looking out of the window, but all the while he saw what lay beyond him--the brief passage he would have to make to the door close by the table where the ring was. However he was resolved to go down; but--by no distinct change of resolution, rather by a dominance of desire, like the thirst of the drunkard--it so happened that in passing the table his fingers fell noiselessly on the ring, and he found himself in the passage with the ring in his hand. It followed that he put on his hat and quitted the house. The possibility of again throwing himself on his children receded into the indefinite distance, and before he was out on the square his sense of haste had concentrated itself on selling the ring and getting on shipboard. Deronda and Ezra were just aware of his exit; that was all. But, by-and-by, Mirah came in and made a real interruption. She had not taken off her hat; and when Deronda rose and advanced to shake hands with her, she said, in a confusion at once unaccountable and troublesome to herself, "I only came in to see that Ezra had his new draught. I must go directly to Mrs. Meyrick's to fetch something." "Pray allow me to walk with you," said Deronda urgently. "I must not tire Ezra any further; besides my brains are melting. I want to go to Mrs. Meyrick's: may I go with you?" "Oh, yes," said Mirah, blushing still more, with the vague sense of something new in Deronda, and turning away to pour out Ezra's draught; Ezra meanwhile throwing back his head with his eyes shut, unable to get his mind away from the ideas that had been filling it while the reading was going on. Deronda for a moment stood thinking of nothing but the walk, till Mirah turned round again and brought the draught, when he suddenly remembered that he had laid aside his cravat, and saying--"Pray excuse my dishabille--I did not mean you to see it," he went to the little table, took up his cravat, and exclaimed with a violent impulse of surprise, "Good heavens, where is my ring gone?" beginning to search about on the floor. Ezra looked round the corner of his chair. Mirah, quick as thought, went to the spot where Deronda was seeking, and said, "Did you lay it down?" "Yes," said Deronda, still unvisited by any other explanation than that the ring had fallen and was lurking in shadow, indiscernable on the variegated carpet. He was moving the bits of furniture near, and searching in all possible and impossible places with hand and eyes. But another explanation had visited Mirah and taken the color from her cheeks. She went to Ezra's ear and whispered "Was my father here?" He bent his head in reply, meeting her eyes with terrible understanding. She darted back to the spot where Deronda was still casting down his eyes in that hopeless exploration which we are apt to carry on over a space we have examined in vain. "You have not found it?" she said, hurriedly. He, meeting her frightened gaze, immediately caught alarm from it and answered, "I perhaps put it in my pocket," professing to feel for it there. She watched him and said, "It is not there?--you put it on the table," with a penetrating voice that would not let him feign to have found it in his pocket; and immediately she rushed out of the room. Deronda followed her--she was gone into the sitting-room below to look for her father--she opened the door of the bedroom to see if he were there--she looked where his hat usually hung--she turned with her hands clasped tight and her lips pale, gazing despairingly out of the window. Then she looked up at Deronda, who had not dared to speak to her in her white agitation. She looked up at him, unable to utter a word--the look seemed a tacit acceptance of the humiliation she felt in his presence. But he, taking her clasped hands between both his, said, in a tone of reverent adoration, "Mirah, let me think that he is my father as well as yours--that we can have no sorrow, no disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather take your grief to be mine than I would take the brightest joy of another woman. Say you will not reject me--say you will take me to share all things with you. Say you will promise to be my wife--say it now. I have been in doubt so long--I have had to hide my love so long. Say that now and always I may prove to you that I love you with complete love." The change in Mirah had been gradual. She had not passed at once from anguish to the full, blessed consciousness that, in this moment of grief and shame, Deronda was giving her the highest tribute man can give to woman. With the first tones and the first words, she had only a sense of solemn comfort, referring this goodness of Deronda's to his feeling for Ezra. But by degrees the rapturous assurance of unhoped-for good took possession of her frame: her face glowed under Deronda's as he bent over her; yet she looked up still with intense gravity, as when she had first acknowledged with religious gratitude that he had thought her "worthy of the best;" and when he had finished, she could say nothing--she could only lift up her lips to his and just kiss them, as if that were the simplest "yes." They stood then, only looking at each other, he holding her hands between his--too happy to move, meeting so fully in their new consciousness that all signs would have seemed to throw them farther apart, till Mirah said in a whisper: "Let us go and comfort Ezra."

Deronda went on his next visit to Ezra eager to confess his love and determined to request a private conversation with Mirah. If she accepted him, he would be able to protect her in any difficulties with her father. Deronda had forebodings of some future struggle in which he might save Ezra and Mirah from being helpless victims. His forebodings would have been strengthened if he had known what was going on in the father's mind. Lapidoth's submission to restraint was only made bearable to him by his thinking of it as a means of by-and-by securing freedom. He intended to await an opening for getting a large sum from Deronda; but meanwhile he was trying to discover where Mirah kept her money and her keys. The imperious desire to gamble, which was present through every other occupation, would hardly have been under his control if he had been able to lay his hands on any sum. But Mirah, with her practical clear-sightedness, confided all money to Mrs. Meyrick's care. If Lapidoth had found and pocketed any bank-notes of Mirah's, he would have considered it a sort of domestic appropriation which held no disgrace; for he really felt himself badly treated by his daughter, and thought that he ought to have what he wanted of her earnings. However, he was most tempted to approach Deronda, whom he felt might be willing to advance a considerable sum for the sake of getting rid of him. But Lapidoth was still in some awe of Ezra's imposing friend, and deferred this approach. When Deronda came, full of a gladdened consciousness, Lapidoth was at a crisis of discontent that made his mind busy with schemes of freedom. He was so restless that he could not show any interest in what went forward; and at last he went out to smoke and walk in the square. The two friends were all the easier. Mirah was not at home, but she was sure to be in again before Deronda left, and his eyes glowed with a secret anticipation: and there was a playful affectionateness in his manner toward Ezra. "This little room is too close for you, Ezra," he said, breaking off his reading. "You must have a better home now. I shall do as I like with you, being the stronger half." He smiled at Ezra, who said- "I lack nothing except breath. But you, who might have the wide green country around you, find this a narrow prison." "The country would be a banishment while you are here," said Deronda, rising and walking round the room, while he made a fan of his handkerchief. "This is the happiest room in the world to me. I will imagine myself in the East, since I am getting ready to go there some day. Only I will not wear a cravat and a heavy ring there," he ended, pausing to take these off and put them on a small table behind Ezra. "I have been wearing my memorial ring ever since I came home," he went on, as he reseated himself. "But it is a burden when I am doing anything. Now I shall get on better." They were soon absorbed in their work again. Deronda was reading a piece of rabbinical Hebrew under Ezra's correction, and they took little notice when Lapidoth re-entered and sat in the background. His rambling eyes quickly alighted on the ring that sparkled on the dark mahogany. During his walk, he had been creating a fiction about an advantageous opening for him abroad, only requiring a sum of ready money, which Deronda might supply. Lapidoth had been debating how large a sum; he did not know the limit of Deronda's willingness. But now, in the midst of these airy fantasies, this ring, which Lapidoth had seen with envy on Deronda's finger, suddenly shone detached and within easy grasp. Its value was certainly below the imaginary sums in his head: but it was before him as a solid fact, and his desire at once leaped into the thought that if he were quietly to pocket that ring and walk away he would have the means of comfortable escape without trouble, and also without danger; for any property of Deronda's was all one with his children's property, since their father would never be prosecuted for taking it. The details of this thinking followed each other so quickly that they seemed to rise before him as one picture. Still, the gift was to be preferred, if Lapidoth could only make haste enough in asking for it, and the imaginary action of taking the ring, which kept repeating itself like an inward tune, sank into a rejected idea. He resolved to go below, and watch for the moment of Deronda's departure, when he would ask leave to join him in his walk and boldly carry out his plan. He rose and stood looking out of the window, but all the while he saw the brief passage to the door past the table where the ring was. However, he was resolved to go down; but - by no distinct change of resolution - it so happened that in passing the table his fingers fell noiselessly on the ring, and he found himself in the passage with the ring in his hand. It followed that he put on his hat and quitted the house. The possibility of again throwing himself on his children receded into the indefinite distance, and before he was out of the square his sense of haste had concentrated itself on selling the ring and getting on shipboard. Deronda and Ezra were aware of his exit; that was all. But, by-and-by, Mirah came in and made a real interruption. She had not taken off her hat; and when Deronda rose to shake hands with her, she said, in a confusion at once unaccountable and troublesome to herself- "I only came to see that Ezra had his medicine. I must go directly to Mrs. Meyrick's." "Pray allow me to walk with you," said Deronda urgently. "I must not tire Ezra any further; besides, my brains are melting. I want to go to Mrs. Meyrick's: may I go with you?" "Oh, yes," said Mirah, blushing still more, with the vague sense of something new in Deronda, and turning away to pour out Ezra's draught. Deronda suddenly remembered that he had laid aside his cravat, and saying- "Pray excuse my dishabille," he went to the little table, took up his cravat, and exclaimed in surprise, "Good heavens, where is my ring gone?" beginning to search about on the floor. Ezra looked round, quick as thought, went to the spot where Deronda was seeking, and said, "Did you lay it down?" "Yes," said Deronda, still assuming that the ring had fallen and was lurking in shadow, indiscernible on the variegated carpet. He was moving the bits of furniture nearby. But another explanation had taken the colour from Mirah's cheeks. She went to Ezra's ear and whispered "Was my father here?" He nodded, meeting her eyes with terrible understanding. She darted back to the spot where Deronda was still hunting in vain. "You have not found it?" she said, hurriedly. He, meeting her frightened gaze, immediately caught her alarm and answered, "Perhaps I put it in my pocket." "You put it on the table," she said, with a penetrating voice that would not let him feign to have found it in his pocket; and immediately she rushed out of the room. Deronda followed her: she was gone into the sitting-room below to look for her father - she opened the door of his bedroom - she looked where his hat usually hung - she turned with her hands clasped tight and her lips pale, gazing despairingly out of the window. Then she looked up at Deronda, unable to utter a word in her humiliation. But he, taking her clasped hands between his, said, in a tone of reverent adoration- "Mirah, let me think that he is my father as well as yours - that we can have no sorrow, no disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather take your grief to be mine than I would take the brightest joy of another woman. Say you will take me to share all things with you. Say you will promise to be my wife. I have been in doubt so long - I have had to hide my love so long. Say that now and always I may prove to you that I love you with complete love." The change in Mirah was gradual. She did not pass at once from anguish to the full, blessed consciousness that, in this moment of grief and shame, Deronda was giving her the highest tribute man can give to woman. With the first words, she had only a sense of comfort, referring this goodness of Deronda's to his feeling for Ezra. But by degrees the rapturous assurance of love took possession of her: her face glowed under Deronda's as he bent over her; yet she looked up still with intense gravity, as when she had first acknowledged with gratitude that he had thought her "worthy of the best;" and when he had finished, she could say nothing - she could only lift up her lips to kiss his. They stood then, looking at each other, he holding her hands between his - too happy to move, till Mirah whispered: "Let us go and comfort Ezra."

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 68

"Within the soul a faculty abides, That with interpositions, which would hide And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp; and serve to exalt Her native brightness, as the ample moon, In the deep stillness of a summer even, Rising behind a thick and lofty grove, Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light, In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea, with her own incorporated, by power Capacious and serene." --WORDSWORTH: _Excursion_, B. IV. Deronda came out of the narrow house at Chelsea in a frame of mind that made him long for some good bodily exercise to carry off what he was himself inclined to call the fumes of his temper. He was going toward the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs with the waiting boats at once determined him to avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in a cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar. His errand was to go to Ram's book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived too late for Mordecai's midday watch, and had been told that he invariably came there again between five and six. Some further acquaintance with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens was particularly desired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming his ring: he wished that their conversation should not again end speedily with that drop of Mordecai's interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge, and threatened to shut out any easy communication in future. As he got warmed with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the errand before him and the ends he wanted to achieve on Mirah's account, he experienced, as was wont with him, a quick change of mental light, shifting his point of view to that of the person whom he had been thinking of hitherto chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and was inclined to taunt himself with being not much better than an enlisting sergeant, who never troubles himself with the drama that brings him the needful recruits. "I suppose if I got from this man the information I am most anxious about," thought Deronda, "I should be contented enough if he felt no disposition to tell me more of himself, or why he seemed to have some expectation from me which was disappointed. The sort of curiosity he stirs would die out; and yet it might be that he had neared and parted as one can imagine two ships doing, each freighted with an exile who would have recognized the other if the two could have looked out face to face. Not that there is any likelihood of a peculiar tie between me and this poor fellow, whose voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I wonder whether there is much of that momentous mutual missing between people who interchange blank looks, or even long for one another's absence in a crowded place. However, one makes one's self chances of missing by going on the recruiting sergeant's plan." When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant to land, it was half-past four, and the gray day was dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory. Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda gave up the oar and drew over him again his Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while fastening the topmost button his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking toward him over the parapet of the bridge--brought out by the western light into startling distinctness and brilliancy--an illuminated type of bodily emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the face of Mordecai, who also, in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of the advancing boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first simply because it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions that made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing figure lifted up its face toward him--the face of his visions--and then immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again. For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had lost no time before signaling, and the answer came straightway. Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it--feeling in that moment that his inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured friend had come from the golden background, and had signaled to him: this actually was: the rest was to be. In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was joining Mordecai, whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and wait for him. "I was very glad to see you standing here," said Deronda, "for I was intending to go on to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there yesterday--perhaps they mentioned it to you?" "Yes," said Mordecai; "that was the reason I came to the bridge." This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to Deronda. Were the peculiarities of this man really associated with any sort of mental alienation, according to Cohen's hint? "You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?" he said, after a moment. "No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for you these five years." Mordecai's deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Deronda's sensitiveness was not the less responsive because he could not but believe that this strangely-disclosed relation was founded on an illusion. "It will be a satisfaction to me if I can be of any real use to you," he answered, very earnestly. "Shall we get into a cab and drive to--wherever you wish to go? You have probably had walking enough with your short breath." "Let us go to the book-shop. It will soon be time for me to be there. But now look up the river," said Mordecai, turning again toward it and speaking in undertones of what may be called an excited calm--so absorbed by a sense of fulfillment that he was conscious of no barrier to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. "See the sky, how it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it when I was a little boy. It is a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. It is true--what the Masters said--that each order of things has its angel: that means the full message of each from what is afar. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me--fading, slowly fading: it was my own decline: it paused--it waited, till at last it brought me my new life--my new self--who will live when this breath is all breathed out." Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely wrought upon. The first-prompted suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to hallucinations of thought--might have become a monomaniac on some subject which had given too severe a strain to his diseased organism--gave way to a more submissive expectancy. His nature was too large, too ready to conceive regions beyond his own experience, to rest at once in the easy explanation, "madness," whenever a consciousness showed some fullness and conviction where his own was blank. It accorded with his habitual disposition that he should meet rather than resist any claim on him in the shape of another's need; and this claim brought with it a sense of solemnity which seemed a radiation from Mordecai, as utterly nullifying his outward poverty and lifting him into authority as if he had been that preternatural guide seen in the universal legend, who suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands a manifest Power. That impression was the more sanctioned by a sort of resolved quietude which the persuasion of fulfillment had produced in Mordecai's manner. After they had stood a moment in silence he said, "Let us go now," and when they were riding he added, "We will get down at the end of the street and walk to the shop. You can look at the books, and Mr. Ram will be going away directly and leave us alone." It seemed that this enthusiast was just as cautious, just as much alive to judgments in other minds as if he had been that antipode of all enthusiasm called "a man of the world." While they were rattling along in the cab, Mirah was still present with Deronda in the midst of this strange experience, but he foresaw that the course of conversation would be determined by Mordecai, not by himself: he was no longer confident what questions he should be able to ask; and with a reaction on his own mood, he inwardly said, "I suppose I am in a state of complete superstition, just as if I were awaiting the destiny that could interpret the oracle. But some strong relation there must be between me and this man, since he feels it strongly. Great heaven! what relation has proved itself more potent in the world than faith even when mistaken--than expectation even when perpetually disappointed? Is my side of the relation to be disappointing or fulfilling?--well, if it is ever possible for me to fulfill I will not disappoint." In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as if they had been two undeclared lovers, felt themselves alone in the small gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head from an instinctive feeling that they wished to see each other fully. Mordecai came forward to lean his back against the little counter, while Deronda stood against the opposite wall hardly more than four feet off. I wish I could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian's "Tribute Money" has perpetuated two types presenting another sort of contrast. Imagine--we all of us can--the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of glance to which the sharply-defined structure of features reminding one of a forsaken temple, give already a far-off look as of one getting unwillingly out of reach; and imagine it on a Jewish face naturally accentuated for the expression of an eager mind--the face of a man little above thirty, but with that age upon it which belongs to time lengthened by suffering, the hair and beard, still black, throwing out the yellow pallor of the skin, the difficult breathing giving more decided marking to the mobile nostril, the wasted yellow hands conspicuous on the folded arms: then give to the yearning consumptive glance something of the slowly dying mother's look, when her one loved son visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out as she says, "My boy!"--for the sense of spiritual perpetuation in another resembles that maternal transference of self. Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite to him was a face not more distinctively oriental than many a type seen among what we call the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible masculine gravity in its repose, that gave the value of judgment to the reverence with which he met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who claimed him as a long-expected friend. The more exquisite quality of Deronda's nature--that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which ran along with his speculative tendency--was never more thoroughly tested. He felt nothing that could be called belief in the validity of Mordecai's impressions concerning him or in the probability of any greatly effective issue: what he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths of another and accompanying that, the summons to be receptive instead of superciliously prejudging. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude; and this state of mind now gave Deronda's face its utmost expression of calm benignant force--an expression which nourished Mordecai's confidence and made an open way before him. He began to speak. "You cannot know what has guided me to you and brought us together at this moment. You are wondering." "I am not impatient," said Deronda. "I am ready to listen to whatever you may wish to disclose." "You see some of the reasons why I needed you," said Mordecai, speaking quietly, as if he wished to reserve his strength. "You see that I am dying. You see that I am as one shut up behind bars by the wayside, who if he spoke to any would be met only by head-shaking and pity. The day is closing--the light is fading--soon we should not have been able to discern each other. But you have come in time." "I rejoice that I am come in time," said Deronda, feelingly. He would not say, "I hope you are not mistaken in me,"--the very word "mistaken," he thought, would be a cruelty at that moment. "But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off," said Mordecai; "began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because I was a Jew. They were a trust to fulfill, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not fully born till then. I counted this heart, and this breath, and this right hand"--Mordecai had pathetically pressed his hand upon his breast, and then stretched its wasted fingers out before him--"I counted my sleep and my waking, and the work I fed my body with, and the sights that fed my eyes--I counted them but as fuel to the divine flame. But I had done as one who wanders and engraves his thought in rocky solitudes, and before I could change my course came care and labor and disease, and blocked the way before me, and bound me with the iron that eats itself into the soul. Then I said, 'How shall I save the life within me from being stifled with this stifled breath?'" Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath which had been taxed by the rising excitement of his speech. And also he wished to check that excitement. Deronda dared not speak: the very silence in the narrow space seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this struggling fervor. And presently Mordecai went on: "But you may misunderstand me. I speak not as an ignorant dreamer--as one bred up in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts anew, and not knowing them ancient, never having stood by the great waters where the world's knowledge passes to and fro. English is my mother-tongue, England is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot of earth around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the desert rejoice. But my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet of my mother's brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning: and when he died I went to Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Gttingen, that I might take a larger outlook on my people, and on the Gentile world, and drank knowledge at all sources. I was a youth; I felt free; I saw our chief seats in Germany; I was not then in utter poverty. And I had possessed myself of a handicraft. For I said, I care not if my lot be as that of Joshua ben Chananja: after the last destruction he earned his bread by making needles, but in his youth he had been a singer on the steps of the Temple, and had a memory of what was before the glory departed. I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. I knew what I chose. They said, 'He feeds himself on visions,' and I denied not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. I see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew. You are not listening to one who raves aloof from the lives of his fellows." Mordecai paused, and Deronda, feeling that the pause was expectant, said, "Do me the justice to believe that I was not inclined to call your words raving. I listen that I may know, without prejudgment. I have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a spiritual destiny embraced willingly, and embraced in youth." "A spiritual destiny embraced willingly--in youth?" Mordecai repeated in a corrective tone. "It was the soul fully born within me, and it came in my boyhood. It brought its own world--a mediaeval world, where there are men who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of exile. They had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a center for our race. One of their souls was born again within me, and awakened amid the memories of their world. It traveled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And when its dumb tongue was loosed, it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood of their ardor, their sorrow, and their martyred trust: it sang with the cadence of their strain." Mordecai paused again, and then said in a loud, hoarse whisper, "While it is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another." "Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?" said Deronda, remembering with some anxiety the former question as to his own knowledge of that tongue. "Yes--yes," said Mordecai, in a tone of deep sadness: "in my youth I wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I had the ranks of the great dead around me; the martyrs gathered and listened. But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I saw my life spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage is an unbreaking patience; part is skill to seek divers methods and find a rooting-place where the planters despair. But there came new messengers from the Eternal. I had to bow under the yoke that presses on the great multitude born of woman: family troubles called me--I had to work, to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but already the angel of death had turned to me and beckoned, and I felt his skirts continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought hearing and help. I spoke; I went to men of our people--to the rich in influence or knowledge, to the rich in other wealth. But I found none to listen with understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a small sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of Hebrew manuscript with me; I said, our chief teachers are misleading the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant were both too busy to listen. Scorn stood as interpreter between me and them. One said, 'The book of Mormon would never have answered in Hebrew; and if you mean to address our learned men, it is not likely you can teach them anything.' He touched a truth there." The last words had a perceptible irony in their hoarsened tone. "But though you had accustomed yourself to write in Hebrew, few, surely, can use English better," said Deronda, wanting to hint consolation in a new effort for which he could smooth the way. Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered, "Too late--too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this gasping breath. But the breath may wake the fount of pity--the writing not. If I could write now and used English, I should be as one who beats a board to summon those who have been used to no signal but a bell. My soul has an ear to hear the faults of its own speech. New writing of mine would be like this body"--Mordecai spread his arms--"within it there might be the Ruach-ha-kodesh--the breath of divine thought--but, men would smile at it and say, 'A poor Jew!' and the chief smilers would be of my own people." Mordecai let his hands fall, and his head sink in melancholy: for the moment he had lost hold of his hope. Despondency, conjured up by his own words, had floated in and hovered above him with eclipsing wings. He had sunk into momentary darkness, "I feel with you--I feel strongly with you," said Deronda, in a clear deep voice which was itself a cordial, apart from the words of sympathy. "But forgive me if I speak hastily--for what you have actually written there need be no utter burial. The means of publication are within reach. If you will rely on me, I can assure you of all that is necessary to that end." "That is not enough," said Mordecai, quickly, looking up again with the flash of recovered memory and confidence. "That is not all my trust in you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul--believing my belief--being moved by my reasons--hoping my hope--seeing the vision I point to--beholding a glory where I behold it!"--Mordecai had taken a step nearer as he spoke, and now laid his hand on Deronda's arm with a tight grasp; his face little more than a foot off had something like a pale flame in it--an intensity of reliance that acted as a peremptory claim, while he went on--"You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance; it has been gathering for ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a bridge: what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You will take the inheritance which the base son refuses because of the tombs which the plow and harrow may not pass over or the gold-seeker disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew." Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm of flood or fire, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of discouraging this fellowman who urged a prayer as one in the last agony, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and being hurried on to a self-committal which might turn into a falsity. The peculiar appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us experience under a grasp and speech which assumed to dominate. The difficulty to him was to inflict the accents of hesitation and doubt on this ardent suffering creature, who was crowding too much of his brief being into a moment of perhaps extravagant trust. With exquisite instinct, Deronda, before he opened his lips, placed his palm gently on Mordecai's straining hand--an act just then equal to many speeches. And after that he said, without haste, as if conscious that he might be wrong, "Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you remember that I said I was not of your race?" "It can't be true," Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of shock. The sympathetic hand still upon him had fortified the feeling which was stronger than those words of denial. There was a perceptible pause, Deronda feeling it impossible to answer, conscious indeed that the assertion "It can't be true"--had the pressure of argument for him. Mordecai, too entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the relation between himself and Deronda to have any other care in his speech, followed up that assertion by a second, which came to his lips as a mere sequence of his long-cherished conviction--"You are not sure of your own origin." "How do you know that?" said Daniel, with an habitual shrinking which made him remove his hands from Mordecai's, who also relaxed his hold, and fell back into his former leaning position. "I know it--I know it; what is my life else?" said Mordecai, with a low cry of impatience. "Tell me everything: tell me why you deny." He could have no conception what that demand was to the hearer--how probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly conscious reticence of years; how the uncertainty he was insisting on as part of his own hope had always for Daniel been a threatening possibility of painful revelation about his mother. But the moment had influences which were not only new but solemn to Deronda; any evasion here might turn out to be a hateful refusal of some task that belonged to him, some act of due fellowship; in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a being who was appealing to him as a forlorn hope under the shadow of a coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort over himself--determined to tell all the truth briefly, "I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an Englishman." Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this confession; and all the while there was an undercurrent of amazement in him at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it. It seemed as if Mordecai were hardly overrating his own power to determine the action of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen. "It will be seen--it will be declared," said Mordecai, triumphantly. "The world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness discerns remote stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned--so events--so beings: they are knit with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a thought not fully spelled; my soul is shaken before the words are all there. The rest will come--it will come." "We must not lose sight of the fact that the outward event has not always been a fulfillment of the firmest faith," said Deronda, in a tone that was made hesitating by the painfully conflicting desires, not to give any severe blow to Mordecai, and not to give his confidence a sanction which might have the severest of blows in reserve. Mordecai's face, which had been illuminated to the utmost in that last declaration of his confidence, changed under Deronda's words, not only into any show of collapsed trust: the force did not disappear from the expression, but passed from the triumphant into the firmly resistant. "You would remind me that I may be under an illusion--that the history of our people's trust has been full of illusion. I face it all." Here Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending his head a little forward, he said, in his hoarse whisper, "_So it might be with my trust, if you would make it an illusion. But you will not._" The very sharpness with which these words penetrated Deronda made him feel the more that here was a crisis in which he must be firm. "What my birth was does not lie in my will," he answered. "My sense of claims on me cannot be independent of my knowledge there. And I cannot promise you that I will try to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it would become if it were made a part of yours." Mordecai had folded his arms again while Deronda was speaking, and now answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing, "You _shall_ know. What are we met for, but that you should know. Your doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. I know the philosophies of this time and of other times; if I chose I could answer a summons before their tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the mother-tongue of my soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a system, that gives you the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet covering them all. I could silence them: may not a man silence his awe or his love, and take to finding reasons, which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found? Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness: now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you has grown but as false hopes grow. That doubt is in your mind? Well, my expectation was there, and you are come. Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty, and the water is on my lips! What are doubts to me? In the hour when you come to me and say, 'I reject your soul: I know that I am not a Jew: we have no lot in common'--I shall not doubt. I shall be certain--certain that I have been deluded. That hour will never come!" Deronda felt a new chord sounding in his speech: it was rather imperious than appealing--had more of conscious power than of the yearning need which had acted as a beseeching grasp on him before. And usually, though he was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change of attitude toward him would have weakened his inclination to admit a claim. But here there was something that balanced his resistance and kept it aloof. This strong man whose gaze was sustainedly calm and his finger-nails pink with health, who was exercised in all questioning, and accused of excessive mental independence, still felt a subduing influence over him in the tenacious certitude of the fragile creature before him, whose pallid yellow nostril was tense with effort as his breath labored under the burthen of eager speech. The influence seemed to strengthen the bond of sympathetic obligation. In Deronda at this moment the desire to escape what might turn into a trying embarrassment was no more likely to determine action than the solicitations of indolence are likely to determine it in one with whom industry is a daily law. He answered simply, "It is my wish to meet and satisfy your wishes wherever that is possible to me. It is certain to me at least that I desire not to undervalue your toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But where can we meet?" "I have thought of that," said Mordecai. "It is not hard for you to come into this neighborhood later in the evening? You did so once." "I can manage it very well occasionally," said Deronda. "You live under the same roof with the Cohens, I think?" Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered to take his place behind the counter. He was an elderly son of Abraham, whose childhood had fallen on the evil times at the beginning of this century, and who remained amid this smart and instructed generation as a preserved specimen, soaked through and through with the effect of the poverty and contempt which were the common heritage of most English Jews seventy years ago. He had none of the oily cheerfulness observable in Mr. Cohen's aspect: his very features--broad and chubby--showed that tendency to look mongrel without due cause, which, in a miscellaneous London neighborhood, may perhaps be compared with the marvels of imitation in insects, and may have been nature's imperfect effort on behalf of the pure Caucasian to shield him from the shame and spitting to which purer features would have been exposed in the times of zeal. Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt in tins of meat and other commodities--without knowledge or responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they might contain. But he believed in Mordecai's learning as something marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts. But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any explicit agreement as to their direction, were walking toward Ezra Cohen's. "We can't meet there: my room is too narrow," said Mordecai, taking up the thread of talk where they had dropped it. "But there is a tavern not far from here where I sometimes go to a club. It is the _Hand and Banner_, in the street at the next turning, five doors down. We can have the parlor there any evening." "We can try that for once," said Deronda. "But you will perhaps let me provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and comfort than where you are." "No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing less precious from you than your soul's brotherhood. I will think of nothing else yet. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it." Deronda was a little startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he could reply Mordecai added--"it is all one. Had you been in need of the money, the great end would have been that we should meet again. But you are rich?" he ended, in a tone of interrogation. "Not rich, except in the sense that every one is rich who has more than he needs for himself." "I desired that your life should be free," said Mordecai, dreamily--"mine has been a bondage." It was clear that he had no interest in the fact of Deronda's appearance at the Cohens' beyond its relation to his own ideal purpose. Despairing of leading easily up to the question he wished to ask, Deronda determined to put it abruptly, and said, "Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to about her daughter?" There was no immediate answer, and he thought that he should have to repeat the question. The fact was that Mordecai had heard the words, but had to drag his mind to a new subject away from his passionate preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied with a careful effort such as he would have used if he had been asked the road to Holborn: "I know the reason. But I will not speak even of trivial family affairs which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their tent as in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as they injure none other, is their own possession." Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks as a sort of rebuke he was little used to, and he also found himself painfully baffled where he had reckoned with some confidence on getting decisive knowledge. He became the more conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens', which must be made not only under the former uncertainty, but under a new disappointment as to the possibility of its removal. "I will part from you now," he said, just before they could reach Cohen's door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious fatigued face under the gaslight. "When will you come back?" he said, with slow emphasis. "May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens' any evening after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to their knowing that you and I meet in private?" "None," said Mordecai. "But the days I wait now are longer than the years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the half. My hope abides in you." "I will be faithful," said Deronda--he could not have left those words unuttered. "I will come the first evening I can after seven: on Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me." He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered energy--"This is come to pass, and the rest will come." That was their good-by.

Deronda came out of the house at Chelsea longing for some bodily exercise to relieve his temper. The sight of the waiting boats at the riverside at once determined him not to go to the City by cab, but by calling a wherry and taking an oar. His errand was to go to Ram's book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived too late for Mordecai's midday watch, and had been told that he returned there between five and six. Deronda wished for further conversation with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens before redeeming his ring: he wished that their talk should not again end speedily with that drop of Mordecai's interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge. As he plied the oar, thinking of Mordecai, he experienced his habitual change of mental light, shifting his point of view to that of the person who was in his mind. "If I got information about Mirah's family from Mordecai," thought Deronda, "I should be content if he did not tell me more about himself, or why he seemed to have some expectation from me which was disappointed. My curiosity would die; and yet it might be that we had neared and parted like two ships, each carrying an exile who would have recognized the other if the two met. Poor fellow; his voyage, I fancy, must soon be over." When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant to land, it was half-past four. The grey day was dying gloriously, its western clouds broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river was reflected as a luminous, rippling movement. Deronda gave up the oar to draw on his Inverness cape. As he lifted his head while fastening the button, his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking toward him over the parapet of the bridge - a face of emaciated eagerness illuminated by the western light into startling distinctness and brilliancy. It was the face of Mordecai, who in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of the advancing boat, and had kept it within his gaze, at first simply because it was advancing, then with a quivering presentiment, till at last the nearing figure lifted up the face of his visions - and then immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again. For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had signalled, and the answer came straightway. Mordecai waved his cap, feeling in that moment that his prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles all melted into the sense of completion which flooded his soul. The prefigured friend had come from the golden background, and had signalled to him: this actually was: the rest was to be. In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was joining Mordecai, who stood perfectly still to wait for him. "I was very glad to see you here," said Deronda, "for I was intending to go to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there yesterday - perhaps they told you?" "Yes," said Mordecai; "that was the reason I came to the bridge." This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to Deronda. Did this man really have a wandering mind, as Cohen had hinted? "You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?" he said, after a moment. "No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for you these five years." Mordecai's deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Although Deronda believed the words to be based on an illusion, he could not but respond with sensitivity. "I will be happy if I can be of any real use to you," he answered, very earnestly. "Shall we get into a cab and drive to - wherever you wish to go? You have probably had walking enough." "Let us go to the book-shop. But now look up the river," said Mordecai, speaking with what may be called an excited calm - so absorbed by a sense of fulfilment that he felt no barrier to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. "See the sky, how it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: it is a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. But the sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me - fading, with my own decline: it paused - it waited, till at last it brought me my new life - my new self - who will live when this breath is all breathed out." Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely affected. His first suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to hallucinations, obsessed by some subject which had over-strained his diseased body, gave way to a submissive expectancy. Deronda's nature was too large and open to rest in the easy explanation, "madness." He would rather meet than resist any claim on him in the shape of another's need; and the solemnity of this claim lifted Mordecai into authority, like a supernatural guide who suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands revealed as a Power, calm and resolved. After they had stood a moment in silence Mordecai said- "Let us go now," and when they were in the cab he added, "We will get down at the end of the street and walk to the shop. You can look at the books, and Mr. Ram will be going directly and leave us alone." It seemed that he was alive to judgments in other minds. Meanwhile, Deronda had not forgotten Mirah: but he was no longer confident what questions he should ask; and said inwardly, "I suppose I am in a superstitious state, as if I were awaiting the fulfilment of an oracle. But there must be some strong relation between me and this man, since he feels it strongly. Great heaven! what relation is more potent than faith, even when mistaken? Will I fulfil my part, or disappoint? - well, I will not disappoint if possible." In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as two undeclared lovers, found themselves alone in the small gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head to see each other fully. Imagine the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of glance and sharply-defined features, creating a far-off look as of one getting unwillingly out of reach; and imagine it on an eager Jewish face - the face of a man little above thirty, but aged by suffering, the black hair and beard emphasising the yellow pallor of the skin. Imagine the difficult breathing, the wasted yellow hands: then give to the yearning consumptive glance something of the dying mother's look, when her one loved son visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out as she says, "My boy!" Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite him was a face not more distinctively oriental than many of the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible masculine gravity in its repose, as it met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who claimed him as a long-expected friend. Deronda's keenly perceptive sympathy was never more thoroughly tested. He did not believe in the validity of Mordecai's impressions concerning him: what he felt was a profound sensitivity to a cry from the depths of another, and the urge to be receptive rather than prejudge. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude; and this state of mind now gave Deronda's face a calm benignant force which nourished Mordecai's confidence. He began to speak. "You are wondering what has guided me to you and brought us together at this moment." "I am not impatient," said Deronda. "I am ready to listen." "You see some of the reasons why I needed you," said Mordecai, speaking quietly, to reserve his strength. "You see that I am dying. The day is closing - the light is fading - soon we should not have been able to discern each other. But you have come in time." "I rejoice that I am come in time," said Deronda. He would not say, "I hope you are not mistaken in me"; for he thought that would be cruel just then. "But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off," said Mordecai; "began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then beloved ideas came to me, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and I felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not fully born till then. I counted this heart, and this breath, and this right hand"- Mordecai pathetically stretched out his wasted fingers - "I counted my sleep and my waking but as fuel to the divine flame. But care and labour and disease came, and blocked my way, and bound me with the iron that eats into the soul. Then I said, 'How shall I save the life within me from being stifled?'" Mordecai paused to rest, and to check his rising excitement. Deronda dared not speak. The very silence seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this struggling fervour. Mordecai went on- "I speak not as an ignorant dreamer - as one bred up in the inland valleys, never having stood by the great waters where the world's knowledge passes to and fro. England is my native land; but my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet of my uncle, a learned Rabbi: and when he died I went to Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Gttingen, that I might learn about my people, and drink knowledge at all sources. And I possessed myself of a craft. For I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where knowledge enters and the inner sanctuary is hope. I knew what I chose. They said, 'He feeds himself on visions,' and I denied it not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. You see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew. I am not one who raves aloof from the lives of his fellows." Mordecai paused, and Deronda said, "Indeed, I would not call your words raving. I listen without prejudgment. I have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a spiritual destiny embraced willingly in youth." "A spiritual destiny embraced willingly in youth?" Mordecai repeated. "Rather it was the soul fully born within me, and it came in my boyhood. It brought its own world - a mediaeval world, where men made the ancient Hebrew language live again in new psalms of exile, and yearned toward a centre for our race. One of their souls was born again within me. It travelled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood of their ardour and their sorrow; it sang with the cadence of their strain." "Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?" said Deronda, with some anxiety as to his own knowledge of that tongue. "Yes," said Mordecai with deep sadness: "in my youth I wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I had the ranks of the great dead around me. But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I saw my life spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage is an unbreaking patience; but then I had to bow under the yoke that presses on so many: family troubles called me - I had to work, to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but already the angel of death had beckoned, and I felt his skirts continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought help. I spoke; I went to men of our people - to the rich in knowledge, and in wealth. But none listened with understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a small sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of Hebrew manuscript with me; and I said, our chief teachers are misleading the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant both scorned me." "But though you wrote in Hebrew, few, surely, can use English better," said Deronda, wanting to hint at a new effort for which he could smooth the way. Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered- "Too late - too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this gasping breath." His head bowed in melancholy: for the moment he had lost his hope. Despondency hovered above him with eclipsing wings. He had sunk into momentary darkness. "I feel strongly with you," said Deronda, in a clear, deep, reviving voice. "But what you have written need not lie buried. The means of publication are within reach. I can help you to that end." "That is not enough," said Mordecai, quickly, looking up with recovered confidence. "That is not all my trust in you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul - believing my belief - moved by my reasons - hoping my hope - beholding a glory where I behold it!" Mordecai moved nearer as he spoke, and laid his hand on Deronda's arm with a tight grasp; his face shone like a pale flame, while he went on- "You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance of ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a bridge: what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew." Deronda had become as pale as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of discouraging this dying fellow man, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and of being hurried on to a self-committal which might prove impossible to carry out. The appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us experience under a dominating grasp and speech. His difficulty was how to express his doubts to this ardent suffering creature. With exquisite instinct, he placed his palm gently on Mordecai's straining hand. Then he said, without haste,- "Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you remember that I said I was not of your race?" "It can't be true," Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of shock. The sympathetic hand upon him had fortified his feelings. There was a pause, Deronda feeling it impossible to answer. Mordecai, entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the relation between them, followed that assertion by a second, spoken in consequence of his long-cherished conviction- "You are not sure of your own origin." "How do you know that?" said Daniel, shrinking away. Mordecai relaxed his hold. "I know it; what is my life else?" he said with a low cry of impatience. "Tell me why you deny?" He could have no conception what that demand meant to the hearer - how probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the reticence of years; how the uncertainty had always for Daniel held a threat of painful revelation about his mother. But Deronda felt that any evasion or refusal would be a cruel rebuff to one who was appealing to him under the shadow of a coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort- "I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an Englishman." Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this confession; and he was amazed at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it. "It will be seen - it will be declared," said Mordecai, triumphantly. "The world grows, and is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned, so events and beings are knit with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a thought not fully spelled; my soul is shaken before the words are all there. The rest will come." "The outward event has not always been a fulfilment of the firmest faith," said Deronda hesitatingly, wishing neither to give any severe blow to Mordecai, nor to encourage him unwisely. Mordecai's face changed from the triumphant to the firmly resistant. "You would remind me that I may be under an illusion - that the history of our people's trust has been full of illusion. I face it all." Here Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending forward, he said, in his hoarse whisper, "So it might be with my trust, if you would make it an illusion. But you will not." The very sharpness of these words persuaded Deronda that here he must be firm. "What my birth was does not lie in my will," he answered. "And I cannot promise you to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it would become if it were made a part of yours." Mordecai had folded his arms, and now answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing- "You shall know. What are we met for, but that you should know? Your doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness: now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you is a false hope. That doubt is in your mind? Well, I expected you, and you are come. Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty, and the water is on my lips! What are doubts to me? Even if you come to me and say, 'I reject your soul: I am not a Jew: we have no lot in common'- I shall not doubt. That hour will never come!" Deronda heard a new, imperious chord sounding in these words. He felt a subduing influence in the certitude of the fragile creature before him, whose breath laboured under the burden of eager speech. His feeling of sympathetic obligation grew, so that he felt no desire to escape what might turn into a trying embarrassment. He answered simply- "It is my wish to satisfy your wishes wherever that is possible. Certainly I desire not to undervalue your toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But where can we meet? At the Cohens', where you live?" Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered the shop. He was an elderly Jew with none of Mr. Cohen's oily cheerfulness. Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt in tins of meat and other commodities - without knowledge or responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they might contain. But he believed in Mordecai's learning as something marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts. But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any explicit agreement, were walking toward Ezra Cohen's. "We can't meet there: my room is too narrow," said Mordecai. "But there is a tavern not far from here where I sometimes go to a club: the Hand and Banner, in the next street, five doors down. We can use the parlour there." "We can try that," said Deronda. "But you will perhaps let me provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and comfort than where you are." "No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing less precious from you than your soul's brotherhood. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it." Deronda was startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he could reply Mordecai added- "It is all one. If you needed money, we should still meet again. But you are rich?" "Only in the sense that everyone is rich who has more than he needs for himself." "I desired that your life should be free," said Mordecai, dreamily; "mine has been a bondage." It was clear that he had no interest in the reason for Deronda's appearance at the Cohens' beyond his own purpose. Deronda, determine to put his question, said- "Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to about her daughter?" There was no immediate answer: Mordecai had heard the words, but had to drag his mind away from his passionate preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied- "I know the reason. But I will not speak of family affairs which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their home as in a sanctuary. Their history is their own possession." Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks at this rebuke, and he found himself painfully baffled. He became conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens'. "I will part from you now," he said, before they reached Cohen's door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious fatigued face. "When will you come back?" he said. "May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens' any evening after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to their knowing that you and I meet?" "None," said Mordecai. "But the days I wait now are longer than the years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the half. My hope abides in you." "I will be faithful," said Deronda - he could not have left those words unuttered. "I will come the first evening I can. Trust me." He put out his hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, said- "This is come to pass, and the rest will come." That was their good-bye.

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 40

"The unwilling brain Feigns often what it would not; and we trust Imagination with such phantasies As the tongue dares not fashion into words; Which have no words, their horror makes them dim To the mind's eye." --SHELLEY. Madonna Pia, whose husband, feeling himself injured by her, took her to his castle amid the swampy flats of the Maremma and got rid of her there, makes a pathetic figure in Dante's Purgatory, among the sinners who repented at the last and desire to be remembered compassionately by their fellow-countrymen. We know little about the grounds of mutual discontent between the Siennese couple, but we may infer with some confidence that the husband had never been a very delightful companion, and that on the flats of the Maremma his disagreeable manners had a background which threw them out remarkably; whence in his desire to punish his wife to the upmost, the nature of things was so far against him that in relieving himself of her he could not avoid making the relief mutual. And thus, without any hardness to the poor Tuscan lady, who had her deliverance long ago, one may feel warranted in thinking of her with a less sympathetic interest than of the better known Gwendolen who, instead of being delivered from her errors on earth and cleansed from their effect in purgatory, is at the very height of her entanglement in those fatal meshes which are woven within more closely than without, and often make the inward torture disproportionate to what is discernable as outward cause. In taking his wife with him on a yachting expedition, Grandcourt had no intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but they were not reasons that can seem black in the mere statement. He suspected a growing spirit of opposition in her, and his feeling about the sentimental inclination she betrayed for Deronda was what in another man he would have called jealousy. In himself it seemed merely a resolution to put an end to such foolery as must have been going on in that prearranged visit of Deronda's which he had divined and interrupted. And Grandcourt might have pleaded that he was perfectly justified in taking care that his wife should fulfill the obligations she had accepted. Her marriage was a contract where all the ostensible advantages were on her side, and it was only of those advantages that her husband should use his power to hinder her from any injurious self committal or unsuitable behavior. He knew quite well that she had not married him--had not overcome her repugnance to certain facts--out of love to him personally; he had won her by the rank and luxuries he had to give her, and these she had got: he had fulfilled his side of the contract. And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly aware of the situation. She could not excuse herself by saying that there had been a tacit part of the contract on her side--namely, that she meant to rule and have her own way. With all her early indulgence in the disposition to dominate, she was not one of the narrow-brained women who through life regard all their own selfish demands as rights, and every claim upon themselves as an injury. She had a root of conscience in her, and the process of purgatory had begun for her on the green earth: she knew that she had been wrong. But now enter into the soul of this young creature as she found herself, with the blue Mediterranean dividing her from the world, on the tiny plank-island of a yacht, the domain of the husband to whom she felt that she had sold herself, and had been paid the strict price--nay, paid more than she had dared to ask in the handsome maintenance of her mother:--the husband to whom she had sold her truthfulness and sense of justice, so that he held them throttled into silence, collared and dragged behind him to witness what he would, without remonstrance. What had she to complain of? The yacht was of the prettiest; the cabin fitted up to perfection, smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with silk, expanded with mirrors; the crew such as suited an elegant toy, one of them having even ringlets, as well as a bronze complexion and fine teeth; and Mr. Lush was not there, for he had taken his way back to England as soon as he had seen all and everything on board. Moreover, Gwendolen herself liked the sea: it did not make her ill; and to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast the necessary adjustments was a sort of amusement that might have gratified her activity and enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was fine, and they were coasting southward, where even the rain-furrowed, heat-cracked clay becomes gem-like with purple shadows, and where one may float between blue and blue in an open-eyed dream that the world has done with sorrow. But what can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of Moslem paradise would quiet the terrible fury of moral repulsion and cowed resistance which, like an eating pain intensifying into torture, concentrates the mind in that poisonous misery? While Gwendolen, throned on her cushions at evening, and beholding the glory of sea and sky softening as if with boundless love around her, was hoping that Grandcourt in his march up and down was not going to pause near her, not going to look at her or speak to her, some woman, under a smoky sky, obliged to consider the price of eggs in arranging her dinner, was listening for the music of a footstep that would remove all risk from her foretaste of joy; some couple, bending cheek by cheek, over a bit of work done by the one and delighted in by the other, were reckoning the earnings that would make them rich enough for a holiday among the furze and heather. Had Grandcourt the least conception of what was going on in the breast of his wife? He conceived that she did not love him; but was that necessary? She was under his power, and he was not accustomed to soothe himself, as some cheerfully-disposed persons are, with the conviction that he was very generally and justly beloved. But what lay quite away from his conception was, that she could have any special repulsion for him personally. How could she? He himself knew what personal repulsion was--nobody better; his mind was much furnished with a sense of what brutes his fellow-creatures were, both masculine and feminine; what odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes of flourishing their handkerchiefs, what costume, what lavender water, what bulging eyes, and what foolish notions of making themselves agreeable by remarks which were not wanted. In this critical view of mankind there was an affinity between him and Gwendolen before their marriage, and we know that she had been attractingly wrought upon by the refined negations he presented to her. Hence he understood her repulsion for Lush. But how was he to understand or conceive her present repulsion for Henleigh Grandcourt? Some men bring themselves to believe, and not merely maintain, the non-existence of an external world; a few others believe themselves objects of repulsion to a woman without being told so in plain language. But Grandcourt did not belong to this eccentric body of thinkers. He had all his life had reason to take a flattering view of his own attractiveness, and to place himself in fine antithesis to the men who, he saw at once, must be revolting to a woman of taste. He had no idea of moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that there may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves or find a supercilious advantage. How, then, could Grandcourt divine what was going on in Gwendolen's breast? For their behavior to each other scandalized no observer--not even the foreign maid, warranted against sea-sickness; nor Grandcourt's own experienced valet: still less the picturesque crew, who regarded them as a model couple in high life. Their companionship consisted chiefly in a well-bred silence. Grandcourt had no humorous observations at which Gwendolen could refuse to smile, no chit-chat to make small occasions of dispute. He was perfectly polite in arranging an additional garment over her when needful, and in handing her any object that he perceived her to need, and she could not fall into the vulgarity of accepting or rejecting such politeness rudely. Grandcourt put up his telescope and said, "There's a plantation of sugar-canes at the foot of that rock; should you like to look?" Gwendolen said, "Yes, please," remembering that she must try and interest herself in sugar-canes as something outside her personal affairs. Then Grandcourt would walk up and down and smoke for a long while, pausing occasionally to point out a sail on the horizon, and at last would seat himself and look at Gwendolen with his narrow immovable gaze, as if she were part of the complete yacht; while she, conscious of being looked at was exerting her ingenuity not to meet his eyes. At dinner he would remark that the fruit was getting stale, and they must put in somewhere for more; or, observing that she did not drink the wine, he asked her if she would like any other kind better. A lady was obliged to respond to these things suitably; and even if she had not shrunk from quarrelling on other grounds, quarreling with Grandcourt was impossible; she might as well have made angry remarks to a dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in her cabin without invitation. And what sort of dispute could a woman of any pride and dignity begin on a yacht? Grandcourt had intense satisfaction in leading his wife captive after this fashion; it gave their life on a small scale a royal representation and publicity in which every thing familiar was got rid of, and every body must do what was expected of them whatever might be their private protest--the protest (kept strictly private) adding to the piquancy of despotism. To Gwendolen, who even in the freedom of her maiden time, had had very faint glimpses of any heroism or sublimity, the medium that now thrust itself everywhere before her view was this husband and her relation to him. The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them--like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless _ennui_, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window before her, affecting the distant equally with the near. Some unhappy wives are soothed by the possibility that they may become mothers; but Gwendolen felt that to desire a child for herself would have been a consenting to the completion of the injury she had been guilty of. She was reduced to dread lest she should become a mother. It was not the image of a new sweetly-budding life that came as a vision of deliverance from the monotony of distaste: it was an image of another sort. In the irritable, fluctuating stages of despair, gleams of hope came in the form of some possible accident. To dwell on the benignity of accident was a refuge from worse temptation. The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged. Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread, which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. Moreover, she had learned to see all her acts through the impression they would make on Deronda: whatever relief might come to her, she could not sever it from the judgment of her that would be created in his mind. Not one word of flattery, of indulgence, of dependence on her favor, could be fastened on by her in all their intercourse, to weaken his restraining power over her (in this way Deronda's effort over himself was repaid); and amid the dreary uncertainties of her spoiled life the possible remedies that lay in his mind, nay, the remedy that lay in her feeling for him, made her only hope. He seemed to her a terrible-browed angel, from whom she could not think of concealing any deed so as to win an ignorant regard from him: it belonged to the nature of their relation that she should be truthful, for his power over her had begun in the raising of a self-discontent which could be satisfied only by genuine change. But in no concealment had she now any confidence: her vision of what she had to dread took more decidedly than ever the form of some fiercely impulsive deed, committed as in a dream that she would instantaneously wake from to find the effects real though the images had been false: to find death under her hands, but instead of darkness, daylight; instead of satisfied hatred, the dismay of guilt; instead of freedom, the palsy of a new terror--a white dead face from which she was forever trying to flee and forever held back. She remembered Deronda's words: they were continually recurring in her thought, "Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing your remorse. * * * Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you." And so it was. In Gwendolen's consciousness temptation and dread met and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the other--each obstructed by its own image; and all the while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them. Inarticulate prayers, no more definite than a cry, often swept out from her into the vast silence, unbroken except by her husband's breathing or the plash of the wave or the creaking of the masts; but if ever she thought of definite help, it took the form of Deronda's presence and words, of the sympathy he might have for her, of the direction he might give her. It was sometimes after a white-lipped fierce-eyed temptation with murdering fingers had made its demon-visit that these best moments of inward crying and clinging for rescue would come to her, and she would lie with wide-open eyes in which the rising tears seemed a blessing, and the thought, "I will not mind if I can keep from getting wicked," seemed an answer to the indefinite prayer. So the days passed, taking with them light breezes beyond and about the Balearic Isles, and then to Sardinia, and then with gentle change persuading them northward again toward Corsica. But this floating, gentle-wafted existence, with its apparently peaceful influences, was becoming as bad as a nightmare to Gwendolen. "How long are we to be yachting?" she ventured to ask one day after they had been touching at Ajaccio, and the mere fact of change in going ashore had given her a relief from some of the thoughts which seemed now to cling about the very rigging of the vessel, mix with the air in the red silk cabin below, and make the smell of the sea odious. "What else should we do?" said Grandcourt. "I'm not tired of it. I don't see why we shouldn't stay out any length of time. There's less to bore one in this way. And where would you go to? I'm sick of foreign places. And we shall have enough of Ryelands. Would you rather be at Ryelands?" "Oh, no," said Gwendolen, indifferently, finding all places alike undescribable as soon as she imagined herself and her husband in them. "I only wondered how long you would like this." "I like yachting longer than anything else," said Grandcourt; "and I had none last year. I suppose you are beginning to tire of it. Women are so confoundedly whimsical. They expect everything to give way to them." "Oh, dear, no!" said Gwendolen, letting out her scorn in a flute-like tone. "I never expect you to give way." "Why should I?" said Grandcourt, with his inward voice, looking at her, and then choosing an orange--for they were at table. She made up her mind to a length of yachting that she could not see beyond; but the next day, after a squall which had made her rather ill for the first time, he came down to her and said, "There's been the devil's own work in the night. The skipper says we shall have to stay at Genoa for a week while things are set right." "Do you mind that?" said Gwendolen, who lay looking very white amidst her white drapery. "I should think so. Who wants to be broiling at Genoa?" "It will be a change," said Gwendolen, made a little incautious by her languor. "_I_ don't want any change. Besides, the place is intolerable; and one can't move along the roads. I shall go out in a boat, as I used to do, and manage it myself. One can get a few hours every day in that way instead of striving in a damnable hotel." Here was a prospect which held hope in it. Gwendolen thought of hours when she would be alone, since Grandcourt would not want to take her in the said boat, and in her exultation at this unlooked-for relief, she had wild, contradictory fancies of what she might do with her freedom--that "running away" which she had already innumerable times seen to be a worse evil than any actual endurance, now finding new arguments as an escape from her worse self. Also, visionary relief on a par with the fancy of a prisoner that the night wind may blow down the wall of his prison and save him from desperate devices, insinuated itself as a better alternative, lawful to wish for. The fresh current of expectation revived her energies, and enabled her to take all things with an air of cheerfulness and alacrity that made a change marked enough to be noticed by her husband. She watched through the evening lights to the sinking of the moon with less of awed loneliness than was habitual to her--nay, with a vague impression that in this mighty frame of things there might be some preparation of rescue for her. Why not?--since the weather had just been on her side. This possibility of hoping, after her long fluctuation amid fears, was like a first return of hunger to the long-languishing patient. She was waked the next morning by the casting of the anchor in the port of Genoa--waked from a strangely-mixed dream in which she felt herself escaping over the Mont Cenis, and wondering to find it warmer even in the moonlight on the snow, till suddenly she met Deronda, who told her to go back. In an hour or so from that dream she actually met Deronda. But it was on the palatial staircase of the _Italia_, where she was feeling warm in her light woolen dress and straw hat; and her husband was by her side. There was a start of surprise in Deronda before he could raise his hat and pass on. The moment did not seem to favor any closer greeting, and the circumstances under which they had last parted made him doubtful whether Grandcourt would be civilly inclined to him. The doubt might certainly have been changed into a disagreeable certainty, for Grandcourt on this unaccountable appearance of Deronda at Genoa of all places, immediately tried to conceive how there could have been an arrangement between him and Gwendolen. It is true that before they were well in their rooms, he had seen how difficult it was to shape such an arrangement with any probability, being too cool-headed to find it at once easily credible that Gwendolen had not only while in London hastened to inform Deronda of the yachting project, but had posted a letter to him from Marseilles or Barcelona, advising him to travel to Genoa in time for the chance of meeting her there, or of receiving a letter from her telling of some other destination--all which must have implied a miraculous foreknowledge in her, and in Deronda a bird-like facility in flying about and perching idly. Still he was there, and though Grandcourt would not make a fool of himself by fabrications that others might call preposterous, he was not, for all that, disposed to admit fully that Deronda's presence was, so far as Gwendolen was concerned, a mere accident. It was a disgusting fact; that was enough; and no doubt she was well pleased. A man out of temper does not wait for proofs before feeling toward all things animate and inanimate as if they were in a conspiracy against him, but at once threshes his horse or kicks his dog in consequence. Grandcourt felt toward Gwendolen and Deronda as if he knew them to be in a conspiracy against him, and here was an event in league with them. What he took for clearly certain--and so far he divined the truth--was that Gwendolen was now counting on an interview with Deronda whenever her husband's back was turned. As he sat taking his coffee at a convenient angle for observing her, he discerned something which he felt sure was the effect of a secret delight--some fresh ease in moving and speaking, some peculiar meaning in her eyes, whatever she looked on. Certainly her troubles had not marred her beauty. Mrs. Grandcourt was handsomer than Gwendolen Harleth: her grace and expression were informed by a greater variety of inward experience, giving new play to her features, new attitudes in movement and repose; her whole person and air had the nameless something which often makes a woman more interesting after marriage than before, less confident that all things are according to her opinion, and yet with less of deer-like shyness--more fully a human being. This morning the benefits of the voyage seemed to be suddenly revealing themselves in a new elasticity of mien. As she rose from the table and put her two heavily-jewelled hands on each side of her neck, according to her wont, she had no art to conceal that sort of joyous expectation which makes the present more bearable than usual, just as when a man means to go out he finds it easier to be amiable to the family for a quarter of an hour beforehand. It is not impossible that a terrier whose pleasure was concerned would perceive those amiable signs and know their meaning--know why his master stood in a peculiar way, talked with alacrity, and even had a peculiar gleam in his eye, so that on the least movement toward the door, the terrier would scuttle to be in time. And, in dog fashion, Grandcourt discerned the signs of Gwendolen's expectation, interpreting them with the narrow correctness which leaves a world of unknown feeling behind. "A--just ring, please, and tell Gibbs to order some dinner for us at three," said Grandcourt, as he too rose, took out a cigar, and then stretched his hand toward the hat that lay near. "I'm going to send Angus to find a little sailing-boat for us to go out in; one that I can manage, with you at the tiller. It's uncommonly pleasant these fine evenings--the least boring of anything we can do." Gwendolen turned cold. There was not only the cruel disappointment; there was the immediate conviction that her husband had determined to take her because he would not leave her out of his sight; and probably this dual solitude in a boat was the more attractive to him because it would be wearisome to her. They were not on the plank-island; she felt it the more possible to begin a contest. But the gleaming content had died out of her. There was a change in her like that of a glacier after sunset. "I would rather not go in the boat," she said. "Take some one else with you." "Very well; if you don't go, I shall not go," said Grandcourt. "We shall stay suffocating here, that's all." "I can't bear to go in a boat," said Gwendolen, angrily. "That is a sudden change," said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer. "But, since you decline, we shall stay indoors." He laid down his hat again, lit his cigar, and walked up and down the room, pausing now and then to look out of the windows. Gwendolen's temper told her to persist. She knew very well now that Grandcourt would not go without her; but if he must tyrannize over her, he should not do it precisely in the way he would choose. She would oblige him to stay in the hotel. Without speaking again, she passed into the adjoining bedroom and threw herself into a chair with her anger, seeing no purpose or issue--only feeling that the wave of evil had rushed back upon her, and dragged her away from her momentary breathing-place. Presently Grandcourt came in with his hat on, but threw it off and sat down sideways on a chair nearly in front of her, saying, in his superficial drawl, "Have you come round yet? or do you find it agreeable to be out of temper. You make things uncommonly pleasant for me." "Why do you want to make them unpleasant for _me_?" said Gwendolen, getting helpless again, and feeling the hot tears rise. "Now, will you be good enough to say what it is you have to complain of?" said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes, and using his most inward voice. "Is it that I stay indoors when you stay?" She could give no answer. The sort of truth that made any excuse for her anger could not be uttered. In the conflict of despair and humiliation she began to sob, and the tears rolled down her cheeks--a form of agitation which she had never shown before in her husband's presence. "I hope this is useful," said Grandcourt, after a moment or two. "All I can say is, it's most confoundedly unpleasant. What the devil women can see in this kind of thing, I don't know. _You_ see something to be got by it, of course. All I can see is, that we shall be shut up here when we might have been having a pleasant sail." "Let us go, then," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "Perhaps we shall be drowned." She began to sob again. This extraordinary behavior, which had evidently some relation to Deronda, gave more definiteness to Grandcourt's conclusions. He drew his chair quite close in front of her, and said, in a low tone, "Just be quiet and listen, will you?" There seemed to be a magical effect in this close vicinity. Gwendolen shrank and ceased to sob. She kept her eyelids down and clasped her hands tightly. "Let us understand each other," said Grandcourt, in the same tone. "I know very well what this nonsense means. But if you suppose I am going to let you make a fool of me, just dismiss that notion from your mind. What are you looking forward to, if you can't behave properly as my wife? There is disgrace for you, if you like to have it, but I don't know anything else; and as to Deronda, it's quite clear that he hangs back from you." "It's all false!" said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You don't in the least imagine what is in my mind. I have seen enough of the disgrace that comes in that way. And you had better leave me at liberty to speak with any one I like. It will be better for you." "You will allow me to judge of that," said Grandcourt, rising and moving to a little distance toward the window, but standing there playing with his whiskers as if he were awaiting something. Gwendolen's words had so clear and tremendous a meaning for herself that she thought they must have expressed it to Grandcourt, and had no sooner uttered them than she dreaded their effect. But his soul was garrisoned against presentiments and fears: he had the courage and confidence that belong to domination, and he was at that moment feeling perfectly satisfied that he held his wife with bit and bridle. By the time they had been married a year she would cease to be restive. He continued standing with his air of indifference, till she felt her habitual stifling consciousness of having an immovable obstruction in her life, like the nightmare of beholding a single form that serves to arrest all passage though the wide country lies open. "What decision have you come to?" he said, presently looking at her. "What orders shall I give?" "Oh, let us go," said Gwendolen. The walls had begun to be an imprisonment, and while there was breath in this man he would have the mastery over her. His words had the power of thumb-screws and the cold touch of the rock. To resist was to act like a stupid animal unable to measure results. So the boat was ordered. She even went down to the quay again with him to see it before midday. Grandcourt had recovered perfect quietude of temper, and had a scornful satisfaction in the attention given by the nautical groups to the _milord_, owner of the handsome yacht which had just put in for repairs, and who being an Englishman was naturally so at home on the sea that he could manage a sail with the same ease that he could manage a horse. The sort of exultation he had discerned in Gwendolen this morning she now thought that she discerned in him; and it was true that he had set his mind on this boating, and carried out his purpose as something that people might not expect him to do, with the gratified impulse of a strong will which had nothing better to exert itself upon. He had remarkable physical courage, and was proud of it--or rather he had a great contempt for the coarser, bulkier men who generally had less. Moreover, he was ruling that Gwendolen should go with him. And when they came down again at five o'clock, equipped for their boating, the scene was as good as a theatrical representation for all beholders. This handsome, fair-skinned English couple, manifesting the usual eccentricity of their nation, both of them proud, pale, and calm, without a smile on their faces, moving like creatures who were fulfilling a supernatural destiny--it was a thing to go out and see, a thing to paint. The husband's chest, back, and arms, showed very well in his close-fitting dress, and the wife was declared to be a statue. Some suggestions were proffered concerning a possible change in the breeze, and the necessary care in putting about, but Grandcourt's manner made the speakers understand that they were too officious, and that he knew better than they. Gwendolen, keeping her impassable air, as they moved away from the strand, felt her imagination obstinately at work. She was not afraid of any outward dangers--she was afraid of her own wishes which were taking shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces. She was afraid of her own hatred, which under the cold iron touch that had compelled her to-day had gathered a fierce intensity. As she sat guiding the tiller under her husband's eyes, doing just what he told her, the strife within her seemed like her own effort to escape from herself. She clung to the thought of Deronda: she persuaded herself that he would not go away while she was there--he knew that she needed help. The sense that he was there would save her from acting out the evil within. And yet quick, quick, came images, plans of evil that would come again and seize her in the night, like furies preparing the deed that they would straightway avenge. They were taken out of the port and carried eastward by a gentle breeze. Some clouds tempered the sunlight, and the hour was always deepening toward the supreme beauty of evening. Sails larger and smaller changed their aspect like sensitive things, and made a cheerful companionship, alternately near and far. The grand city shone more vaguely, the mountains looked out above it, and there was stillness as in an island sanctuary. Yet suddenly Gwendolen let her hands fall, and said in a scarcely audible tone, "God help me!" "What is the matter?" said Grandcourt, not distinguishing the words. "Oh, nothing," said Gwendolen, rousing herself from her momentary forgetfulness and resuming the ropes. "Don't you find this pleasant?" said Grandcourt. "Very." "You admit now we couldn't have done anything better?" "No--I see nothing better. I think we shall go on always, like the Flying Dutchman," said Gwendolen wildly. Grandcourt gave her one of his narrow examining glances, and then said, "If you like, we can go to Spezia in the morning, and let them take us up there." "No; I shall like nothing better than this." "Very well: we'll do the same to-morrow. But we must be turning in soon. I shall put about."

Gwendolen was now at the height of her entanglement in those fatal meshes which are woven more closely within than without, and make the inward torture far worse than the apparent outward cause. In taking his wife with him on a yachting expedition, Grandcourt wanted to feel that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was very fond of yachting: its dreamy do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his disposition. He had his reasons for carrying Gwendolen out of reach: he suspected a growing spirit of opposition in her, and his feeling about the inclination she betrayed for Deronda was what in another man he would have called jealousy. In himself it seemed merely a resolution to put an end to such foolery. And Grandcourt might have pleaded that he was perfectly justified in taking care that his wife should fulfil her obligations. Her marriage was a contract where all the apparent advantages were on her side, and it was only right for her husband to hinder her from any unsuitable behaviour. He knew quite well that she had not married him out of love; he had won her by the rank and luxuries he had to give her, and these she had got: he had fulfilled his side of the contract. And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly aware of the situation. She could not excuse herself by saying that that she had meant to rule and have her own way. With all her early indulgence, she was not one of those narrow-brained women who regard all their own selfish demands as rights, and every claim upon themselves as an injury. She had a root of conscience in her, and the process of purgatory had begun: she knew that she had been wrong. But now enter into the soul of this young creature as she found herself, with the blue Mediterranean dividing her from the world, on the tiny plank-island of a yacht, the domain of the husband to whom she had sold herself, and had been paid the strict price: the husband to whom she had sold her truth and justice, so that he held them throttled into silence, collared and dragged behind him, without remonstrance. What had she to complain of? The yacht was of the prettiest; the cabin fitted up to perfection, smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with silk, expanded with mirrors; the crew such as suited an elegant toy; and Mr. Lush was not there, for he had returned to England. Moreover, Gwendolen liked the sea: it did not make her ill; and to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast its adjustments was a sort of amusement that might have gratified her enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was fine, and they were coasting southward, where one may float between blue and blue in an open-eyed dream that the world has done with sorrow. But what can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of paradise would quiet the terrible fury of repulsion, which, like a torture, concentrates the mind in poisonous misery? While Gwendolen, throned on her cushions at evening, and beholding the glory of sea and sky softening as if with boundless love around her, was hoping that Grandcourt in his march up and down was not going to pause near her or speak to her, some woman living in poverty, under a smoky sky, was listening for the music of a footstep that would remove all risk from her foretaste of joy. Had Grandcourt the least conception of what was going on in his wife's mind? He conceived that she did not love him; but was that necessary? She was under his power. But he did not understand that she could have any special repulsion for him personally. How could she? He himself knew what personal repulsion was - nobody better; his mind was much furnished with a sense of what brutes his fellow-creatures were, what odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what foolish modes of flourishing their handkerchiefs. In this critical view of mankind there was an affinity between him and Gwendolen before their marriage, and she was attracted by the refined negations he presented to her. Hence he understood her repulsion for Lush. But how was he to understand her present repulsion for Henleigh Grandcourt? He had all his life had reason to take a flattering view of his own attractiveness to women of taste. He had no idea of moral repulsion, and could not have believed that there may be a disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through exasperation at that outward advantage in which hateful things can affect superiority. How, then, could Grandcourt divine what was going on in Gwendolen's breast? For their behaviour to each other scandalized no observer: the staff and crew regarded them as a model couple in high life. Their companionship consisted chiefly in a well-bred silence. Grandcourt had no humorous observations at which Gwendolen could refuse to smile. He was perfectly polite in arranging a garment over her when needful, and in handing her any object that he perceived her to need, and she could not fall into the vulgarity of rejecting such politeness rudely. Grandcourt put up his telescope and said, "There's a plantation of sugar-canes there; should you like to look?" Gwendolen said, "Yes, please," remembering that she must try and interest herself in sugar-canes as something outside her personal affairs. Then Grandcourt would walk up and down and smoke, pausing occasionally to point out a sail on the horizon, and at last would seat himself and look at Gwendolen with his narrow immovable gaze, as if she were part of the yacht; while she was exerting her ingenuity not to meet his eyes. At dinner he would remark that the fruit was getting stale, and they must put in somewhere for more; or, observing that she did not drink the wine, asked if she would like another kind better. A lady was obliged to respond to these things suitably; and in any case, quarrelling with Grandcourt was impossible; she might as well have made angry remarks to a dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in her cabin. Grandcourt had intense satisfaction in leading his wife captive after this fashion; it gave their life on a small scale a royal representation which satisfied his taste for despotism. To Gwendolen, the medium that now thrust itself everywhere before her view was this husband and her relation to him. The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady who barely passes for a human being, with petty standards, low suspicions and loveless boredom, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them. Gwendolen had that kind of window before her. Some unhappy wives are soothed by the possibility of becoming mothers; but Gwendolen felt that to desire a child would have meant consenting to the completion of the injury she had been guilty of. She dreaded becoming a mother. It was not the image of a new sweetly-budding life that came as a vision of deliverance: her only gleams of hope came in the form of some possible accident. To dwell on an accident was a refuge from worse temptation. The embitterment of hatred is often, like devoted love, out of direct relation with any outward causes. Passion finds nourishment within, directs all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and leads to an imaginary annihilation of the detested object, like hidden rites of vengeance. Such rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread, which urged her to flee from the images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing cast a ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom. Moreover, she had learned to see all her acts through the impression they would make on Deronda, and the judgment of her that would be created in his mind. She could not recall one word of flattery or indulgence from him that might weaken his restraining power over her (in this way Deronda's effort over himself was repaid); and amid the dreary uncertainties of her spoiled life, the possible remedies in his mind, and her feeling for him, made her only hope. He seemed to her a terrible-browed angel, from whom she could not think of concealing any deed. But her vision of what she had to dread took more decidedly than ever the form of some fiercely impulsive deed, committed as in a dream that she would instantaneously wake from to find the effects: to find death under her hands, guilt and terror - a white dead face from which she was forever trying to flee and forever held back. She remembered Deronda's words: they were continually recurring in her thought- "Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing your remorse. Take your fear as a safeguard, like quickness of hearing, that will warn you of consequences." And so it was. In Gwendolen's consciousness temptation and dread met and stared like two pale phantoms, while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them. Inarticulate prayers often swept out from her into the vast silence, unbroken except by her husband's breathing or the plash of the wave; but if ever she thought of help, it took the form of Deronda's presence and words, of his sympathy and direction. It was sometimes after a white-lipped temptation with murdering fingers had made its demon-visit that these best moments of inward crying for rescue would come to her, and she would lie with wide-open eyes in which the rising tears seemed a blessing, and the thought, "I will not mind if I can keep from getting wicked," seemed an answer to her prayer. So the days passed, taking them with light breezes about the Balearic Isles, and then to Sardinia, and then persuading them northward toward Corsica. But this peaceful, gentle-wafted existence was becoming a nightmare to Gwendolen. "How long are we to be yachting?" she ventured to ask one day after they had touched at Ajaccio, and the mere fact of going ashore was a relief. "What else should we do?" said Grandcourt. "I'm not tired of it. I don't see why we shouldn't stay out any length of time. And where would you go to? I'm sick of foreign places. Would you rather be at Ryelands?" "Oh, no," said Gwendolen, indifferently, finding all places alike undescribable as soon as she imagined her husband in them. "I only wondered how long you would like this." "I like yachting longer than anything else," said Grandcourt. "I suppose you are beginning to tire of it. Women are so confoundedly whimsical. They expect everything to give way to them." "Oh, dear, no!" said Gwendolen, letting out her scorn in a flute-like tone. "I never expect you to give way." She made up her mind to a length of yachting that she could not see beyond; but the next day, after a squall which had made her rather ill for the first time, he said- "There's been the devil's own work in the night. The skipper says we shall have to stay at Genoa for a week while things are set right." "Do you mind that?" said Gwendolen, who lay looking very white. "I should think so. Who wants to be broiling at Genoa?" "It will be a change," said Gwendolen, made a little incautious. "I don't want any change. The place is intolerable. I shall go out in a boat, and manage it myself for a few hours every day instead of striving in a damnable hotel." Gwendolen thought with hope of hours when she would be alone, since Grandcourt would not want to take her in the said boat; and in her exultation at this unlooked-for relief, she had wild fancies of running away as an escape from her worse self. The fresh expectation revived her energies, and gave her an air of cheerfulness that was noticed by her husband. She watched the sinking of the moon with a vague impression that in this mighty frame of things there might be some preparation of rescue for her. This possibility of hope was like a first return of hunger to the long-languishing patient. The next morning she woke from dreams of meeting Deronda to find they had cast anchor in the port of Genoa. And an hour or so from that dream she actually met Deronda, on the palatial staircase of the Italia, with her husband by her side. Deronda started in surprise before raising his hat and passing on without further greeting. He was doubtful whether Grandcourt would be civilly inclined to him. The doubt might have been a disagreeable certainty, for Grandcourt, on this unaccountable appearance of Deronda at Genoa, immediately tried to conceive how there could have been an arrangement between him and Gwendolen. It is true that he quickly saw how difficult it would have been to make such an arrangement, being too cool-headed to believe that Gwendolen had posted a letter to Deronda from Marseilles or Barcelona, advising him to travel to Genoa on the chance of meeting her there - which must have implied a miraculous foreknowledge in her, and in Deronda a bird-like facility in flying about. For all that, Grandcourt was not disposed to admit that Deronda's presence was a mere accident. It was a disgusting fact; that was enough; and no doubt she was well pleased. A man out of temper does not wait for proofs before feeling all things to be in a conspiracy against him. Grandcourt felt as if Gwendolen and Deronda conspired against him; and what he took for certain - and in this he guessed the truth - was that Gwendolen was counting on an interview with Deronda whenever her husband's back was turned. As he sat taking his coffee at a convenient angle for observing her, he discerned some fresh ease in her movements, some peculiar meaning in her eyes. Certainly her troubles had not marred her beauty. Mrs. Grandcourt was handsomer than Gwendolen Harleth: her inward experience had given new play to her features; her person and air had the nameless something which often makes a woman more interesting after marriage than before, less confident that all things are according to her opinion, and yet with less of deer-like shyness - more fully a human being. This morning, as she rose from the table, she had no art to conceal her joyous expectation. Just as a terrier may perceive its master's purpose by the slightest signs, and scuttle to the door ready to go out, so, in dog fashion, Grandcourt discerned the signs of Gwendolen's intentions. "A - just ring, please, and order some dinner for us at three," said Grandcourt, as he too rose and stretched his hand toward his hat. "I'm going to send Angus to find a little sailing-boat for us to go out in; one that I can manage, with you at the tiller. It's uncommonly pleasant these fine evenings." Gwendolen turned cold. There was not only the cruel disappointment; there was the immediate conviction that her husband had determined to take her because he would not leave her out of his sight; and probably this dual solitude in a boat was the more attractive to him because it would be wearisome to her. "I would rather not go in the boat," she said. "Take some one else." "Very well; if you don't go, I shall not go," said Grandcourt. "We shall stay suffocating here, that's all." "I can't bear to go in a boat," said Gwendolen, angrily. "That is a sudden change," said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer. "But, since you decline, we shall stay indoors." He laid down his hat again, lit a cigar, and walked up and down the room. Gwendolen knew that Grandcourt would not go without her; but if he must tyrannize over her, he should not do it as he chose. She would oblige him to stay in the hotel. Without speaking, she passed into the bedroom and threw herself angrily into a chair, feeling that the wave of evil had rushed back upon her, and dragged her away from her momentary breathing-space. Presently Grandcourt came in and sat down in front of her, saying, in his drawl- "Have you come round yet? or do you find it agreeable to be out of temper? You make things uncommonly pleasant for me." "Why do you want to make them unpleasant for me?" said Gwendolen, feeling the hot tears rise. "Now, what do you have to complain of?" said Grandcourt, using his most inward voice. "Is it that I stay indoors when you stay?" She could not answer. In her despair and humiliation she began to sob - something she had never done before in her husband's presence. "I hope this is useful," said Grandcourt, after a moment. "All I can say is, it's most confoundedly unpleasant. What the devil women can see in this kind of thing, I don't know. All I can see is, that we are shut up here when we might be having a pleasant sail." "Let us go, then," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "Perhaps we shall be drowned." She began to sob again. This extraordinary behaviour, which had evidently some relation to Deronda, gave more definiteness to Grandcourt's conclusions. He drew his chair close to her, and said, in a low tone, "Just be quiet and listen, will you?" Gwendolen shrank and ceased to sob. She kept her eyelids down and clasped her hands tightly. "I know very well what this nonsense means," said Grandcourt. "But if you suppose I am going to let you make a fool of me, just dismiss that notion from your mind. There is disgrace for you, if you like to have it, but as to Deronda, it's quite clear that he hangs back from you." "It's all false!" said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You don't in the least imagine what is in my mind. You had better leave me at liberty to speak with anyone I like. It will be better for you." "You will allow me to judge of that," said Grandcourt. Gwendolen's words had so clear and tremendous a meaning for herself that she thought they must have expressed it to Grandcourt, and had no sooner uttered them than she dreaded their effect. But his soul was garrisoned against fears: he had the confidence of domination, and he was perfectly satisfied that he held his wife with bit and bridle. By the time they had been married a year she would cease to be restive. He stood with his air of indifference, till she felt him like an immovable obstruction in her life. "What decision have you come to?" he said presently. "Oh, let us go," said Gwendolen. The walls had begun to be an imprisonment, and while there was breath in this man he would have the mastery over her. It was stupid to resist. So the boat was ordered. She even went down to the quay with him to see it before midday. Grandcourt had recovered his temper, and had a scornful satisfaction in the attention given to the milord, who being an Englishman was naturally at home on the sea. The sort of exultation he had discerned in Gwendolen this morning she now discerned in him; and it was true that he had set his mind on this boating with the gratified impulse of a strong will which had nothing better to exert itself upon. He had remarkable physical courage, and was proud of it. Moreover, he was ruling that Gwendolen should go with him. And when they came down again at five o'clock, equipped for their boating, beholders admired this handsome, fair-skinned English couple, both of them proud, pale, and calm, without a smile on their faces. The husband's physique showed very well in his close-fitting dress, and the wife was declared to be like a statue. Some suggestions were proffered concerning a possible change in the breeze, and the necessary care in putting about, but Grandcourt's manner made the speakers understand that they were too officious, and that he knew better than they. Gwendolen was not afraid of any outward dangers - she was afraid of her own wishes which were taking shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces. She was afraid of her own hatred, which under his cold iron touch today had gathered a fierce intensity. As she sat guiding the tiller under her husband's eyes, doing just what he told her, the strife within her seemed like her own effort to escape from herself. She clung to the thought of Deronda: he would not go away while she was there - he knew that she needed help. The sense that he was there would save her from doing wrong. And yet quick, quick, came images, plans of evil, like furies preparing the deed that they would straightway avenge. They were taken out of the port and carried eastward by a gentle breeze. Some clouds tempered the sunlight, and the supreme beauty of evening was approaching. Sails larger and smaller made a cheerful companionship. The grand city shone, and the mountains looked out above it in stillness. Suddenly Gwendolen let her hands fall, and said in a scarcely audible tone, "God help me!" "What is the matter?" said Grandcourt. "Oh, nothing," said Gwendolen, rousing herself and resuming the ropes. "Don't you find this pleasant?" said Grandcourt. "Very." "You admit now we couldn't have done anything better?" "No - I see nothing better. I think we shall go on always, like the Flying Dutchman," said Gwendolen wildly. Grandcourt gave her one of his narrow examining glances, and then said, "If you like, we can go to Spezia in the morning." "No; I shall like nothing better than this." "Very well: we'll do the same tomorrow. But we must be turning in soon. I shall put about."

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 54

Desire has trimmed the sails, and Circumstance Brings but the breeze to fill them. While Grandcourt on his beautiful black Yarico, the groom behind him on Criterion, was taking the pleasant ride from Diplow to Offendene, Gwendolen was seated before the mirror while her mother gathered up the lengthy mass of light-brown hair which she had been carefully brushing. "Only gather it up easily and make a coil, mamma," said Gwendolen. "Let me bring you some ear-rings, Gwen," said Mrs. Davilow, when the hair was adjusted, and they were both looking at the reflection in the glass. It was impossible for them not to notice that the eyes looked brighter than they had done of late, that there seemed to be a shadow lifted from the face, leaving all the lines once more in their placid youthfulness. The mother drew some inference that made her voice rather cheerful. "You do want your earrings?" "No, mamma; I shall not wear any ornaments, and I shall put on my black silk. Black is the only wear when one is going to refuse an offer," said Gwendolen, with one of her old smiles at her mother, while she rose to throw off her dressing-gown. "Suppose the offer is not made after all," said Mrs. Davilow, not without a sly intention. "Then that will be because I refuse it beforehand," said Gwendolen. "It comes to the same thing." There was a proud little toss of the head as she said this; and when she walked down-stairs in her long black robes, there was just that firm poise of head and elasticity of form which had lately been missing, as in a parched plant. Her mother thought, "She is quite herself again. It must be pleasure in his coming. Can her mind be really made up against him?" Gwendolen would have been rather angry if that thought had been uttered; perhaps all the more because through the last twenty hours, with a brief interruption of sleep, she had been so occupied with perpetually alternating images and arguments for and against the possibility of her marrying Grandcourt, that the conclusion which she had determined on beforehand ceased to have any hold on her consciousness: the alternate dip of counterbalancing thoughts begotten of counterbalancing desires had brought her into a state in which no conclusion could look fixed to her. She would have expressed her resolve as before; but it was a form out of which the blood had been sucked--no more a part of quivering life than the "God's will be done" of one who is eagerly watching chances. She did not mean to accept Grandcourt; from the first moment of receiving his letter she had meant to refuse him; still, that could not but prompt her to look the unwelcome reasons full in the face until she had a little less awe of them, could not hinder her imagination from filling out her knowledge in various ways, some of which seemed to change the aspect of what she knew. By dint of looking at a dubious object with a constructive imagination, one can give it twenty different shapes. Her indistinct grounds of hesitation before the interview at the Whispering Stones, at present counted for nothing; they were all merged in the final repulsion. If it had not been for that day in Cardell Chase, she said to herself now, there would have been no obstacle to her marrying Grandcourt. On that day and after it, she had not reasoned and balanced; she had acted with a force of impulse against which all questioning was no more than a voice against a torrent. The impulse had come--not only from her maidenly pride and jealousy, not only from the shock of another woman's calamity thrust close on her vision, but--from her dread of wrong-doing, which was vague, it was true, and aloof from the daily details of her life, but not the less strong. Whatever was accepted as consistent with being a lady she had no scruple about; but from the dim region of what was called disgraceful, wrong, guilty, she shrunk with mingled pride and terror; and even apart from shame, her feeling would have made her place any deliberate injury of another in the region of guilt. But now--did she know exactly what was the state of the case with regard to Mrs. Glasher and her children? She had given a sort of promise--had said, "I will not interfere with your wishes." But would another woman who married Grandcourt be in fact the decisive obstacle to her wishes, or be doing her and her boy any real injury? Might it not be just as well, nay better, that Grandcourt should marry? For what could not a woman do when she was married, if she knew how to assert herself? Here all was constructive imagination. Gwendolen had about as accurate a conception of marriage--that is to say, of the mutual influences, demands, duties of man and woman in the state of matrimony--as she had of magnetic currents and the law of storms. "Mamma managed badly," was her way of summing up what she had seen of her mother's experience: she herself would manage quite differently. And the trials of matrimony were the last theme into which Mrs. Davilow could choose to enter fully with this daughter. "I wonder what mamma and my uncle would say if they knew about Mrs. Glasher!" thought Gwendolen in her inward debating; not that she could imagine herself telling them, even if she had not felt bound to silence. "I wonder what anybody would say; or what they would say to Mr. Grandcourt's marrying some one else and having other children!" To consider what "anybody" would say, was to be released from the difficulty of judging where everything was obscure to her when feeling had ceased to be decisive. She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that "anybody" regarded the illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers. The verdict of "anybody" seemed to be that she had no reason to concern herself greatly on behalf of Mrs. Glasher and her children. But there was another way in which they had caused her concern. What others might think could not do away with a feeling which in the first instance would hardly be too strongly described as indignation and loathing that she should have been expected to unite herself with an outworn life, full of backward secrets which must have been more keenly felt than any association with _her_. True, the question of love on her own part had occupied her scarcely at all in relation to Grandcourt. The desirability of marriage for her had always seemed due to other feeling than love; and to be enamored was the part of the man, on whom the advances depended. Gwendolen had found no objection to Grandcourt's way of being enamored before she had had that glimpse of his past, which she resented as if it had been a deliberate offense against her. His advances to _her_ were deliberate, and she felt a retrospective disgust for them. Perhaps other men's lives were of the same kind--full of secrets which made the ignorant suppositions of the women they wanted to marry a farce at which they were laughing in their sleeves. These feelings of disgust and indignation had sunk deep; and though other troublous experience in the last weeks had dulled them from passion into remembrance, it was chiefly their reverberating activity which kept her firm to the understanding with herself, that she was not going to accept Grandcourt. She had never meant to form a new determination; she had only been considering what might be thought or said. If anything could have induced her to change, it would have been the prospect of making all things easy for "poor mamma:" that, she admitted, was a temptation. But no! she was going to refuse him. Meanwhile, the thought that he was coming to be refused was inspiriting: she had the white reins in her hands again; there was a new current in her frame, reviving her from the beaten-down consciousness in which she had been left by the interview with Klesmer. She was not now going to crave an opinion of her capabilities; she was going to exercise her power. Was this what made her heart palpitate annoyingly when she heard the horse's footsteps on the gravel?--when Miss Merry, who opened the door to Grandcourt, came to tell her that he was in the drawing-room? The hours of preparation and the triumph of the situation were apparently of no use: she might as well have seen Grandcourt coming suddenly on her in the midst of her despondency. While walking into the drawing-room, she had to concentrate all her energy in that self-control, which made her appear gravely gracious--as she gave her hand to him, and answered his hope that she was quite well in a voice as low and languid as his own. A moment afterward, when they were both of them seated on two of the wreath-painted chairs--Gwendolen upright with downcast eyelids, Grandcourt about two yards distant, leaning one arm over the back of his chair and looking at her, while he held his hat in his left hand--any one seeing them as a picture would have concluded that they were in some stage of love-making suspense. And certainly the love-making had begun: she already felt herself being wooed by this silent man seated at an agreeable distance, with the subtlest atmosphere of attar of roses and an attention bent wholly on her. And he also considered himself to be wooing: he was not a man to suppose that his presence carried no consequences; and he was exactly the man to feel the utmost piquancy in a girl whom he had not found quite calculable. "I was disappointed not to find you at Leubronn," he began, his usual broken drawl having just a shade of amorous languor in it. "The place was intolerable without you. A mere kennel of a place. Don't you think so?" "I can't judge what it would be without myself," said Gwendolen, turning her eyes on him, with some recovered sense of mischief. "_With_ myself I like it well enough to have stayed longer, if I could. But I was obliged to come home on account of family troubles." "It was very cruel of you to go to Leubronn," said Grandcourt, taking no notice of the troubles, on which Gwendolen--she hardly knew why--wished that there should be a clear understanding at once. "You must have known that it would spoil everything: you knew you were the heart and soul of everything that went on. Are you quite reckless about me?" It would be impossible to say "yes" in a tone that would be taken seriously; equally impossible to say "no;" but what else could she say? In her difficulty, she turned down her eyelids again and blushed over face and neck. Grandcourt saw her in a new phase, and believed that she was showing her inclination. But he was determined that she should show it more decidedly. "Perhaps there is some deeper interest? Some attraction--some engagement--which it would have been only fair to make me aware of? Is there any man who stands between us?" Inwardly the answer framed itself. "No; but there is a woman." Yet how could she utter this? Even if she had not promised that woman to be silent, it would have been impossible for her to enter on the subject with Grandcourt. But how could she arrest his wooing by beginning to make a formal speech--"I perceive your intention--it is most flattering, etc."? A fish honestly invited to come and be eaten has a clear course in declining, but how if it finds itself swimming against a net? And apart from the network, would she have dared at once to say anything decisive? Gwendolen had not time to be clear on that point. As it was, she felt compelled to silence, and after a pause, Grandcourt said, "Am I to understand that some one else is preferred?" Gwendolen, now impatient of her own embarrassment, determined to rush at the difficulty and free herself. She raised her eyes again and said with something of her former clearness and defiance, "No"--wishing him to understand, "What then? I may not be ready to take _you_." There was nothing that Grandcourt could not understand which he perceived likely to affect his _amour propre_. "The last thing I would do, is to importune you. I should not hope to win you by making myself a bore. If there were no hope for me, I would ask you to tell me so at once, that I might just ride away to--no matter where." Almost to her own astonishment, Gwendolen felt a sudden alarm at the image of Grandcourt finally riding away. What would be left her then? Nothing but the former dreariness. She liked him to be there. She snatched at the subject that would defer any decisive answer. "I fear you are not aware of what has happened to us. I have lately had to think so much of my mamma's troubles, that other subjects have been quite thrown into the background. She has lost all her fortune, and we are going to leave this place. I must ask you to excuse my seeming preoccupied." In eluding a direct appeal Gwendolen recovered some of her self-possession. She spoke with dignity and looked straight at Grandcourt, whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers, and mysteriously arrested them: mysteriously; for the subtly-varied drama between man and woman is often such as can hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, according to obvious fixed marks. The word of all work, Love, will no more express the myriad modes of mutual attraction, than the word Thought can inform you what is passing through your neighbor's mind. It would be hard to tell on which side--Gwendolen's or Grandcourt's--the influence was more mixed. At that moment his strongest wish was to be completely master of this creature--this piquant combination of maidenliness and mischief: that she knew things which had made her start away from him, spurred him to triumph over that repugnance; and he was believing that he should triumph. And she--ah, piteous equality in the need to dominate!--she was overcome like the thirsty one who is drawn toward the seeming water in the desert, overcome by the suffused sense that here in this man's homage to her lay the rescue from helpless subjection to an oppressive lot. All the while they were looking at each other; and Grandcourt said, slowly and languidly, as if it were of no importance, other things having been settled, "You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. Davilow's loss of fortune will not trouble you further. You will trust me to prevent it from weighing upon her. You will give me the claim to provide against that." The little pauses and refined drawlings with which this speech was uttered, gave time for Gwendolen to go through the dream of a life. As the words penetrated her, they had the effect of a draught of wine, which suddenly makes all things easier, desirable things not so wrong, and people in general less disagreeable. She had a momentary phantasmal love for this man who chose his words so well, and who was a mere incarnation of delicate homage. Repugnance, dread, scruples--these were dim as remembered pains, while she was already tasting relief under the immediate pain of hopelessness. She imagined herself already springing to her mother, and being playful again. Yet when Grandcourt had ceased to speak, there was an instant in which she was conscious of being at the turning of the ways. "You are very generous," she said, not moving her eyes, and speaking with a gentle intonation. "You accept what will make such things a matter of course?" said Grandcourt, without any new eagerness. "You consent to become my wife?" This time Gwendolen remained quite pale. Something made her rise from her seat in spite of herself and walk to a little distance. Then she turned and with her hands folded before her stood in silence. Grandcourt immediately rose too, resting his hat on the chair, but still keeping hold of it. The evident hesitation of this destitute girl to take his splendid offer stung him into a keenness of interest such as he had not known for years. None the less because he attributed her hesitation entirely to her knowledge about Mrs. Glasher. In that attitude of preparation, he said, "Do you command me to go?" No familiar spirit could have suggested to him more effective words. "No," said Gwendolen. She could not let him go: that negative was a clutch. She seemed to herself to be, after all, only drifted toward the tremendous decision--but drifting depends on something besides the currents when the sails have been set beforehand. "You accept my devotion?" said Grandcourt, holding his hat by his side and looking straight into her eyes, without other movement. Their eyes meeting in that way seemed to allow any length of pause: but wait as long as she would, how could she contradict herself? What had she detained him for? He had shut out any explanation. "Yes," came as gravely from Gwendolen's lips as if she had been answering to her name in a court of justice. He received it gravely, and they still looked at each other in the same attitude. Was there ever such a way before of accepting the bliss-giving "Yes"? Grandcourt liked better to be at that distance from her, and to feel under a ceremony imposed by an indefinable prohibition that breathed from Gwendolen's bearing. But he did at length lay down his hat and advance to take her hand, just pressing his lips upon it and letting it go again. She thought his behavior perfect, and gained a sense of freedom which made her almost ready to be mischievous. Her "Yes" entailed so little at this moment that there was nothing to screen the reversal of her gloomy prospects; her vision was filled by her own release from the Momperts, and her mother's release from Sawyer's Cottage. With a happy curl of the lips, she said, "Will you not see mamma? I will fetch her." "Let us wait a little," said Grandcourt, in his favorite attitude, having his left forefinger and thumb in his waist-coat pocket, and with his right hand caressing his whisker, while he stood near Gwendolen and looked at her--not unlike a gentleman who has a felicitous introduction at an evening party. "Have you anything else to say to me?" said Gwendolen, playfully. "Yes--I know having things said to you is a great bore," said Grandcourt, rather sympathetically. "Not when they are things I like to hear." "Will it bother you to be asked how soon we can be married?" "I think it will, to-day," said Gwendolen, putting up her chin saucily. "Not to-day, then, but to-morrow. Think of it before I come to-morrow. In a fortnight--or three weeks--as soon as possible." "Ah, you think you will be tired of my company," said Gwendolen. "I notice when people are married the husband is not so much with his wife as when they are engaged. But perhaps I shall like that better, too." She laughed charmingly. "You shall have whatever you like," said Grandcourt. "And nothing that I don't like?--please say that; because I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like," said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise, where all her nonsense is adorable. Grandcourt paused; these were subtilties in which he had much experience of his own. "I don't know--this is such a brute of a world, things are always turning up that one doesn't like. I can't always hinder your being bored. If you like to ride Criterion, I can't hinder his coming down by some chance or other." "Ah, my friend Criterion, how is he?" "He is outside: I made the groom ride him, that you might see him. He had the side-saddle on for an hour or two yesterday. Come to the window and look at him." They could see the two horses being taken slowly round the sweep, and the beautiful creatures, in their fine grooming, sent a thrill of exultation through Gwendolen. They were the symbols of command and luxury, in delightful contrast with the ugliness of poverty and humiliation at which she had lately been looking close. "Will you ride Criterion to-morrow?" said Grandcourt. "If you will, everything shall be arranged." "I should like it of all things," said Gwendolen. "I want to lose myself in a gallop again. But now I must go and fetch mamma." "Take my arm to the door, then," said Grandcourt, and she accepted. Their faces were very near each other, being almost on a level, and he was looking at her. She thought his manners as a lover more agreeable than any she had seen described. She had no alarm lest he meant to kiss her, and was so much at her ease, that she suddenly paused in the middle of the room and said half archly, half earnestly, "Oh, while I think of it--there is something I dislike that you can save me from. I do _not_ like Mr. Lush's company." "You shall not have it. I'll get rid of him." "You are not fond of him yourself?" "Not in the least. I let him hang on me because he has always been a poor devil," said Grandcourt, in an _adagio_ of utter indifference. "They got him to travel with me when I was a lad. He was always that coarse-haired kind of brute--sort of cross between a hog and a _dilettante_." Gwendolen laughed. All that seemed kind and natural enough: Grandcourt's fastidiousness enhanced the kindness. And when they reached the door, his way of opening it for her was the perfection of easy homage. Really, she thought, he was likely to be the least disagreeable of husbands. Mrs. Davilow was waiting anxiously in her bed-room when Gwendolen entered, stepped toward her quickly, and kissing her on both cheeks said in a low tone, "Come down, mamma, and see Mr. Grandcourt. I am engaged to him." "My darling child," said Mrs. Davilow, with a surprise that was rather solemn than glad. "Yes," said Gwendolen, in the same tone, and with a quickness which implied that it was needless to ask questions. "Everything is settled. You are not going to Sawyer's Cottage, I am not going to be inspected by Mrs. Mompert, and everything is to be as I like. So come down with me immediately."

While Grandcourt was riding to Offendene on his beautiful black Yarico, with the groom behind him on Criterion, Gwendolen was seated before the mirror while her mother carefully brushed her light-brown hair. "Just gather it up easily and make a coil, mamma," said Gwendolen. "Let me bring you some ear-rings, Gwen," said Mrs. Davilow, when the hair was adjusted, and they were both looking at the reflection in the glass. The eyes looked brighter than they had done of late; there seemed to be a shadow lifted from the face. "No, mamma; no ornaments, and I shall put on my black silk. Black is the only colour to wear when one is going to refuse an offer," said Gwendolen, with one of her old smiles. "Suppose the offer is not made?" "Then that will be because I refuse it beforehand," said Gwendolen. "It comes to the same thing." There was a proud toss of the head as she said this; and when she walked downstairs in her black robes, there was just that firm poise of head and elasticity of form which had lately been missing, as in a parched plant. Her mother thought, "She is quite herself again. It must be pleasure in his coming. Can her mind be really made up against him?" Gwendolen had been so occupied with perpetually alternating arguments for and against her marrying Grandcourt, that the conclusion which she had determined on ceased to have any hold on her mind. She was in a state in which no conclusion could look fixed to her. She would have expressed her resolve as before; but the blood had been sucked out of it. She did not mean to accept Grandcourt; still, that only prompted her to look the unwelcome reasons full in the face until she had a little less awe of them. By looking at a dubious object with a constructive imagination, one can give it twenty different shapes. Her indistinct hesitation before the interview at the Whispering Stones now counted for nothing; if it had not been for that day in Cardell Chase, she said to herself, there would have been no obstacle to her marrying Grandcourt. On that day, she had acted with an impulse which had come partly from her dread of wrong-doing. She shrank with pride and terror from the dim region of what was called disgraceful, wrong, or guilty. But now - did she know the exact state of the case with regard to Mrs. Glasher? She had given a sort of promise - had said, "I will not interfere with your wishes." But might it not be just as well, nay better, that Grandcourt should marry? For what could not a woman do when she was married, if she knew how to assert herself? Here all was imagination. Gwendolen had about as accurate an idea of marriage - of its mutual influences, demands and duties - as she had of magnetic currents and the law of storms. "Mamma managed badly," was how she summed up her mother's experience: she herself would manage quite differently. "I wonder what mamma and my uncle would say if they knew about Mrs. Glasher!" thought Gwendolen. "I wonder what anybody would say!" To consider what "anybody" would say, was to be released from the difficulty of judging: "anybody" would regard illegitimate children as rightfully to be looked down on and deprived of social advantages. The verdict of "anybody" seemed to be that she had no reason to concern herself greatly on behalf of Mrs. Glasher and her children. But this could not do away with her indignation and loathing that she should have been expected to unite herself with an outworn life, full of past secrets. True, love on her own part had hardly occupied her mind at all in relation to Grandcourt. The desirability of marriage for her had always seemed due to other feelings; and to be enamoured was the part of the man. Gwendolen had found no objection to Grandcourt's way of being enamoured before she had that glimpse of his past, which made her feel disgust for his addresses. Perhaps other men's lives were also full of secrets, and they were laughing up their sleeves at the ignorance of the women they wanted to marry. These feelings of disgust and indignation had sunk deep, and kept her firm to her decision that she was not going to accept Grandcourt. If anything could have induced her to change, it would have been the prospect of making all things easy for "poor mamma:" that, she admitted, was a temptation. But no! she was going to refuse him. Meanwhile, the thought that he was coming to be refused was inspiriting: she had the reins in her hands again, and felt herself reviving from the beaten-down state in which she had been left by the interview with Klesmer. She was going to exercise her power. Was this what made her heart palpitate annoyingly when she heard the horse's footsteps on the gravel? - when Miss Merry came to tell her that Grandcourt was in the drawing-room? Walking into the drawing-room, she had to concentrate all her energy in self-control, which made her appear gravely gracious as she answered his greeting in a voice as low and languid as his own. When they were both seated - Gwendolen upright with downcast eyelids, Grandcourt about two yards distant, leaning one arm over the back of his chair while he looked at her - anyone seeing them would have concluded that they were in some stage of love-making suspense. And she already felt herself being wooed by this silent man seated at an agreeable distance, with his attention bent wholly on her. And he also considered himself to be wooing: he felt the utmost piquancy in a girl whom he had not found quite calculable. "I was disappointed not to find you at Leubronn," he began, his usual broken drawl having just a shade of amorous languor in it. "The place was intolerable without you. A mere kennel of a place. Don't you think so?" "I can't judge what it would be without myself," said Gwendolen, with some recovered sense of mischief. "With myself I liked it well enough. But I was obliged to come home on account of family troubles." "It was very cruel of you to go to Leubronn," said Grandcourt, taking no notice of the troubles, on which Gwendolen - she hardly knew why - wished that there should be a clear understanding at once. "You knew you were the heart and soul of everything that went on. Are you quite reckless about me?" It was impossible to say "yes"; equally impossible to say "no;" but what else could she say? In her difficulty, she looked down, blushing. Grandcourt believed that she was showing her inclination. But he was determined that she should show it more decidedly. "Perhaps there is some deeper interest? Some attraction - some engagement? Is there any man who stands between us?" Inwardly the answer framed itself. "No; but there is a woman." Yet how could she utter this? Even if she had not promised that woman to be silent, it would have been impossible for her to enter on the subject with Grandcourt. Gwendolen felt compelled to silence, and after a pause, Grandcourt said- "Am I to understand that some one else is preferred?" Gwendolen, now impatient of her own embarrassment, determined to rush at the difficulty and free herself. She raised her eyes again and said with her former clearness and defiance, "No," wishing him to understand that she might not be ready to take him. "The last thing I would do, is to importune you. I should not hope to win you by making myself a bore. If there were no hope for me, I would ask you to tell me so at once, that I might just ride away to - no matter where." Almost to her own astonishment, Gwendolen felt a sudden alarm at the image of Grandcourt finally riding away. What would be left her then? Nothing but the former dreariness. She liked him to be there. She snatched at the subject that would defer any decisive answer. "I fear you are not aware of what has happened to us. I have lately had to think so much of my mamma's troubles, that other matters have been quite thrown into the background. She has lost all her fortune, and we are going to leave this place. I must ask you to excuse my seeming preoccupied." In eluding a direct appeal Gwendolen recovered some of her self-possession. She spoke with dignity and looked straight at Grandcourt, whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers, and mysteriously arrested them. It would be hard to tell on which side - Gwendolen's or Grandcourt's - the effect of that look was more mixed. At that moment his strongest wish was to be completely master of this creature - this piquant combination of maidenliness and mischief. The fact that she knew things which had repelled her, spurred him to triumph over that repugnance; and he believed that he should triumph. And she - ah, piteous equality in the need to dominate! - she was overcome like the thirsty one who is drawn toward the seeming water in the desert, overcome by the sense that this man offered rescue from helpless subjection to an oppressive lot. All the while they were looking at each other; and Grandcourt said, slowly and languidly, as if it were of no importance, "You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. Davilow's loss of fortune will not trouble you further. You will trust me to prevent it from weighing upon her. You will give me the claim to provide against that." The pauses and refined drawlings with which this speech was uttered, gave time for Gwendolen to go through the dream of a life. The words had the effect of a draught of wine, which suddenly makes all things easier. She had a momentary phantasmal love for this man who chose his words so well, and paid her such delicate homage. Repugnance, dread, scruples - these were dim as remembered pains. She imagined herself already springing to her mother. Yet when Grandcourt had ceased to speak, there was an instant in which she was conscious of being at the turning of the ways. "You are very generous," she said, not moving her eyes, and speaking gently. "You accept this provision?" said Grandcourt, without any new eagerness. "You consent to become my wife?" Something made her rise from her seat and walk a little distance. Then she turned and with her hands folded stood in silence. Grandcourt immediately rose too. The hesitation of this destitute girl to take his splendid offer stung him into a keenness of interest such as he had not known for years; none the less because he attributed her hesitation entirely to her knowledge about Mrs. Glasher. "Do you command me to go?" he said. "No," said Gwendolen. She could not let him go: that no clutched at his presence. She seemed to herself to be drifting toward the tremendous decision - but drifting depends not only on the currents but on how the sails have been set beforehand. "You accept my devotion?" said Grandcourt, looking straight into her eyes, without other movement. Their eyes meeting in that way seemed to allow any length of pause: but how could she contradict herself? What had she detained him for? He had shut out any explanation. "Yes," came as gravely from Gwendolen's lips as if she had been answering to her name in a court of justice. He received it gravely, and they still looked at each other in the same attitude. Was there ever such a way of accepting the bliss-giving "Yes"? Grandcourt liked better to be at that distance from her, and to feel under a ceremony imposed by an indefinable prohibition that breathed from Gwendolen's bearing. But he did at length advance to take her hand, just pressing his lips upon it and letting it go again. She thought his behaviour perfect, and gained a sense of freedom which made her almost ready to be mischievous. Her "Yes" entailed so little at this moment that there was nothing to screen the reversal of her gloomy prospects; her vision was filled by her own release from the Momperts, and her mother's release from Sawyer's Cottage. With a happy curl of the lips, she said- "Will you not see mamma? I will fetch her." "Let us wait a little," said Grandcourt, in his favourite attitude, having his left forefinger and thumb in his waist-coat pocket, and with his right hand caressing his whisker, while he looked at Gwendolen. "Have you anything else to say to me?" she said, playfully. "I know having things said to you is a great bore," said Grandcourt, rather sympathetically. "Not when they are things I like to hear." "Will it bother you to be asked how soon we can be married?" "I think it will, today," said Gwendolen, putting up her chin saucily. "Not today, then, but tomorrow. Think of it before I come tomorrow. In a fortnight - or three weeks - as soon as possible." "Ah, you think you will be tired of my company," said Gwendolen. "I notice when people are married the husband is not so much with his wife as when they are engaged. But perhaps I shall like that better, too." She laughed charmingly. "You shall have whatever you like," said Grandcourt. "And nothing that I don't like - please say that; because I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like," said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise, where all her nonsense is adorable. Grandcourt paused; these were subtleties in which he had much experience of his own. "I don't know. This is such a brute of a world, things are always turning up that one doesn't like. If you like to ride Criterion, I can't prevent his coming down by some chance or other." "Ah, my friend Criterion, how is he?" "He is outside: I made the groom ride him, that you might see him. Come to the window and look at him." They could see the two horses being taken slowly round the sweep, and the beautiful creatures sent a thrill of exultation through Gwendolen. They were symbols of command and luxury, in delightful contrast with the ugliness of poverty and humiliation at which she had lately been looking. "Will you ride Criterion tomorrow?" said Grandcourt. "If you will, everything shall be arranged." "I should like it of all things," said Gwendolen. "I want to lose myself in a gallop again. But now I must go and fetch mamma." "Take my arm to the door, then," said Grandcourt, and she accepted. Their faces were very near each other, almost on a level. She thought his manners as a lover more agreeable than any she had seen described. She had no alarm lest he meant to kiss her, and was so much at her ease, that she suddenly paused and said half archly, half earnestly- "Oh, while I think of it, there is something I dislike that you can save me from. I do not like Mr. Lush's company." "You shall not have it. I'll get rid of him." "You are not fond of him yourself?" "Not in the least. I let him hang on me because he has always been a poor devil," said Grandcourt, in utter indifference. "A coarse-haired kind of brute - sort of cross between a hog and a dilettante." Gwendolen laughed. When they reached the door, his way of opening it for her was the perfection of easy homage. Really, she thought, he was likely to be the least disagreeable of husbands. Mrs. Davilow was waiting anxiously in her bedroom when Gwendolen entered, and kissing her, said, "Come down, mamma, and see Mr. Grandcourt. I am engaged to him." "My darling child," said Mrs. Davilow, with surprise. "Yes," said Gwendolen. "Everything is settled. You are not going to Sawyer's Cottage, I am not going to be inspected by Mrs. Mompert, and everything is to be as I like. So come down with me immediately."

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 27

I will not clothe myself in wreck--wear gems Sawed from cramped finger-bones of women drowned; Feel chilly vaporous hands of ireful ghosts Clutching my necklace: trick my maiden breast With orphans' heritage. Let your dead love Marry its dead. Gwendolen looked lovely and vigorous as a tall, newly-opened lily the next morning: there was a reaction of young energy in her, and yesterday's self-distrust seemed no more than the transient shiver on the surface of a full stream. The roving archery match in Cardell Chase was a delightful prospect for the sport's sake: she felt herself beforehand moving about like a wood-nymph under the beeches (in appreciative company), and the imagined scene lent a charm to further advances on the part of Grandcourt--not an impassioned lyrical Daphnis for the wood-nymph, certainly: but so much the better. To-day Gwendolen foresaw him making slow conversational approaches to a declaration, and foresaw herself awaiting and encouraging it according to the rational conclusion which she had expressed to her uncle. When she came down to breakfast (after every one had left the table except Mrs. Davilow) there were letters on her plate. One of them she read with a gathering smile, and then handed it to her mamma, who, on returning it, smiled also, finding new cheerfulness in the good spirits her daughter had shown ever since waking, and said, "You don't feel inclined to go a thousand miles away?" "Not exactly so far." "It was a sad omission not to have written again before this. Can't you write now--before we set out this morning?" "It is not so pressing. To-morrow will do. You see they leave town to-day. I must write to Dover. They will be there till Monday." "Shall I write for you, dear--if it teases you?" Gwendolen did not speak immediately, but after sipping her coffee, answered brusquely, "Oh no, let it be; I will write to-morrow." Then, feeling a touch of compunction, she looked up and said with playful tenderness, "Dear, old, beautiful mamma!" "Old, child, truly." "Please don't, mamma! I meant old for darling. You are hardly twenty-five years older than I am. When you talk in that way my life shrivels up before me." "One can have a great deal of happiness in twenty-five years, my dear." "I must lose no time in beginning," said Gwendolen, merrily. "The sooner I get my palaces and coaches the better." "And a good husband who adores you, Gwen," said Mrs. Davilow, encouragingly. Gwendolen put out her lips saucily and said nothing. It was a slight drawback on her pleasure in starting that the rector was detained by magistrate's business, and would probably not be able to get to Cardell Chase at all that day. She cared little that Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna chose not to go without him, but her uncle's presence would have seemed to make it a matter of course that the decision taken would be acted on. For decision in itself began to be formidable. Having come close to accepting Grandcourt, Gwendolen felt this lot of unhoped-for fullness rounding itself too definitely. When we take to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion. Still there was the reassuring thought that marriage would be the gate into a larger freedom. The place of meeting was a grassy spot called Green Arbor, where a bit of hanging wood made a sheltering amphitheatre. It was here that the coachful of servants with provisions had to prepare the picnic meal; and the warden of the Chase was to guide the roving archers so as to keep them within the due distance from this centre, and hinder them from wandering beyond the limit which had been fixed on--a curve that might be drawn through certain well-known points, such as the double Oak, the Whispering Stones, and the High Cross. The plan was to take only a preliminary stroll before luncheon, keeping the main roving expedition for the more exquisite lights of the afternoon. The muster was rapid enough to save every one from dull moments of waiting, and when the groups began to scatter themselves through the light and shadow made here by closely neighboring beeches and there by rarer oaks, one may suppose that a painter would have been glad to look on. This roving archery was far prettier than the stationary game, but success in shooting at variable marks were less favored by practice, and the hits were distributed among the volunteer archers otherwise than they would have been in target-shooting. From this cause, perhaps, as well as from the twofold distraction of being preoccupied and wishing not to betray her preoccupation, Gwendolen did not greatly distinguish herself in these first experiments, unless it were by the lively grace with which she took her comparative failure. She was in white and green as on the day of the former meeting, when it made an epoch for her that she was introduced to Grandcourt; he was continually by her side now, yet it would have been hard to tell from mere looks and manners that their relation to each other had at all changed since their first conversation. Still there were other grounds that made most persons conclude them to be, if not engaged already, on the eve of being so. And she believed this herself. As they were all returning toward Green Arbor in divergent groups, not thinking at all of taking aim but merely chattering, words passed which seemed really the beginning of that end--the beginning of her acceptance. Grandcourt said, "Do you know how long it is since I first saw you in this dress?" "The archery meeting was on the 25th, and this is the 13th," said Gwendolen, laughingly. "I am not good at calculating, but I will venture to say that it must be nearly three weeks." A little pause, and then he said, "That is a great loss of time." "That your knowing me has caused you? Pray don't be uncomplimentary; I don't like it." Pause again. "It is because of the gain that I feel the loss." Here Gwendolen herself left a pause. She was thinking, "He is really very ingenious. He never speaks stupidly." Her silence was so unusual that it seemed the strongest of favorable answers, and he continued: "The gain of knowing you makes me feel the time I lose in uncertainty. Do _you_ like uncertainty?" "I think I do, rather," said Gwendolen, suddenly beaming on him with a playful smile. "There is more in it." Grandcourt met her laughing eyes with a slow, steady look right into them, which seemed like vision in the abstract, and then said, "Do you mean more torment for me?" There was something so strange to Gwendolen in this moment that she was quite shaken out of her usual self-consciousness. Blushing and turning away her eyes, she said, "No, that would make me sorry." Grandcourt would have followed up this answer, which the change in her manner made apparently decisive of her favorable intention; but he was not in any way overcome so as to be unaware that they were now, within sight of everybody, descending the space into Green Arbor, and descending it at an ill-chosen point where it began to be inconveniently steep. This was a reason for offering his hand in the literal sense to help her; she took it, and they came down in silence, much observed by those already on the level--among others by Mrs. Arrowpoint, who happened to be standing with Mrs. Davilow. That lady had now made up her mind that Grandcourt's merits were not such as would have induced Catherine to accept him, Catherine having so high a standard as to have refused Lord Slogan. Hence she looked at the tenant of Diplow with dispassionate eyes. "Mr. Grandcourt is not equal as a man to his uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger--too languid. To be sure, Mr. Grandcourt is a much younger man, but I shouldn't wonder if Sir Hugo were to outlive him, notwithstanding the difference of years. It is ill calculating on successions," concluded Mrs. Arrowpoint, rather too loudly. "It is indeed," said Mrs. Davilow, able to assent with quiet cheerfulness, for she was so well satisfied with the actual situation of affairs that her habitual melancholy in their general unsatisfactoriness was altogether in abeyance. I am not concerned to tell of the food that was eaten in that green refectory, or even to dwell on the stories of the forest scenery that spread themselves out beyond the level front of the hollow; being just now bound to tell a story of life at a stage when the blissful beauty of earth and sky entered only by narrow and oblique inlets into the consciousness, which was busy with a small social drama almost as little penetrated by a feeling of wider relations as if it had been a puppet-show. It will be understood that the food and champagne were of the best--the talk and laughter too, in the sense of belonging to the best society, where no one makes an invidious display of anything in particular, and the advantages of the world are taken with that high-bred depreciation which follows from being accustomed to them. Some of the gentlemen strolled a little and indulged in a cigar, there being a sufficient interval before four o'clock--the time for beginning to rove again. Among these, strange to say, was Grandcourt; but not Mr. Lush, who seemed to be taking his pleasure quite generously to-day by making himself particularly serviceable, ordering everything for everybody, and by this activity becoming more than ever a blot on the scene to Gwendolen, though he kept himself amiably aloof from her, and never even looked at her obviously. When there was a general move to prepare for starting, it appeared that the bows had all been put under the charge of Lord Brackenshaw's valet, and Mr. Lush was concerned to save ladies the trouble of fetching theirs from the carriage where they were propped. He did not intend to bring Gwendolen's, but she, fearful lest he should do so, hurried to fetch it herself. The valet, seeing her approach, met her with it, and in giving it into her hand gave also a letter addressed to her. She asked no question about it, perceived at a glance that the address was in a lady's handwriting (of the delicate kind which used to be esteemed feminine before the present uncial period), and moving away with her bow in her hand, saw Mr. Lush coming to fetch other bows. To avoid meeting him she turned aside and walked with her back toward the stand of carriages, opening the letter. It contained these words, If Miss Harleth is in doubt whether she should accept Mr. Grandcourt, let her break from her party after they have passed the Whispering Stones and return to that spot. She will then hear something to decide her; but she can only hear it by keeping this letter a strict secret from every one. If she does not act according to this letter, she will repent, as the woman who writes it has repented. The secrecy Miss Harleth will feel herself bound in honor to guard. Gwendolen felt an inward shock, but her immediate thought was, "It is come in time." It lay in her youthfulness that she was absorbed by the idea of the revelation to be made, and had not even a momentary suspicion of contrivance that could justify her in showing the letter. Her mind gathered itself up at once into the resolution, that she would manage to go unobserved to the Whispering Stones; and thrusting the letter into her pocket she turned back to rejoin the company, with that sense of having something to conceal which to her nature had a bracing quality and helped her to be mistress of herself. It was a surprise to every one that Grandcourt was not, like the other smokers, on the spot in time to set out roving with the rest. "We shall alight on him by-and-by," said Lord Brackenshaw; "he can't be gone far." At any rate, no man could be waited for. This apparent forgetfulness might be taken for the distraction of a lover so absorbed in thinking of the beloved object as to forget an appointment which would bring him into her actual presence. And the good-natured Earl gave Gwendolen a distant jocose hint to that effect, which she took with suitable quietude. But the thought in her mind was "Can he too be starting away from a decision?" It was not exactly a pleasant thought to her; but it was near the truth. "Starting away," however, was not the right expression for the languor of intention that came over Grandcourt, like a fit of diseased numbness, when an end seemed within easy reach: to desist then, when all expectation was to the contrary, became another gratification of mere will, sublimely independent of definite motive. At that moment he had begun a second large cigar in a vague, hazy obstinacy which, if Lush or any other mortal who might be insulted with impunity had interrupted by overtaking him with a request for his return, would have expressed itself by a slow removal of his cigar, to say in an undertone, "You'll be kind enough to go to the devil, will you?" But he was not interrupted, and the rovers set off without any visible depression of spirits, leaving behind only a few of the less vigorous ladies, including Mrs. Davilow, who preferred a quiet stroll free from obligation to keep up with others. The enjoyment of the day was soon at its highest pitch, the archery getting more spirited and the changing scenes of the forest from roofed grove to open glade growing lovelier with the lengthening shadows, and the deeply-felt but undefinable gradations of the mellowing afternoon. It was agreed that they were playing an extemporized _As you like it_; and when a pretty compliment had been turned to Gwendolen about her having the part of Rosalind, she felt the more compelled to be surpassing in loveliness. This was not very difficult to her, for the effect of what had happened to-day was an excitement which needed a vent--a sense of adventure rather than alarm, and a straining toward the management of her retreat, so as not to be impeded. The roving had been lasting nearly an hour before the arrival at the Whispering Stones, two tall conical blocks that leaned toward each other like gigantic gray-mantled figures. They were soon surveyed and passed by with the remark that they would be good ghosts on a starlit night. But a soft sunlight was on them now, and Gwendolen felt daring. The stones were near a fine grove of beeches, where the archers found plenty of marks. "How far are we from Green Arbor now?" said Gwendolen, having got in front by the side of the warden. "Oh, not more than half a mile, taking along the avenue we're going to cross up there: but I shall take round a couple of miles, by the High Cross." She was falling back among the rest, when suddenly they seemed all to be hurrying obliquely forward under the guidance of Mr. Lush, and lingering a little where she was, she perceived her opportunity of slipping away. Soon she was out of sight, and without running she seemed to herself to fly along the ground and count the moments nothing till she found herself back again at the Whispering Stones. They turned their blank gray sides to her: what was there on the other side? If there were nothing after all? That was her only dread now--to have to turn back again in mystification; and walking round the right-hand stone without pause, she found herself in front of some one whose large dark eyes met hers at a foot's distance. In spite of expectation, she was startled and shrank bank, but in doing so she could take in the whole figure of this stranger and perceive that she was unmistakably a lady, and one who must have been exceedingly handsome. She perceived, also, that a few yards from her were two children seated on the grass. "Miss Harleth?" said the lady. "Yes." All Gwendolen's consciousness was wonder. "Have you accepted Mr. Grandcourt?" "No." "I have promised to tell you something. And you will promise to keep my secret. However you may decide you will not tell Mr. Grandcourt, or any one else, that you have seen me?" "I promise." "My name is Lydia Glasher. Mr. Grandcourt ought not to marry any one but me. I left my husband and child for him nine years ago. Those two children are his, and we have two others--girls--who are older. My husband is dead now, and Mr. Grandcourt ought to marry me. He ought to make that boy his heir." She looked at the boy as she spoke, and Gwendolen's eyes followed hers. The handsome little fellow was puffing out his cheeks in trying to blow a tiny trumpet which remained dumb. His hat hung backward by a string, and his brown curls caught the sun-rays. He was a cherub. The two women's eyes met again, and Gwendolen said proudly, "I will not interfere with your wishes." She looked as if she were shivering, and her lips were pale. "You are very attractive, Miss Harleth. But when he first knew me, I too was young. Since then my life has been broken up and embittered. It is not fair that he should be happy and I miserable, and my boy thrust out of sight for another." These words were uttered with a biting accent, but with a determined abstinence from anything violent in tone or manner. Gwendolen, watching Mrs. Glasher's face while she spoke, felt a sort of terror: it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, "I am a woman's life." "Have you anything more to say to me?" she asked in a low tone, but still proud and coldly. The revulsion within her was not tending to soften her. Everyone seemed hateful. "Nothing. You know what I wished you to know. You can inquire about me if you like. My husband was Colonel Glasher." "Then I will go," said Gwendolen, moving away with a ceremonious inclination, which was returned with equal grace. In a few minutes Gwendolen was in the beech grove again but her party had gone out of sight and apparently had not sent in search of her, for all was solitude till she had reached the avenue pointed out by the warden. She determined to take this way back to Green Arbor, which she reached quickly; rapid movements seeming to her just now a means of suspending the thoughts which might prevent her from behaving with due calm. She had already made up her mind what step she would take. Mrs. Davilow was of course astonished to see Gwendolen returning alone, and was not without some uneasiness which the presence of other ladies hindered her from showing. In answer to her words of surprise Gwendolen said, "Oh, I have been rather silly. I lingered behind to look at the Whispering Stones, and the rest hurried on after something, so I lost sight of them. I thought it best to come home by the short way--the avenue that the warden had told me of. I'm not sorry after all. I had had enough walking." "Your party did not meet Mr. Grandcourt, I presume," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, not without intention. "No," said Gwendolen, with a little flash of defiance, and a light laugh. "And we didn't see any carvings on the trees, either. Where can he be? I should think he has fallen into the pool or had an apoplectic fit." With all Gwendolen's resolve not to betray any agitation, she could not help it that her tone was unusually high and hard, and her mother felt sure that something unpropitious had happened. Mrs. Arrowpoint thought that the self-confident young lady was much piqued, and that Mr. Grandcourt was probably seeing reason to change his mind. "If you have no objection, mamma, I will order the carriage," said Gwendolen. "I am tired. And every one will be going soon." Mrs. Davilow assented; but by the time the carriage was announced as ready--the horses having to be fetched from the stables on the warden's premises--the roving party reappeared, and with them Mr. Grandcourt. "Ah, there you are!" said Lord Brackenshaw, going up to Gwendolen, who was arranging her mamma's shawl for the drive. "We thought at first you had alighted on Grandcourt and he had taken you home. Lush said so. But after that we met Grandcourt. However, we didn't suppose you could be in any danger. The warden said he had told you a near way back." "You are going?" said Grandcourt, coming up with his usual air, as if he did not conceive that there had been any omission on his part. Lord Brackenshaw gave place to him and moved away. "Yes, we are going," said Gwendolen, looking busily at her scarf, which she was arranging across her shoulders Scotch fashion. "May I call at Offendene to-morrow?" "Oh yes, if you like," said Gwendolen, sweeping him from a distance with her eyelashes. Her voice was light and sharp as the first touch of frost. Mrs. Davilow accepted his arm to lead her to the carriage; but while that was happening, Gwendolen with incredible swiftness had got in advance of them, and had sprung into the carriage. "I got in, mamma, because I wished to be on this side," she said, apologetically. But she had avoided Grandcourt's touch: he only lifted his hat and walked away--with the not unsatisfactory impression that she meant to show herself offended by his neglect. The mother and daughter drove for five minutes in silence. Then Gwendolen said, "I intend to join the Langens at Dover, mamma. I shall pack up immediately on getting home, and set off by the early train. I shall be at Dover almost as soon as they are; we can let them know by telegraph." "Good heavens, child! what can be your reason for saying so?" "My reason for saying it, mamma, is that I mean to do it." "But why do you mean to do it?" "I wish to go away." "Is it because you are offended with Mr. Grandcourt's odd behavior in walking off to-day?" "It is useless to enter into such questions. I am not going in any case to marry Mr. Grandcourt. Don't interest yourself further about it." "What can I say to your uncle, Gwendolen? Consider the position you place me in. You led him to believe only last night that you had made up your mind in favor of Mr. Grandcourt." "I am very sorry to cause you annoyance, mamma, dear, but I can't help it," said Gwendolen, with still harder resistance in her tone. "Whatever you or my uncle may think or do, I shall not alter my resolve, and I shall not tell my reason. I don't care what comes of it. I don't care if I never marry any one. There is nothing worth caring for. I believe all men are bad, and I hate them." "But need you set off in this way, Gwendolen?" said Mrs. Davilow, miserable and helpless. "Now mamma, don't interfere with me. If you have ever had any trouble in your own life, remember it and don't interfere with me. If I am to be miserable, let it be by my own choice." The mother was reduced to trembling silence. She began to see that the difficulty would be lessened if Gwendolen went away. And she did go. The packing was all carefully done that evening, and not long after dawn the next day Mrs. Davilow accompanied her daughter to the railway station. The sweet dews of morning, the cows and horses looking over the hedges without any particular reason, the early travelers on foot with their bundles, seemed all very melancholy and purposeless to them both. The dingy torpor of the railway station, before the ticket could be taken, was still worse. Gwendolen had certainly hardened in the last twenty-four hours: her mother's trouble evidently counted for little in her present state of mind, which did not essentially differ from the mood that makes men take to worse conduct when their belief in persons or things is upset. Gwendolen's uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Is that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the _opra bouffe_ in the present day would not leave men's minds entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own families. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience. Mrs. Davilow felt Gwendolen's new phase of indifference keenly, and as she drove back alone, the brightening morning was sadder to her than before. Mr. Grandcourt called that day at Offendene, but nobody was at home.

Gwendolen looked as lovely and vigorous as a tall, newly-opened lily the next morning: yesterday's self-distrust seemed no more than the transient shiver on the surface of a full stream. The roving archery match in Cardell Chase was a delightful prospect: she imagined herself moving like a wood-nymph under the beeches (in appreciative company), and the scene lent a charm to any further advances by Grandcourt. Gwendolen foresaw him making slow conversational approaches to a declaration, and foresaw herself encouraging it. When she came down to breakfast there were letters on her plate. One of them she read with a gathering smile, and then handed it to her mamma, who, on returning it, said- "You don't feel inclined to go a thousand miles away?" "Not exactly so far." "It was a sad omission not to have answered their invitation before this. Can't you write this morning?" "It is not so pressing. Tomorrow will do. They leave town today; I will write to Dover. They will be there till Monday." "Shall I write for you, dear - if it teases you?" Gwendolen did not speak immediately, but after sipping her coffee, answered brusquely, "No, I will write tomorrow." Then, feeling compunction, she said with playful tenderness, "Dear, old, beautiful mamma!" "Old, child, truly." "Please don't, mamma! You are hardly twenty-five years older than I am. When you talk in that way my life shrivels up before me." "One can have a great deal of happiness in twenty-five years, my dear." "I must lose no time," said Gwendolen, merrily. "The sooner I get my palaces and coaches the better." "And a good husband who adores you, Gwen," said Mrs. Davilow, encouragingly. Gwendolen put out her lips saucily and said nothing. Today's decision began to be formidable. Still, there was the reassuring thought that marriage would be the gate into a larger freedom. The meeting place was a grassy spot called Green Arbour. It was here that the servants would prepare the picnic meal; while the warden of the Chase would guide the roving archers so as to keep them from wandering too far. The plan was to take only a stroll before luncheon, keeping the main roving expedition for the afternoon. When the groups began to scatter themselves through the light and shadow made by beeches and oaks, a painter would have been glad to look on. This roving archery was far prettier than the stationary game, but more difficult. Gwendolen did not distinguish herself in her first experiments, except by her lively grace. Grandcourt was continually by her side, yet it would have been hard to tell from mere looks and manners that their relation to each other had changed at all since their first conversation. Still most persons concluded them to be, if not engaged already, on the eve of being so. And she believed this herself. As the groups returned toward Green Arbour, Grandcourt said, "Do you know how long it is since I first saw you in this dress?" "The archery meeting was on the 25th, and this is the 13th," said Gwendolen, laughingly. "Nearly three weeks." A little pause, and then he said, "That is a great loss of time." "That your knowing me has caused you? Pray don't be uncomplimentary." Pause again. "It is because of the gain that I feel the loss." Here Gwendolen herself paused, thinking, "He is really very ingenious. He never speaks stupidly." He continued: "The gain of knowing you makes me feel the time I lose in uncertainty. Do you like uncertainty?" "I think I do, rather," said Gwendolen, with a playful smile. "There is more in it." Grandcourt met her laughing eyes with a slow, steady look right into them, and said, "Do you mean more torment for me?" There was something so strange to Gwendolen in this moment that she was quite shaken. Blushing and looking away, she said, "No, that would make me sorry." Grandcourt would have followed up this favourable answer; but he was aware that they were now within sight of everybody, descending a steep slope into Green Arbour. He offered his hand to help her, and they came down in silence, observed by many. I am not concerned to tell of the food that was eaten in that green refectory: it will be understood that it was of the best - the talk and laughter too, in the sense of belonging to the best society. Some of the gentlemen strolled and indulged in a cigar, there being an interval before four o'clock - the time to rove again. Among these, strange to say, was Grandcourt; but not Mr. Lush, who was making himself serviceable to everybody, and becoming more than ever a blot on the scene to Gwendolen, though he kept himself amiably aloof from her. When there was a general move to start, Mr. Lush offered to fetch the ladies' bows from the charge of Mr Brackenshaw's valet; but Gwendolen hurried to fetch hers herself. The valet, on her approach, gave her the bow and also a letter addressed to her. She perceived at a glance that the address was in a lady's handwriting. Mr. Lush was coming to fetch other bows: to avoid meeting him she walked away, opening the letter. It contained these words- 'If Miss Harleth is in doubt whether to accept Mr. Grandcourt, let her leave her party after they have passed the Whispering Stones and return to that spot. She will then hear something to decide her; but only by keeping this letter a strict secret from everyone. If she does not act according to this letter, she will repent, as the woman who writes it has repented. The secrecy Miss Harleth will feel herself bound in honour to guard.' Gwendolen felt an inward shock; but her immediate thought was, "It is come in time." Her youthfulness meant that she was absorbed by the idea of the revelation to be made, and did not even think of showing the letter to anyone. She at once resolved that she would manage to go unobserved to the Whispering Stones; and thrusting the letter into her pocket she turned back to rejoin the company. It was a surprise to everyone that Grandcourt was not there in time to set out roving with the rest. "We shall find him by-and-by," said Lord Brackenshaw. No man could be waited for. This apparent forgetfulness might be taken for the distraction of a lover so absorbed in thinking of his beloved as to forget an appointment which would bring him into her actual presence. But Gwendolen thought, "Can he too be starting away from a decision?" It was not exactly a pleasant thought; but it was near the truth. "Starting away," however, was not the right expression for the languor that came over Grandcourt, like a fit of diseased numbness, when an end seemed within easy reach. At that moment he had begun a second large cigar in a vague, hazy obstinacy; if anyone had interrupted him to request his return, he would have said in a slow undertone, "You'll be kind enough to go to the devil, will you?" But he was not interrupted, and the rovers set off, leaving behind only a few ladies, including Mrs. Davilow, who preferred a quiet stroll. The enjoyment of the day was soon at its highest pitch, the archery getting more spirited and the changing scenes of the forest growing lovelier with the lengthening shadows of the mellowing afternoon. Gwendolen felt an excitement - a sense of adventure rather than alarm. The roving had lasted nearly an hour before the arrival at the Whispering Stones, two tall blocks that leaned toward each other like gigantic grey-mantled figures. They were soon passed by, on the way to a fine grove of beeches, where the archers found plenty of marks. Suddenly the group seemed to be hurrying forward under the guidance of Mr. Lush, and Gwendolen perceived her opportunity of slipping away. Soon she was out of sight, and without running she seemed to fly along the ground till she was back at the Whispering Stones. They turned their blank grey sides to her: what was on the other side? Walking round the right-hand stone, she found herself in front of some one whose large dark eyes met hers. Startled, she shrank bank, but at the same time perceived that the stranger was a lady, and one who must have been exceedingly handsome. She perceived, also, that a few yards away were two children seated on the grass. "Miss Harleth?" said the lady. "Yes." All Gwendolen's consciousness was wonder. "Have you accepted Mr. Grandcourt?" "No." "I have promised to tell you something. And you will promise to keep my secret. You will not tell Mr. Grandcourt, or anyone else, that you have seen me?" "I promise." "My name is Lydia Glasher. Mr. Grandcourt ought not to marry anyone but me. I left my husband and child for him nine years ago. Those two children are his, and we have two more, older girls. My husband is dead, and Mr. Grandcourt ought to marry me. He ought to make that boy his heir." Gwendolen's eyes followed hers to the boy. The handsome, curly-haired little fellow was puffing out his cheeks in trying to blow a tiny trumpet. He was a cherub. The two women's eyes met again, and Gwendolen said proudly, "I will not interfere with your wishes." She was shivering, and her lips were pale. "You are very attractive, Miss Harleth. But when he first knew me, I too was young. Since then my life has been broken and embittered. It is not fair that he should be happy and I miserable, and my boy thrust out of sight for another." These words were uttered bitingly. Gwendolen felt a sort of terror, as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, "I am a woman's life." "Have you anything more to say to me?" she asked, still proudly and coldly. The revulsion within her did not soften her. Everyone seemed hateful. "Nothing. You know what I wished you to know. You can inquire about me if you like. My husband was Colonel Glasher." "Then I will go," said Gwendolen, moving away ceremoniously. In a few minutes she was in the beech grove again, but her party had gone out of sight. All was solitude till she reached the avenue to Green Arbour, walking rapidly as a means of suspending her thoughts. She had already made up her mind what to do. Mrs. Davilow was astonished to see Gwendolen returning. To her look of surprise Gwendolen said- "Oh, I have been rather silly. I lingered behind to look at the Whispering Stones, and I lost sight of the others. I thought it best to come home by the short way. I had had enough walking." "Your party did not meet Mr. Grandcourt, I presume," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "No," said Gwendolen, with a light laugh. "Where can he be? I should think he has fallen into the pool." Despite Gwendolen's resolve not to betray any agitation, her tone was unusually high and hard. Mrs. Arrowpoint thought that the young lady was much piqued, and that Mr. Grandcourt was probably seeing reason to change his mind. "If you have no objection, mamma, I will order the carriage," said Gwendolen. By the time the carriage was ready, the roving party reappeared, and with them Mr. Grandcourt. "Ah, there you are!" said Lord Brackenshaw to Gwendolen. "We thought at first you had met Grandcourt and he had taken you home. Lush said so. But after that we met Grandcourt." "You are going?" said Grandcourt, coming up with his usual air. "Yes," said Gwendolen, busily arranging her scarf across her shoulders. "May I call at Offendene tomorrow?" "Oh yes, if you like," said Gwendolen, her voice as light and sharp as the first touch of frost. Before he could lead them to the carriage, she swiftly sprang into it on her own. "I wished to be on this side, mamma," she said, apologetically. But she had avoided Grandcourt's touch: he lifted his hat and walked away, with the not unsatisfactory impression that she was offended by his neglect. The mother and daughter drove for five minutes in silence. Then Gwendolen said, "I intend to join the Langens at Dover, mamma. I shall pack immediately on getting home, and set off by the early train. We can let them know by telegraph." "Good heavens, child! what can be your reason for saying so?" "My reason for saying it, mamma, is that I mean to do it." "But why do you mean to do it?" "I wish to go away." "Is it because you are offended with Mr. Grandcourt's odd behaviour in walking off to-day?" "It is useless to ask. I am not going to marry Mr. Grandcourt." "What can I tell your uncle, Gwendolen? You led him to believe last night that you had made up your mind in favour of Mr. Grandcourt." "I am very sorry, mamma, dear, but I can't help it," said Gwendolen, with still harder resistance in her tone. "Whatever you or my uncle think, I shall not alter my resolve, and I shall not tell my reason. I don't care if I never marry anyone. All men are bad, and I hate them. Don't interfere with me. If I am to be miserable, let it be by my own choice." The helpless mother was reduced to trembling silence. She began to see that the difficulty would be lessened if Gwendolen went away. And she did go. The packing was done that evening, and early the next day Mrs. Davilow accompanied her daughter to the railway station, whose dingy torpor seemed very melancholy. Gwendolen had hardened in the last twenty-four hours: her reading had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Mrs. Davilow felt Gwendolen's indifference keenly, and as she drove back alone, the brightening morning was sadder to her than before. Mr. Grandcourt called that day at Offendene, but nobody was at home.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 14

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

There was another breast besides Rex's, in which the news of Grandcourt's death caused both strong agitation and the effort to repress it. It was Hans Meyrick's habit to bring the Times for his mother. On a Wednesday, he always chose to bring the paper at about the time Mirah finished giving Mab her weekly lesson. But on this particular Wednesday he appeared in the parlour, shaking the Times aloft with a crackling which interrupted Mab's singing. Mirah, who had been playing the accompaniment, started up and turned round; and Mab said- "Oh, Hans! why do you bring a more horrible noise than my singing?" "What on earth is the wonderful news?" said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the only other person in the room. "Something from Italy," said Hans, with a peculiar tone and manner. "Nothing bad?" said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously, thinking immediately of Deronda; and Mirah's heart had been already clutched by the same thought. "Not bad for anybody we care about," said Hans, quickly; "rather uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently before." "Oh, Hans!" said Mab, impatiently, "What has happened?" "Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that's all," said Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick. "But Deronda was at Genoa in the same hotel, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got her out of the water. They saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However, Deronda is a lucky fellow in being there to take care of her." Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her hands tightly clasped. Mrs. Meyrick said- "Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after him." "It was a little absence of mind," said Hans roguishly, throwing himself into a chair. "The Duchess is at liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the wedding." Here Mirah started up, and fixing her eyes angrily on Hans, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice of indignation- "Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Why will you say he is lucky - when what is life to one is death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs. Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away from my brother. Mr. Deronda would not call that lucky to pierce my brother's heart." All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Poor Hans sat transfixed, blushing, and said, nervously- "I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word." But Mirah's anger was not appeased: how could it be? She had burst into indignant speech as creatures in intense pain bite even through their own flesh, by way of making their agony bearable. She said no more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed the sheet of music before her, as if she thought of beginning to play again. Both Hans and his mother were silent. It was Mab who spoke, saying, "Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. You are always taking Mr. Deronda's name in vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way about his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men's minds must be very black, I think." "Quite true, my dear," said Hans, rising and walking toward the window. "We had better go on with your lesson, Mab," said Mirah, in a higher tone than usual. "Will you sing this again, or shall I sing it to you?" "Oh, please sing it to me," said Mab, rejoiced to take no more notice of what had happened. Mirah immediately sang with new fullness and energy. Hans leaned against the mantelpiece, keeping his eyes carefully away from his mother's. When Mirah had sung her last note, she rose and said, "I must go home now. Ezra expects me." She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick, instead of kissing her as usual. She feared that she had offended Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking Hans; but the little mother sensed this, and drew Mirah's face to hers, saying soothingly, "God bless you, my dear." "Now, Hans," said Mab, "you are not going to walk home with Mirah. I am sure she would rather not. You are so dreadfully disagreeable to-day." "I shall go to take care of her, if she does not forbid me," said Hans, opening the door. Mirah said nothing, and when he had closed the door behind them, he walked by her side unforbidden. She had not the courage to begin speaking to him again, and she was pressed upon by a crowd of thoughts thrusting themselves forward. Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. Mirah's anger had waked in him a new perception, and with it the unpleasant sense that he was a dolt not to have had it before. Suppose Mirah's heart were entirely preoccupied with Deronda in another character than that of her benefactor? He believed that there was a serious attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he had pieced together many fragments of observation, which convinced him not only that Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, but also that his austere self-repression concealed love for her. As for Deronda's annoyance at his aspiring to love Mirah, Hans took this to be accounted for by her dependent position; for he credited his friend with all possible unselfish anxiety for those whom he could rescue and protect. And Deronda's insistence that Mirah would never marry one who was not a Jew seemed to exclude himself, since Hans shared the general opinion that Deronda was Sir Hugo's son. Thus he felt clear about Deronda's affections; but now, he had seen a flash of revelation from Mirah - a betrayal of her passionate feeling on this subject which made him melancholy on her account as well as his own - yet on the whole, less melancholy than if he had imagined Deronda's hopes fixed on her. Hans fluctuated between the contradictory states of feeling wounded because Mirah was wounded, and of being almost obliged to Deronda for loving somebody else. He longed that his speechless companionship should be eloquent in tender sympathy, an admissible form of wooing a bruised heart. Thus the two went side by side to the door of Mirah's home, and when Hans said "Good-bye," with a look of penitence, she said gently, "Will you not come in and see my brother?" Hans interpreted this as a sign of pardon. He did not understand how Mirah had been taught by her early experience to accept pain with resolution. When they went in together, half his grief was gone, and he was spinning a little romance of how his devotion might make him indispensable to Mirah. This was quite fair, since his friend loved another; and on the question of Judaism Hans felt thoroughly fortified: for in tales and history, Moslem and Jewish damsels were always attracted toward Christians. And thus his bird-like hope, constructed on the lightest principles, soared again. They found Mordecai looking singularly happy, holding a letter, his eyes glowing with a quiet triumph which in his emaciated face gave the idea of a conquest over death. Mirah put her arm round his neck, not daring to ask about the letter. "It is from Daniel Deronda," said Mordecai. "Brief - only saying that he hopes soon to return. The promise of seeing him again is like the rainbow in the cloud to me," he continued, looking at Hans; "and to you it must be a gladness." While Hans was answering Mirah slipped away to her own room; but not to indulge in any outburst of passion. She merely took off her hat, sat down and pressed her hands against her temples as if her head ached; dashed cold water on her eyes and brow; and then, with deep sighs of relief, put on her slippers and sat still for a couple of minutes, which seemed to her so long that she rose again, and went down to make tea. Something of the old life had returned. She had been used to remember that she must learn her part, must rehearse, must hide her feelings from her father; and the more painful her life grew, the more she had been used to hide. She had learnt resolute endurance, and today her first violence of feeling had quickly transformed itself into a steady facing of trouble, the well-known companion of her young years. But while she spoke as usual, a close observer might have discerned a difference between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraint, and the sweet genuine calm of the previous months. Those who have been indulged by fortune feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. Mirah felt no such surprise when familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her according to the old use. And this habit of expecting trouble rather than joy, inclined her to believe in the probability of an attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, and the certainly that they would marry. There was a tie between him and this woman who belonged to another world than hers. Well, well - if it could have been deferred so as to make no difference while Ezra was there! She felt instinctively that the relation between Deronda and her brother was incongruous with any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt. But in the still, quick action of her consciousness, her thoughts soon said distinctly that her repugnance would remain even if Ezra were secured from loss. "What I have read and sung about, is happening to me - this is the love that makes jealousy;" so impartially Mirah summed up the charge against herself. But what difference could this pain of hers make to anyone? It must remain hidden. What should have been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk into selfish pain; the feeling she had hitherto delighted to pour out in words was degraded into something she was ashamed to betray - an absurd longing that she who had received all and given nothing should be of importance where she was of no importance. It was as if her soul had been steeped in poisonous passion by forgotten dreams in sleep, and now flamed out in this unaccountable misery. For with her waking reason she had never entertained the thought that Deronda could love her. Her previous vague uneasiness had been easily explained as a general regret that he was only a visitant in her brother's world, which was so different to his. But her feeling was no longer vague: the cause of her pain - the image of Mrs. Grandcourt by Deronda's side - was as sharp as pincers on her flesh. "I could bear everything that used to be - but this is worse - I used not to have horrible feelings!" said the poor child in a whisper to her pillow. Strange that she should have to pray against any feeling which concerned Deronda! But this conclusion had been reached through an evening spent with Mordecai, whose exaltation in the prospect of seeing his friend made him voice many thoughts aloud to Mirah. One thought especially occupied him. "Seest thou, Mirah," he said, "the Shemah, wherein we confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional exercise of the Hebrew; and this made our religion the fundamental religion for the whole world. See, then - the nation which has been scoffed at for its separateness, has given a binding theory to the human race. Now, in complete unity a part possesses the whole as the whole possesses every part: and in this way human life is tending toward the image of the Supreme Unity: for as our life becomes more spiritual, possession becomes more universal, and independent of material contact; so that in a brief day the soul of man may know more fully the good which has been and is to come, than all he could possess in a whole life where he had to follow the creeping paths of the senses. I hold the joy of another's future within me: a future which these eyes will not see. I love it so, that I can lay down this poor life upon its altar and say: 'Burn, burn indiscernibly into that which shall be, which is my love and not me.' Dost thou understand, Mirah?" "A little," said Mirah, faintly, "but my mind is too poor to have felt it." "And yet," said Mordecai, rather insistently, "women are specially framed for the love which feels possession in renouncing. Somewhere in the later Midrash, I think, is the story of a Jewish maiden who loved a Gentile king so well, that she entered into prison and changed clothes with the woman who was beloved by the king, that she might deliver that woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king to be happy in his love which was not for her. This is the surpassing love, that loses self." "No, Ezra, no," said Mirah, with low-toned intensity, "that was not it. She wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and to feel that she was better than the other. It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that made her die. The Jewish girl must have had jealousy in her heart, and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king's mind. That is what she would die for." "My sister, thou hast read too many plays. Thou judgest by those, and not by thy own heart, which is like our mother's." Mirah made no answer.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 61

"And you must love him ere to you He will seem worthy of your love." --WORDSWORTH. One might be tempted to envy Deronda providing new clothes for Mordecai, and pleasing himself as if he were sketching a picture in imagining the effect of the fine gray flannel shirts and a dressing-gown very much like a Franciscan's brown frock, with Mordecai's head and neck above them. Half his pleasure was the sense of seeing Mirah's brother through her eyes, and securing her fervid joy from any perturbing impression. And yet, after he had made all things ready, he was visited with doubt whether he were not mistaking her, and putting the lower effect for the higher: was she not just as capable as he himself had been of feeling the impressive distinction in her brother all the more for that aspect of poverty which was among the memorials of his past? But there were the Meyricks to be propitiated toward this too Judaic brother; and Deronda detected himself piqued into getting out of sight everything that might feed the ready repugnance in minds unblessed with that precious "seeing," that bathing of all objects in a solemnity as of sun-set glow, which is begotten of a loving reverential emotion. And his inclination would have been the more confirmed if he had heard the dialogue round Mrs. Meyrick's fire late in the evening, after Mirah had gone to her room. Hans, settled now in his Chelsea rooms, had stayed late, and Mrs. Meyrick, poking the fire into a blaze, said, "Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily. Hans, dear, do leave off laughing at those poems for the ninety-ninth time, and come too. I have something wonderful to tell." "As if I didn't know that, ma. I have seen it in the corner of your eye ever so long, and in your pretense of errands," said Kate, while the girls came up to put their feet on the fender, and Hans, pushing his chair near them, sat astride it, resting his fists and chin on the back. "Well, then, if you are so wise, perhaps you know that Mirah's brother is found!" said Mrs. Meyrick, in her clearest accents. "Oh, confound it!" said Hans, in the same moment. "Hans, that is wicked," said Mab. "Suppose we had lost you?" "I _cannot_ help being rather sorry," said Kate. "And her mother?--where is she?" "Her mother is dead." "I hope the brother is not a bad man," said Amy. "Nor a fellow all smiles and jewelry--a Crystal Palace Assyrian with a hat on," said Hans, in the worst humor. "Were there ever such unfeeling children?" said Mrs. Meyrick, a little strengthened by the need for opposition. "You don't think the least bit of Mirah's joy in the matter." "You know, ma, Mirah hardly remembers her brother," said Kate. "People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again," said Hans. "They are always in the way." "Hans!" said Mrs. Meyrick, reproachfully. "If you had lost me for _twenty_ years, I should have thought--" "I said twelve years," Hans broke in. "Anywhere about twelve years is the time at which lost relations should keep out of the way." "Well, but it's nice finding people--there is something to tell," said Mab, clasping her knees. "Did Prince Camaralzaman find him?" Then Mrs. Meyrick, in her neat, narrative way, told all she knew without interruption. "Mr. Deronda has the highest admiration for him," she ended--"seems quite to look up to him. And he says Mirah is just the sister to understand this brother." "Deronda is getting perfectly preposterous about those Jews," said Hans with disgust, rising and setting his chair away with a bang. "He wants to do everything he can to encourage Mirah in her prejudices." "Oh, for shame, Hans!--to speak in that way of Mr. Deronda," said Mab. And Mrs. Meyrick's face showed something like an under-current of expression not allowed to get to the surface. "And now we shall never be all together," Hans went on, walking about with his hands thrust into the pockets of his brown velveteen coat, "but we must have this prophet Elijah to tea with us, and Mirah will think of nothing but sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem. She will be spoiled as an artist--mind that--she will get as narrow as a nun. Everything will be spoiled--our home and everything. I shall take to drinking." "Oh, really, Hans," said Kate, impatiently. "I do think men are the most contemptible animals in all creation. Every one of them must have everything to his mind, else he is unbearable." "Oh, oh, oh, it's very dreadful!" cried Mab. "I feel as if ancient Nineveh were come again." "I should like to know what is the good of having gone to the university and knowing everything, if you are so childish, Hans," said Amy. "You ought to put up with a man that Providence sends you to be kind to. _We_ shall have to put up with him." "I hope you will all of you like the new Lamentations of Jeremiah--'to be continued in our next'--that's all," said Hans, seizing his wide-awake. "It's no use being one thing more than another if one has to endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly at you, and requiring all your remarks to be small foot-notes to their text. If you're to be under a petrifying wall, you'd better be an old boot. I don't feel myself an old boot." Then abruptly, "Good night, little mother," bending to kiss her brow in a hasty, desperate manner, and condescendingly, on his way to the door, "Good-night, girls." "Suppose Mirah knew how you are behaving," said Kate. But her answer was a slam of the door. "I _should_ like to see Mirah when Mr. Deronda tells her," she went on to her mother. "I know she will look so beautiful." But Deronda, on second thoughts, had written a letter, which Mrs. Meyrick received the next morning, begging her to make the revelation instead of waiting for him, not giving the real reason--that he shrank from going again through a narrative in which he seemed to be making himself important and giving himself a character of general beneficence--but saying that he wished to remain with Mordecai while Mrs. Meyrick would bring Mirah on what was to be understood as a visit, so that there might be a little interval before that change of abode which he expected that Mirah herself would propose. Deronda secretly felt some wondering anxiety how far Mordecai, after years of solitary preoccupation with ideas likely to have become the more exclusive from continual diminution of bodily strength, would allow him to feel a tender interest in his sister over and above the rendering of pious duties. His feeling for the Cohens, and especially for little Jacob, showed a persistent activity of affection; but these objects had entered into his daily life for years; and Deronda felt it noticeable that Mordecai asked no new questions about Mirah, maintaining, indeed, an unusual silence on all subjects, and appearing simply to submit to the changes that were coming over his personal life. He donned the new clothes obediently, but said afterward to Deronda, with a faint smile, "I must keep my old garments by me for a remembrance." And when they were seated, awaiting Mirah, he uttered no word, keeping his eyelids closed, but yet showing restless feeling in his face and hands. In fact, Mordecai was undergoing that peculiar nervous perturbation only known to those whose minds, long and habitually moving with strong impetus in one current, are suddenly compelled into a new or reopened channel. Susceptible people, whose strength has been long absorbed by dormant bias, dread an interview that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening illness. Joy may be there, but joy, too, is terrible. Deronda felt the infection of excitement, and when he heard the ring at the door, he went out, not knowing exactly why, that he might see and greet Mirah beforehand. He was startled to find that she had on the hat and cloak in which he had first seen her--the memorable cloak that had once been wetted for a winding-sheet. She had come down-stairs equipped in this way; and when Mrs. Meyrick said, in a tone of question, "You like to go in that dress, dear?" she answered, "My brother is poor, and I want to look as much like him as I can, else he may feel distant from me"--imagining that she should meet him in the workman's dress. Deronda could not make any remark, but felt secretly rather ashamed of his own fastidious arrangements. They shook hands silently, for Mirah looked pale and awed. When Deronda opened the door for her, Mordecai had risen, and had his eyes turned toward it with an eager gaze. Mirah took only two or three steps, and then stood still. They looked at each other, motionless. It was less their own presence that they felt than another's; they were meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union. Mirah was the first to break the silence, standing where she was. "Ezra," she said, in exactly the same tone as when she was telling of her mother's call to him. Mordecai with a sudden movement advanced and laid his hand on her shoulders. He was the head taller, and looked down at her tenderly while he said, "That was our mother's voice. You remember her calling me?" "Yes, and how you answered her--'Mother!'--and I knew you loved her." Mirah threw her arms round her brother's neck, clasped her little hands behind it, and drew down his face, kissing it with childlike lavishness. Her hat fell backward on the ground and disclosed all her curls. "Ah, the dear head, the dear head!" said Mordecai, in a low loving tone, laying his thin hand gently on the curls. "You are very ill, Ezra," said Mirah, sadly looking at him with more observation. "Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body," was the quiet answer. "Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other," said Mirah, with a sweet outpouring of her words, as spontaneous as bird-notes. "I will tell you everything, and you will teach me:--you will teach me to be a good Jewess--what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep us. Oh, I have had such good friends." Mirah until now had quite forgotten that any one was by, but here she turned with the prettiest attitude, keeping one hand on her brother's arm while she looked at Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda. The little mother's happy emotion in witnessing this meeting of brother and sister had already won her to Mordecai, who seemed to her really to have more dignity and refinement than she had felt obliged to believe in from Deronda's account. "See this dear lady!" said Mirah. "I was a stranger, a poor wanderer, and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give my brother your hand," she added, beseechingly, taking Mrs. Meyrick's hand and putting it in Mordecai's, then pressing them both with her own and lifting them to her lips. "The Eternal Goodness has been with you," said Mordecai. "You have helped to fulfill our mother's prayer." "I think we will go now, shall we?--and return later," said Deronda, laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick's arm, and she immediately complied. He was afraid of any reference to the facts about himself which he had kept back from Mordecai, and he felt no uneasiness now in the thought of the brother and sister being alone together.

Deronda, having provided new clothes for Mordecai, was pleased with the effect of the fine grey flannel shirts and a dressing-gown like a Franciscan's brown robe, with Mordecai's head above them. He knew that Mirah would see her brother's distinction through any appearance of poverty; but there were the Meyricks to be propitiated, and Deronda found himself putting out of sight everything that might feed their repugnance. This inclination would have been confirmed if he had heard the dialogue round Mrs. Meyrick's fire in the evening, after Mirah had gone to her room. Hans had stayed late, and Mrs. Meyrick said- "Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily. I have something wonderful to tell." "As if I didn't know that, ma. I have seen it in your eye ever so long," said Kate, while the girls came up to put their feet on the fender, and Hans sat astride his chair. "Well, then, if you are so wise, perhaps you know that Mirah's brother is found!" said Mrs. Meyrick. "Oh, confound it!" said Hans. "Hans, that is wicked," said Mab. "Suppose we had lost you?" "I cannot help being rather sorry," said Kate. "And her mother?- where is she?" "Her mother is dead." "I hope the brother is not a bad man," said Amy. "Nor a fellow all smiles and jewellery," said Hans, in the worst humour. "Were there ever such unfeeling children?" said Mrs. Meyrick. "You don't think about Mirah's joy in the matter." "Mirah hardly remembers her brother," said Kate. "People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again," said Hans. "They are in the way." "Hans!" said Mrs. Meyrick, reproachfully. "But it's nice finding people - there is something to tell," said Mab, clasping her knees. "Did Prince Camaralzaman find him?" Then Mrs. Meyrick, in her neat way, told all she knew without interruption. "Mr. Deronda has the highest admiration for him," she ended,- "and he says Mirah is just the sister to understand this brother." "Deronda is getting perfectly preposterous about those Jews," said Hans, standing up in disgust. "He wants to do everything he can to encourage Mirah in her prejudices." "Oh, for shame, Hans!- to speak in that way of Mr. Deronda," said Mab. And Mrs. Meyrick's face showed an under-current of expression not allowed to surface. "And now we shall never be all together," Hans went on, walking about with his hands thrust into his pockets, "but we must have this prophet Elijah to tea with us, and Mirah will think of nothing but sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem. Everything will be spoiled. I shall take to drinking." "Oh, really, Hans," said Kate, impatiently. "I do think men are the most contemptible animals in all creation. Every one of them must have everything to his mind, else he is unbearable." "What is the good of going to university and knowing everything, if you are so childish, Hans?" said Amy. "You ought to be kind to a man that Providence sends you." "I hope you will like the Lamentations of Jeremiah - that's all," said Hans, seizing his hat. "I can't endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly at you, and requiring all your remarks to be foot-notes to their text." Then abruptly, "Good night, little mother," bending to kiss her brow, and condescendingly, on his way to the door, "Good-night, girls." "Suppose Mirah knew how you are behaving," said Kate. But her answer was a slam of the door. "I should like to see Mirah when Mr. Deronda tells her," she went on to her mother. "She will look so beautiful." But Deronda, on second thoughts, had written a letter which Mrs. Meyrick received next morning, begging her to make the revelation instead of waiting for him. He shrank from telling a story in which he seemed to make himself important; but he told Mrs. Meyrick that he wished to remain with Mordecai while she brought Mirah on a visit to see him. Deronda secretly felt anxious as to how much tender interest in his sister Mordecai might be able to feel, after years of solitary preoccupation with ideas. He had shown affection for the Cohens, and especially little Jacob; but he had known them for years; and Deronda noticed that Mordecai asked no new questions about Mirah, but was unusually silent and submissive. He donned the new clothes obediently, but said to Deronda, with a faint smile, "I must keep my old garments for a remembrance." And when they were seated, awaiting Mirah, he uttered no word, keeping his eyelids closed, but yet with restless hands and face. In fact, Mordecai was undergoing that nervous upheaval only known to those whose minds have long moved in one direction, when they are suddenly compelled into a new channel. They may dread an interview that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening illness. Joy may be there, but joy, too, is terrible. When Deronda heard the doorbell, he went out to greet Mirah beforehand. He was startled to find that she had on the hat and cloak in which he had first seen her - the cloak that had been wetted for a winding-sheet. She had told Mrs. Meyrick, "My brother is poor, and I want to look as much like him as I can, else he may feel distant from me" - imagining that she should meet him in workman's dress. Deronda felt secretly rather ashamed of his own fastidious arrangements. They shook hands silently, for Mirah looked pale and awed. When Deronda opened the door, Mordecai had risen, and turned his eyes toward it with an eager gaze. Mirah took two or three steps, and then stood still. They looked at each other, motionless. They were meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union. Mirah was the first to break the silence. "Ezra," she said, in exactly the same tone as when she was telling of her mother's call to him. Mordecai suddenly advanced and laid his hands on her shoulders. He was a head taller, and looked down at her tenderly, saying, "That was our mother's voice. You remember her calling me?" "Yes, and how you answered her - 'Mother!'- and I knew you loved her." Mirah threw her arms round her brother's neck, and kissed his face with childlike lavishness. Her hat fell backward on the ground, disclosing her curls. "Ah, the dear head!" said Mordecai, in a low loving tone, laying his thin hand gently on the curls. "You are very ill, Ezra," said Mirah, with sad observation. "Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body," was the quiet answer. "Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other," said Mirah, her words as sweet and spontaneous as bird-notes. "I will tell you everything, and you will teach me to be a good Jewess - what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep us. Oh, I have had such good friends." Here Mirah turned with the prettiest attitude to look at Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda. The little mother's happiness in witnessing this meeting had already won her to Mordecai, who had more dignity and refinement than she had expected. "See this dear lady!" said Mirah. "I was a poor wanderer, and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter." Taking Mrs. Meyrick's hand and putting it in Mordecai's, she pressed them both with her own before lifting them to her lips. "The Eternal Goodness has been with you," said Mordecai. "I think we will go now, and return later," said Deronda, laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick's arm. He felt no uneasiness now at the brother and sister being alone together.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 47

"Questa montagna e tale, Che sempre al cominciar di sotto a grave. E quanto uom piu va su e men fa male." --DANTE: _Il Purgatorio_. It was not many days after her mother's arrival that Gwendolen would consent to remain at Genoa. Her desire to get away from that gem of the sea, helped to rally her strength and courage. For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet? "I shall never like to see the Mediterranean again," said Gwendolen, to her mother, who thought that she quite understood her child's feeling--even in her tacit prohibition of any express reference to her late husband. Mrs. Davilow, indeed, though compelled formally to regard this time as one of severe calamity, was virtually enjoying her life more than she had ever done since her daughter's marriage. It seemed that her darling was brought back to her not merely with all the old affection, but with a conscious cherishing of her mother's nearness, such as we give to a possession that we have been on the brink of losing. "Are you there, mamma?" cried Gwendolen, in the middle of the night (a bed had been made for her mother in the same room with hers), very much as she would have done in her early girlhood, if she had felt frightened in lying awake. "Yes, dear; can I do anything for you?" "No, thank you; only I like so to know you are there. Do you mind my waking you?" (This question would hardly have been Gwendolen's in her early girlhood.) "I was not asleep, darling." "It seemed not real that you were with me. I wanted to make it real. I can bear things if you are with me. But you must not lie awake, anxious about me. You must be happy now. You must let me make you happy now at last--else what shall I do?" "God bless you, dear; I have the best happiness I can have, when you make much of me." But the next night, hearing that she was sighing and restless Mrs. Davilow said, "Let me give you your sleeping-draught, Gwendolen." "No, mamma, thank you; I don't want to sleep." "It would be so good for you to sleep more, my darling." "Don't say what would be good for me, mamma," Gwendolen answered, impetuously. "You don't know what would be good for me. You and my uncle must not contradict me and tell me anything is good for me when I feel it is not good." Mrs. Davilow was silent, not wondering that the poor child was irritable. Presently Gwendolen said, "I was always naughty to you, mamma." "No, dear, no." "Yes, I was," said Gwendolen insistently. "It is because I was always wicked that I am miserable now." She burst into sobs and cries. The determination to be silent about all the facts of her married life and its close, reacted in these escapes of enigmatic excitement. But dim lights of interpretation were breaking on the mother's mind through the information that came from Sir Hugo to Mr. Gascoigne, and, with some omissions, from Mr. Gascoigne to herself. The good-natured baronet, while he was attending to all decent measures in relation to his nephew's death, and the possible washing ashore of the body, thought it the kindest thing he could do to use his present friendly intercourse with the rector as an opportunity for communicating with him, in the mildest way, the purport of Grandcourt's will, so as to save him the additional shock that would be in store for him if he carried his illusions all the way home. Perhaps Sir Hugo would have been communicable enough without that kind motive, but he really felt the motive. He broke the unpleasant news to the rector by degrees: at first he only implied his fear that the widow was not so splendidly provided for as Mr. Gascoigne, nay, as the baronet himself had expected; and only at last, after some previous vague reference to large claims on Grandcourt, he disclosed the prior relations which, in the unfortunate absence of a legitimate heir, had determined all the splendor in another direction. The rector was deeply hurt, and remembered, more vividly than he had ever done before, how offensively proud and repelling the manners of the deceased had been toward him--remembered also that he himself, in that interesting period just before the arrival of the new occupant at Diplow, had received hints of former entangling dissipations, and an undue addiction to pleasure, though he had not foreseen that the pleasure which had probably, so to speak, been swept into private rubbish-heaps, would ever present itself as an array of live caterpillars, disastrous to the green meat of respectable people. But he did not make these retrospective thoughts audible to Sir Hugo, or lower himself by expressing any indignation on merely personal grounds, but behaved like a man of the world who had become a conscientious clergyman. His first remark was, "When a young man makes his will in health, he usually counts on living a long while. Probably Mr. Grandcourt did not believe that this will would ever have its present effect." After a moment, he added, "The effect is painful in more ways than one. Female morality is likely to suffer from this marked advantage and prominence being given to illegitimate offspring." "Well, in point of fact," said Sir Hugo, in his comfortable way, "since the boy is there, this was really the best alternative for the disposal of the estates. Grandcourt had nobody nearer than his cousin. And it's a chilling thought that you go out of this life only for the benefit of a cousin. A man gets a little pleasure in making his will, if it's for the good of his own curly heads; but it's a nuisance when you're giving the bequeathing to a used-up fellow like yourself, and one you don't care two straws for. It's the next worse thing to having only a life interest in your estates. No; I forgive Grandcourt for that part of his will. But, between ourselves, what I don't forgive him for, is the shabby way he has provided for your niece--_our_ niece, I will say--no better a position than if she had been a doctor's widow. Nothing grates on me more than that posthumous grudgingness toward a wife. A man ought to have some pride and fondness for his widow. _I_ should, I know. I take it as a test of a man, that he feels the easier about his death when he can think of his wife and daughters being comfortable after it. I like that story of the fellows in the Crimean war, who were ready to go to the bottom of the sea if their widows were provided for." "It has certainly taken me by surprise," said Mr. Gascoigne, "all the more because, as the one who stood in the place of father to my niece, I had shown my reliance on Mr. Grandcourt's apparent liberality in money matters by making no claims for her beforehand. That seemed to me due to him under the circumstances. Probably you think me blamable." "Not blamable exactly. I respect a man for trusting another. But take my advice. If you marry another niece, though it may be to the Archbishop of Canterbury, bind him down. Your niece can't be married for the first time twice over. And if he's a good fellow, he'll wish to be bound. But as to Mrs. Grandcourt, I can only say that I feel my relation to her all the nearer because I think that she has not been well treated. And I hope you will urge her to rely on me as a friend." Thus spake the chivalrous Sir Hugo, in his disgust at the young and beautiful widow of a Mallinger Grandcourt being left with only two thousand a year and a house in a coal-mining district. To the rector that income naturally appeared less shabby and less accompanied with mortifying privations; but in this conversation he had devoured a much keener sense than the baronet's of the humiliation cast over his niece, and also over her nearest friends, by the conspicuous publishing of her husband's relation to Mrs. Glasher. And like all men who are good husbands and fathers, he felt the humiliation through the minds of the women who would be chiefly affected by it; so that the annoyance of first hearing the facts was far slighter than what he felt in communicating them to Mrs. Davilow, and in anticipating Gwendolen's feeling whenever her mother saw fit to tell her of them. For the good rector had an innocent conviction that his niece was unaware of Mrs. Glasher's existence, arguing with masculine soundness from what maidens and wives were likely to know, do, and suffer, and having had a most imperfect observation of the particular maiden and wife in question. Not so Gwendolen's mother, who now thought that she saw an explanation of much that had been enigmatic in her child's conduct and words before and after her engagement, concluding that in some inconceivable way Gwendolen had been informed of this left-handed marriage and the existence of the children. She trusted to opportunities that would arise in moments of affectionate confidence before and during their journey to England, when she might gradually learn how far the actual state of things was clear to Gwendolen, and prepare her for anything that might be a disappointment. But she was spared from devices on the subject. "I hope you don't expect that I am going to be rich and grand, mamma," said Gwendolen, not long after the rector's communication; "perhaps I shall have nothing at all." She was dressed, and had been sitting long in quiet meditation. Mrs. Davilow was startled, but said, after a moment's reflection, "Oh yes, dear, you will have something. Sir Hugo knows all about the will." "That will not decide," said Gwendolen, abruptly. "Surely, dear: Sir Hugo says you are to have two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere." "What I have will depend on what I accept," said Gwendolen. "You and my uncle must not attempt to cross me and persuade me about this. I will do everything I can do to make you happy, but in anything about my husband I must not be interfered with. Is eight hundred a year enough for you, mamma?" "More than enough, dear. You must not think of giving me so much." Mrs. Davilow paused a little, and then said, "Do you know who is to have the estates and the rest of the money?" "Yes," said Gwendolen, waving her hand in dismissal of the subject. "I know everything. It is all perfectly right, and I wish never to have it mentioned." The mother was silent, looked away, and rose to fetch a fan-screen, with a slight flush on her delicate cheeks. Wondering, imagining, she did not like to meet her daughter's eyes, and sat down again under a sad constraint. What wretchedness her child had perhaps gone through, which yet must remain as it always had been, locked away from their mutual speech. But Gwendolen was watching her mother with that new divination which experience had given her; and in tender relenting at her own peremptoriness, said, "Come and sit nearer to me, mamma, and don't be unhappy." Mrs. Davilow did as she was told, but bit her lips in the vain attempt to hinder smarting tears. Gwendolen leaned toward her caressingly and said, "I mean to be very wise; I do, really. And good--oh, so good to you, dear, old, sweet mamma, you won't know me. Only you must not cry." The resolve that Gwendolen had in her mind was that she would ask Deronda whether she ought to accept any of her husband's money--whether she might accept what would enable her to provide for her mother. The poor thing felt strong enough to do anything that would give her a higher place in Deronda's mind. An invitation that Sir Hugo pressed on her with kind urgency was that she and Mrs. Davilow should go straight with him to Park Lane, and make his house their abode as long as mourning and other details needed attending to in London. Town, he insisted, was just then the most retired of places; and he proposed to exert himself at once in getting all articles belonging to Gwendolen away from the house in Grosvenor Square. No proposal could have suited her better than this of staying a little while in Park Lane. It would be easy for her there to have an interview with Deronda, if she only knew how to get a letter into his hands, asking him to come to her. During the journey, Sir Hugo, having understood that she was acquainted with the purport of her husband's will, ventured to talk before her and to her about her future arrangements, referring here and there to mildly agreeable prospects as matters of course, and otherwise shedding a decorous cheerfulness over her widowed position. It seemed to him really the more graceful course for a widow to recover her spirits on finding that her husband had not dealt as handsomely by her as he might have done; it was the testator's fault if he compromised all her grief at his departure by giving a testamentary reason for it, so that she might be supposed to look sad, not because he had left her, but because he had left her poor. The baronet, having his kindliness doubly fanned by the favorable wind on his fortunes and by compassion for Gwendolen, had become quite fatherly in his behavior to her, called her "my dear," and in mentioning Gadsmere to Mr. Gascoigne, with its various advantages and disadvantages, spoke of what "we" might do to make the best of that property. Gwendolen sat by in pale silence while Sir Hugo, with his face turned toward Mrs. Davilow or Mr. Gascoigne, conjectured that Mrs. Grandcourt might perhaps prefer letting Gadsmere to residing there during any part of the year, in which case he thought that it might be leased on capital terms to one of the fellows engaged with the coal: Sir Hugo had seen enough of the place to know that it was as comfortable and picturesque a box as any man need desire, providing his desires were circumscribed within a coal area. "_I_ shouldn't mind about the soot myself," said the baronet, with that dispassionateness which belongs to the potential mood. "Nothing is more healthy. And if one's business lay there, Gadsmere would be a paradise. It makes quite a feature in Scrogg's history of the county, with the little tower and the fine piece of water--the prettiest print in the book." "A more important place than Offendene, I suppose?" said Mr. Gascoigne. "Much," said the baronet, decisively. "I was there with my poor brother--it is more than a quarter of a century ago, but I remember it very well. The rooms may not be larger, but the grounds are on a different scale." "Our poor dear Offendene is empty after all," said Mrs. Davilow. "When it came to the point, Mr. Haynes declared off, and there has been no one to take it since. I might as well have accepted Lord Brackenshaw's kind offer that I should remain in it another year rent-free: for I should have kept the place aired and warmed." "I hope you've something snug instead," said Sir Hugo. "A little too snug," said Mr. Gascoigne, smiling at his sister-in-law. "You are rather thick upon the ground." Gwendolen had turned with a changed glance when her mother spoke of Offendene being empty. This conversation passed during one of the long unaccountable pauses often experienced in foreign trains at some country station. There was a dreamy, sunny stillness over the hedgeless fields stretching to the boundary of poplars; and to Gwendolen the talk within the carriage seemed only to make the dreamland larger with an indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purgatorial Gadsmere which she would never visit; till at her mother's words, this mingled, dozing view seemed to dissolve and give way to a more wakeful vision of Offendene and Pennicote under their cooler lights. She saw the gray shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked fields, the shadowy plantations with rutted lanes where the barked timber lay for a wayside seat, the neatly-clipped hedges on the road from the parsonage to Offendene, the avenue where she was gradually discerned from the window, the hall-door opening, and her mother or one of the troublesome sisters coming out to meet her. All that brief experience of a quiet home which had once seemed a dullness to be fled from, now came back to her as a restful escape, a station where she found the breath of morning and the unreproaching voice of birds after following a lure through a long Satanic masquerade, which she had entered on with an intoxicated belief in its disguises, and had seen the end of in shrieking fear lest she herself had become one of the evil spirits who were dropping their human mummery and hissing around her with serpent tongues. In this way Gwendolen's mind paused over Offendene and made it the scene of many thoughts; but she gave no further outward sign of interest in this conversation, any more than in Sir Hugo's opinion on the telegraphic cable or her uncle's views of the Church Rate Abolition Bill. What subjects will not our talk embrace in leisurely day-journeying from Genoa to London? Even strangers, after glancing from China to Peru and opening their mental stores with a liberality threatening a mutual impression of poverty on any future meeting, are liable to become excessively confidential. But the baronet and the rector were under a still stronger pressure toward cheerful communication: they were like acquaintances compelled to a long drive in a mourning-coach who having first remarked that the occasion is a melancholy one, naturally proceed to enliven it by the most miscellaneous discourse. "I don't mind telling _you_," said Sir Hugo to the rector, in mentioning some private details; while the rector, without saying so, did not mind telling the baronet about his sons, and the difficulty of placing them in the world. By the dint of discussing all persons and things within driving-reach of Diplow, Sir Hugo got himself wrought to a pitch of interest in that former home, and of conviction that it was his pleasant duty to regain and strengthen his personal influence in the neighborhood, that made him declare his intention of taking his family to the place for a month or two before the autumn was over; and Mr. Gascoigne cordially rejoiced in that prospect. Altogether, the journey was continued and ended with mutual liking between the male fellow-travellers. Meanwhile Gwendolen sat by like one who had visited the spirit-world and was full to the lips of an unutterable experience that threw a strange unreality over all the talk she was hearing of her own and the world's business; and Mrs. Davilow was chiefly occupied in imagining what her daughter was feeling, and in wondering what was signified by her hinted doubt whether she would accept her husband's bequest. Gwendolen in fact had before her the unsealed wall of an immediate purpose shutting off every other resolution. How to scale the wall? She wanted again to see and consult Deronda, that she might secure herself against any act he would disapprove. Would her remorse have maintained its power within her, or would she have felt absolved by secrecy, if it had not been for that outer conscience which was made for her by Deronda? It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy--who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world's tolerance would easily melt and disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making. That mission of Deronda to Gwendolen had begun with what she had felt to be his judgment of her at the gaming-table. He might easily have spoiled it:--much of our lives is spent in marring our own influence and turning others' belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief which they call knowledge of the world, while it is really disappointment in you or me. Deronda had not spoiled his mission. But Gwendolen had forgotten to ask him for his address in case she wanted to write, and her only way of reaching him was through Sir Hugo. She was not in the least blind to the construction that all witnesses might put on her giving signs of dependence on Deronda, and her seeking him more than he sought her: Grandcourt's rebukes had sufficiently enlightened her pride. But the force, the tenacity of her nature had thrown itself into that dependence, and she would no more let go her hold on Deronda's help, or deny herself the interview her soul needed, because of witnesses, than if she had been in prison in danger of being condemned to death. When she was in Park Lane and knew that the baronet would be going down to the Abbey immediately (just to see his family for a couple of days and then return to transact needful business for Gwendolen), she said to him without any air of hesitation, while her mother was present, "Sir Hugo, I wish to see Mr. Deronda again as soon as possible. I don't know his address. Will you tell it me, or let him know that I want to see him?" A quick thought passed across Sir Hugo's face, but made no difference to the ease with which he said, "Upon my word, I don't know whether he's at his chambers or the Abbey at this moment. But I'll make sure of him. I'll send a note now to his chambers telling him to come, and if he's at the Abbey I can give him your message and send him up at once. I am sure he will want to obey your wish," the baronet ended, with grave kindness, as if nothing could seem to him more in the appropriate course of things than that she should send such a message. But he was convinced that Gwendolen had a passionate attachment to Deronda, the seeds of which had been laid long ago, and his former suspicion now recurred to him with more strength than ever, that her feeling was likely to lead her into imprudences--in which kind-hearted Sir Hugo was determined to screen and defend her as far as lay in his power. To him it was as pretty a story as need be that this fine creature and his favorite Dan should have turned out to be formed for each other, and that the unsuitable husband should have made his exit in such excellent time. Sir Hugo liked that a charming woman should be made as happy as possible. In truth, what most vexed his mind in this matter at present was a doubt whether the too lofty and inscrutable Dan had not got some scheme or other in his head, which would prove to be dearer to him than the lovely Mrs. Grandcourt, and put that neatly-prepared marriage with her out of the question. It was among the usual paradoxes of feeling that Sir Hugo, who had given his fatherly cautions to Deronda against too much tenderness in his relations with the bride, should now feel rather irritated against him by the suspicion that he had not fallen in love as he ought to have done. Of course all this thinking on Sir Hugo's part was eminently premature, only a fortnight or so after Grandcourt's death. But it is the trick of thinking to be either premature or behind-hand. However, he sent the note to Deronda's chambers, and it found him there.

Gwendolen would not consent to remain at Genoa after her mother's arrival. Her desire to get away helped to rally her strength. For that gem of the sea had turned into a place of punishment. "I shall never like to see the Mediterranean again," she said to her mother, who thought that she quite understood her child's feeling. Mrs. Davilow, indeed, though compelled formally to regard this time as one of severe calamity, was enjoying her life more than she had ever done since her daughter's marriage. It seemed that her darling was brought back to her not merely with all the old affection, but with a conscious cherishing of her mother's nearness, such as we give to a possession that we have been on the brink of losing. "Are you there, mamma?" cried Gwendolen, in the middle of the night, as she had in her young girlhood. (A bed had been made for her mother in the same room with hers.) "Yes, dear; can I do anything for you?" "No, thank you; only I like so to know you are there. Do you mind my waking you?" (Gwendolen would hardly have asked this in her early girlhood.) "I was not asleep, darling." "It seemed not real that you were with me. I wanted to make it real. I can bear things if you are with me. But you must not lie awake and anxious. You must be happy now. You must let me make you happy now at last." "God bless you, dear; I have the best happiness possible, when you make much of me." But the next night, hearing that she was sighing and restless, Mrs. Davilow said, "Let me give you your sleeping-draught, Gwendolen." "No, mamma, thank you; I don't want to sleep." "It would be good for you to sleep more, my darling." "Don't say what would be good for me, mamma," Gwendolen answered impetuously. "You don't know what would be good for me. You and my uncle must not contradict me and tell me what would be good for me." Mrs. Davilow was silent, not wondering that the poor child was irritable. Presently Gwendolen said- "I was always naughty to you, mamma." "No, dear." "Yes, I was," said Gwendolen insistently. "It is because I was always wicked that I am miserable now." She burst into sobs. The determination to be silent about the facts of her married life reacted in these escapes. But light was breaking on the mother's mind through the information that came to her from Sir Hugo, through Mr. Gascoigne. The good-natured baronet thought it best to tell the rector the purport of Grandcourt's will, so as to save him the shock that would be in store for him otherwise. The rector was deeply hurt, and remembered, more vividly than before, how offensively proud and repelling the manners of the deceased had been - remembered also that he himself had received hints of former entangling dissipations. However, he did not express these thoughts, but remarked- "When a young man makes his will in health, he usually counts on living a long while. Probably Mr. Grandcourt did not believe that this will would ever have its present effect." "Well, in point of fact," said Sir Hugo, in his comfortable way, "since the boy is there, this was really the best alternative for the disposal of the estates. I forgive Grandcourt for that part of his will. But what I don't forgive him for, is the shabby way he has provided for your niece. I think that she has not been well treated. And I hope you will urge her to rely on me as a friend." Thus spake the chivalrous Sir Hugo, in his disgust at the young and beautiful widow of a Mallinger Grandcourt being left with only two thousand a year and a house in a coal-mining district. To the rector that income naturally appeared less shabby; but he had a keener sense of the humiliation cast over his niece, and also over her nearest friends, by the publishing of her husband's relation to Mrs. Glasher. He felt the unpleasantness of communicating the facts to Mrs. Davilow, who had to tell Gwendolen. For the good rector had an innocent conviction that his niece was unaware of Mrs. Glasher's existence. Not so Gwendolen's mother, who now thought that she saw an explanation of much that had been enigmatic in her child's conduct, concluding that in some way Gwendolen had been informed of this left-handed marriage and the existence of the children. She trusted that Gwendolen might confide in her during their journey to England, so that she could prepare her for any disappointment. But she was spared from devices on the subject. "I hope you don't expect that I am going to be rich and grand, mamma," said Gwendolen; "perhaps I shall have nothing." Mrs. Davilow was startled, but said, after a moment's reflection- "Oh yes, dear, you will have something. Sir Hugo says you are to have two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere." "What I have will depend on what I accept," said Gwendolen. "You and my uncle must not attempt to cross me. I will do everything I can do to make you happy, but in anything about my husband I must not be interfered with. Is eight hundred a year enough for you, mamma?" "More than enough, dear." Mrs. Davilow paused, and then said, "Do you know who is to have the rest of the money?" "Yes," said Gwendolen, waving her hand in dismissal of the subject. "I know everything. It is all perfectly right, and I wish never to have it mentioned." The mother was silent. She did not like to meet her daughter's eyes, and sat down again under a sad constraint, wondering what wretchedness her child had perhaps gone through. But Gwendolen was watching her mother with that new divination which experience had given her; and said tenderly, "Come and sit nearer, mamma, and don't be unhappy." When Mrs. Davilow did so, Gwendolen leaned toward her caressingly and said, "I mean to be very wise; I do, really. And so good to you, dear, old, sweet mamma, you won't know me. Only you must not cry." Gwendolen had resolved to ask Deronda whether she ought to accept any of her husband's money - whether she might accept enough to provide for her mother. The poor thing felt strong enough to do anything that would give her a higher place in Deronda's mind. Sir Hugo kindly invited Gwendolen and Mrs. Davilow to Park Lane, to stay for as long as they needed. No proposal could have suited Gwendolen better. It would be easy for her there to have an interview with Deronda, if she could only get a letter to him. During the journey, Sir Hugo ventured to talk to her about her future arrangements. He had become quite fatherly towards her, calling her "my dear," and in mentioning Gadsmere, spoke of what "we" might do to make the best of that property. Gwendolen sat in pale silence while Sir Hugo, addressing Mrs. Davilow or Mr. Gascoigne, conjectured that Mrs. Grandcourt might prefer letting Gadsmere to residing there, in which case he thought that it might be leased to one of the fellows engaged with the coal. "If one's business lay there, Gadsmere would be a paradise," he said. "A more important place than Offendene, I suppose?" said Mr. Gascoigne. "Much," said the baronet, decisively. "The grounds are on a different scale." "Our poor dear Offendene is empty after all," said Mrs. Davilow. "Mr. Haynes cried off, and no-one has taken it since." Gwendolen had turned with a changed glance when her mother said this; it was during one of the long unaccountable pauses often experienced in foreign trains at some country station. There was a dreamy, sunny stillness over the fields; and to Gwendolen the talk within the carriage seemed only to make the dreamland larger with an indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purgatorial Gadsmere which she would never visit; then this dozing view dissolved into a vision of Offendene. She saw the grey shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked fields, the neatly-clipped hedges on the road to Offendene, the avenue, the hall-door opening, and her mother coming out to meet her. All that brief experience of a quiet home which had once seemed dull, now came back to her as a restful escape. However, Gwendolen gave no outward sign of interest in the conversation. The baronet and the rector were talking about their families. Sir Hugo declared his intention of taking his family to Diplow for a month or two in autumn; and Mr. Gascoigne cordially rejoiced in that prospect. Altogether, the journey was continued with mutual liking between the male fellow-travellers. Meanwhile Gwendolen sat by like one who had visited the spirit-world and whose experience threw a strange unreality over all worldly talk; and Mrs. Davilow was chiefly occupied in imagining what her daughter was feeling, and in wondering whether she would accept her husband's bequest. Gwendolen in fact had a purpose shutting off every other resolution. She wanted again to consult Deronda, so that she might secure herself against any act he would disapprove. Would her remorse have maintained its power within her, if it had not been for that conscience which was made for her by Deronda? His influence had begun with what she had felt to be his judgment of her at the gaming-table. But Gwendolen did not know his address, and her only way of reaching him was through Sir Hugo. She knew the construction that might be put on her seeking out Deronda; but she would not let go of her dependence. When she was in Park Lane and knew that the baronet was about to go down to the Abbey, she said to him without hesitation, while her mother was present- "Sir Hugo, I wish to see Mr. Deronda again as soon as possible. Will you let him know that I want to see him?" A quick thought passed across Sir Hugo's face, but he said easily, "Upon my word, I don't know whether he's at his chambers or the Abbey at this moment. But I'll send a note to his chambers, and if he's at the Abbey I can give him your message and send him up. I am sure he will want to obey your wish." The baronet spoke with grave kindness, as if nothing could seem more appropriate. But he was convinced that Gwendolen had a passionate attachment to Deronda, and thinking that this might lead her into imprudences, he was determined to screen her as far as lay in his power. To him it was a pretty story that this fine creature and his favourite Dan should have turned out to be formed for each other, and that the unsuitable husband should have made his exit in such excellent time. In truth, what most vexed his mind was a doubt whether Dan had not got some scheme or other in his head, which would prove to be dearer to him than the lovely Mrs. Grandcourt, and put that neatly-prepared marriage with her out of the question. Of course all this thinking on Sir Hugo's part was premature, only a fortnight after Grandcourt's death. But it is the trick of thinking to be either premature or behind-hand. However, he sent the note to Deronda's chambers, and it found him there.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 64

"O gentlemen, the time of life is short; To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial's point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour." --SHAKESPEARE: _Henry IV_. On the second day after the archery meeting, Mr. Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt was at his breakfast-table with Mr. Lush. Everything around them was agreeable: the summer air through the open windows, at which the dogs could walk in from the old green turf on the lawn; the soft, purplish coloring of the park beyond, stretching toward a mass of bordering wood; the still life in the room, which seemed the stiller for its sober antiquated elegance, as if it kept a conscious, well-bred silence, unlike the restlessness of vulgar furniture. Whether the gentlemen were agreeable to each other was less evident. Mr. Grandcourt had drawn his chair aside so as to face the lawn, and with his left leg over another chair, and his right elbow on the table, was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was still eating. The dogs--half-a-dozen of various kinds were moving lazily in and out, taking attitudes of brief attention--gave a vacillating preference first to one gentleman, then to the other; being dogs in such good circumstances that they could play at hunger, and liked to be served with delicacies which they declined to put in their mouths; all except Fetch, the beautiful liver-colored water-spaniel, which sat with its forepaws firmly planted and its expressive brown face turned upward, watching Grandcourt with unshaken constancy. He held in his lap a tiny Maltese dog with a tiny silver collar and bell, and when he had a hand unused by cigar or coffee-cup, it rested on this small parcel of animal warmth. I fear that Fetch was jealous, and wounded that her master gave her no word or look; at last it seemed that she could bear this neglect no longer, and she gently put her large silky paw on her master's leg. Grandcourt looked at her with unchanged face for half a minute, and then took the trouble to lay down his cigar while he lifted the unimpassioned Fluff close to his chin and gave it caressing pats, all the while gravely watching Fetch, who, poor thing, whimpered interruptedly, as if trying to repress that sign of discontent, and at last rested her head beside the appealing paw, looking up with piteous beseeching. So, at least, a lover of dogs must have interpreted Fetch, and Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them; at any rate, his impulse to act just in that way started from such an interpretation. But when the amusing anguish burst forth in a howling bark, Grandcourt pushed Fetch down without speaking, and, depositing Fluff carelessly on the table (where his black nose predominated over a salt-cellar), began to look to his cigar, and found, with some annoyance against Fetch as the cause, that the brute of a cigar required relighting. Fetch, having begun to wail, found, like others of her sex, that it was not easy to leave off; indeed, the second howl was a louder one, and the third was like unto it. "Turn out that brute, will you?" said Grandcourt to Lush, without raising his voice or looking at him--as if he counted on attention to the smallest sign. And Lush immediately rose, lifted Fetch, though she was rather heavy, and he was not fond of stooping, and carried her out, disposing of her in some way that took him a couple of minutes before he returned. He then lit a cigar, placed himself at an angle where he could see Grandcourt's face without turning, and presently said, "Shall you ride or drive to Quetcham to-day?" "I am not going to Quetcham." "You did not go yesterday." Grandcourt smoked in silence for half a minute, and then said, "I suppose you sent my card and inquiries." "I went myself at four, and said you were sure to be there shortly. They would suppose some accident prevented you from fulfilling the intention. Especially if you go to-day." Silence for a couple of minutes. Then Grandcourt said, "What men are invited here with their wives?" Lush drew out a note-book. "The Captain and Mrs. Torrington come next week. Then there are Mr. Hollis and Lady Flora, and the Cushats and the Gogoffs." "Rather a ragged lot," remarked Grandcourt, after a while. "Why did you ask the Gogoffs? When you write invitations in my name, be good enough to give me a list, instead of bringing down a giantess on me without my knowledge. She spoils the look of the room." "You invited the Gogoffs yourself when you met them in Paris." "What has my meeting them in Paris to do with it? I told you to give me a list." Grandcourt, like many others, had two remarkably different voices. Hitherto we have heard him speaking in a superficial interrupted drawl suggestive chiefly of languor and _ennui_. But this last brief speech was uttered in subdued inward, yet distinct, tones, which Lush had long been used to recognize as the expression of a peremptory will. "Are there any other couples you would like to invite?" "Yes; think of some decent people, with a daughter or two. And one of your damned musicians. But not a comic fellow." "I wonder if Klesmer would consent to come to us when he leaves Quetcham. Nothing but first-class music will go down with Miss Arrowpoint." Lush spoke carelessly, but he was really seizing an opportunity and fixing an observant look on Grandcourt, who now for the first time, turned his eyes toward his companion, but slowly and without speaking until he had given two long luxuriant puffs, when he said, perhaps in a lower tone than ever, but with a perceptible edge of contempt, "What in the name of nonsense have I to do with Miss Arrowpoint and her music?" "Well, something," said Lush, jocosely. "You need not give yourself much trouble, perhaps. But some forms must be gone through before a man can marry a million." "Very likely. But I am not going to marry a million." "That's a pity--to fling away an opportunity of this sort, and knock down your own plans." "_Your_ plans, I suppose you mean." "You have some debts, you know, and things may turn out inconveniently, after all. The heirship is not _absolutely_ certain." Grandcourt did not answer, and Lush went on. "It really is a fine opportunity. The father and mother ask for nothing better, I can see, and the daughter's looks and manners require no allowances, any more than if she hadn't a sixpence. She is not beautiful; but equal to carrying any rank. And she is not likely to refuse such prospects as you can offer her." "Perhaps not." "The father and mother would let you do anything you like with them." "But I should not like to do anything with them." Here it was Lush who made a little pause before speaking again, and then he said in a deep voice of remonstrance, "Good God, Grandcourt! after your experience, will you let a whim interfere with your comfortable settlement in life?" "Spare your oratory. I know what I am going to do." "What?" Lush put down his cigar and thrust his hands into his side pockets, as if he had to face something exasperating, but meant to keep his temper. "I am going to marry the other girl." "Have you fallen in love?" This question carried a strong sneer. "I am going to marry her." "You have made her an offer already, then?" "No." "She is a young lady with a will of her own, I fancy. Extremely well fitted to make a rumpus. She would know what she liked." "She doesn't like you," said Grandcourt, with the ghost of a smile. "Perfectly true," said Lush, adding again in a markedly sneering tone. "However, if you and she are devoted to each other, that will be enough." Grandcourt took no notice of this speech, but sipped his coffee, rose, and strolled out on the lawn, all the dogs following him. Lush glanced after him a moment, then resumed his cigar and lit it, but smoked slowly, consulting his beard with inspecting eyes and fingers, till he finally stroked it with an air of having arrived at some conclusion, and said in a subdued voice, "Check, old boy!" Lush, being a man of some ability, had not known Grandcourt for fifteen years without learning what sort of measures were useless with him, though what sort might be useful remained often dubious. In the beginning of his career he held a fellowship, and was near taking orders for the sake of a college living, but, not being fond of that prospect, accepted instead the office of traveling companion to a marquess, and afterward to young Grandcourt, who had lost his father early, and who found Lush so convenient that he had allowed him to become prime minister in all his more personal affairs. The habit of fifteen years had made Grandcourt more and more in need of Lush's handiness, and Lush more and more in need of the lazy luxury to which his transactions on behalf of Grandcourt made no interruption worth reckoning. I cannot say that the same lengthened habit had intensified Grandcourt's want of respect for his companion since that want had been absolute from the beginning, but it had confirmed his sense that he might kick Lush if he chose--only he never did choose to kick any animal, because the act of kicking is a compromising attitude, and a gentleman's dogs should be kicked for him. He only said things which might have exposed himself to be kicked if his confidant had been a man of independent spirit. But what son of a vicar who has stinted his wife and daughters of calico in order to send his male offspring to Oxford, can keep an independent spirit when he is bent on dining with high discrimination, riding good horses, living generally in the most luxuriant honey-blossomed clover--and all without working? Mr. Lush had passed for a scholar once, and had still a sense of scholarship when he was not trying to remember much of it; but the bachelor's and other arts which soften manners are a time-honored preparation for sinecures; and Lush's present comfortable provision was as good a sinecure in not requiring more than the odor of departed learning. He was not unconscious of being held kickable, but he preferred counting that estimate among the peculiarities of Grandcourt's character, which made one of his incalculable moods or judgments as good as another. Since in his own opinion he had never done a bad action, it did not seem necessary to consider whether he should be likely to commit one if his love of ease required it. Lush's love of ease was well-satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled toward him in the dust, he took the inside bits and found them relishing. This morning, for example, though he had encountered more annoyance than usual, he went to his private sitting-room and played a good hour on the violoncello.

On the second day after the Archery Meeting, Mr. Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt was at his breakfast-table with Mr. Lush. Everything around them was agreeable: the summer air through the open windows, at which the dogs could walk in from the lawn; the park beyond; the still room, with its sober antiquated elegance, as if it kept a conscious, well-bred silence, unlike the restlessness of vulgar furniture. Whether the gentlemen were agreeable to each other was less evident. Mr. Grandcourt had drawn his chair aside to face the lawn, and with his left leg over another chair, was smoking a large cigar, while his companion was eating. Half a dozen dogs were moving lazily in and out; except for Fetch, the water-spaniel, which sat with its forepaws firmly planted and its face turned upward, watching Grandcourt with unshaken constancy. He held in his lap a tiny Maltese dog, and his hand rested on this small parcel of animal warmth. I fear that Fetch was jealous; at last she could bear this neglect no longer, and she gently put her large silky paw on her master's leg. Grandcourt looked at her with unchanged face, and then laid down his cigar while he lifted the unimpassioned Fluff close to his chin and gave it caressing pats, all the while gravely watching Fetch, who, poor thing, whimpered and looked up with piteous beseeching. So, at least, a lover of dogs must have interpreted Fetch, and Grandcourt kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them. But when the amusing anguish burst forth in a howling bark, Grandcourt pushed Fetch down without speaking, and, depositing Fluff carelessly on the table, looked to his cigar. Fetch, having begun to wail, found, like others of her sex, that it was not easy to stop. "Turn out that brute, will you?" said Grandcourt quietly to Lush. Lush immediately rose, lifted Fetch, and carried her out. On returning he lit a cigar, and looking at Grandcourt said- "Shall you ride or drive to Quetcham today?" "I am not going to Quetcham." "You did not go yesterday." Grandcourt smoked in silence for half a minute, and then said- "I suppose you sent my card." "I went at four, and said you were sure to be there shortly. They would suppose some accident prevented you from going. Especially if you go to-day." Silence for a couple of minutes. Then Grandcourt said, "Who is invited here?" Lush drew out a note-book. "The Captain and Mrs. Torrington come next week. Mr. Hollis and Lady Flora, and the Cushats and the Gogoffs." "Rather a ragged lot," remarked Grandcourt, after a while. "Why did you ask the Gogoffs? When you write invitations in my name, be good enough to give me a list, instead of bringing down a giantess on me without my knowledge. She spoils the look of the room." "You invited the Gogoffs yourself when you met them in Paris." "What has that to do with it? I told you to give me a list." Hitherto we have heard Grandcourt speaking in an interrupted drawl suggestive of languor and boredom. But this last brief speech was uttered in subdued, yet distinct, tones, which Lush had long recognized as the expression of a peremptory will. "Are there any other couples you would like to invite?" "Yes; think of some decent people, with a daughter or two. And one of your damned musicians." "I wonder if Klesmer would come to us when he leaves Quetcham. Nothing but first-class music will go down with Miss Arrowpoint." Lush spoke carelessly, but he was really seizing an opportunity and observing Grandcourt, who now for the first time turned his eyes toward his companion, while he gave two long luxuriant puffs on his cigar. Then he said, with a perceptible edge of contempt- "What in the name of nonsense have I to do with Miss Arrowpoint and her music?" "Well, something," said Lush, jocosely. "You need not give yourself much trouble, perhaps. But some forms must be gone through before a man can marry a million." "Very likely. But I am not going to marry a million." "That's a pity - to fling away an opportunity of this sort, and knock down your plans." "Your plans, you mean." "You have some debts, you know, and the heirship is not absolutely certain. It really is a fine opportunity. The father and mother ask for nothing better, I can see, and the daughter is equal to carrying any rank. She is not likely to refuse." "Perhaps not." "The father and mother would let you do anything you like with them." "But I should not like to do anything with them." Here it was Lush who paused before remonstrating. "Good God, Grandcourt! after your experience, will you let a whim interfere with your comfortable settlement in life?" "Spare your oratory. I know what I am going to do." "What?" Lush thrust his hands into his side pockets, as if he had to face something exasperating, but meant to keep his temper. "I am going to marry the other girl." "Have you fallen in love?" This question carried a strong sneer. "I am going to marry her." "You have made her an offer, then?" "No." "She has a will of her own, I fancy. Extremely well fitted to make a rumpus. She would know what she liked." "She doesn't like you," said Grandcourt, with the ghost of a smile. "Perfectly true," said Lush, with another sneer. "However, if you and she are devoted to each other, that will be enough." Grandcourt took no notice, but sipped his coffee, rose, and strolled out on the lawn, all the dogs following him. Lush glanced after him, then took up his cigar and smoked slowly, till he finally said- "Check, old boy!" Lush had not known Grandcourt for fifteen years without learning what sort of measures were useless with him, though what sort might be useful remained often doubtful. In the beginning of his career Lush held a fellowship, and nearly took orders for the sake of a college living, but not being fond of that prospect accepted instead the office of travelling companion to young Grandcourt, who had lost his father early, and who found Lush so convenient that he had allowed him to become prime minister in all his more personal affairs. The habit of fifteen years had made Grandcourt more and more in need of Lush's handiness, and Lush more and more in need of the lazy luxury which his life with Grandcourt allowed. I cannot say that time increased Grandcourt's lack of respect for his companion, since that lack had been absolute from the start, but it had confirmed his sense that he might kick Lush if he chose - only he never did choose to kick any animal, because a gentleman's dogs should be kicked for him. He only said things which might have exposed himself to be kicked if his companion had been a man of independent spirit. But Mr. Lush's liking of comfort had overtaken any sense of independence. He was conscious of being held kickable, but he preferred calling that one of the peculiarities of Grandcourt's incalculable character. Lush's love of ease was well-satisfied in his position, and if his puddings were rolled toward him in the dust, he took the inside bits and found them relishing. This morning, for example, though he had encountered more annoyance than usual, he went to his private sitting-room and played a good hour on the cello.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 12

Were uneasiness of conscience measured by extent of crime, human history had been different, and one should look to see the contrivers of greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the money-market in one troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand. No doubt wickedness hath its rewards to distribute; but who so wins in this devil's game must needs be baser, more cruel, more brutal than the order of this planet will allow for the multitude born of woman, the most of these carrying a form of conscience--a fear which is the shadow of justice, a pity which is the shadow of love--that hindereth from the prize of serene wickedness, itself difficult of maintenance in our composite flesh. On the twenty-ninth of December Deronda knew that the Grandcourts had arrived at the Abbey, but he had had no glimpse of them before he went to dress for dinner. There had been a splendid fall of snow, allowing the party of children the rare pleasures of snow-balling and snow-building, and in the Christmas holidays the Mallinger girls were content with no amusement unless it were joined in and managed by "cousin," as they had always called Deronda. After that outdoor exertion he had been playing billiards, and thus the hours had passed without his dwelling at all on the prospect of meeting Gwendolen at dinner. Nevertheless that prospect was interesting to him; and when, a little tired and heated with working at amusement, he went to his room before the half-hour bell had rung, he began to think of it with some speculation on the sort of influence her marriage with Grandcourt would have on her, and on the probability that there would be some discernible shades of change in her manner since he saw her at Diplow, just as there had been since his first vision of her at Leubronn. "I fancy there are some natures one could see growing or degenerating every day, if one watched them," was his thought. "I suppose some of us go on faster than others: and I am sure she is a creature who keeps strong traces of anything that has once impressed her. That little affair of the necklace, and the idea that somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evidently bitten into her. But such impressibility leads both ways: it may drive one to desperation as soon as to anything better. And whatever fascinations Grandcourt may have for capricious tastes--good heavens! who can believe that he would call out the tender affections in daily companionship? One might be tempted to horsewhip him for the sake of getting some show of passion into his face and speech. I'm afraid she married him out of ambition--to escape poverty. But why did she run out of his way at first? The poverty came after, though. Poor thing! she may have been urged into it. How can one feel anything else than pity for a young creature like that--full of unused life--ignorantly rash--hanging all her blind expectations on that remnant of a human being." Doubtless the phrases which Deronda's meditation applied to the bridegroom were the less complimentary for the excuses and pity in which it clad the bride. His notion of Grandcourt as a "remnant" was founded on no particular knowledge, but simply on the impression which ordinary polite intercourse had given him that Grandcourt had worn out all his natural healthy interest in things. In general, one may be sure that whenever a marriage of any mark takes place, male acquaintances are likely to pity the bride, female acquaintances the bridegroom: each, it is thought, might have done better; and especially where the bride is charming, young gentlemen on the scene are apt to conclude that she can have no real attachment to a fellow so uninteresting to themselves as her husband, but has married him on other grounds. Who, under such circumstances, pities the husband? Even his female friends are apt to think his position retributive: he should have chosen some one else. But perhaps Deronda may be excused that he did not prepare any pity for Grandcourt, who had never struck acquaintances as likely to come out of his experiences with more suffering than he inflicted; whereas, for Gwendolen, young, headlong, eager for pleasure, fed with the flattery which makes a lovely girl believe in her divine right to rule--how quickly might life turn from expectancy to a bitter sense of the irremediable! After what he had seen of her he must have had rather dull feelings not to have looked forward with some interest to her entrance into the room. Still, since the honeymoon was already three weeks in the distance, and Gwendolen had been enthroned, not only at Ryelands, but at Diplow, she was likely to have composed her countenance with suitable manifestation or concealment, not being one who would indulge the curious by a helpless exposure of her feelings. A various party had been invited to meet the new couple; the old aristocracy was represented by Lord and Lady Pentreath; the old gentry by young Mr. and Mrs. Fitzadam of the Worcestershire branch of the Fitzadams; politics and the public good, as specialized in the cider interest, by Mr. Fenn, member for West Orchards, accompanied by his two daughters; Lady Mallinger's family, by her brother, Mr. Raymond, and his wife; the useful bachelor element by Mr. Sinker, the eminent counsel, and by Mr. Vandernoodt, whose acquaintance Sir Hugo had found pleasant enough at Leubronn to be adopted in England. All had assembled in the drawing-room before the new couple appeared. Meanwhile, the time was being passed chiefly in noticing the children--various little Raymonds, nephews and nieces of Lady Mallinger's with her own three girls, who were always allowed to appear at this hour. The scene was really delightful--enlarged by full-length portraits with deep backgrounds, inserted in the cedar paneling--surmounted by a ceiling that glowed with the rich colors of the coats of arms ranged between the sockets--illuminated almost as much by the red fire of oak-boughs as by the pale wax-lights--stilled by the deep-piled carpet and by the high English breeding that subdues all voices; while the mixture of ages, from the white-haired Lord and Lady Pentreath to the four-year-old Edgar Raymond, gave a varied charm to the living groups. Lady Mallinger, with fair matronly roundness and mildly prominent blue eyes, moved about in her black velvet, carrying a tiny white dog on her arm as a sort of finish to her costume; the children were scattered among the ladies, while most of the gentlemen were standing rather aloof, conversing with that very moderate vivacity observable during the long minutes before dinner. Deronda was a little out of the circle in a dialogue fixed upon him by Mr. Vandernoodt, a man of the best Dutch blood imported at the revolution: for the rest, one of those commodious persons in society who are nothing particular themselves, but are understood to be acquainted with the best in every department; close-clipped, pale-eyed, _nonchalant_, as good a foil as could well be found to the intense coloring and vivid gravity of Deronda. He was talking of the bride and bridegroom, whose appearance was being waited for. Mr. Vandernoodt was an industrious gleaner of personal details, and could probably tell everything about a great philosopher or physicist except his theories or discoveries; he was now implying that he had learned many facts about Grandcourt since meeting him at Leubronn. "Men who have seen a good deal of life don't always end by choosing their wives so well. He has had rather an anecdotic history--gone rather deep into pleasures, I fancy, lazy as he is. But, of course, you know all about him." "No, really," said Deronda, in an indifferent tone. "I know little more of him than that he is Sir Hugo's nephew." But now the door opened and deferred any satisfaction of Mr. Vandernoodt's communicativeness. The scene was one to set off any figure of distinction that entered on it, and certainly when Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered, no beholder could deny that their figures had distinction. The bridegroom had neither more nor less easy perfection of costume, neither more nor less well-cut impassibility of face, than before his marriage. It was to be supposed of him that he would put up with nothing less than the best in outward equipment, wife included; and the bride was what he might have been expected to choose. "By George, I think she's handsomer, if anything!" said Mr. Vandernoodt. And Deronda was of the same opinion, but he said nothing. The white silk and diamonds--it may seem strange, but she did wear diamonds on her neck, in her ears, in her hair--might have something to do with the new imposingness of her beauty, which flashed on him as more unquestionable if not more thoroughly satisfactory than when he had first seen her at the gaming-table. Some faces which are peculiar in their beauty are like original works of art: for the first time they are almost always met with question. But in seeing Gwendolen at Diplow, Deronda had discerned in her more than he had expected of that tender appealing charm which we call womanly. Was there any new change since then? He distrusted his impressions; but as he saw her receiving greetings with what seemed a proud cold quietude and a superficial smile, there seemed to be at work within her the same demonic force that had possessed her when she took him in her resolute glance and turned away a loser from the gaming-table. There was no time for more of a conclusion--no time even for him to give his greeting before the summons to dinner. He sat not far from opposite to her at table, and could sometimes hear what she said in answer to Sir Hugo, who was at his liveliest in conversation with her; but though he looked toward her with the intention of bowing, she gave him no opportunity of doing so for some time. At last Sir Hugo, who might have imagined that they had already spoken to each other, said, "Deronda, you will like to hear what Mrs. Grandcourt tells me about your favorite Klesmer." Gwendolen's eyelids had been lowered, and Deronda, already looking at her, thought he discovered a quivering reluctance as she was obliged to raise them and return his unembarrassed bow and smile, her own smile being one of the lip merely. It was but an instant, and Sir Hugo continued without pause, "The Arrowpoints have condoned the marriage, and he is spending the Christmas with his bride at Quetcham." "I suppose he will be glad of it for the sake of his wife, else I dare say he would not have minded keeping at a distance," said Deronda. "It's a sort of troubadour story," said Lady Pentreath, an easy, deep-voiced old lady; "I'm glad to find a little romance left among us. I think our young people now are getting too worldly wise." "It shows the Arrowpoints' good sense, however, to have adopted the affair, after the fuss in the paper," said Sir Hugo. "And disowning your own child because of a _msalliance_ is something like disowning your one eye: everybody knows it's yours, and you have no other to make an appearance with." "As to _msalliance_, there's no blood on any side," said Lady Pentreath. "Old Admiral Arrowpoint was one of Nelson's men, you know--a doctor's son. And we all know how the mother's money came." "If they were any _msalliance_ in the case, I should say it was on Klesmer's side," said Deronda. "Ah, you think it is a case of the immortal marrying the mortal. What is your opinion?" said Sir Hugo, looking at Gwendolen. "I have no doubt that Herr Klesmer thinks himself immortal. But I dare say his wife will burn as much incense before him as he requires," said Gwendolen. She had recovered any composure that she might have lost. "Don't you approve of a wife burning incense before her husband?" said Sir Hugo, with an air of jocoseness. "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, "if it were only to make others believe in him." She paused a moment and then said with more gayety, "When Herr Klesmer admires his own genius, it will take off some of the absurdity if his wife says Amen." "Klesmer is no favorite of yours, I see," said Sir Hugo. "I think very highly of him, I assure you," said Gwendolen. "His genius is quite above my judgment, and I know him to be exceedingly generous." She spoke with the sudden seriousness which is often meant to correct an unfair or indiscreet sally, having a bitterness against Klesmer in her secret soul which she knew herself unable to justify. Deronda was wondering what he should have thought of her if he had never heard of her before: probably that she put on a little hardness and defiance by way of concealing some painful consciousness--if, indeed, he could imagine her manners otherwise than in the light of his suspicion. But why did she not recognize him with more friendliness? Sir Hugo, by way of changing the subject, said to her, "Is not this a beautiful room? It was part of the refectory of the Abbey. There was a division made by those pillars and the three arches, and afterward they were built up. Else it was half as large again originally. There used to be rows of Benedictines sitting where we are sitting. Suppose we were suddenly to see the lights burning low and the ghosts of the old monks rising behind all our chairs!" "Please don't!" said Gwendolen, with a playful shudder. "It is very nice to come after ancestors and monks, but they should know their places and keep underground. I should be rather frightened to go about this house all alone. I suppose the old generations must be angry with us because we have altered things so much." "Oh, the ghosts must be of all political parties," said Sir Hugo. "And those fellows who wanted to change things while they lived and couldn't do it must be on our side. But if you would not like to go over the house alone, you will like to go in company, I hope. You and Grandcourt ought to see it all. And we will ask Deronda to go round with us. He is more learned about it than I am." The baronet was in the most complaisant of humors. Gwendolen stole a glance at Deronda, who must have heard what Sir Hugo said, for he had his face turned toward them helping himself to an _entre_; but he looked as impassive as a picture. At the notion of Deronda's showing her and Grandcourt the place which was to be theirs, and which she with painful emphasis remembered might have been his (perhaps, if others had acted differently), certain thoughts had rushed in--thoughts repeated within her, but now returning on an occasion embarrassingly new; and was conscious of something furtive and awkward in her glance which Sir Hugo must have noticed. With her usual readiness of resource against betrayal, she said, playfully, "You don't know how much I am afraid of Mr. Deronda." "How's that? Because you think him too learned?" said Sir Hugo, whom the peculiarity of her glance had not escaped. "No. It is ever since I first saw him at Leubronn. Because when he came to look on at the roulette-table, I began to lose. He cast an evil eye on my play. He didn't approve it. He has told me so. And now whatever I do before him, I am afraid he will cast an evil eye upon it." "Gad! I'm rather afraid of him myself when he doesn't approve," said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda; and then turning his face toward Gwendolen, he said less audibly, "I don't think ladies generally object to have his eyes upon them." The baronet's small chronic complaint of facetiousness was at this moment almost as annoying to Gwendolen as it often was to Deronda. "I object to any eyes that are critical," she said, in a cool, high voice, with a turn of her neck. "Are there many of these old rooms left in the Abbey?" "Not many. There is a fine cloistered court with a long gallery above it. But the finest bit of all is turned into stables. It is part of the old church. When I improved the place I made the most of every other bit; but it was out of my reach to change the stables, so the horses have the benefit of the fine old choir. You must go and see it." "I shall like to see the horses as well as the building," said Gwendolen. "Oh, I have no stud to speak of. Grandcourt will look with contempt at my horses," said Sir Hugo. "I've given up hunting, and go on in a jog-trot way, as becomes an old gentlemen with daughters. The fact is, I went in for doing too much at this place. We all lived at Diplow for two years while the alterations were going on: Do you like Diplow?" "Not particularly," said Gwendolen, with indifference. One would have thought that the young lady had all her life had more family seats than she cared to go to. "Ah! it will not do after Ryelands," said Sir Hugo, well pleased. "Grandcourt, I know, took it for the sake of the hunting. But he found something so much better there," added the baronet, lowering his voice, "that he might well prefer it to any other place in the world." "It has one attraction for me," said Gwendolen, passing over this compliment with a chill smile, "that it is within reach of Offendene." "I understand that," said Sir Hugo, and then let the subject drop. What amiable baronet can escape the effect of a strong desire for a particular possession? Sir Hugo would have been glad that Grandcourt, with or without reason, should prefer any other place to Diplow; but inasmuch as in the pure process of wishing we can always make the conditions of our gratification benevolent, he did wish that Grandcourt's convenient disgust for Diplow should not be associated with his marriage with this very charming bride. Gwendolen was much to the baronet's taste, but, as he observed afterward to Lady Mallinger, he should never have taken her for a young girl who had married beyond her expectations. Deronda had not heard much of this conversation, having given his attention elsewhere, but the glimpses he had of Gwendolen's manner deepened the impression that it had something newly artificial. Later, in the drawing-room, Deronda, at somebody's request, sat down to the piano and sang. Afterward, Mrs. Raymond took his place; and on rising he observed that Gwendolen had left her seat, and had come to this end of the room, as if to listen more fully, but was now standing with her back to every one, apparently contemplating a fine cowled head carved in ivory which hung over a small table. He longed to go to her and speak. Why should he not obey such an impulse, as he would have done toward any other lady in the room? Yet he hesitated some moments, observing the graceful lines of her back, but not moving. If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair woman, it is a bad plan to look long at her back: the wish to see what it screens becomes the stronger. There may be a very sweet smile on the other side. Deronda ended by going to the end of the small table, at right angles to Gwendolen's position, but before he could speak she had turned on him no smile, but such an appealing look of sadness, so utterly different from the chill effort of her recognition at table, that his speech was checked. For what was an appreciative space of time to both, though the observation of others could not have measured it, they looked at each other--she seeming to take the deep rest of confession, he with an answering depth of sympathy that neutralized all other feelings. "Will you not join in the music?" he said, by way of meeting the necessity for speech. That her look of confession had been involuntary was shown by that just perceptible shake and change of countenance with which she roused herself to reply calmly, "I join in it by listening. I am fond of music." "Are you not a musician?" "I have given a great deal of time to music. But I have not talent enough to make it worth while. I shall never sing again." "But if you are fond of music, it will always be worth while in private, for your own delight. I make it a virtue to be content with my middlingness," said Deronda, smiling; "it is always pardonable, so that one does not ask others to take it for superiority." "I cannot imitate you," said Gwendolen, recovering her tone of artificial vivacity. "To be middling with me is another phrase for being dull. And the worst fault I have to find with the world is that it is dull. Do you know, I am going to justify gambling in spite of you. It is a refuge from dullness." "I don't admit the justification," said Deronda. "I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how can any one find an intense interest in life? And many do." "Ah, I see! The fault I find in the world is my own fault," said Gwendolen, smiling at him. Then after a moment, looking up at the ivory again, she said, "Do _you_ never find fault with the world or with others?" "Oh, yes. When I am in a grumbling mood." "And hate people? Confess you hate them when they stand in your way--when their gain is your loss? That is your own phrase, you know." "We are often standing in each other's way when we can't help it. I think it is stupid to hate people on that ground." "But if they injure you and could have helped it?" said Gwendolen with a hard intensity unaccountable in incidental talk like this. Deronda wondered at her choice of subjects. A painful impression arrested his answer a moment, but at last he said, with a graver, deeper intonation, "Why, then, after all, I prefer my place to theirs." "There I believe you are right," said Gwendolen, with a sudden little laugh, and turned to join the group at the piano. Deronda looked around for Grandcourt, wondering whether he followed his bride's movements with any attention; but it was rather undiscerning to him to suppose that he could find out the fact. Grandcourt had a delusive mood of observing whatever had an interest for him, which could be surpassed by no sleepy-eyed animal on the watch for prey. At that moment he was plunged in the depth of an easy chair, being talked to by Mr. Vandernoodt, who apparently thought the acquaintance of such a bridegroom worth cultivating; and an incautious person might have supposed it safe to telegraph secrets in front of him, the common prejudice being that your quick observer is one whose eyes have quick movements. Not at all. If you want a respectable witness who will see nothing inconvenient, choose a vivacious gentleman, very much on the alert, with two eyes wide open, a glass in one of them, and an entire impartiality as to the purpose of looking. If Grandcourt cared to keep any one under his power he saw them out of the corners of his long narrow eyes, and if they went behind him he had a constructive process by which he knew what they were doing there. He knew perfectly well where his wife was, and how she was behaving. Was he going to be a jealous husband? Deronda imagined that to be likely; but his imagination was as much astray about Grandcourt as it would have been about an unexplored continent where all the species were peculiar. He did not conceive that he himself was a likely subject of jealousy, or that he should give any pretext for it; but the suspicion that a wife is not happy naturally leads one to speculate on the husband's private deportment; and Deronda found himself after one o'clock in the morning in the rather ludicrous position of sitting up severely holding a Hebrew grammar in his hands (for somehow, in deference to Mordecai, he had begun to study Hebrew), with the consciousness that he had been in that attitude nearly an hour, and had thought of nothing but Gwendolen and her husband. To be an unusual young man means for the most part to get a difficult mastery over the usual, which is often like the sprite of ill-luck you pack up your goods to escape from, and see grinning at you from the top of your luggage van. The peculiarities of Deronda's nature had been acutely touched by the brief incident and words which made the history of his intercourse with Gwendolen; and this evening's slight addition had given them an importunate recurrence. It was not vanity--it was ready sympathy that had made him alive to a certain appealingness in her behavior toward him; and the difficulty with which she had seemed to raise her eyes to bow to him, in the first instance, was to be interpreted now by that unmistakable look of involuntary confidence which she had afterward turned on him under the consciousness of his approach. "What is the use of it all?" thought Deronda, as he threw down his grammar, and began to undress. "I can't do anything to help her--nobody can, if she has found out her mistake already. And it seems to me that she has a dreary lack of the ideas that might help her. Strange and piteous to think what a center of wretchedness a delicate piece of human flesh like that might be, wrapped round with fine raiment, her ears pierced for gems, her head held loftily, her mouth all smiling pretense, the poor soul within her sitting in sick distaste of all things! But what do I know of her? There may be a demon in her to match the worst husband, for what I can tell. She was clearly an ill-educated, worldly girl: perhaps she is a coquette." This last reflection, not much believed in, was a self-administered dose of caution, prompted partly by Sir Hugo's much-contemned joking on the subject of flirtation. Deronda resolved not to volunteer any _tete--tete_ with Gwendolen during the days of her stay at the Abbey; and he was capable of keeping a resolve in spite of much inclination to the contrary. But a man cannot resolve about a woman's actions, least of all about those of a woman like Gwendolen, in whose nature there was a combination of proud reserve with rashness, of perilously poised terror with defiance, which might alternately flatter and disappoint control. Few words could less represent her than "coquette." She had native love of homage, and belief in her own power; but no cold artifice for the sake of enslaving. And the poor thing's belief in her power, with her other dreams before marriage, had often to be thrust aside now like the toys of a sick child, which it looks at with dull eyes, and has no heart to play with, however it may try. The next day at lunch Sir Hugo said to her, "The thaw has gone on like magic, and it's so pleasant out of doors just now--shall we go and see the stables and the other odd bits about the place?" "Yes, pray," said Gwendolen. "You will like to see the stables, Henleigh?" she added, looking at her husband. "Uncommonly," said Grandcourt, with an indifference which seemed to give irony to the word, as he returned her look. It was the first time Deronda had seen them speak to each other since their arrival, and he thought their exchange of looks as cold or official as if it had been a ceremony to keep up a charter. Still, the English fondness for reserve will account for much negation; and Grandcourt's manners with an extra veil of reserve over them might be expected to present the extreme type of the national taste. "Who else is inclined to make the tour of the house and premises?" said Sir Hugo. "The ladies must muffle themselves; there is only just about time to do it well before sunset. You will go, Dan, won't you?" "Oh, yes," said Deronda, carelessly, knowing that Sir Hugo would think any excuse disobliging. "All meet in the library, then, when they are ready--say in half an hour," said the baronet. Gwendolen made herself ready with wonderful quickness, and in ten minutes came down into the library in her sables, plume, and little thick boots. As soon as she entered the room she was aware that some one else was there: it was precisely what she had hoped for. Deronda was standing with his back toward her at the far end of the room, and was looking over a newspaper. How could little thick boots make any noise on an Axminster carpet? And to cough would have seemed an intended signaling which her pride could not condescend to; also, she felt bashful about walking up to him and letting him know that she was there, though it was her hunger to speak to him which had set her imagination on constructing this chance of finding him, and had made her hurry down, as birds hover near the water which they dare not drink. Always uneasily dubious about his opinion of her, she felt a peculiar anxiety to-day, lest he might think of her with contempt, as one triumphantly conscious of being Grandcourt's wife, the future lady of this domain. It was her habitual effort now to magnify the satisfactions of her pride, on which she nourished her strength; but somehow Deronda's being there disturbed them all. There was not the faintest touch of coquetry in the attitude of her mind toward him: he was unique to her among men, because he had impressed her as being not her admirer but her superior: in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience, as one woman whose nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man. And now he would not look round and find out that she was there! The paper crackled in his hand, his head rose and sank, exploring those stupid columns, and he was evidently stroking his beard; as if this world were a very easy affair to her. Of course all the rest of the company would soon be down, and the opportunity of her saying something to efface her flippancy of the evening before, would be quite gone. She felt sick with irritation--so fast do young creatures like her absorb misery through invisible suckers of their own fancies--and her face had gathered that peculiar expression which comes with a mortification to which tears are forbidden. At last he threw down the paper and turned round. "Oh, you are there already," he said, coming forward a step or two: "I must go and put on my coat." He turned aside and walked out of the room. This was behaving quite badly. Mere politeness would have made him stay to exchange some words before leaving her alone. It was true that Grandcourt came in with Sir Hugo immediately after, so that the words must have been too few to be worth anything. As it was, they saw him walking from the library door. "A--you look rather ill," said Grandcourt, going straight up to her, standing in front of her, and looking into her eyes. "Do you feel equal to the walk?" "Yes, I shall like it," said Gwendolen, without the slightest movement except this of the lips. "We could put off going over the house, you know, and only go out of doors," said Sir Hugo, kindly, while Grandcourt turned aside. "Oh, dear no!" said Gwendolen, speaking with determination; "let us put off nothing. I want a long walk." The rest of the walking party--two ladies and two gentlemen besides Deronda--had now assembled; and Gwendolen rallying, went with due cheerfulness by the side of Sir Hugo, paying apparently an equal attention to the commentaries Deronda was called upon to give on the various architectural fragments, to Sir Hugo's reasons for not attempting to remedy the mixture of the undisguised modern with the antique--which in his opinion only made the place the more truly historical. On their way to the buttery and kitchen they took the outside of the house and paused before a beautiful pointed doorway, which was the only old remnant in the east front. "Well, now, to my mind," said Sir Hugo, "that is more interesting standing as it is in the middle of what is frankly four centuries later, than if the whole front had been dressed up in a pretense of the thirteenth century. Additions ought to smack of the time when they are made and carry the stamp of their period. I wouldn't destroy any old bits, but that notion of reproducing the old is a mistake, I think. At least, if a man likes to do it he must pay for his whistle. Besides, where are you to stop along that road--making loopholes where you don't want to peep, and so on? You may as well ask me to wear out the stones with kneeling; eh, Grandcourt?" "A confounded nuisance," drawled Grandcourt. "I hate fellows wanting to howl litanies--acting the greatest bores that have ever existed." "Well, yes, that's what their romanticism must come to," said Sir Hugo, in a tone of confidential assent--"that is if they carry it out logically." "I think that way of arguing against a course because it may be ridden down to an absurdity would soon bring life to a standstill," said Deronda. "It is not the logic of human action, but of a roasting-jack, that must go on to the last turn when it has been once wound up. We can do nothing safely without some judgment as to where we are to stop." "I find the rule of the pocket the best guide," said Sir Hugo, laughingly. "And as for most of your new-old building, you had need to hire men to scratch and chip it all over artistically to give it an elderly-looking surface; which at the present rate of labor would not answer." "Do you want to keep up the old fashions, then, Mr. Deronda?" said Gwendolen, taking advantage of the freedom of grouping to fall back a little, while Sir Hugo and Grandcourt went on. "Some of them. I don't see why we should not use our choice there as we do elsewhere--or why either age or novelty by itself is an argument for or against. To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is good if it shuts out nothing better; it enlarges the range of affection--and affection is the broadest basis of good in life." "Do you think so?" said Gwendolen with a little surprise. "I should have thought you cared most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and all that." "But to care about _them_ is a sort of affection," said Deronda, smiling at her sudden _navet_. "Call it attachment; interest, willing to bear a great deal for the sake of being with them and saving them from injury. Of course, it makes a difference if the objects of interest are human beings; but generally in all deep affections the objects are a mixture--half persons and half ideas--sentiments and affections flow in together." "I wonder whether I understand that," said Gwendolen, putting up her chin in her old saucy manner. "I believe I am not very affectionate; perhaps you mean to tell me, that is the reason why I don't see much good in life." "No, I did _not_ mean to tell you that; but I admit that I should think it true if I believed what you say of yourself," said Deronda, gravely. Here Sir Hugo and Grandcourt turned round and paused. "I never can get Mr. Deronda to pay me a compliment," said Gwendolen. "I have quite a curiosity to see whether a little flattery can be extracted from him." "Ah!" said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda, "the fact is, it is useless to flatter a bride. We give it up in despair. She has been so fed on sweet speeches that every thing we say seems tasteless." "Quite true," said Gwendolen, bending her head and smiling. "Mr. Grandcourt won me by neatly-turned compliments. If there had been one word out of place it would have been fatal." "Do you hear that?" said Sir Hugo, looking at the husband. "Yes," said Grandcourt, without change of countenance. "It's a deucedly hard thing to keep up, though." All this seemed to Sir Hugo a natural playfulness between such a husband and wife; but Deronda wondered at the misleading alternations in Gwendolen's manner, which at one moment seemed to excite sympathy by childlike indiscretion, at another to repel it by proud concealment. He tried to keep out of her way by devoting himself to Miss Juliet Fenn, a young lady whose profile had been so unfavorably decided by circumstances over which she had no control, that Gwendolen some months ago had felt it impossible to be jealous of her. Nevertheless, when they were seeing the kitchen--a part of the original building in perfect preservation--the depth of shadow in the niches of the stone-walls and groined vault, the play of light from the huge glowing fire on polished tin, brass, and copper, the fine resonance that came with every sound of voice or metal, were all spoiled for Gwendolen, and Sir Hugo's speech about them was made rather importunate, because Deronda was discoursing to the other ladies and kept at a distance from her. It did not signify that the other gentlemen took the opportunity of being near her: of what use in the world was their admiration while she had an uneasy sense that there was some standard in Deronda's mind which measured her into littleness? Mr. Vandernoodt, who had the mania of always describing one thing while you were looking at another, was quite intolerable with his insistence on Lord Blough's kitchen, which he had seen in the north. "Pray don't ask us to see two kitchens at once. It makes the heat double. I must really go out of it," she cried at last, marching resolutely into the open air, and leaving the others in the rear. Grandcourt was already out, and as she joined him, he said, "I wondered how long you meant to stay in that damned place"--one of the freedoms he had assumed as a husband being the use of his strongest epithets. Gwendolen, turning to see the rest of the party approach, said, "It was certainly rather too warm in one's wraps." They walked on the gravel across a green court, where the snow still lay in islets on the grass, and in masses on the boughs of the great cedar and the crenelated coping of the stone walls, and then into a larger court, where there was another cedar, to find the beautiful choir long ago turned into stables, in the first instance perhaps after an impromptu fashion by troopers, who had a pious satisfaction in insulting the priests of Baal and the images of Ashtoreth, the queen of heaven. The exterior--its west end, save for the stable door, walled in with brick and covered with ivy--was much defaced, maimed of finial and gargoyle, the friable limestone broken and fretted, and lending its soft gray to a powdery dark lichen; the long windows, too, were filled in with brick as far as the springing of the arches, the broad clerestory windows with wire or ventilating blinds. With the low wintry afternoon sun upon it, sending shadows from the cedar boughs, and lighting up the touches of snow remaining on every ledge, it had still a scarcely disturbed aspect of antique solemnity, which gave the scene in the interior rather a startling effect; though, ecclesiastical or reverential indignation apart, the eyes could hardly help dwelling with pleasure on its piquant picturesqueness. Each finely-arched chapel was turned into a stall, where in the dusty glazing of the windows there still gleamed patches of crimson, orange, blue, and palest violet; for the rest, the choir had been gutted, the floor leveled, paved, and drained according to the most approved fashion, and a line of loose boxes erected in the middle: a soft light fell from the upper windows on sleek brown or gray flanks and haunches; on mild equine faces looking out with active nostrils over the varnished brown boarding; on the hay hanging from racks where the saints once looked down from the altar-pieces, and on the pale golden straw scattered or in heaps; on a little white-and-liver-colored spaniel making his bed on the back of an elderly hackney, and on four ancient angels, still showing signs of devotion like mutilated martyrs--while over all, the grand pointed roof, untouched by reforming wash, showed its lines and colors mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder, while outside there was the answering bay of the blood-hounds. "Oh, this is glorious!" Gwendolen burst forth, in forgetfulness of everything but the immediate impression: there had been a little intoxication for her in the grand spaces of courts and building, and the fact of her being an important person among them. "This _is_ glorious! Only I wish there were a horse in every one of the boxes. I would ten times rather have these stables than those at Diplow." But she had no sooner said this than some consciousness arrested her, and involuntarily she turned her eyes toward Deronda, who oddly enough had taken off his felt hat and stood holding it before him as if they had entered a room or an actual church. He, like others, happened to be looking at her, and their eyes met--to her intense vexation, for it seemed to her that by looking at him she had betrayed the reference of her thoughts, and she felt herself blushing: she exaggerated the impression that even Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of her bad taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey: as for Deronda, she had probably made him despise her. Her annoyance at what she imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed her of her usual facility in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her face to look at the roof, she wheeled away in that attitude. If any had noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not interpreted it by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her feeling; but while he was observing her he was himself under observation. "Do you take off your hat to horses?" said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer. "Why not?" said Deronda, covering himself. He had really taken off the hat automatically, and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless have done so with impunity; ugliness having naturally the air of involuntary exposure, and beauty, of display. Gwendolen's confusion was soon merged in the survey of the horses, which Grandcourt politely abstained from appraising, languidly assenting to Sir Hugo's alternate depreciation and eulogy of the same animal, as one that he should not have bought when he was younger, and piqued himself on his horses, but yet one that had better qualities than many more expensive brutes. "The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper into the pocket nowadays, and I am very glad to have got rid of that _dmangeaison_," said Sir Hugo, as they were coming out. "What is a man to do, though?" said Grandcourt. "He must ride. I don't see what else there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit astride a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun." This delicate diplomatic way of characterizing Sir Hugo's stud did not require direct notice; and the baronet, feeling that the conversation had worn rather thin, said to the party generally, "Now we are going to see the cloister--the finest bit of all--in perfect preservation; the monks might have been walking there yesterday." But Gwendolen had lingered behind to look at the kenneled blood-hounds, perhaps because she felt a little dispirited; and Grandcourt waited for her. "You had better take my arm," he said, in his low tone of command; and she took it. "It's a great bore being dragged about in this way, and no cigar," said Grandcourt. "I thought you would like it." "Like it!--one eternal chatter. And encouraging those ugly girls--inviting one to meet such monsters. How that _fat_ Deronda can bear looking at her----" "Why do you call him a _fat_? Do you object to him so much?" "Object? no. What do I care about his being a _fat_? It's of no consequence to me. I'll invite him to Diplow again if you like." "I don't think he would come. He is too clever and learned to care about _us_," said Gwendolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be told (privately) that it was possible for him to be looked down upon. "I never saw that make much difference in a man. Either he is a gentleman, or he is not," said Grandcourt. That a new husband and wife should snatch a moment's _tete--tete_ was what could be understood and indulged; and the rest of the party left them in the rear till, re-entering the garden, they all paused in that cloistered court where, among the falling rose-petals thirteen years before, we saw a boy becoming acquainted with his first sorrow. This cloister was built of a harder stone than the church, and had been in greater safety from the wearing weather. It was a rare example of a northern cloister with arched and pillared openings not intended for glazing, and the delicately-wrought foliage of the capitals seemed still to carry the very touches of the chisel. Gwendolen had dropped her husband's arm and joined the other ladies, to whom Deronda was noticing the delicate sense which had combined freedom with accuracy in the imitation of natural forms. "I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representations through the real objects," he said, after pointing out a lovely capital made by the curled leaves of greens, showing their reticulated under-side with the firm gradual swell of its central rib. "When I was a little fellow these capitals taught me to observe and delight in the structure of leaves." "I suppose you can see every line of them with your eyes shut," said Juliet Fenn. "Yes. I was always repeating them, because for a good many years this court stood for me as my only image of a convent, and whenever I read of monks and monasteries, this was my scenery for them." "You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn, innocently, not thinking of inheritance. "So many homes are like twenty others. But this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well." "Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda, quietly, being used to all possible thoughts of this kind. "To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years, and I'm not sure but they have the best of it. The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side." Gwendolen felt sure that he spoke in that way out of delicacy to her and Grandcourt--because he knew they must hear him; and that he probably thought of her as a selfish creature who only cared about possessing things in her own person. But whatever he might say, it must have been a secret hardship to him that any circumstances of his birth had shut him out from the inheritance of his father's position; and if he supposed that she exulted in her husband's taking it, what could he feel for her but scornful pity? Indeed it seemed clear to her that he was avoiding her, and preferred talking to others--which nevertheless was not kind in him. With these thoughts in her mind she was prevented by a mixture of pride and timidity from addressing him again, and when they were looking at the rows of quaint portraits in the gallery above the cloisters, she kept up her air of interest and made her vivacious remarks without any direct appeal to Deronda. But at the end she was very weary of her assumed spirits, and as Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, she went to the pretty boudoir which had been assigned to her, and shut herself up to look melancholy at her ease. No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another. Changes in theory, religion, admirations, may begin with a suspicion of dissent or disapproval, even when the grounds of disapproval are but matter of searching conjecture. Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process--all the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures perturbed, but still showing wholeness and strength in the will to reassert itself. After every new shock of humiliation she tried to adjust herself and seize her old supports--proud concealment, trust in new excitements that would make life go by without much thinking; trust in some deed of reparation to nullify her self-blame and shield her from a vague, ever-visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust in the hardening effect of use and wont that would make her indifferent to her miseries. Yes--miseries. This beautiful, healthy young creature, with her two-and-twenty years and her gratified ambition, no longer felt inclined to kiss her fortunate image in the glass. She looked at it with wonder that she could be so miserable. One belief which had accompanied her through her unmarried life as a self-cajoling superstition, encouraged by the subordination of every one about her--the belief in her own power of dominating--was utterly gone. Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband had gained a mastery which she could no more resist than she could have resisted the benumbing effect from the touch of a torpedo. Gwendolen's will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway; but it was the will of a creature with a large discourse of imaginative fears: a shadow would have been enough to relax its hold. And she had found a will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor, which goes on pinching or crushing without alarm at thunder. Not that Grandcourt was without calculation of the intangible effects which were the chief means of mastery; indeed, he had a surprising acuteness in detecting that situation of feeling in Gwendolen which made her proud and rebellious spirit dumb and helpless before him. She had burned Lydia Glasher's letter with an instantaneous terror lest other eyes should see it, and had tenaciously concealed from Grandcourt that there was any other cause of her violent hysterics than the excitement and fatigue of the day: she had been urged into an implied falsehood. "Don't ask me--it was my feeling about everything--it was the sudden change from home." The words of that letter kept repeating themselves, and hung on her consciousness with the weight of a prophetic doom. "I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried as well as mine. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul. Will you give him this letter to set him against me and ruin us more--me and my children? Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse." The words had nestled their venomous life within her, and stirred continually the vision of the scene at the Whispering Stones. That scene was now like an accusing apparition: she dreaded that Grandcourt should know of it--so far out of her sight now was that possibility she had once satisfied herself with, of speaking to him about Mrs. Glasher and her children, and making them rich amends. Any endurance seemed easier than the mortal humiliation of confessing that she knew all before she married him, and in marrying him had broken her word. For the reasons by which she had justified herself when the marriage tempted her, and all her easy arrangement of her future power over her husband to make him do better than he might be inclined to do, were now as futile as the burned-out lights which set off a child's pageant. Her sense of being blameworthy was exaggerated by a dread both definite and vague. The definite dread was lest the veil of secrecy should fall between her and Grandcourt, and give him the right to taunt her. With the reading of that letter had begun her husband's empire of fear. And her husband all the while knew it. He had not, indeed, any distinct knowledge of her broken promise, and would not have rated highly the effect of that breach on her conscience; but he was aware not only of what Lush had told him about the meeting at the Whispering Stones, but also of Gwendolen's concealment as to the cause of her sudden illness. He felt sure that Lydia had enclosed something with the diamonds, and that this something, whatever it was, had at once created in Gwendolen a new repulsion for him and a reason for not daring to manifest it. He did not greatly mind, or feel as many men might have felt, that his hopes in marriage were blighted: he had wanted to marry Gwendolen, and he was not a man to repent. Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life? What he chiefly felt was that a change had come over the conditions of his mastery, which, far from shaking it, might establish it the more thoroughly. And it was established. He judged that he had not married a simpleton unable to perceive the impossibility of escape, or to see alternative evils: he had married a girl who had spirit and pride enough not to make a fool of herself by forfeiting all the advantages of a position which had attracted her; and if she wanted pregnant hints to help her in making up her mind properly he would take care not to withhold them. Gwendolen, indeed, with all that gnawing trouble in her consciousness, had hardly for a moment dropped the sense that it was her part to bear herself with dignity, and appear what is called happy. In disclosure of disappointment or sorrow she saw nothing but a humiliation which would have been vinegar to her wounds. Whatever her husband might have come at last to be to her, she meant to wear the yoke so as not to be pitied. For she did think of the coming years with presentiment: she was frightened at Grandcourt. The poor thing had passed from her girlish sauciness of superiority over this inert specimen of personal distinction into an amazed perception of her former ignorance about the possible mental attitude of a man toward the woman he sought in marriage--of her present ignorance as to what their life with each other might turn into. For novelty gives immeasurableness to fear, and fills the early time of all sad changes with phantoms of the future. Her little coquetries, voluntary or involuntary, had told on Grandcourt during courtship, and formed a medium of communication between them, showing him in the light of a creature such as she could understand and manage: but marriage had nullified all such interchange, and Grandcourt had become a blank uncertainty to her in everything but this, that he would do just what he willed, and that she had neither devices at her command to determine his will, nor any rational means of escaping it. What had occurred between them and her wearing the diamonds was typical. One evening, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they were going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. Gwendolen had said to herself that she would never wear those diamonds: they had horrible words clinging and crawling about them, as from some bad dream, whose images lingered on the perturbed sense. She came down dressed in her white, with only a streak of gold and a pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had given her, round her neck, and the little emerald stars in her ears. Grandcourt stood with his back to the fire and looked at her as she entered. "Am I altogether as you like?" she said, speaking rather gaily. She was not without enjoyment in this occasion of going to Brackenshaw Castle with her new dignities upon her, as men whose affairs are sadly involved will enjoy dining out among persons likely to be under a pleasant mistake about them. "No," said Grandcourt. Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, wondering what was to come. She was not unprepared for some struggle about the diamonds; but suppose he were going to say, in low, contemptuous tones, "You are not in any way what I like." It was very bad for her to be secretly hating him; but it would be much worse when he gave the first sign of hating her. "Oh, mercy!" she exclaimed, the pause lasting till she could bear it no longer. "How am I to alter myself?" "Put on the diamonds," said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with his narrow glance. Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of showing any emotion, and feeling that nevertheless there was some change in her eyes as they met his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she could, "Oh, please not. I don't think diamonds suit me." "What you think has nothing to do with it," said Grandcourt, his _sotto voce_ imperiousness seeming to have an evening quietude and finish, like his toilet. "I wish you to wear the diamonds." "Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds," said Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingling with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point. "Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when I desire it," said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, and she felt her own eyes narrowing under them as if to shut out an entering pain. Of what use was the rebellion within her? She could say nothing that would not hurt her worse than submission. Turning slowly and covering herself again, she went to her dressing-room. As she reached out the diamonds, it occurred to her that her unwillingness to wear them might have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some knowledge about them which he had not given her. She fancied that his eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? She had nothing to say that would touch him--nothing but what would give him a more painful grasp on her consciousness. "He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his," she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shivering sensation. "It will come to be so with me; and I shall quail. What else is there for me? I will not say to the world, 'Pity me.'" She was about to ring for her maid when she heard the door open behind her. It was Grandcourt who came in. "You want some one to fasten them," he said, coming toward her. She did not answer, but simply stood still, leaving him to take out the ornaments and fasten them as he would. Doubtless he had been used to fasten them on some one else. With a bitter sort of sarcasm against herself, Gwendolen thought, "What a privilege this is, to have robbed another woman of!" "What makes you so cold?" said Grandcourt, when he had fastened the last ear-ring. "Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see a woman come into a room looking frozen. If you are to appear as a bride at all, appear decently." This marital speech was not exactly persuasive, but it touched the quick of Gwendolen's pride and forced her to rally. The words of the bad dream crawled about the diamonds still, but only for her: to others they were brilliants that suited her perfectly, and Grandcourt inwardly observed that she answered to the rein. "Oh, yes, mamma, quite happy," Gwendolen had said on her return to Diplow. "Not at all disappointed in Ryelands. It is a much finer place than this--larger in every way. But don't you want some more money?" "Did you not know that Mr. Grandcourt left me a letter on your wedding-day? I am to have eight hundred a year. He wishes me to keep Offendene for the present, while you are at Diplow. But if there were some pretty cottage near the park at Ryelands we might live there without much expense, and I should have you most of the year, perhaps." "We must leave that to Mr. Grandcourt, mamma." "Oh, certainly. It is exceedingly handsome of him to say that he will pay the rent for Offendene till June. And we can go on very well--without any man-servant except Crane, just for out-of-doors. Our good Merry will stay with us and help me to manage everything. It is natural that Mr. Grandcourt should wish me to live in a good style of house in your neighborhood, and I cannot decline. So he said nothing about it to you?" "No; he wished me to hear it from you, I suppose." Gwendolen in fact had been very anxious to have some definite knowledge of what would be done for her mother, but at no moment since her marriage had she been able to overcome the difficulty of mentioning the subject to Grandcourt. Now, however, she had a sense of obligation which would not let her rest without saying to him, "It is very good of you to provide for mamma. You took a great deal on yourself in marrying a girl who had nothing but relations belonging to her." Grandcourt was smoking, and only said carelessly, "Of course I was not going to let her live like a gamekeeper's mother." "At least he is not mean about money," thought Gwendolen, "and mamma is the better off for my marriage." She often pursued the comparison between what might have been, if she had not married Grandcourt, and what actually was, trying to persuade herself that life generally was barren of satisfaction, and that if she had chosen differently she might now have been looking back with a regret as bitter as the feeling she was trying to argue away. Her mother's dullness, which used to irritate her, she was at present inclined to explain as the ordinary result of woman's experience. True, she still saw that she would "manage differently from mamma;" but her management now only meant that she would carry her troubles with spirit, and let none suspect them. By and by she promised herself that she should get used to her heart-sores, and find excitements that would carry her through life, as a hard gallop carried her through some of the morning hours. There was gambling: she had heard stories at Leubronn of fashionable women who gambled in all sorts of ways. It seemed very flat to her at this distance, but perhaps if she began to gamble again, the passion might awake. Then there was the pleasure of producing an effect by her appearance in society: what did celebrated beauties do in town when their husbands could afford display? All men were fascinated by them: they had a perfect equipage and toilet, walked into public places, and bowed, and made the usual answers, and walked out again, perhaps they bought china, and practiced accomplishments. If she could only feel a keen appetite for those pleasures--could only believe in pleasure as she used to do! Accomplishments had ceased to have the exciting quality of promising any pre-eminence to her; and as for fascinated gentlemen--adorers who might hover round her with languishment, and diversify married life with the romantic stir of mystery, passion, and danger, which her French reading had given her some girlish notion of--they presented themselves to her imagination with the fatal circumstance that, instead of fascinating her in return, they were clad in her own weariness and disgust. The admiring male, rashly adjusting the expression of his features and the turn of his conversation to her supposed tastes, had always been an absurd object to her, and at present seemed rather detestable. Many courses are actually pursued--follies and sins both convenient and inconvenient--without pleasure or hope of pleasure; but to solace ourselves with imagining any course beforehand, there must be some foretaste of pleasure in the shape of appetite; and Gwendolen's appetite had sickened. Let her wander over the possibilities of her life as she would, an uncertain shadow dogged her. Her confidence in herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted neither herself nor her future. This hidden helplessness gave fresh force to the hold Deronda had from the first taken on her mind, as one who had an unknown standard by which he judged her. Had he some way of looking at things which might be a new footing for her--an inward safeguard against possible events which she dreaded as stored-up retribution? It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness. It had been Gwendolen's habit to think of the persons around her as stale books, too familiar to be interesting. Deronda had lit up her attention with a sense of novelty: not by words only, but by imagined facts, his influence had entered into the current of that self-suspicion and self-blame which awakens a new consciousness. "I wish he could know everything about me without my telling him," was one of her thoughts, as she sat leaning over the end of a couch, supporting her head with her hand, and looking at herself in a mirror--not in admiration, but in a sad kind of companionship. "I wish he knew that I am not so contemptible as he thinks me; that I am in deep trouble, and want to be something better if I could." Without the aid of sacred ceremony or costume, her feelings had turned this man, only a few years older than herself, into a priest; a sort of trust less rare than the fidelity that guards it. Young reverence for one who is also young is the most coercive of all: there is the same level of temptation, and the higher motive is believed in as a fuller force--not suspected to be a mere residue from weary experience. But the coercion is often stronger on the one who takes the reverence. Those who trust us educate us. And perhaps in that ideal consecration of Gwendolen's, some education was being prepared for Deronda.

On the 29th of December Deronda knew that the Grandcourts had arrived at the Abbey, but he had had no glimpse of them before he went to dress for dinner. There had been a splendid fall of snow, allowing the Mallinger girls the rare pleasures of snow-balling and snow-building, in which amusement they insisted on the company of "cousin," as they had always called Deronda. After that exertion, he played billiards, and thus the hours had passed without his dwelling on the prospect of meeting Gwendolen at dinner. Nevertheless that prospect was interesting to him; and when he went to his room to dress, he began to speculate on how her marriage with Grandcourt would have influenced her. He thought there would be some changes in her manner since he saw her at Diplow, just as there had been since his first vision of her at Leubronn. "I fancy there are some natures one could see growing or degenerating every day, if one watched them," was his thought. "I am sure she is a creature who keeps strong traces of anything that has impressed her. That little matter of the necklace, and the idea that somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evidently bitten into her. But such impressibility may drive one to desperation. As for having Grandcourt as a daily companion - good heavens! One might be tempted to horsewhip him for the sake of getting him to show some passion. I'm afraid she married him to escape poverty. But why did she run away at first? The poverty came after, though. Poor thing! she may have been urged into it. One can only pity a young creature like that - full of unused life - ignorantly rash - hanging all her blind expectations on that remnant of a human being!" Deronda's notion of Grandcourt as a "remnant" was founded on no particular knowledge, but simply on his impression that Grandcourt had worn out all his natural healthy interest in things. In general, whenever a marriage of any mark takes place, male acquaintances are likely to pity the bride, female acquaintances the bridegroom: each, it is thought, might have done better; and especially where the bride is charming, young gentlemen are apt to conclude that she can have no real attachment to a fellow so uninteresting as her husband, but has married him on other grounds. But perhaps Deronda may be excused for not pitying Grandcourt, who had never struck acquaintances as likely to undergo more suffering than he inflicted; whereas, for Gwendolen, young, headlong, eager for pleasure - how quickly might life turn from expectancy to a bitter sense of the irremediable! Still, since the honeymoon was already three weeks past, and Gwendolen had been enthroned at both Ryelands and Diplow, she was likely to have composed herself with suitable concealment, not being one who would indulge the curious by a helpless exposure of her feelings. A varied party had been invited to meet the new couple; the aristocracy was represented by Lord and Lady Pentreath; the gentry by Mr. and Mrs. Fitzadam of the Worcestershire Fitzadams; politics by Mr. Fenn, Member of Parliament, with his daughters; Lady Mallinger's family, by her brother and his wife with various little Raymonds; the useful bachelor element by Mr. Sinker, the eminent lawyer, and Mr. Vandernoodt, whose acquaintance Sir Hugo had found pleasant enough at Leubronn to be adopted in England. All had assembled in the drawing-room before the new couple appeared. The scene was really delightful: full-length portraits with deep backgrounds, inserted in the cedar panelling, were surmounted by a ceiling that glowed with the richly coloured coats of arms. Sounds were muted by the deep-piled carpet and by the high English breeding that subdues all voices; while the mixture of ages, from the white-haired Lord and Lady Pentreath to the four-year-old Edgar Raymond, gave a varied charm to the groups. Lady Mallinger moved about in her black velvet, carrying a tiny white dog as a sort of finish to her costume; while the gentlemen were conversing with very moderate vivacity. Deronda was a little out of the circle with Mr. Vandernoodt, a nonchalant Dutchman, who was talking of the bride and bridegroom. Mr. Vandernoodt was an industrious gleaner of personal details, and implied that he had learned many facts about Grandcourt since meeting him at Leubronn. "Men who have seen a good deal of life don't always end by choosing their wives so well. He has gone rather deep into pleasures, I fancy, lazy as he is. But, of course, you know all about him." "No, really," said Deronda in an indifferent tone. "I know little more of him than that he is Sir Hugo's nephew." But now the door opened and their conversation halted. When Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered, no beholder could deny that their figures had distinction. The bridegroom had the same easy perfection of costume and impassivity of face as before his marriage: and his bride looked as faultless as one might expect. "By George, I think she's handsomer, if anything!" said Mr. Vandernoodt. Deronda was of the same opinion, but he said nothing. The white silk and diamonds - it may seem strange, but she did wear diamonds on her neck, in her ears, in her hair - might have something to do with the new imposing nature of her beauty; but at Diplow, Deronda had discerned in her that tender appealing charm which we call womanly. Was there any new change since then? As he saw her receiving greetings with what seemed a proud cold quietude and a superficial smile, he thought that there was within her the same demonic force that had possessed her when she turned away a loser from the gaming-table. There was no time for more of a conclusion - no time even for him to greet her before the summons to dinner. He sat almost opposite her at table, and could sometimes hear what she said in answer to Sir Hugo, who was at his liveliest with her; but she did not look his way at all. At last Sir Hugo, who might have imagined that they had already spoken to each other, said, "Deronda, you will like to hear what Mrs. Grandcourt tells me about your favourite Klesmer." Deronda thought he saw a quivering reluctance in Gwendolen's eyelids as she was obliged to raise them and return his bow and smile. It was but an instant, and Sir Hugo continued- "The Arrowpoints have condoned the marriage, and he is spending Christmas at Quetcham." "I suppose he will be glad of it for his wife's sake, if not his own," said Deronda. "It's a sort of troubadour story," said Lady Pentreath, an easy, deep-voiced old lady; "I'm glad to find a little romance left among us. I think our young people now are too worldly wise." "It shows the Arrowpoints' good sense, after the fuss in the paper," said Sir Hugo. "Disowning your own child because of a msalliance is something like disowning your one eye: everybody knows it's yours, and you have no other to make an appearance with." "As to msalliance," said Lady Pentreath, "old Admiral Arrowpoint was one of Nelson's men - a doctor's son. And we all know how the mother's money came." "If there were any msalliance in the case, I should say it was on Klesmer's side," said Deronda. "Ah, you think it is a case of the immortal marrying the mortal. What is your opinion?" said Sir Hugo, looking at Gwendolen. "I have no doubt that Herr Klesmer thinks himself immortal. But I dare say his wife will burn as much incense before him as he requires," said Gwendolen. "Don't you approve of a wife burning incense before her husband?" said Sir Hugo, smiling. "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, "if it were only to make others believe in him. When Herr Klesmer admires his own genius, it will take off some of the absurdity if his wife says Amen." "Klesmer is no favourite of yours, I see," said Sir Hugo. "I think very highly of him, I assure you," said Gwendolen. "His genius is quite above my judgment, and I know him to be exceedingly generous." She spoke with the sudden seriousness which is often meant to correct an unfair or indiscreet sally. Deronda wondered what he would have thought of her if he had never met her before: probably that she put on a little hard defiance to conceal some painful knowledge. But why did she not greet him with more friendliness? Sir Hugo, changing the subject, said to her, "Is not this a beautiful room? It was part of the Abbey's refectory. There used to be rows of Benedictines sitting here. Suppose we were suddenly to see the lights burning low and the ghosts of the old monks rising behind our chairs!" "Please don't!" said Gwendolen, with a playful shudder. "It is very nice to come after ancestors and monks, but they should know their places and keep underground. I should be rather frightened to go about this house all alone." "But I hope you will like to go in company. You and Grandcourt ought to see it all. We will ask Deronda to go round with us. He is more learned about it than I am," said the baronet good-humouredly. Gwendolen stole a glance at Deronda; but he looked as impassive as a picture. At the notion of Deronda's showing her and Grandcourt the place which was to be theirs, and which she painfully remembered might perhaps have been his, certain recurring thoughts about inheritance rushed in anew; and she was conscious of something furtive and awkward in her glance. To explain it, she said, playfully, "You don't know how much I am afraid of Mr. Deronda." "How's that? Because you think him too learned?" said Sir Hugo, who had noticed the peculiarity of her glance. "No. It is ever since I first saw him at Leubronn. When he looked on at the roulette-table, I began to lose. He cast an evil eye on my play. He didn't approve it. He has told me so. And now whatever I do, I am afraid he will cast an evil eye upon it." "Gad! I'm rather afraid of him myself when he doesn't approve," said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda; and added less audibly to Gwendolen, "I don't think ladies generally object to have his eyes upon them." The baronet's facetiousness was at this moment almost as annoying to her as it often was to Deronda. "I object to any eyes that are critical," she said, in a cool, high voice. "Are there many of these old rooms left in the Abbey?" "Not many. There is a fine cloistered court with a long gallery above it. But the best bit of all is turned into stables. It is part of the old church, so the horses have the benefit of the fine old choir. You must go and see it." "I shall like to see the horses as well as the building," said Gwendolen. "Oh, I have no stud to speak of. Grandcourt will look with contempt at my horses," said Sir Hugo. "I've given up hunting. The fact is, I did too much at this place. We all lived at Diplow for two years while the alterations were going on. Do you like Diplow?" "Not particularly," said Gwendolen, with indifference. "Ah! it will not do after Ryelands," said Sir Hugo, well pleased. "Grandcourt, I know, took it for the hunting. But he found something so much better there that he might well prefer it to any other place in the world." "It has one attraction for me," said Gwendolen, passing over this compliment with a chill smile, "that it is within reach of Offendene." "I understand that," said Sir Hugo. Deronda did not hear much of this conversation, but the glimpses he had of Gwendolen's manner deepened the impression that it had something newly artificial. Later, in the drawing-room, Deronda, at somebody's request, sat down to the piano and sang. On rising to make way for another, he observed that Gwendolen had left her seat, and had come to this end of the room as if to listen, but was now standing with her back to everyone, apparently contemplating a fine cowled ivory head on a small table. He longed to go to her and speak. Why should he not obey such an impulse, as he would have done toward any other lady in the room? Yet he hesitated, observing the graceful lines of her back, but not moving. If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair woman, it is a bad plan to look at her back: the wish to see what it screens becomes the stronger. Deronda ended by going to the small table, but before he could speak Gwendolen had turned on him such an appealing look of sadness, so utterly different from her chilly recognition at table, that his speech was checked. For a moment they looked at each other - she seeming to take the deep rest of confession, he with an answering depth of sympathy that neutralised all other feelings. "Will you not join in the music?" he said, since speech seemed necessary. That her look of confession had been involuntary was shown by her change of expression as she roused herself to reply calmly, "I join in it by listening. I am fond of music." "Are you not a musician?" "I have given a great deal of time to music. But I have not talent enough to make it worth while. I shall never sing again." "But if you are fond of music, it will always be worth while in private, for your own delight. I make it a virtue to be content with my middlingness," said Deronda, smiling. "It is always pardonable, if one does not ask other to take it for superiority." "I cannot imitate you," said Gwendolen, recovering her tone of artificial vivacity. "To be middling with me is another word for being dull. And the worst fault I have to find with the world is, that it is dull. Do you know, I am going to justify gambling in spite of you. It is a refuge from dullness." "I don't agree," said Deronda. "I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how can anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do." "Ah, I see! The fault I find in the world is my own fault," said Gwendolen, smiling at him. Then after a moment, she said, "Do you never find fault with the world or with others?" "Oh, yes. When I am in a grumbling mood." "And hate people? Confess you hate them when they stand in your way." "We are often standing in each other's way when we can't help it. I think it is stupid to hate people on that ground." "But if they injure you and could have helped it?" said Gwendolen with an unaccountable intensity. Deronda wondered at her choice of subjects. At last he said, more gravely, "Why, then, after all, I prefer my place to theirs." "There I believe you are right," said Gwendolen, with a sudden little laugh, and turned to join the group at the piano. Deronda looked around for Grandcourt, wondering whether he followed his bride's movements with any attention; but he should not have supposed he would be able to find that out. Grandcourt had a delusive mood of observing whatever had an interest for him, which could be surpassed by no sleepy-eyed animal on the watch for prey. At that moment he was plunged in the depth of an easy chair, being talked to by Mr. Vandernoodt, and one might have thought it safe to telegraph secrets in front of that unmoving gaze. But Grandcourt saw anyone he cared to out of the corners of his long narrow eyes, and if they went behind him he had a constructive process by which he knew what they were doing there. He knew perfectly well where his wife was, and how she was behaving. Would he be a jealous husband? Deronda imagined so; but his imagination was as much astray about Grandcourt as it would have been about an unexplored continent where all the species were peculiar. He did not think that he himself was a likely subject of jealousy, or that he gave any pretext for it; but the suspicion that a wife is not happy naturally leads one to speculate on the husband's private conduct. Hence Deronda found himself at one o'clock in the morning in the ludicrous position of sitting up, severely holding a Hebrew grammar in his hands (for in deference to Mordecai, he had begun to study Hebrew), with the consciousness that he had been in that attitude nearly an hour, and had thought of nothing but Gwendolen and her husband. Deronda's nature had been acutely touched by his brief acquaintance and speech with Gwendolen. His ready sympathy made him alive to a certain appealingness in her behaviour toward him; and he remembered that unmistakable look of involuntary confidence which she had turned on him as he approached her. "What is the use of it all?" thought Deronda, throwing down his book. "I can't do anything to help her, if she has found out her mistake already. And it seems to me that she has a dreary lack of the ideas that might help her. Poor soul, wrapped around with fine raiment and gems, smiling loftily, and with a sick distaste of all things! But what do I know? There may be a demon in her to match the worst husband, for all I can tell. She is clearly ill-educated and worldly: perhaps she is a coquette." This last reflection, not much believed in, was a self-administered dose of caution, prompted partly by Sir Hugo's joke about flirtation. Deronda resolved not to have any tte--tte with Gwendolen during her stay at the Abbey. But few words could less represent Gwendolen than "coquette." She had a love of homage, and belief in her own power; but no cold artifice for the sake of enslaving. And the poor thing's belief in her power, with her other dreams before marriage, had to be thrust aside now like the toys of a sick child, which it looks at with dull eyes, and has no heart to play with, however it may try. The next day at lunch Sir Hugo said to her, "It's so pleasant out of doors just now - shall we go and see the stables and the other odd bits about the place?" "Yes, pray," said Gwendolen. "You will like to see the stables, Henleigh?" she added, looking at her husband. "Uncommonly," said Grandcourt, with an indifference which seemed ironic. It was the first time Deronda had seen them speak to each other since their arrival, and he thought their exchange as cold as an official ceremony. Still, English reserve might account for much of that. "Who else is inclined to make the tour of the house and premises?" said Sir Hugo. "There is just about time to do it before sunset. You will go, Dan, won't you?" "Oh, yes," said Deronda, carelessly, knowing that Sir Hugo would think any excuse disobliging. "All meet in the library, then - say in half an hour," said the baronet. Gwendolen made herself ready with wonderful quickness, and in ten minutes came down into the library in her sables, plume, and little thick boots. As soon as she entered the room she saw that Deronda was there, as she had hoped. He was standing with his back toward her at the far end of the room, looking over a newspaper. How could little thick boots make any noise on an Axminster carpet? And a cough would have seemed a signal which her pride could not allow. Also, she felt bashful about walking up to him, though it was her hunger to speak to him which had made her hurry down. Always uneasy about his opinion of her, she felt a peculiar anxiety today, lest he might think of her with contempt, as one triumphantly conscious of being Grandcourt's wife, the future lady of this domain. There was not the faintest touch of coquetry in her attitude toward him: he was unique to her among men, because he had impressed her as being not her admirer but her superior: in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience. And now he would not look round and see that she was there! The paper crackled in his hand, his head rose and sank, exploring those stupid columns. The rest of the company would soon be down, and the opportunity of her saying something to erase the flippancy of the evening before, would be quite gone. She felt sick with irritation and mortification. At last he threw down the paper and turned round. "Oh, you are there already," he said: "I must go and put on my coat." He turned aside and walked out of the room. This was behaving quite badly. Mere politeness would have made him stay to exchange some words before leaving. It was true that Grandcourt came in with Sir Hugo immediately after, so that the words must have been few. As it was, they saw him walking from the library door. "A - you look rather ill," said Grandcourt, going straight up to her, and looking into her eyes. "Do you feel equal to the walk?" "Yes, I shall like it," said Gwendolen, without the slightest movement except of the lips. "We could put off going over the house, you know," said Sir Hugo, kindly. "Oh dear no!" said Gwendolen, speaking with determination, "let us put off nothing. I want a long walk." The rest of the walking party had now assembled; and Gwendolen, rallying, went with due cheerfulness by the side of Sir Hugo, paying apparently equal attention to Deronda's commentaries on the architectural fragments and to Sir Hugo's reasons for not attempting to change them. Outside the house they paused before a beautiful pointed doorway, the only old remnant of the east front. "To my mind," said Sir Hugo, "that is more interesting than if the whole front had been dressed up in a pretence of the thirteenth century. That notion of reproducing the old is a mistake, I think. As for your new-old building, you need to hire men to scratch and chip it all over artistically to give it an elderly-looking surface." "Do you want to keep up the old fashions, Mr. Deronda?" said Gwendolen, taking advantage of the grouping to fall back a little, while Sir Hugo and Grandcourt went on. "Some of them. I don't see why we should not choose, and why age or novelty in itself is an argument for or against. To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is good if it shuts out nothing better; it enlarges the range of affection - and affection is the broadest basis of good in life." "Do you think so?" said Gwendolen, surprised. "I should have thought you cared most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and all that." "But to care about them is a sort of affection," said Deronda, smiling. "Call it attachment, interest, willingness to bear a great deal for the sake of being with them and saving them from injury. Of course, it makes a difference if the objects of interest are human beings; but generally the objects of deep affections are a mixture of people and ideas." "I wonder whether I understand that," said Gwendolen, putting up her chin in her old saucy manner. "I believe I am not very affectionate; perhaps you mean to tell me, that is the reason why I don't see much good in life." "No, I did not mean to tell you that; but I admit that I should think it true if I believed what you say of yourself," said Deronda gravely. Here Sir Hugo and Grandcourt turned and paused. "I never can get Mr. Deronda to pay me a compliment," said Gwendolen. "I am quite curious to see whether a little flattery can be extracted from him." "Ah!" said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda, "the fact is, it is useless to flatter a bride. She has been so fed on sweet speeches that everything we say seems tasteless." "Quite true," said Gwendolen, bending her head. "Mr. Grandcourt won me by neatly-turned compliments. If there had been one word out of place it would have been fatal." "Do you hear that?" said Sir Hugo, looking at the husband. "Yes," said Grandcourt, without change of expression. "It's a deucedly hard thing to keep up, though." All this seemed to Sir Hugo a natural playfulness between husband and wife; but Deronda wondered at the alternations in Gwendolen's manner, which at one moment seemed to excite sympathy by childlike indiscretion, at another to repel it by proud concealment. He tried to keep out of her way by devoting himself to Miss Juliet Fenn, a young lady whose unfortunate profile had months ago made Gwendolen feel it impossible to be jealous of her. Nevertheless, when they were viewing the kitchen, the play of light from the huge glowing fire, the polished brass and copper, the fine resonance of every sound, were all spoiled for Gwendolen, because Deronda was talking to the other ladies. It did not signify that the other gentlemen were near her: of what use was their admiration compared to Deronda's judgment? "The heat is too much. I must really go out," she cried at last, marching resolutely into the open air. Grandcourt was already outside, and as she joined him, he said- "I wondered how long you meant to stay in that damned place"- one of the freedoms he had assumed as a husband being the use of his strongest epithets. Gwendolen, turning to see the rest of the party approach, said- "It was certainly rather too warm in one's wraps." They walked on the gravel across a green court, where the snow still lay in islets on the grass, and in masses on the boughs of the great cedar and the stone walls; and then into a larger court, to find the choir that had been turned into stables. The exterior was much defaced, its gargoyles maimed, the friable limestone broken and fretted; the long windows were bricked in, up to the springing of the arches. With the low wintry sun lighting up the snow on every ledge, it had an antique solemnity which gave the scene rather a startling effect. Each finely-arched chapel was turned into a stall, where in the dusty glazing of the windows there gleamed patches of crimson, orange and blue; the choir had been gutted, the floor levelled, paved, and drained, and a line of loose boxes erected in the middle. A soft light fell from the upper windows on sleek brown or grey flanks and on mild equine faces looking out over the varnished boarding; while over all, the grand pointed roof showed its lines mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder. "Oh, this is glorious!" Gwendolen burst forth, forgetting everything but the immediate impression. "I wish there were a horse in every one of the boxes. I would ten times rather have these stables than those at Diplow." But she had no sooner said this than she involuntarily turned her eyes toward Deronda, who oddly enough had taken off his hat and stood holding it as if in an actual church. He happened to be looking at her, and their eyes met - to her intense vexation, for she felt herself blushing at the thought that Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have felt her bad taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey. Her annoyance at her own confusion robbed her of her usual facility of playful speech, and turning up her face to look at the roof, she wheeled away. Deronda alone guessed part of her feeling; but while he was observing her, he was himself under observation. "Do you take off your hat to horses?" said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer. "Why not?" said Deronda, replacing his hat, which he had removed automatically. Gwendolen's confusion was soon merged in the survey of the horses, which Grandcourt politely abstained from appraising, languidly assenting to Sir Hugo's self-deprecating opinion of his animals. "The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper into the pocket nowadays," said Sir Hugo, as they were coming out. "What is a man to do, though?" said Grandcourt. "He must ride. I don't see what else there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit astride a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun." At this delicate diplomatic assessment of Sir Hugo's stud, the baronet, feeling that the conversation had worn rather thin, said, "Now we are going to see the cloister, which is in perfect preservation; the monks might have been walking there yesterday." But Gwendolen had lingered behind, and Grandcourt waited for her. "You had better take my arm," he said, in his low tone of command. "It's a great bore being dragged about in this way, and no cigar." "I thought you would like it." "Like it!- one eternal chatter. And encouraging those ugly girls - inviting one to meet such monsters. How that smug Deronda can bear looking at her-" "Why do you call him smug? Do you object to him so much?" "Object? He's of no consequence to me. I'll invite him to Diplow again if you like." "I don't think he would come. He is too clever and learned to care about us," said Gwendolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be told (privately) that it was possible for him to be looked down upon. "I never saw that make much difference in a man. Either he is a gentleman, or he is not," said Grandcourt. Meanwhile the group, wishing to indulge a tete-a-tete between the new husband and wife, left them behind. On their re-entering the garden, they all paused in that cloistered court where, among the falling rose-petals thirteen years before, we saw a boy becoming acquainted with his first sorrow. This cloister was built of a harder stone than the church, and the delicately-wrought foliage of the capitals seemed still to carry the touches of the chisel. Gwendolen dropped her husband's arm and joined the other ladies, to whom Deronda was indicating the artistry of the carvings. "I wonder whether one learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representations through the real objects," he said, after pointing out some lovely curled leaves of stone. "When I was a little fellow these capitals taught me to delight in the structure of leaves." "I suppose you can see every line of them with your eyes shut. You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn, innocently, not thinking of inheritance. "You seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well." "Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda quietly. Gwendolen felt that he probably thought of her as a selfish creature who only cared about possessions. It must be a secret hardship to him that he was shut out from his inheritance; and if he supposed that she exulted in her husband's taking it, what could he feel for her but scornful pity? It seemed clear to her that he was avoiding her. With these thoughts in her mind she was prevented by a mixture of pride and timidity from addressing him again, and when they were looking at the quaint portraits in the gallery, she made her vivacious remarks without any direct appeal to Deronda. But at the end she was very weary of her assumed spirits, and when Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, she went to her pretty boudoir to be melancholy at her ease. No chemical process shows a more extraordinary activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another. Changes in theory, religion, admirations, may all begin with a suspicion of another's dissent. Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process - all the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures perturbed, but still showing strength in the will to reassert itself. After every new shock of humiliation she tried to adjust herself and seize her old supports - proud concealment, new excitements that would make life go by without much thinking; trust in some deed of reparation to shield her from a vague, ever-visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust in the hardening effect of use that would make her indifferent to her miseries. Yes - miseries. This beautiful, healthy young creature, with her two-and-twenty years and her gratified ambition, no longer felt inclined to kiss her fortunate image in the glass. She looked at it with wonder that she could be so miserable. Her belief in her own power of dominating was utterly gone. Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband had gained a mastery which she could no more resist than she could have resisted the numbing electric touch of a torpedo fish. Gwendolen's will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway; but it had been beset by imaginative fears, and even a shadow could weaken it: and she had found a will like that of a boa-constrictor, which goes on crushing without alarm at thunder. Not that Grandcourt was without acuity; he detected the feeling which made her proud and rebellious spirit dumb and helpless before him. She had burned Lydia Glasher's letter in terror lest other eyes should see it, and had blamed her violent hysterics solely on the excitement and fatigue of the day. "Don't ask me - it was my feeling about everything - it was the sudden change from home." But the words of that letter kept repeating themselves with the weight of doom: 'I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul. 'Will you give him this letter to set him against me and ruin us - me and my children? Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with your eyes open. The wrong you have done me will be your curse.' The words had nestled their venomous life within her. She dreaded that Grandcourt should know of that meeting at the Whispering Stones - so far out of her sight now was the possibility of speaking to him about Mrs. Glasher and her children, and making them rich amends. Any endurance seemed easier than the humiliation of confessing that she knew all before she married him, and in marrying him had broken her word. For the reasons by which she had justified her marriage, and her easy assumption of her future power over her husband, seemed now childish and futile. She dreaded the veil of secrecy being removed, and giving Grandcourt the right to taunt her. With the reading of that letter had begun her husband's empire of fear. And her husband all the while knew it. He did not know of her broken promise; but he was aware not only of what Lush had told him about the meeting at the Whispering Stones, but also of Gwendolen's concealment as to the cause of her sudden illness. He felt sure that Lydia had enclosed something with the diamonds which had created in Gwendolen a new repulsion for him and a reason for not daring to show it. He did not greatly mind, or feel that his hopes in marriage were blighted: he had wanted to marry Gwendolen, and he was not a man to repent. Sympathetic feeling did not play a large part in his life. What he chiefly felt was that the change might establish his mastery more thoroughly. And it was established. He judged that he had not married a simpleton: he had married a girl who had spirit and pride enough not to make a fool of herself by forfeiting the advantages of her position; and if she wanted pregnant hints to help her in making up her mind properly he would not withhold them. Gwendolen, indeed, for all her trouble, felt bound to bear herself with dignity, and appear what is called happy. In disclosure of her disappointment or sorrow she saw nothing but humiliation. Whatever her husband might have become to her, she meant not to be pitied. For she did think of the future with fear: she was frightened at Grandcourt. The poor thing had passed from her girlish sauciness of superiority over this inert specimen into an amazed perception of her former ignorance about the possible attitude of a man toward the woman he sought in marriage. During their courtship, her little coquetries had formed a means of communication between them, showing him in the light of a creature such as she could understand and manage. But marriage had nullified all such interchange, and Grandcourt had become a blank uncertainty to her in everything but that he would do just what he willed; and she had no means of either discovering his will, or of escaping it. What had occurred between them concerning her wearing the diamonds was typical. One evening, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they were going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. Gwendolen had said to herself that she would never wear those diamonds: they had horrible words clinging and crawling about them. She came down dressed in her white, with only a streak of gold and a pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had given her, round her neck, and little emerald stars in her ears. Grandcourt looked at her as she entered. "Am I altogether as you like?" she said, speaking rather gaily. She was not without enjoyment at going to Brackenshaw Castle with her new dignities upon her. "No," said Grandcourt. Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, wondering what was to come. She was prepared for some struggle about the diamonds; but suppose he were going to say, in low, contemptuous tones, "You are not in any way what I like." It was very bad for her to be secretly hating him; but it would be much worse when he gave the first sign of hating her. "Oh, mercy!" she exclaimed. "How am I to alter myself?" "Put on the diamonds," said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with his narrow glance. Gwendolen paused, afraid of showing any emotion. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she could, "Oh, please not. I don't think diamonds suit me." "What you think has nothing to do with it," said Grandcourt with sotto voce imperiousness. "I wish you to wear the diamonds." "Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds," said Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingling with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity, had reached a superstitious point. "Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when I desire it," said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her. Of what use was rebellion? It would hurt her worse than submission. She went slowly to her dressing-room. As she brought out the diamonds it occurred to her that she might have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some knowledge about them. She fancied that his eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? Nothing she could say would touch him - it would merely give him a more painful grasp on her mind. "He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his," she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shiver. "So shall I quail too. What else is there for me? I will not say to the world, 'Pity me.'" She heard the door open behind her, and Grandcourt came in. "You want some one to fasten them," he said. She did not answer, but simply stood still, leaving him to fasten the diamonds on her as he would. Doubtless he had been used to fasten them on someone else. With a bitter sarcasm against herself, Gwendolen thought, "What a privilege this is, to have robbed another woman of!" "What makes you so cold?" said Grandcourt. "Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see a woman come into a room looking frozen. If you are to appear as a bride at all, appear decently." This marital speech touched the quick of Gwendolen's pride and forced her to rally. The words of the bad dream crawled about the diamonds still, but only for her: to others they were brilliants that suited her perfectly, and Grandcourt inwardly observed that she answered to the rein. "Oh, yes, mamma, quite happy," Gwendolen had said on her return to Diplow. "Ryelands is a much finer place than this in every way. But don't you want some more money?" "Did you not know that Mr. Grandcourt left me a letter on your wedding-day? I am to have eight hundred a year. He wishes me to keep Offendene for the present, while you are at Diplow. But if there were some pretty cottage near the park at Ryelands we might live there without much expense, and be closer to you." "We must leave that to Mr. Grandcourt, mamma." "Oh, certainly. It is exceedingly handsome of him to pay the rent for Offendene till June. And we can go on very well; our good Merry will stay and help to manage everything. It is natural that Mr. Grandcourt should wish me to live in a good style of house, and I cannot decline. So he said nothing about it to you?" "No; he wished me to hear it from you, I suppose." Gwendolen in fact had been very anxious to have some definite knowledge of what would be done for her mother, but had not been able to overcome the difficulty of mentioning the subject to Grandcourt. Now, however, she had a sense of obligation which made her say to him, "It is very good of you to provide for mamma." Grandcourt only said carelessly, "Of course I was not going to let her live like a gamekeeper's mother." "At least he is not mean about money," thought Gwendolen, "and mamma is the better off for my marriage." She often pursued the comparison between what might have been, if she had not married Grandcourt, and what actually was, trying to persuade herself that life generally was barren of satisfaction, and that if she had chosen differently she might now be feeling a regret as bitter as her current misery. She still thought that she would "manage differently from mamma;" but her management now only meant that she would let none suspect her troubles. She promised herself that she should get used to her heart-sores, and find excitements that would carry her through life, as a hard gallop carried her through the morning hours. There was gambling: she had heard stories at Leubronn of fashionable women who gambled. It seemed very flat to her at this distance, but perhaps if she began to gamble again, the passion might awake. Then there was the pleasure of producing an effect by her appearance in society, and winning men's admiration, as celebrated beauties did: they had perfect outfits, walked into public places, bowed, made the usual answers, and walked out again; and perhaps they bought china, and practiced accomplishments. If she could only believe in pleasure as she used to do! Accomplishments had ceased to have the exciting quality of promising her pre-eminence; and as for admirers, she imagined them with weariness and disgust. Gwendolen's appetite for such delights had sickened. Wherever she wandered over the possibilities of her life, a shadow dogged her. Her confidence in herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted neither herself nor her future. This hidden helplessness gave fresh force to the hold Deronda had taken on her mind, as one who judged her by an unknown standard. Had he some way of looking at things which might be a new inward safeguard for her against the retribution which she dreaded? It had been Gwendolen's habit to think of the persons around her as stale books, too familiar to be interesting. Deronda had lit up her attention with a sense of novelty: his influence had entered into the current of that self-suspicion and self-blame which awakens a new consciousness. "I wish he could know everything about me without my telling him," she thought, as she sat on a couch, supporting her head with her hand, and looking at herself in a mirror - not in admiration, but in a sad companionship. "I wish he knew that I am not so contemptible as he thinks me; that I am in deep trouble, and want to be something better." Without the aid of sacred ceremony or costume, her feelings had turned this man, only a few years older than herself, into a priest. Young reverence for one who is also young is the strongest of all. But the effect is also stronger on the one who takes the reverence. Those who trust us educate us. And perhaps in that consecration of Gwendolen's, some education was being prepared for Deronda.

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 35

Among the heirs of Art, as is the division of the promised land, each has to win his portion by hard fighting: the bestowal is after the manner of prophecy, and is a title without possession. To carry the map of an ungotten estate in your pocket is a poor sort of copyhold. And in fancy to cast his shoe over Eden is little warrant that a man shall ever set the sole of his foot on an acre of his own there. The most obstinate beliefs that mortals entertain about themselves are such as they have no evidence for beyond a constant, spontaneous pulsing of their self-satisfaction--as it were a hidden seed of madness, a confidence that they can move the world without precise notion of standing-place or lever. "Pray go to church, mamma," said Gwendolen the next morning. "I prefer seeing Herr Klesmer alone." (He had written in reply to her note that he would be with her at eleven.) "That is hardly correct, I think," said Mrs. Davilow, anxiously. "Our affairs are too serious for us to think of such nonsensical rules," said Gwendolen, contemptuously. "They are insulting as well as ridiculous." "You would not mind Isabel sitting with you? She would be reading in a corner." "No; she could not: she would bite her nails and stare. It would be too irritating. Trust my judgment, mamma, I must be alone. Take them all to church." Gwendolen had her way, of course; only that Miss Merry and two of the girls stayed at home, to give the house a look of habitation by sitting at the dining-room windows. It was a delicious Sunday morning. The melancholy waning sunshine of autumn rested on the half-strown grass and came mildly through the windows in slanting bands of brightness over the old furniture, and the glass panel that reflected the furniture; over the tapestried chairs with their faded flower-wreaths, the dark enigmatic pictures, the superannuated organ at which Gwendolen had pleased herself with acting Saint Cecelia on her first joyous arrival, the crowd of pallid, dusty knickknacks seen through the open doors of the antechamber where she had achieved the wearing of her Greek dress as Hermione. This last memory was just now very busy in her; for had not Klesmer then been struck with admiration of her pose and expression? Whatever he had said, whatever she imagined him to have thought, was at this moment pointed with keenest interest for her: perhaps she had never before in her life felt so inwardly dependent, so consciously in need of another person's opinion. There was a new fluttering of spirit within her, a new element of deliberation in her self-estimate which had hitherto been a blissful gift of intuition. Still it was the recurrent burden of her inward soliloquy that Klesmer had seen but little of her, and any unfavorable conclusion of his must have too narrow a foundation. She really felt clever enough for anything. To fill up the time she collected her volumes and pieces of music, and laying them on the top of the piano, set herself to classify them. Then catching the reflection of her movements in the glass panel, she was diverted to the contemplation of the image there and walked toward it. Dressed in black, without a single ornament, and with the warm whiteness of her skin set off between her light-brown coronet of hair and her square-cut bodice, she might have tempted an artist to try again the Roman trick of a statue in black, white, and tawny marble. Seeing her image slowly advancing, she thought "I _am_ beautiful"--not exultingly, but with grave decision. Being beautiful was after all the condition on which she most needed external testimony. If any one objected to the turn of her nose or the form of her neck and chin, she had not the sense that she could presently show her power of attainment in these branches of feminine perfection. There was not much time to fill up in this way before the sound of wheels, the loud ring, and the opening doors assured her that she was not by any accident to be disappointed. This slightly increased her inward flutter. In spite of her self-confidence, she dreaded Klesmer as part of that unmanageable world which was independent of her wishes--something vitriolic that would not cease to burn because you smiled or frowned at it. Poor thing! she was at a higher crisis of her woman's fate than in her last experience with Grandcourt. The questioning then, was whether she should take a particular man as a husband. The inmost fold of her questioning now was whether she need take a husband at all--whether she could not achieve substantially for herself and know gratified ambition without bondage. Klesmer made his most deferential bow in the wide doorway of the antechamber--showing also the deference of the finest gray kerseymere trousers and perfect gloves (the 'masters of those who know' are happily altogether human). Gwendolen met him with unusual gravity, and holding out her hand said, "It is most kind of you to come, Herr Klesmer. I hope you have not thought me presumptuous." "I took your wish as a command that did me honor," said Klesmer, with answering gravity. He was really putting by his own affairs in order to give his utmost attention to what Gwendolen might have to say; but his temperament was still in a state of excitation from the events of yesterday, likely enough to give his expressions a more than usually biting edge. Gwendolen for once was under too great a strain of feeling to remember formalities. She continued standing near the piano, and Klesmer took his stand near the other end of it with his back to the light and his terribly omniscient eyes upon her. No affectation was of use, and she began without delay. "I wish to consult you, Herr Klesmer. We have lost all our fortune; we have nothing. I must get my own bread, and I desire to provide for my mamma, so as to save her from any hardship. The only way I can think of--and I should like it better than anything--is to be an actress--to go on the stage. But, of course, I should like to take a high position, and I thought--if you thought I could"--here Gwendolen became a little more nervous--"it would be better for me to be a singer--to study singing also." Klesmer put down his hat upon the piano, and folded his arms as if to concentrate himself. "I know," Gwendolen resumed, turning from pale to pink and back again--"I know that my method of singing is very defective; but I have been ill taught. I could be better taught; I could study. And you will understand my wish:--to sing and act too, like Grisi, is a much higher position. Naturally, I should wish to take as high rank as I can. And I can rely on your judgment. I am sure you will tell me the truth." Gwendolen somehow had the conviction that now she made this serious appeal the truth would be favorable. Still Klesmer did not speak. He drew off his gloves quickly, tossed them into his hat, rested his hands on his hips, and walked to the other end of the room. He was filled with compassion for this girl: he wanted to put a guard on his speech. When he turned again, he looked at her with a mild frown of inquiry, and said with gentle though quick utterance, "You have never seen anything, I think, of artists and their lives?--I mean of musicians, actors, artists of that kind?" "Oh, no," said Gwendolen, not perturbed by a reference to this obvious fact in the history of a young lady hitherto well provided for. "You are--pardon me," said Klesmer, again pausing near the piano--"in coming to a conclusion on such a matter as this, everything must be taken into consideration--you are perhaps twenty?" "I am twenty-one," said Gwendolen, a slight fear rising in her. "Do you think I am too old?" Klesmer pouted his under lip and shook his long fingers upward in a manner totally enigmatic. "Many persons begin later than others," said Gwendolen, betrayed by her habitual consciousness of having valuable information to bestow. Klesmer took no notice, but said with more studied gentleness than ever, "You have probably not thought of an artistic career until now: you did not entertain the notion, the longing--what shall I say?--you did not wish yourself an actress, or anything of that sort, till the present trouble?" "Not exactly: but I was fond of acting. I have acted; you saw me, if you remember--you saw me here in charades, and as Hermione," said Gwendolen, really fearing that Klesmer had forgotten. "Yes, yes," he answered quickly, "I remember--I remember perfectly," and again walked to the other end of the room. It was difficult for him to refrain from this kind of movement when he was in any argument either audible or silent. Gwendolen felt that she was being weighed. The delay was unpleasant. But she did not yet conceive that the scale could dip on the wrong side, and it seemed to her only graceful to say, "I shall be very much obliged to you for taking the trouble to give me your advice, whatever it maybe." "Miss Harleth," said Klesmer, turning toward her and speaking with a slight increase of accent, "I will veil nothing from you in this matter. I should reckon myself guilty if I put a false visage on things--made them too black or too white. The gods have a curse for him who willingly tells another the wrong road. And if I misled one who is so young, so beautiful--who, I trust, will find her happiness along the right road, I should regard myself as a--_Bsewicht_." In the last word Klesmer's voice had dropped to a loud whisper. Gwendolen felt a sinking of heart under this unexpected solemnity, and kept a sort of fascinated gaze on Klesmer's face, as he went on. "You are a beautiful young lady--you have been brought up in ease--you have done what you would--you have not said to yourself, 'I must know this exactly,' 'I must understand this exactly,' 'I must do this exactly,'"--in uttering these three terrible _musts_, Klesmer lifted up three long fingers in succession. "In sum, you have not been called upon to be anything but a charming young lady, whom it is an impoliteness to find fault with." He paused an instant; then resting his fingers on his hips again, and thrusting out his powerful chin, he said, "Well, then, with that preparation, you wish to try the life of an artist; you wish to try a life of arduous, unceasing work, and--uncertain praise. Your praise would have to be earned, like your bread; and both would come slowly, scantily--what do I say?--they may hardly come at all." This tone of discouragement, which Klesmer had hoped might suffice without anything more unpleasant, roused some resistance in Gwendolen. With a slight turn of her head away from him, and an air of pique, she said, "I thought that you, being an artist, would consider the life one of the most honorable and delightful. And if I can do nothing better?--I suppose I can put up with the same risks as other people do." "Do nothing better?" said Klesmer, a little fired. "No, my dear Miss Harleth, you could do nothing better--neither man nor woman could do anything better--if you could do what was best or good of its kind. I am not decrying the life of the true artist. I am exalting it. I say, it is out of the reach of any but choice organizations--natures framed to love perfection and to labor for it; ready, like all true lovers, to endure, to wait, to say, I am not yet worthy, but she--Art, my mistress--is worthy, and I will live to merit her. An honorable life? Yes. But the honor comes from the inward vocation and the hard-won achievement: there is no honor in donning the life as a livery." Some excitement of yesterday had revived in Klesmer and hurried him into speech a little aloof from his immediate friendly purpose. He had wished as delicately as possible to rouse in Gwendolen a sense of her unfitness for a perilous, difficult course; but it was his wont to be angry with the pretensions of incompetence, and he was in danger of getting chafed. Conscious of this, he paused suddenly. But Gwendolen's chief impression was that he had not yet denied her the power of doing what would be good of its kind. Klesmer's fervor seemed to be a sort of glamor such as he was prone to throw over things in general; and what she desired to assure him of was that she was not afraid of some preliminary hardships. The belief that to present herself in public on the stage must produce an effect such as she had been used to feel certain of in private life, was like a bit of her flesh--it was not to be peeled off readily, but must come with blood and pain. She said, in a tone of some insistence; "I am quite prepared to bear hardships at first. Of course no one can become celebrated all at once. And it is not necessary that every one should be first-rate--either actresses or singers. If you would be so kind as to tell me what steps I should take, I shall have the courage to take them. I don't mind going up hill. It will be easier than the dead level of being a governess. I will take any steps you recommend." Klesmer was convinced now that he must speak plainly. "I will tell you the steps, not that I recommend, but that will be forced upon you. It is all one, so far, what your goal will be--excellence, celebrity, second, third rateness--it is all one. You must go to town under the protection of your mother. You must put yourself under training--musical, dramatic, theatrical:--whatever you desire to do you have to learn"--here Gwendolen looked as if she were going to speak, but Klesmer lifted up his hand and said, decisively, "I know. You have exercised your talents--you recite--you sing--from the drawing-room _Standpunkt_. My dear Frulein, you must unlearn all that. You have not yet conceived what excellence is: you must unlearn your mistaken admirations. You must know what you have to strive for, and then you must subdue your mind and body to unbroken discipline. Your mind, I say. For you must not be thinking of celebrity: put that candle out of your eyes, and look only at excellence. You would of course earn nothing--you could get no engagement for a long while. You would need money for yourself and your family. But that," here Klesmer frowned and shook his fingers as if to dismiss a triviality, "that could perhaps be found." Gwendolen turned pink and pale during this speech. Her pride had felt a terrible knife-edge, and the last sentence only made the smart keener. She was conscious of appearing moved, and tried to escape from her weakness by suddenly walking to a seat and pointing out a chair to Klesmer. He did not take it, but turned a little in order to face her and leaned against the piano. At that moment she wished that she had not sent for him: this first experience of being taken on some other ground than that of her social rank and her beauty was becoming bitter to her. Klesmer, preoccupied with a serious purpose, went on without change of tone. "Now, what sort of issue might be fairly expected from all this self-denial? You would ask that. It is right that your eyes should be open to it. I will tell you truthfully. This issue would be uncertain, and, most probably, would not be worth much." At these relentless words Klesmer put out his lip and looked through his spectacles with the air of a monster impenetrable by beauty. Gwendolen's eyes began to burn, but the dread of showing weakness urged her to added self-control. She compelled herself to say, in a hard tone, "You think I want talent, or am too old to begin." Klesmer made a sort of hum, and then descended on an emphatic "Yes! The desire and the training should have begun seven years ago--or a good deal earlier. A mountebank's child who helps her father to earn shillings when she is six years old--a child that inherits a singing throat from a long line of choristers and learns to sing as it learns to talk, has a likelier beginning. Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cups and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles--your whole frame--must go like a watch, true, true to a hair. That is the work of spring-time, before habits have been determined." "I did not pretend to genius," said Gwendolen, still feeling that she might somehow do what Klesmer wanted to represent as impossible. "I only suppose that I might have a little talent--enough to improve." "I don't deny that," said Klesmer. "If you had been put in the right track some years ago and had worked well you might now have made a public singer, though I don't think your voice would have counted for much in public. For the stage your personal charms and intelligence might then have told without the present drawback of inexperience--lack of discipline--lack of instruction." Certainly Klesmer seemed cruel, but his feeling was the reverse of cruel. Our speech, even when we are most single-minded, can never take its line absolutely from one impulse; but Klesmer's was, as far as possible, directed by compassion for poor Gwendolen's ignorant eagerness to enter on a course of which he saw all the miserable details with a definiteness which he could not if he would have conveyed to her mind. Gwendolen, however, was not convinced. Her self-opinion rallied, and since the counselor whom she had called in gave a decision of such severe peremptoriness, she was tempted to think that his judgment was not only fallible but biased. It occurred to her that a simpler and wiser step for her to have taken would have been to send a letter through the post to the manager of a London theatre, asking him to make an appointment. She would make no further reference to her singing; Klesmer, she saw, had set himself against her singing. But she felt equal to arguing with him about her going on the stage, and she answered in a resistant tone, "I understood, of course, that no one can be a finished actress at once. It may be impossible to tell beforehand whether I should succeed; but that seems to me a reason why I should try. I should have thought that I might have taken an engagement at a theatre meanwhile, so as to earn money and study at the same time." "Can't be done, my dear Miss Harleth--I speak plainly--it can't be done. I must clear your mind of these notions which have no more resemblance to reality than a pantomime. Ladies and gentlemen think that when they have made their toilet and drawn on their gloves they are as presentable on the stage as in a drawing-room. No manager thinks that. With all your grace and charm, if you were to present yourself as an aspirant to the stage, a manager would either require you to pay as an amateur for being allowed to perform or he would tell you to go and be taught--trained to bear yourself on the stage, as a horse, however beautiful, must be trained for the circus; to say nothing of that study which would enable you to personate a character consistently, and animate it with the natural language of face, gesture, and tone. For you to get an engagement fit for you straight away is out of the question." "I really cannot understand that," said Gwendolen, rather haughtily--then, checking herself, she added in another tone--"I shall be obliged to you if you will explain how it is that such poor actresses get engaged. I have been to the theatre several times, and I am sure there were actresses who seemed to me to act not at all well and who were quite plain." "Ah, my dear Miss Harleth, that is the easy criticism of the buyer. We who buy slippers toss away this pair and the other as clumsy; but there went an apprenticeship to the making of them. Excuse me; you could not at present teach one of those actresses; but there is certainly much that she could teach you. For example, she can pitch her voice so as to be heard: ten to one you could not do it till after many trials. Merely to stand and move on the stage is an art--requires practice. It is understood that we are not now talking of a _comparse_ in a petty theatre who earns the wages of a needle-woman. That is out of the question for you." "Of course I must earn more than that," said Gwendolen, with a sense of wincing rather than of being refuted, "but I think I could soon learn to do tolerably well all those little things you have mentioned. I am not so very stupid. And even in Paris, I am sure, I saw two actresses playing important ladies' parts who were not at all ladies and quite ugly. I suppose I have no particular talent, but I _must_ think it is an advantage, even on the stage, to be a lady and not a perfect fright." "Ah, let us understand each other," said Klesmer, with a flash of new meaning. "I was speaking of what you would have to go through if you aimed at becoming a real artist--if you took music and the drama as a higher vocation in which you would strive after excellence. On that head, what I have said stands fast. You would find--after your education in doing things slackly for one-and-twenty years--great difficulties in study; you would find mortifications in the treatment you would get when you presented yourself on the footing of skill. You would be subjected to tests; people would no longer feign not to see your blunders. You would at first only be accepted on trial. You would have to bear what I may call a glaring insignificance: any success must be won by the utmost patience. You would have to keep your place in a crowd, and after all it is likely you would lose it and get out of sight. If you determine to face these hardships and still try, you will have the dignity of a high purpose, even though you may have chosen unfortunately. You will have some merit, though you may win no prize. You have asked my judgment on your chances of winning. I don't pretend to speak absolutely; but measuring probabilities, my judgment is:--you will hardly achieve more than mediocrity." Klesmer had delivered himself with emphatic rapidity, and now paused a moment. Gwendolen was motionless, looking at her hands, which lay over each other on her lap, till the deep-toned, long-drawn "_But_," with which he resumed, had a startling effect, and made her look at him again. "But--there are certainly other ideas, other dispositions with which a young lady may take up an art that will bring her before the public. She may rely on the unquestioned power of her beauty as a passport. She may desire to exhibit herself to an admiration which dispenses with skill. This goes a certain way on the stage: not in music: but on the stage, beauty is taken when there is nothing more commanding to be had. Not without some drilling, however: as I have said before, technicalities have in any case to be mastered. But these excepted, we have here nothing to do with art. The woman who takes up this career is not an artist: she is usually one who thinks of entering on a luxurious life by a short and easy road--perhaps by marriage--that is her most brilliant chance, and the rarest. Still, her career will not be luxurious to begin with: she can hardly earn her own poor bread independently at once, and the indignities she will be liable to are such as I will not speak of." "I desire to be independent," said Gwendolen, deeply stung and confusedly apprehending some scorn for herself in Klesmer's words. "That was my reason for asking whether I could not get an immediate engagement. Of course I cannot know how things go on about theatres. But I thought that I could have made myself independent. I have no money, and I will not accept help from any one." Her wounded pride could not rest without making this disclaimer. It was intolerable to her that Klesmer should imagine her to have expected other help from him than advice. "That is a hard saying for your friends," said Klesmer, recovering the gentleness of tone with which he had begun the conversation. "I have given you pain. That was inevitable. I was bound to put the truth, the unvarnished truth, before you. I have not said--I will not say--you will do wrong to choose the hard, climbing path of an endeavoring artist. You have to compare its difficulties with those of any less hazardous--any more private course which opens itself to you. If you take that more courageous resolve I will ask leave to shake hands with you on the strength of our freemasonry, where we are all vowed to the service of art, and to serve her by helping every fellow-servant." Gwendolen was silent, again looking at her hands. She felt herself very far away from taking the resolve that would enforce acceptance; and after waiting an instant or two, Klesmer went on with deepened seriousness. "Where there is the duty of service there must be the duty of accepting it. The question is not one of personal obligation. And in relation to practical matters immediately affecting your future--excuse my permitting myself to mention in confidence an affair of my own. I am expecting an event which would make it easy for me to exert myself on your behalf in furthering your opportunities of instruction and residence in London--under the care, that is, of your family--without need for anxiety on your part. If you resolve to take art as a bread-study, you need only undertake the study at first; the bread will be found without trouble. The event I mean is my marriage--in fact--you will receive this as a matter of confidence--my marriage with Miss Arrowpoint, which will more than double such right as I have to be trusted by you as a friend. Your friendship will have greatly risen in value for _her_ by your having adopted that generous labor." Gwendolen's face had begun to burn. That Klesmer was about to marry Miss Arrowpoint caused her no surprise, and at another moment she would have amused herself in quickly imagining the scenes that must have occurred at Quetcham. But what engrossed her feeling, what filled her imagination now, was the panorama of her own immediate future that Klesmer's words seemed to have unfolded. The suggestion of Miss Arrowpoint as a patroness was only another detail added to its repulsiveness: Klesmer's proposal to help her seemed an additional irritation after the humiliating judgment he had passed on her capabilities. His words had really bitten into her self-confidence and turned it into the pain of a bleeding wound; and the idea of presenting herself before other judges was now poisoned with the dread that they also might be harsh; they also would not recognize the talent she was conscious of. But she controlled herself, and rose from her seat before she made any answer. It seemed natural that she should pause. She went to the piano and looked absently at leaves of music, pinching up the corners. At last she turned toward Klesmer and said, with almost her usual air of proud equality, which in this interview had not been hitherto perceptible. "I congratulate you sincerely, Herr Klesmer. I think I never saw any one so admirable as Miss Arrowpoint. And I have to thank you for every sort of kindness this morning. But I can't decide now. If I make the resolve you have spoken of, I will use your permission--I will let you know. But I fear the obstacles are too great. In any case, I am deeply obliged to you. It was very bold of me to ask you to take this trouble." Klesmer's inward remark was, "She will never let me know." But with the most thorough respect in his manner, he said, "Command me at any time. There is an address on this card which will always find me with little delay." When he had taken up his hat and was going to make his bow, Gwendolen's better self, conscious of an ingratitude which the clear-seeing Klesmer must have penetrated, made a desperate effort to find its way above the stifling layers of egoistic disappointment and irritation. Looking at him with a glance of the old gayety, she put out her hand, and said with a smile, "If I take the wrong road, it will not be because of your flattery." "God forbid that you should take any road but one where you will find and give happiness!" said Klesmer, fervently. Then, in foreign fashion, he touched her fingers lightly with his lips, and in another minute she heard the sound of his departing wheels getting more distant on the gravel. Gwendolen had never in her life felt so miserable. No sob came, no passion of tears, to relieve her. Her eyes were burning; and the noonday only brought into more dreary clearness the absence of interest from her life. All memories, all objects, the pieces of music displayed, the open piano--the very reflection of herself in the glass--seemed no better than the packed-up shows of a departing fair. For the first time since her consciousness began, she was having a vision of herself on the common level, and had lost the innate sense that there were reasons why she should not be slighted, elbowed, jostled--treated like a passenger with a third-class ticket, in spite of private objections on her own part. She did not move about; the prospects begotten by disappointment were too oppressively preoccupying; she threw herself into the shadiest corner of a settee, and pressed her fingers over her burning eyelids. Every word that Klesmer had said seemed to have been branded into her memory, as most words are which bring with them a new set of impressions and make an epoch for us. Only a few hours before, the dawning smile of self-contentment rested on her lips as she vaguely imagined a future suited to her wishes: it seemed but the affair of a year or so for her to become the most approved Juliet of the time: or, if Klesmer encouraged her idea of being a singer, to proceed by more gradual steps to her place in the opera, while she won money and applause by occasional performances. Why not? At home, at school, among acquaintances, she had been used to have her conscious superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind, politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like--otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings, and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with. The self-confident visions that had beguiled her were not of a highly exceptional kind; and she had at least shown some rationality in consulting the person who knew the most and had flattered her the least. In asking Klesmer's advice, however, she had rather been borne up by a belief in his latent admiration than bent on knowing anything more unfavorable that might have lain behind his slight objections to her singing; and the truth she had asked for, with an expectation that it would be agreeable, had come like a lacerating thong. "Too old--should have begun seven years ago--you will not, at best, achieve more than mediocrity--hard, incessant work, uncertain praise--bread coming slowly, scantily, perhaps not at all--mortifications, people no longer feigning not to see your blunders--glaring insignificance"--all these phrases rankled in her; and even more galling was the hint that she could only be accepted on the stage as a beauty who hoped to get a husband. The "indignities" that she might be visited with had no very definite form for her, but the mere association of anything called "indignity" with herself, roused a resentful alarm. And along with the vaguer images which were raised by those biting words, came the precise conception of disagreeables which her experience enabled her to imagine. How could she take her mamma and the four sisters to London? if it were not possible for her to earn money at once? And as for submitting to be a _protg_, and asking her mamma to submit with her to the humiliation of being supported by Miss Arrowpoint--that was as bad as being a governess; nay, worse; for suppose the end of all her study to be as worthless as Klesmer clearly expected it to be, the sense of favors received and never repaid, would embitter the miseries of disappointment. Klesmer doubtless had magnificent ideas about helping artists; but how could he know the feelings of ladies in such matters? It was all over: she had entertained a mistaken hope; and there was an end of it. "An end of it!" said Gwendolen, aloud, starting from her seat as she heard the steps and voices of her mamma and sisters coming in from church. She hurried to the piano and began gathering together her pieces of music with assumed diligence, while the expression on her pale face and in her burning eyes was what would have suited a woman enduring a wrong which she might not resent, but would probably revenge. "Well, my darling," said gentle Mrs. Davilow, entering, "I see by the wheel-marks that Klesmer has been here. Have you been satisfied with the interview?" She had some guesses as to its object, but felt timid about implying them. "Satisfied, mamma? oh, yes," said Gwendolen, in a high, hard tone, for which she must be excused, because she dreaded a scene of emotion. If she did not set herself resolutely to feign proud indifference, she felt that she must fall into a passionate outburst of despair, which would cut her mamma more deeply than all the rest of their calamities. "Your uncle and aunt were disappointed at not seeing you," said Mrs. Davilow, coming near the piano, and watching Gwendolen's movements. "I only said that you wanted rest." "Quite right, mamma," said Gwendolen, in the same tone, turning to put away some music. "Am I not to know anything now, Gwendolen? Am I always to be in the dark?" said Mrs. Davilow, too keenly sensitive to her daughter's manner and expression not to fear that something painful had occurred. "There is really nothing to tell now, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a still higher voice. "I had a mistaken idea about something I could do. Herr Klesmer has undeceived me. That is all." "Don't look and speak in that way, my dear child: I cannot bear it," said Mrs. Davilow, breaking down. She felt an undefinable terror. Gwendolen looked at her a moment in silence, biting her inner lip; then she went up to her, and putting her hands on her mamma's shoulders, said, with a drop in her voice to the lowest undertone, "Mamma, don't speak to me now. It is useless to cry and waste our strength over what can't be altered. You will live at Sawyer's Cottage, and I am going to the bishop's daughters. There is no more to be said. Things cannot be altered, and who cares? It makes no difference to any one else what we do. We must try not to care ourselves. We must not give way. I dread giving way. Help me to be quiet." Mrs. Davilow was like a frightened child under her daughter's face and voice; her tears were arrested and she went away in silence.

"Pray go to church, mamma," said Gwendolen the next morning. "I prefer seeing Herr Klesmer alone. He will be here at eleven." "That is hardly correct, I think," said Mrs. Davilow anxiously. "You would not mind Isabel? She could be reading in a corner." "No; she could not: she would bite her nails and stare. It would be too irritating. Trust my judgment, mamma; I must be alone. Take them all to church." Gwendolen had her way, of course; only Miss Merry and two of the girls stayed at home, to give the house a look of habitation by sitting at the dining-room windows. It was a delicious Sunday morning. The melancholy waning sunshine of autumn came mildly through the windows in slanting bands of brightness over the old furniture, the organ at which Gwendolen had acted Saint Cecilia, the antechamber where she worn her Greek dress as Hermione. This last memory was just now very busy in her; for had not Klesmer been struck with admiration of her pose and expression? His reaction was at this moment of the keenest interest for her: perhaps she had never before in her life felt so in need of another person's opinion. Still she told herself that Klesmer had seen little of her, and any unfavourable conclusion of his must have too narrow a foundation. She really felt clever enough for anything. The sound of wheels and opening doors increased her inward flutter. In spite of her self-confidence, she dreaded Klesmer as part of that unmanageable world which was independent of her wishes. Klesmer made his most deferential bow. Gwendolen met him with unusual gravity, saying, "It is most kind of you to come, Herr Klesmer. I hope you have not thought me presumptuous." "I took your wish as a command that did me honour," said Klesmer, with answering gravity. He was really putting aside his own affairs to give his utmost attention to Gwendolen; but he was still in a state of excitation from the events of yesterday. Gwendolen was under too great a strain to remember formalities. She began without delay. "I wish to consult you, Herr Klesmer. We have lost all our fortune; we have nothing. I must get my own bread, and I desire to provide for my mamma. The only way I can think of - and I should like it better than anything - is to be an actress on the stage. But, of course, I should like to take a high position, and I thought - if you thought I could" - here Gwendolen became a little more nervous- "it would be better for me to study singing also." Klesmer put down his hat upon the piano, and folded his arms as if to concentrate himself. "I know," Gwendolen resumed, turning from pale to pink, "I know that my singing is very defective; but I have been ill taught. I could be better taught. And you will understand my wish: to sing and act too, is a much higher position. Naturally, I should wish to take as high rank as I can. And I can rely on your judgment. I am sure you will tell me the truth." Gwendolen somehow had the conviction that now she had made this serious appeal the truth would be favourable. Still Klesmer did not speak. He drew off his gloves, tossed them into his hat, and walked to the other end of the room, filled with compassion for this girl: he wanted to guard his speech. When he turned again, he looked at her with a mild frown of inquiry, and said gently, "You have never seen anything, I think, of actors and their lives?" "Oh, no," said Gwendolen. "You are - pardon me," said Klesmer, "but you are perhaps twenty?" "I am twenty-one," said Gwendolen, a slight fear rising in her. "Do you think I am too old? Many persons begin later than others." Klesmer said with more studied gentleness than ever, "You have probably not thought of an artistic career until now: you did not wish yourself an actress, till the present trouble?" "Not exactly: but I was fond of acting. You saw me, if you remember, in charades, and as Hermione," said Gwendolen, really fearing that Klesmer had forgotten. "Yes, yes," he answered quickly, "I remember perfectly," and again walked to the other end of the room. Gwendolen felt that she was being weighed. The delay was unpleasant. But she did not yet conceive that the scale could dip on the wrong side, when she said, "I shall be very much obliged to you for your advice, whatever it may be." "Miss Harleth," said Klesmer with a slight increase of accent, "I will veil nothing from you in this matter. I should reckon myself guilty if I put you on the wrong road. And if I misled one who is so young, so beautiful - who, I trust, will find her happiness along the right road, I should regard myself as a villain." Gwendolen felt a sinking of heart under this unexpected solemnity as he went on. "You are a beautiful young lady - you have been brought up in ease. You have not been called upon to be anything but a charming young lady, whom it is impolite to find fault with." He paused; then thrusting out his powerful chin, he said, "With that preparation, you wish to try the life of an artist; a life of arduous, unceasing work, and uncertain praise. Your praise would have to be earned, like your bread; and both would come slowly, scantily. They may hardly come at all." This discouragement, which Klesmer had hoped might suffice without anything more unpleasant, roused some resistance in Gwendolen. With an air of pique, she said- "I thought that you, being an artist, would consider the life one of the most honourable and delightful. And if I can do nothing better, I suppose I can put up with the same risks as other people." "Do nothing better?" said Klesmer, a little fired. "No, my dear Miss Harleth, you could do nothing better. I am not decrying the life of the artist. I am exalting it. An honourable life? Yes. But the honour comes from the inward vocation and the hard-won achievement: there is no honour in donning the life as a livery." Some excitement of yesterday had revived in Klesmer and hurried him into sterner speech than he had intended. Conscious of this, he paused suddenly. But Gwendolen's impression was that he had not yet denied that she could succeed. Klesmer was prone to fervour; and she wished to assure him that she was not afraid of some preliminary hardships. She believed that on the stage she must produce an effect such as she had been used to feel certain of in private life: and the belief would not be peeled off easily, but with blood and pain. She insisted- "I am quite prepared to bear hardships at first. Of course no one can become famous all at once. And it is not necessary that every actress or singer should be first-rate. If you would be so kind as to tell me what steps you would recommend, I shall have the courage to take them." Klesmer was convinced now that he must speak plainly. "I will tell you the steps that will be forced upon you. You must go to town under the protection of your mother. You must put yourself under training - musical, dramatic, theatrical"- here Gwendolen looked as if she were going to speak, but Klesmer lifted up his hand and said, decisively, "I know. You recite and sing for the drawing-room. You must unlearn all that. You have not yet conceived what excellence is: you must unlearn your mistakes. You must know what you have to strive for, and then subdue your mind and body to unbroken discipline. For you must not be thinking of celebrity: put that candle out of your eyes, and look only at excellence. You would of course earn nothing - you could get no engagement for a long while. You would need money. But that could perhaps be found." Gwendolen turned pink and then pale during this speech. Her pride had felt a terrible knife-edge. She wished that she had not sent for him: this first experience of being taken on some other ground than that of her social rank and her beauty was becoming bitter. Klesmer went on. "Now, what sort of result might be fairly expected from this self-denial? I will tell you truthfully. The result would be uncertain, and probably would not be worth much." Gwendolen's eyes began to burn, but the dread of showing weakness urged her to self-control. She said in a hard tone- "You think I want talent, or am too old to begin." "Yes! The desire and the training should have begun seven years ago, or earlier. A mountebank's child who helps her father to earn shillings when she is six - a child that learns to sing as it learns to talk, has a likelier beginning. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline, and patient practice. Singing and acting require a shaping of the organs toward a finer certainty of effect. Your muscles - your whole frame - must go like a watch, true to a hair. That is the work of youth." "I did not pretend to genius," said Gwendolen, still feeling that she might somehow do what he said was impossible. "I only suppose that I might have a little talent - enough to improve." "I don't deny that," said Klesmer. "If you had been put in the right track some years ago and had worked well, you might now have made a public singer, though I don't think your voice would have counted for much. For the stage your personal charms and intelligence might then have told." Klesmer seemed cruel, but his feeling was the reverse of cruel. He was directed by compassion for poor Gwendolen, so ignorantly eager to enter on a course of which he saw all the miserable details. Gwendolen, however, was not convinced. Her self-opinion rallied, and since her counsellor was so severe, she was tempted to think that his judgment was fallible and biased. It occurred to her that it would have been simpler and wiser for her to have written to the manager of a London theatre, asking to make an appointment. Klesmer, she saw, had set himself against her singing. But she felt equal to arguing about her acting, and she answered in a resistant tone- "I understood, of course, that no one can be a finished actress at once. It may be impossible to tell beforehand whether I should succeed; but I could try. I could take an engagement at a theatre meanwhile, so as to earn money and study at the same time." "Can't be done, my dear Miss Harleth. I must clear your mind of these notions which have no more resemblance to reality than a pantomime. With all your grace and charm, if you were to present yourself as an aspirant to the stage, a manager would either require you to pay as an amateur for being allowed to perform, or he would tell you to go and be taught. An actor must study to personate a character consistently, and animate it with the natural language of face, gesture, and tone. For you to get an engagement fit for you straight away is out of the question." "I really cannot understand that," said Gwendolen, rather haughtily. "How is it that such poor actresses get engaged? I have been to the theatre several times, and I am sure there were actresses who seemed to me to act not at all well and who were quite plain." "Ah, my dear Miss Harleth, excuse me; you could not at present teach one of those actresses; but there is certainly much that she could teach you. Ten to one you could not pitch your voice so as to be heard: and merely to stand and move on the stage requires practice." "I think I could soon learn to do it tolerably well. I am not so very stupid. And even in Paris, I saw two actresses playing important ladies' parts who were not at all ladies and quite ugly. I suppose I have no particular talent, but I must think it is an advantage, even on the stage, to be a lady and not a perfect fright." "Ah, let us understand each other," said Klesmer, with a flash of new meaning. "I was speaking of what you would have to go through if you aimed at becoming a real artist and striving after excellence. On that head, you would find mortifications: you would be subjected to tests, and judged without flattery. You would have to bear insignificance: any success must be won by the utmost patience. If you determine to face these hardships, you will have the dignity of a high purpose, even though you may have chosen unfortunately. You will have some merit, though you may win no prize. You have asked my judgment on your chances of winning. I don't pretend to speak absolutely; but measuring probabilities, my judgment is that you will hardly achieve more than mediocrity." Klesmer now paused a moment. Gwendolen was motionless, looking at her hands. "But"- he resumed- "there are certainly other ideas with which a young lady may take up an art that will bring her before the public. She may rely on the unquestioned power of her beauty as a passport. She may desire to exhibit herself to an admiration which dispenses with skill. This goes a certain way on the stage: not in music: but on the stage, beauty is taken when there is nothing more commanding to be had. Not without some drilling, however: as I have said, technicalities have to be mastered. But the woman who takes up this career is not an artist: she usually thinks of entering a luxurious life by a short and easy road - perhaps by marriage. Still, her career will not be luxurious to begin with: she can hardly earn her own bread at once, and the indignities she will be liable to are such as I will not speak of." "I desire to be independent," said Gwendolen, deeply stung and confusedly apprehending some scorn for herself in Klesmer's words. "Of course I cannot know how things go on in theatres. But I thought that I could have made myself independent. I have no money, and I will not accept help from anyone." "I have given you pain," said Klesmer gently. "But I was bound to put the unvarnished truth before you. I will not say you will do wrong to choose the hard, climbing path of an artist. If you take that courageous resolve I will ask leave to shake hands with you on the strength of our freemasonry, where we are all vowed to the service of art." Gwendolen was silent, looking down. She felt herself very far from taking the resolve; and after a moment, Klesmer went on with deepened seriousness. "Excuse my mentioning in confidence an affair of my own. I am expecting an event which would make it easy for me to exert myself on your behalf, by arranging for your instruction and residence in London, under the care of your family. If you resolve to study the art, you need only undertake the study at first; your bread will be found without trouble. The event I mean is my marriage with Miss Arrowpoint. Your friendship will have greatly risen in value for her by your having adopted that generous labour." Gwendolen's face began to burn. That Klesmer was about to marry Miss Arrowpoint caused her no surprise, and at another time she would have amused herself in imagining the scenes at Quetcham. But she saw only the picture of her own future that Klesmer's words unfolded. The suggestion of Miss Arrowpoint as a patroness, and Klesmer's proposal to help her, were irritations after his humiliating judgment on her abilities. His words had bitten into her self-confidence; and the idea of presenting herself before other judges was now poisoned with the dread that they also might be harsh, and fail to recognize her talent. But she controlled herself, and went to the piano before answering. At last she turned toward Klesmer and said, with almost her usual air of proud equality, "I congratulate you sincerely, Herr Klesmer. I never saw anyone so admirable as Miss Arrowpoint. And I thank you for your kindness this morning. But I can't decide now. If I make the resolve you have spoken of, I will let you know. But I fear the obstacles are too great. In any case, I am deeply obliged to you." Klesmer's inward remark was, "She will never let me know." But with the utmost respect, he said, "Command me at any time. The address on this card will always find me." He took up his hat. Gwendolen's better self, conscious of ingratitude, made a desperate effort to rise above the stifling layers of egoistic disappointment. She said with a smile, "If I take the wrong road, it will not be because of your flattery." "God forbid that you should take any road but one to happiness!" said Klesmer, fervently. Then he touched her fingers lightly with his lips, and left. Gwendolen had never felt so miserable. Her eyes were burning; and she saw with dreary clearness the absence of interest from her life. All memories, all objects, the pieces of music displayed, the piano, seemed no better than the packed-up shows of a departing fair. For the first time she had lost the innate sense of her superiority. She threw herself onto the settee, and pressed her fingers over her eyelids. Every word of Klesmer's seemed branded into her memory. Only a few hours before, she had contentedly imagined a future suited to her wishes: in a year or so she would become the most approved Juliet of the time: or would proceed by gradual steps to her place in the opera, while she won money and applause by occasional performances. Why not? At home, at school, among acquaintances, she had been used to have her superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything is of the amateur kind, only falling short of perfection because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like. She had at least shown some sense in consulting the person who knew the most and had flattered her the least. In asking Klesmer's advice, however, she had been borne up by a belief in his latent admiration rather than a wish to know anything more unfavourable than slight objections; and the truth she had asked for, expecting it to be agreeable, had come like a lacerating blow. "Too old - should have begun seven years ago - will not achieve more than mediocrity - incessant work, uncertain praise, little earnings - mortifications, insignificance" - these phrases rankled; and even more galling was the hint that she could only be accepted on the stage as a beauty hoping for a husband. The "indignities" that she might incur had no very definite form for her, but the mere word "indignity" roused a resentful alarm. And how could she take her mamma and four sisters to London, if she were not earning money at once? As for submitting to be the protg of Miss Arrowpoint, that was as bad as being a governess. It was over: she had entertained a mistaken hope; and there was an end of it. "An end of it!" said Gwendolen aloud, starting up as she heard the voices of her mamma and sisters coming in from church. She hurried to the piano and began to rearrange her music. "Well, my darling," said gentle Mrs. Davilow, "were you satisfied with your interview with Klesmer?" She had some guesses as to its object. "Satisfied, mamma? oh, yes," said Gwendolen, in a high, hard tone. She had set herself resolutely to feign proud indifference, lest she fall into a passionate outburst of despair. "Your uncle and aunt were disappointed at not seeing you," said Mrs. Davilow. "I said that you wanted rest." "Quite right, mamma," said Gwendolen, in the same tone, turning to put away some music. "Am I not to know anything now, Gwendolen? Am I always to be in the dark?" said Mrs. Davilow, in fear that something painful had occurred. "There is really nothing to tell, mamma," said Gwendolen, in a still higher voice. "I had a mistaken idea about something I could do. Herr Klesmer has undeceived me. That is all." "Don't look and speak in that way, my dear child: I cannot bear it," said Mrs. Davilow, breaking down. Gwendolen looked at her a moment in silence, then, putting her hands on her mamma's shoulders, said in an undertone, "Mamma, it is useless to cry over what can't be altered. You will live at Sawyer's Cottage, and I am going to the bishop's daughters. There is no more to be said. We must try not to care. We must not give way. I dread giving way. Help me to be quiet." Mrs. Davilow's tears were arrested; and she went away in silence.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 23

"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen, Sicher ist's in allen Fllen! Wenn du lange dich gequlet, Wei er gleich, wo dir es fehlet. Auch auf Beifall darfst du hoffen; Denn er wei, wo du's getroffen." --GOETHE: _West-stlicher Divan_. Momentous things happened to Deronda the very evening of that visit to the small house at Chelsea, when there was the discussion about Mirah's public name. But for the family group there, what appeared to be the chief sequence connected with it occurred two days afterward. About four o'clock wheels paused before the door, and there came one of those knocks with an accompanying ring which serve to magnify the sense of social existence in a region where the most enlivening signals are usually those of the muffin-man. All the girls were at home, and the two rooms were thrown together to make space for Kate's drawing, as well as a great length of embroidery which had taken the place of the satin cushions--a sort of _pice de rsistance_ in the courses of needlework, taken up by any clever fingers that happened to be at liberty. It stretched across the front room picturesquely enough, Mrs. Meyrick bending over it on one corner, Mab in the middle, and Amy at the other end. Mirah, whose performances in point of sewing were on the make-shift level of the tailor-bird's, her education in that branch having been much neglected, was acting as reader to the party, seated on a camp-stool; in which position she also served Kate as model for a title-page vignette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the successive volumes of the family tea-table. She was giving forth with charming distinctness the delightful Essay of Elia, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweeps," and all were smiling over the "innocent blackness," when the imposing knock and ring called their thoughts to loftier spheres, and they looked up in wonderment. "Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick; "can it be Lady Mallinger? Is there a grand carriage, Amy?" "No--only a hansom cab. It must be a gentleman." "The Prime Minister, I should think," said Kate dryly. "Hans says the greatest man in London may get into a hansom cab." "Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "Suppose it should be Lord Russell!" The five bright faces were all looking amused when the old maid-servant bringing in a card distractedly left the parlor-door open, and there was seen bowing toward Mrs. Meyrick a figure quite unlike that of the respected Premier--tall and physically impressive even in his kid and kerseymere, with massive face, flamboyant hair, and gold spectacles: in fact, as Mrs. Meyrick saw from the card, _Julius Klesmer_. Even embarrassment could hardly have made the "little mother" awkward, but quick in her perceptions she was at once aware of the situation, and felt well satisfied that the great personage had come to Mirah instead of requiring her to come to him; taking it as a sign of active interest. But when he entered, the rooms shrank into closets, the cottage piano, Mab thought, seemed a ridiculous toy, and the entire family existence as petty and private as an establishment of mice in the Tuileries. Klesmer's personality, especially his way of glancing round him, immediately suggested vast areas and a multitudinous audience, and probably they made the usual scenery of his consciousness, for we all of us carry on our thinking in some habitual locus where there is a presence of other souls, and those who take in a larger sweep than their neighbors are apt to seem mightily vain and affected. Klesmer was vain, but not more so than many contemporaries of heavy aspect, whose vanity leaps out and startles one like a spear out of a walking-stick; as to his carriage and gestures, these were as natural to him as the length of his fingers; and the rankest affectation he could have shown would have been to look diffident and demure. While his grandiose air was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano, he was taking in the details around him with a keen and thoroughly kind sensibility. He remembered a home no longer than this on the outskirts of Bohemia; and in the figurative Bohemia too he had had large acquaintance with the variety and romance which belong to small incomes. He addressed Mrs. Meyrick with the utmost deference. "I hope I have not taken too great a freedom. Being in the neighborhood, I ventured to save time by calling. Our friend, Mr. Deronda, mentioned to me an understanding that I was to have the honor of becoming acquainted with a young lady here--Miss Lapidoth." Klesmer had really discerned Mirah in the first moment of entering, but, with subtle politeness, he looked round bowingly at the three sisters as if he were uncertain which was the young lady in question. "Those are my daughters: this is Miss Lapidoth," said Mrs. Meyrick, waving her hand toward Mirah. "Ah," said Klesmer, in a tone of gratified expectation, turning a radiant smile and deep bow to Mirah, who, instead of being in the least taken by surprise, had a calm pleasure in her face. She liked the look of Klesmer, feeling sure that he would scold her, like a great musician and a kind man. "You will not object to beginning our acquaintance by singing to me," he added, aware that they would all be relieved by getting rid of preliminaries. "I shall be very glad. It is good of you to be willing to listen to me," said Mirah, moving to the piano. "Shall I accompany myself?" "By all means," said Klesmer, seating himself, at Mrs. Meyrick's invitation, where he could have a good view of the singer. The acute little mother would not have acknowledged the weakness, but she really said to herself, "He will like her singing better if he sees her." All the feminine hearts except Mirah's were beating fast with anxiety, thinking Klesmer terrific as he sat with his listening frown on, and only daring to look at him furtively. If he did say anything severe it would be so hard for them all. They could only comfort themselves with thinking that Prince Camaralzaman, who had heard the finest things, preferred Mirah's singing to any other: also she appeared to be doing her very best, as if she were more instead of less at ease than usual. The song she had chosen was a fine setting of some words selected from Leopardi's grand Ode to Italy:, "_O patria mia, vedo le mura c gli archi E le colonne e i simula-cri e l'erme Torridegli avi nostri_", This was recitative: then followed, "_Ma la gloria--non vedo_", a mournful melody, a rhythmic plaint. After this came a climax of devout triumph--passing from the subdued adoration of a happy Andante in the words, "_Beatissimi voi. Che offriste il petto alle nemiche lance Per amor di costei che al sol vi diede_", to the joyous outburst of an exultant Allegro in, "_Oh viva, oh viva: Beatissimi voi Mentre nel monde si favelli o scriva._" When she had ended, Klesmer said after a moment, "That is old Leo's music." "Yes, he was my last master--at Vienna: so fierce and so good," said Mirah, with a melancholy smile. "He prophesied that my voice would not do for the stage. And he was right." "_Con_tinue, if you please," said Klesmer, putting out his lips and shaking his long fingers, while he went on with a smothered articulation quite unintelligible to the audience. The three girls detested him unanimously for not saying one word of praise. Mrs. Meyrick was a little alarmed. Mirah, simply bent on doing what Klesmer desired, and imagining that he would now like to hear her sing some German, went through Prince Radzivill's music to Gretchen's songs in the _Faust,_ one after the other without any interrogatory pause. When she had finished he rose and walked to the extremity of the small space at command, then walked back to the piano, where Mirah had risen from her seat and stood looking toward him with her little hands crossed before her, meekly awaiting judgment; then with a sudden unknitting of his brow and with beaming eyes, he stretched out his hand and said abruptly, "Let us shake hands: you are a musician." Mab felt herself beginning to cry, and all the three girls held Klesmer adorable. Mrs. Meyrick took a long breath. But straightway the frown came again, the long hand, back uppermost, was stretched out in quite a different sense to touch with finger-tip the back of Mirah's, and with protruded lip he said, "Not for great tasks. No high roofs. We are no skylarks. We must be modest." Klesmer paused here. And Mab ceased to think him adorable: "as if Mirah had shown the least sign of conceit!" Mirah was silent, knowing that there was a specific opinion to be waited for, and Klesmer presently went on--"I would not advise--I would not further your singing in any larger space than a private drawing-room. But you will do there. And here in London that is one of the best careers open. Lessons will follow. Will you come and sing at a private concert at my house on Wednesday?" "Oh, I shall be grateful," said Mirah, putting her hands together devoutly. "I would rather get my bread in that way than by anything more public. I will try to improve. What should I work at most?" Klesmer made a preliminary answer in noises which sounded like words bitten in two and swallowed before they were half out, shaking his fingers the while, before he said, quite distinctly, "I shall introduce you to Astorga: he is the foster-father of good singing and will give you advice." Then addressing Mrs. Meyrick, he added, "Mrs. Klesmer will call before Wednesday, with your permission." "We shall feel that to be a great kindness," said Mrs. Meyrick. "You will sing to her," said Klesmer, turning again to Mirah. "She is a thorough musician, and has a soul with more ears to it than you will often get in a musician. Your singing will satisfy her: 'Vor den Wissenden sich stellen;' you know the rest?" "'Sicher ist's in alien Fllen.'" said Mirah, promptly. And Klesmer saying "Schn!" put out his hand again as a good-by. He had certainly chosen the most delicate way of praising Mirah, and the Meyrick girls had now given him all their esteem. But imagine Mab's feeling when suddenly fixing his eyes on her, he said decisively, "That young lady is musical, I see!" She was a mere blush and sense of scorching. "Yes," said Mirah, on her behalf. "And she has a touch." "Oh, please, Mirah--a scramble, not a touch," said Mab, in anguish, with a horrible fear of what the next thing might be: this dreadful divining personage--evidently Satan in gray trousers--might order her to sit down to the piano, and her heart was like molten wax in the midst of her. But this was cheap payment for her amazed joy when Klesmer said benignantly, turning to Mrs. Meyrick, "Will she like to accompany Miss Lapidoth and hear the music on Wednesday?" "There could hardly be a greater pleasure for her," said Mrs. Meyrick. "She will be most glad and grateful." Thereupon Klesmer bowed round to the three sisters more grandly than they had ever been bowed to before. Altogether it was an amusing picture--the little room with so much of its diagonal taken up in Klesmer's magnificent bend to the small feminine figures like images a little less than life-size, the grave Holbein faces on the walls, as many as were not otherwise occupied, looking hard at this stranger who by his face seemed a dignified contemporary of their own, but whose garments seemed a deplorable mockery of the human form. Mrs. Meyrick could not help going out of the room with Klesmer and closing the door behind her. He understood her, and said with a frowning nod, "She will do: if she doesn't attempt too much and her voice holds out, she can make an income. I know that is the great point: Deronda told me. You are taking care of her. She looks like a good girl." "She is an angel," said the warm-hearted woman. "No," said Klesmer, with a playful nod; "she is a pretty Jewess: the angels must not get the credit of her. But I think she has found a guardian angel," he ended, bowing himself out in this amiable way. The four young creatures had looked at each other mutely till the door banged and Mrs. Meyrick re-entered. Then there was an explosion. Mab clapped her hands and danced everywhere inconveniently; Mrs. Meyrick kissed Mirah and blessed her; Amy said emphatically, "We can never get her a new dress before Wednesday!" and Kate exclaimed, "Thank heaven my table is not knocked over!" Mirah had reseated herself on the music-stool without speaking, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks as she looked at her friends. "Now, now, Mab!" said Mrs. Meyrick; "come and sit down reasonably and let us talk?" "Yes, let us talk," said Mab, cordially, coming back to her low seat and caressing her knees. "I am beginning to feel large again. Hans said he was coming this afternoon. I wish he had been here--only there would have been no room for him. Mirah, what are you looking sad for?" "I am too happy," said Mirah. "I feel so full of gratitude to you all; and he was so very kind." "Yes, at last," said Mab, sharply. "But he might have said something encouraging sooner. I thought him dreadfully ugly when he sat frowning, and only said, '_Con_tinue.' I hated him all the long way from the top of his hair to the toe of his polished boot." "Nonsense, Mab; he has a splendid profile," said Kate. "_Now_, but not _then_. I cannot bear people to keep their minds bottled up for the sake of letting them off with a pop. They seem to grudge making you happy unless they can make you miserable beforehand. However, I forgive him everything," said Mab, with a magnanimous air, "but he has invited me. I wonder why he fixed on me as the musical one? Was it because I have a bulging forehead, ma, and peep from under it like a newt from under a stone?" "It was your way of listening to the singing, child," said Mrs. Meyrick. "He has magic spectacles and sees everything through them, depend upon it. But what was that German quotation you were so ready with, Mirah--you learned puss?" "Oh, that was not learning," said Mirah, her tearful face breaking into an amused smile. "I said it so many times for a lesson. It means that it is safer to do anything--singing or anything else--before those who know and understand all about it." "That was why you were not one bit frightened, I suppose," said Amy. "But now, what we have to talk about is a dress for you on Wednesday." "I don't want anything better than this black merino," said Mirah, rising to show the effect. "Some white gloves and some new _bottines_." She put out her little foot, clad in the famous felt slipper. "There comes Hans," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Stand still, and let us hear what he says about the dress. Artists are the best people to consult about such things." "You don't consult me, ma," said Kate, lifting up her eyebrow with a playful complainingness. "I notice mothers are like the people I deal with--the girls' doings are always priced low." "My dear child, the boys are such a trouble--we could never put up with them, if we didn't make believe they were worth more," said Mrs. Meyrick, just as her boy entered. "Hans, we want your opinion about Mirah's dress. A great event has happened. Klesmer has been here, and she is going to sing at his house on Wednesday among grand people. She thinks this dress will do." "Let me see," said Hans. Mirah in her childlike way turned toward him to be looked at; and he, going to a little further distance, knelt with one knee on a hassock to survey her. "This would be thought a very good stage-dress for me," she said, pleadingly, "in a part where I was to come on as a poor Jewess and sing to fashionable Christians." "It would be effective," said Hans, with a considering air; "it would stand out well among the fashionable _chiffons_." "But you ought not to claim all the poverty on your side, Mirah," said Amy. "There are plenty of poor Christians and dreadfully rich Jews and fashionable Jewesses." "I didn't mean any harm," said Mirah. "Only I have been used to thinking about my dress for parts in plays. And I almost always had a part with a plain dress." "That makes me think it questionable," said Hans, who had suddenly become as fastidious and conventional on this occasion as he had thought Deronda was, apropos of the Berenice-pictures. "It looks a little too theatrical. We must not make you a _rle_ of the poor Jewess--or of being a Jewess at all." Hans had a secret desire to neutralize the Jewess in private life, which he was in danger of not keeping secret. "But it is what I am really. I am not pretending anything. I shall never be anything else," said Mirah. "I always feel myself a Jewess." "But we can't feel that about you," said Hans, with a devout look. "What does it signify whether a perfect woman is a Jewess or not?" "That is your kind way of praising me; I never was praised so before," said Mirah, with a smile, which was rather maddening to Hans and made him feel still more of a cosmopolitan. "People don't think of me as a British Christian," he said, his face creasing merrily. "They think of me as an imperfectly handsome young man and an unpromising painter." "But you are wandering from the dress," said Amy. "If that will not do, how are we to get another before Wednesday? and to-morrow Sunday?" "Indeed this will do," said Mirah, entreatingly. "It is all real, you know," here she looked at Hans--"even if it seemed theatrical. Poor Berenice sitting on the ruins--any one might say that was theatrical, but I know that this is just what she would do." "I am a scoundrel," said Hans, overcome by this misplaced trust. "That is my invention. Nobody knows that she did that. Shall you forgive me for not saying so before?" "Oh, yes," said Mirah, after a momentary pause of surprise. "You knew it was what she would be sure to do--a Jewess who had not been faithful--who had done what she did and was penitent. She could have no joy but to afflict herself; and where else would she go? I think it is very beautiful that you should enter so into what a Jewess would feel." "The Jewesses of that time sat on ruins," said Hans, starting up with a sense of being checkmated. "That makes them convenient for pictures." "But the dress--the dress," said Amy; "is it settled?" "Yes; is it not?" said Mirah, looking doubtfully at Mrs. Meyrick, who in her turn looked up at her son, and said, "What do you think, Hans?" "That dress will not do," said Hans, decisively. "She is not going to sit on ruins. You must jump into a cab with her, little mother, and go to Regent Street. It's plenty of time to get anything you like--a black silk dress such as ladies wear. She must not be taken for an object of charity. She has talents to make people indebted to her." "I think it is what Mr. Deronda would like--for her to have a handsome dress," said Mrs. Meyrick, deliberating. "Of course it is," said Hans, with some sharpness. "You may take my word for what a gentleman would feel." "I wish to do what Mr. Deronda would like me to do," said Mirah, gravely, seeing that Mrs. Meyrick looked toward her; and Hans, turning on his heel, went to Kate's table and took up one of her drawings as if his interest needed a new direction. "Shouldn't you like to make a study of Klesmer's head, Hans?" said Kate. "I suppose you have often seen him?" "Seen him!" exclaimed Hans, immediately throwing back his head and mane, seating himself at the piano and looking round him as if he were surveying an amphitheatre, while he held his fingers down perpendicularly toward the keys. But then in another instant he wheeled round on the stool, looked at Mirah and said, half timidly--"Perhaps you don't like this mimicry; you must always stop my nonsense when you don't like it." Mirah had been smiling at the swiftly-made image, and she smiled still, but with a touch of something else than amusement, as she said--"Thank you. But you have never done anything I did not like. I hardly think he could, belonging to you," she added, looking at Mrs. Meyrick. In this way Hans got food for his hope. How could the rose help it when several bees in succession took its sweet odor as a sign of personal attachment?

Momentous things happened to Deronda the very evening of that visit to the Meyricks' house. But for the family there, the chief sequel connected with it occurred two days afterward. About four o'clock wheels paused before the door, and there came an imperious knock with an accompanying ring. All the girls were at home: Kate was drawing, and a great length of embroidery was stretched across the front room, Mrs. Meyrick bending over it on one corner, Mab in the middle, and Amy at the other end. Mirah was acting as reader to the party, seated on a stool, and giving forth with charming distinctness a delightful Essay of Elia, over which all were smiling, when the imposing knock and ring caused them to look up in wonderment. "Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick. "Is there a grand carriage, Amy?" "No - only a hansom cab. It must be a gentleman." When the old maid-servant opened the door, there was seen a tall and impressive figure, with massive face, flamboyant hair, and gold spectacles: in fact, as Mrs. Meyrick read on the card, Julius Klesmer. When he entered, the rooms shrank into closets, the cottage piano, Mab thought, seemed a ridiculous toy, and the entire family existence like an establishment of mice in the Tuileries. Klesmer's personality, especially his way of glancing round him, immediately suggested vast areas and an audience, and probably they made the usual scenery of his consciousness. But while his grandiose air was making Mab feel herself a ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano, he was taking in his surroundings with a keen and thoroughly kind sensibility. He remembered a home no larger than this on the outskirts of Bohemia; and he addressed Mrs. Meyrick with the utmost deference. "I hope I have not taken too great a freedom by calling, since I was in the area. Our friend, Mr. Deronda, mentioned to me a young lady here - Miss Lapidoth." Klesmer had really discerned Mirah on entering, but he looked round bowingly at the three sisters as if he were uncertain which was the young lady in question. "This is Miss Lapidoth," said Mrs. Meyrick, waving her hand toward Mirah. "Ah," said Klesmer, turning a radiant smile and deep bow to Mirah, who, instead of surprise, had a calm pleasure in her face. She liked the look of Klesmer, feeling sure that he would scold her, like a great musician and a kind man. "You will not object to beginning our acquaintance by singing to me," he added. "I shall be very glad. It is good of you to be willing to listen," said Mirah, moving to the piano. "Shall I accompany myself?" "By all means," said Klesmer, sitting, at Mrs Meyrick's invitation, where he could have a good view of the singer. The acute little mother said to herself, "He will like her singing better if he sees her." All the feminine hearts except Mirah's were beating fast with anxiety, finding Klesmer terrifying as he sat with his listening frown on. They could only comfort themselves with thinking that Prince Camaralzaman preferred Mirah's singing to any other:- also she appeared to be doing her very best, as if she were more instead of less at ease than usual. The song she had chosen was a fine setting of Leopardi's grand Ode to Italy; the recitative was followed by "Ma la Gloria non vedo" - a mournful melody; then after this came a climax of devout triumph, ending in the joyous outburst of an exultant Allegro: "Oh viva, oh viva: Beatissimi voi Mentre nel mondo si favelli o scriva." When she had ended, Klesmer said after a moment- "That is Joseph Leo's music." "Yes, he was my last master, at Vienna: so fierce and so good," said Mirah, with a melancholy smile. "He prophesied that my voice would not do for the stage. And he was right." "Continue, if you please," said Klesmer, putting out his lips and shaking his long fingers. The three girls detested him unanimously for not saying one word of praise. Mrs. Meyrick was a little alarmed. Mirah, simply bent on doing what Klesmer desired, and imagining that he would now like to hear her sing some German, went through Prince Radzivill's music to Gretchen's songs in the "Faust," one after the other without any pause. When she had finished he rose and walked the length of the small space, then walked back to the piano, where Mirah had risen from her seat and stood with her little hands crossed before her, meekly awaiting judgment. With a sudden unknitting of his brow and with beaming eyes, he stretched out his hand and said abruptly, "Let us shake hands: you are a musician." Mab felt herself beginning to cry, and all the three girls held Klesmer adorable. Mrs. Meyrick took a long breath. But straightway the frown came again, as with protruded lip he said- "Not for great tasks. No high roofs. We are no skylarks. We must be modest." Klesmer paused. And Mab ceased to think him adorable: "as if Mirah had shown the least sign of conceit!" Klesmer went on- "I would not advise your singing in any larger space than a private drawing-room. But you will do there. And here in London that is one of the best careers open. Lessons will follow. Will you come and sing at a private concert at my house on Wednesday?" "Oh, I shall be grateful," said Mirah, putting her hands together. "I would rather get my bread in that way than by anything more public. I will try to improve. What should I work at most?" "I shall introduce you to Astorga: he is the foster-father of good singing and will give you advice." Then addressing Mrs. Meyrick, he added, "Mrs. Klesmer will call before Wednesday, with your permission." "We shall feel that to be a great kindness," said Mrs. Meyrick. "You will sing to her," said Klesmer, turning again to Mirah. "She is a thorough musician. Your singing will satisfy her: 'Vor den Wissenden sich stellen;' you know the rest?" "'Sicher ist's in alien Fllen.'" said Mirah, promptly. And Klesmer saying "Schn!" put out his hand as a good-bye. But imagine Mab's feeling when suddenly fixing his eyes on her, he said decisively, "That young lady is musical, I see!" She was a mere blush and sense of scorching. "Yes," said Mirah. "And she has a touch." "Oh, please, Mirah - a scramble, not a touch," said Mab, in anguish, with a horrible fear that this dreadful divining personage might order her to sit down to the piano. But her dread turned to amazed joy when Klesmer said benignantly to Mrs. Meyrick, "Will she like to accompany Miss Lapidoth and hear the music on Wednesday?" "There could hardly be a greater pleasure for her," said Mrs. Meyrick. Thereupon Klesmer bowed round to the three sisters more grandly than they had ever been bowed to before. Mrs. Meyrick left the room with him, closing the door behind her. He said in privacy, with a frowning nod- "She will do: if she doesn't attempt too much and her voice holds out, she can make an income. I know that is the great point: Deronda told me. You are taking care of her. She looks like a good girl." "She is an angel," said the warm-hearted woman. "No," said Klesmer, with a playful nod; "she is a pretty Jewess. But I think she has found a guardian angel," he ended, bowing himself out in this amiable way. The four young creatures looked at each other mutely till the door banged and Mrs. Meyrick re-entered. Then there was an explosion. Mab clapped her hands and danced; Mrs. Meyrick kissed Mirah and blessed her; and Amy said emphatically, "We can never get her a new dress before Wednesday!" Mirah had reseated herself on the music-stool, with the tears rolling down her cheeks. "I am too happy," she said. "I feel so full of gratitude to you all; and he was so very kind." "Yes, at last," said Mab. "But he might have said something encouraging sooner. I thought him dreadfully ugly when he sat frowning, and only said, 'Continue.' However, I forgive him everything, now he has invited me. I wonder why he fixed on me as the musical one?" "It was your way of listening, child," said Mrs. Meyrick. "But what was that German quotation you were so ready with, Mirah - you learned puss?" "Oh, that was not learning," said Mirah, her tearful face breaking into an amused smile. "I said it so many times for a lesson. It means that it is safer to do anything before those who understand all about it." "That was why you were not frightened, I suppose," said Amy. "But now, we have to talk about a dress for you on Wednesday." "I don't want anything better than this black merino," said Mirah. "Here comes Hans," said Mrs. Meyrick, as he entered. "Hans, we want your opinion about Mirah's dress. A great event has happened. Klesmer has been here, and she is to sing at his house among grand people. She thinks this dress will do." "Let me see," said Hans. Mirah in her childlike way turned toward him. "This would be thought a very good stage-dress for me," she said, pleadingly, "in a part where I was to come on as a poor Jewess. I almost always had a part with a plain dress." "That makes me think it questionable," said Hans, who had suddenly become as fastidious and conventional on this occasion as he had thought Deronda was. "It looks too theatrical. We must not make you a role of the poor Jewess." Hans had a secret desire to neutralize the Jewess in private life. "But it is what I am. I shall never be anything else," said Mirah. "I always feel myself a Jewess." "People don't think of me as a Christian," said Hans, his face creasing merrily. "They think of me as an imperfectly handsome young man and an unpromising painter." "You are wandering from the dress," said Amy. "If that will not do, how are we to get another before Wednesday?" "Indeed this will do," said Mirah, entreatingly, looking at Hans, "even if it seems theatrical. Poor Berenice sitting on the ruins is theatrical, but I know that is just what she would do." "I am a scoundrel," said Hans. "That is my invention. Nobody knows that she did that. Shall you forgive me for not saying so before?" "Oh, yes," said Mirah, in surprise. "You knew it was what she would be sure to do - a Jewess who had not been faithful - who was penitent. I think it is very beautiful that you should enter so into what a Jewess would feel." With a sense of being checkmated, Hans said decisively, "That dress will not do. She is not going to sit on ruins. You must jump into a cab with her, little mother, and go to Regent Street for a black silk dress such as ladies wear. She must not be taken for an object of charity." "I think Mr. Deronda would like her to have a handsome dress," said Mrs. Meyrick, deliberating. "Of course," said Hans, sharply. "You may take my word for what a gentleman would feel." "I wish to do what Mr. Deronda would like," said Mirah, gravely; and Hans, turning on his heel, went to Kate's table and took up one of her drawings to inspect it. "Shouldn't you like to draw Klesmer's head, Hans?" said Kate. "I suppose you have often seen him?" "Seen him!" exclaimed Hans, immediately throwing back his mane, seating himself at the piano and looking round him as if he were surveying an amphitheatre, while he stretched his fingers down toward the keys. But then he wheeled round, looked at Mirah and said, half timidly- "Perhaps you don't like this mimicry; you must stop my nonsense when you don't like it." Mirah smiled, but with a touch of something else than amusement, as she said- "Thank you. But you have never done anything I did not like. I hardly think he could, belonging to you," she added, looking at Mrs. Meyrick. In this way Hans got food for his hope. How could the rose help it when several bees in succession took its sweet odour as a sign of personal attachment?

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 39

The godhead in us wrings our noble deeds From our reluctant selves. It was an unpleasant surprise to Deronda when he returned from the Abbey to find the undesirable father installed in the lodgings at Brompton. Mirah had felt it necessary to speak of Deronda to her father, and even to make him as fully aware as she could of the way in which the friendship with Ezra had begun, and of the sympathy which had cemented it. She passed more lightly over what Deronda had done for her, omitting altogether the rescue from drowning, and speaking of the shelter she had found in Mrs. Meyrick's family so as to leave her father to suppose that it was through these friends Deronda had become acquainted with her. She could not persuade herself to more completeness in her narrative: she could not let the breath of her father's soul pass over her relation to Deronda. And Lapidoth, for reasons, was not eager in his questioning about the circumstances of her flight and arrival in England. But he was much interested in the fact of his children having a beneficent friend apparently high in the world. It was the brother who told Deronda of this new condition added to their life. "I am become calm in beholding him now," Ezra ended, "and I try to think it possible that my sister's tenderness, and the daily tasting a life of peace, may win him to remain aloof from temptation. I have enjoined her, and she has promised, to trust him with no money. I have convinced her that he will buy with it his own destruction." Deronda first came on the third day from Ladipoth's arrival. The new clothes for which he had been measured were not yet ready, and wishing to make a favorable impression, he did not choose to present himself in the old ones. He watched for Deronda's departure, and, getting a view of him from the window, was rather surprised at his youthfulness, which Mirah had not mentioned, and which he had somehow thought out of the question in a personage who had taken up a grave friendship and hoary studies with the sepulchral Ezra. Lapidoth began to imagine that Deronda's real or chief motive must be that he was in love with Mirah. And so much the better; for a tie to Mirah had more promise of indulgence for her father than a tie to Ezra: and Lapidoth was not without the hope of recommending himself to Deronda, and of softening any hard prepossessions. He was behaving with much amiability, and trying in all ways at his command to get himself into easy domestication with his children--entering into Mirah's music, showing himself docile about smoking, which Mrs. Adam could not tolerate in her parlor, and walking out in the square with his German pipe, and the tobacco with which Mirah supplied him. He was too acute to offer any present remonstrance against the refusal of money, which Mirah told him that she must persist in as a solemn duty promised to her brother. He was comfortable enough to wait. The next time Deronda came, Lapidoth, equipped in his new clothes, and satisfied with his own appearance, was in the room with Ezra, who was teaching himself, as a part of his severe duty, to tolerate his father's presence whenever it was imposed. Deronda was cold and distant, the first sight of this man, who had blighted the lives of his wife and children, creating in him a repulsion that was even a physical discomfort. But Lapidoth did not let himself be discouraged, asked leave to stay and hear the reading of papers from the old chest, and actually made himself useful in helping to decipher some difficult German manuscript. This led him to suggest that it might be desirable to make a transcription of the manuscript, and he offered his services for this purpose, and also to make copies of any papers in Roman characters. Though Ezra's young eyes he observed were getting weak, his own were still strong. Deronda accepted the offer, thinking that Lapidoth showed a sign of grace in the willingness to be employed usefully; and he saw a gratified expression in Ezra's face, who, however, presently said, "Let all the writing be done here; for I cannot trust the papers out of my sight, lest there be an accident by burning or otherwise." Poor Ezra felt very much as if he had a convict on leave under his charge. Unless he saw his father working, it was not possible to believe that he would work in good faith. But by this arrangement he fastened on himself the burden of his father's presence, which was made painful not only through his deepest, longest associations, but also through Lapidoth's restlessness of temperament, which showed itself the more as he become familiarized with his situation, and lost any awe he had felt of his son. The fact was, he was putting a strong constraint on himself in confining his attention for the sake of winning Deronda's favor; and like a man in an uncomfortable garment he gave himself relief at every opportunity, going out to smoke, or moving about and talking, or throwing himself back in his chair and remaining silent, but incessantly carrying on a dumb language of facial movement or gesticulation: and if Mirah were in the room, he would fall into his old habit of talk with her, gossiping about their former doings and companions, or repeating quirks and stories, and plots of the plays he used to adapt, in the belief that he could at will command the vivacity of his earlier time. All this was a mortal infliction to Ezra; and when Mirah was at home she tried to relieve him, by getting her father down into the parlor and keeping watch over him there. What duty is made of a single difficult resolve? The difficulty lies in the daily unflinching support of consequences that mar the blessed return of morning with the prospect of irritation to be suppressed or shame to be endured. And such consequences were being borne by these, as by many other heroic children of an unworthy father--with the prospect, at least to Mirah, of their stretching onward through the solid part of life. Meanwhile Lapidoth's presence had raised a new impalpable partition between Deronda and Mirah--each of them dreading the soiling inferences of his mind, each of them interpreting mistakenly the increased reserve and diffidence of the other. But it was not very long before some light came to Deronda. As soon as he could, after returning from his brief visit to the Abbey, he had called at Hans Meyrick's rooms, feeling it, on more grounds than one, a due of friendship that Hans should be at once acquainted with the reasons of his late journey, and the changes of intention it had brought about. Hans was not there; he was said to be in the country for a few days; and Deronda, after leaving a note, waited a week, rather expecting a note in return. But receiving no word, and fearing some freak of feeling in the incalculably susceptible Hans, whose proposed sojourn at the Abbey he knew had been deferred, he at length made a second call, and was admitted into the painting-room, where he found his friend in a light coat, without a waistcoat, his long hair still wet from a bath, but with a face looking worn and wizened--anything but country-like. He had taken up his palette and brushes, and stood before his easel when Deronda entered, but the equipment and attitude seemed to have been got up on short notice. As they shook hands, Deronda said, "You don't look much as if you had been in the country, old fellow. Is it Cambridge you have been to?" "No," said Hans, curtly, throwing down his palette with the air of one who has begun to feign by mistake; then pushing forward a chair for Deronda, he threw himself into another, and leaned backward with his hands behind his head, while he went on, "I've been to I-don't-know-where--No man's land--and a mortally unpleasant country it is." "You don't mean to say you have been drinking, Hans," said Deronda, who had seated himself opposite, in anxious survey. "Nothing so good. I've been smoking opium. I always meant to do it some time or other, to try how much bliss could be got by it; and having found myself just now rather out of other bliss, I thought it judicious to seize the opportunity. But I pledge you my word I shall never tap a cask of that bliss again. It disagrees with my constitution." "What has been the matter? You were in good spirits enough when you wrote to me." "Oh, nothing in particular. The world began to look seedy--a sort of cabbage-garden with all the cabbages cut. A malady of genius, you may be sure," said Hans, creasing his face into a smile; "and, in fact, I was tired of being virtuous without reward, especially in this hot London weather." "Nothing else? No real vexation?" said Deronda. Hans shook his head. "I came to tell you of my own affairs, but I can't do it with a good grace if you are to hide yours." "Haven't an affair in the world," said Hans, in a flighty way, "except a quarrel with a bric--brac man. Besides, as it is the first time in our lives that you ever spoke to me about your own affairs, you are only beginning to pay a pretty long debt." Deronda felt convinced that Hans was behaving artificially, but he trusted to a return of the old frankness by-and-by if he gave his own confidence. "You laughed at the mystery of my journey to Italy, Hans," he began. "It was for an object that touched my happiness at the very roots. I had never known anything about my parents, and I really went to Genoa to meet my mother. My father has been long dead--died when I was an infant. My mother was the daughter of an eminent Jew; my father was her cousin. Many things had caused me to think of this origin as almost a probability before I set out. I was so far prepared for the result that I was glad of it--glad to find myself a Jew." "You must not expect me to look surprised, Deronda," said Hans, who had changed his attitude, laying one leg across the other and examining the heel of his slipper. "You knew it?" "My mother told me. She went to the house the morning after you had been there--brother and sister both told her. You may imagine we can't rejoice as they do. But whatever you are glad of, I shall come to be glad of in the end--_when_ exactly the end may be I can't predict," said Hans, speaking in a low tone, which was as usual with him as it was to be out of humor with his lot, and yet bent on making no fuss about it. "I quite understand that you can't share my feeling," said Deronda; "but I could not let silence lie between us on what casts quite a new light over my future. I have taken up some of Mordecai's ideas, and I mean to try and carry them out, so far as one man's efforts can go. I dare say I shall by and by travel to the East and be away for some years." Hans said nothing, but rose, seized his palette and began to work his brush on it, standing before his picture with his back to Deronda, who also felt himself at a break in his path embarrassed by Hans's embarrassment. Presently Hans said, again speaking low, and without turning, "Excuse the question, but does Mrs. Grandcourt know of all this?" "No; and I must beg of you, Hans," said Deronda, rather angrily, "to cease joking on that subject. Any notions you have are wide of the truth--are the very reverse of the truth." "I am no more inclined to joke than I shall be at my own funeral," said Hans. "But I am not at all sure that you are aware what are my notions on that subject." "Perhaps not," said Deronda. "But let me say, once for all, that in relation to Mrs. Grandcourt, I never have had, and never shall have the position of a lover. If you have ever seriously put that interpretation on anything you have observed, you are supremely mistaken." There was silence a little while, and to each the silence was like an irritating air, exaggerating discomfort. "Perhaps I have been mistaken in another interpretation, also," said Hans, presently. "What is that?" "That you had no wish to hold the position of a lover toward another woman, who is neither wife nor widow." "I can't pretend not to understand you, Meyrick. It is painful that our wishes should clash. I hope you will tell me if you have any ground for supposing that you would succeed." "That seems rather a superfluous inquiry on your part, Deronda," said Hans, with some irritation. "Why superfluous?" "Because you are perfectly convinced on the subject--and probably have had the very best evidence to convince you." "I will be more frank with you than you are with me," said Deronda, still heated by Hans' show of temper, and yet sorry for him. "I have never had the slightest evidence that I should succeed myself. In fact, I have very little hope." Hans looked round hastily at his friend, but immediately turned to his picture again. "And in our present situation," said Deronda, hurt by the idea that Hans suspected him of insincerity, and giving an offended emphasis to his words, "I don't see how I can deliberately make known my feeling to her. If she could not return it, I should have embittered her best comfort; for neither she nor I can be parted from her brother, and we should have to meet continually. If I were to cause her that sort of pain by an unwilling betrayal of my feeling, I should be no better than a mischievous animal." "I don't know that I have ever betrayed _my_ feeling to her," said Hans, as if he were vindicating himself. "You mean that we are on a level, then; you have no reason to envy me." "Oh, not the slightest," said Hans, with bitter irony. "You have measured my conceit and know that it out-tops all your advantages." "I am a nuisance to you, Meyrick. I am sorry, but I can't help it," said Deronda, rising. "After what passed between us before, I wished to have this explanation; and I don't see that any pretensions of mine have made a real difference to you. They are not likely to make any pleasant difference to myself under present circumstances. Now the father is there--did you know that the father is there?" "Yes. If he were not a Jew I would permit myself to damn him--with faint praise, I mean," said Hans, but with no smile. "She and I meet under greater constraint than ever. Things might go on in this way for two years without my getting any insight into her feeling toward me. That is the whole state of affairs, Hans. Neither you nor I have injured the other, that I can see. We must put up with this sort of rivalry in a hope that is likely enough to come to nothing. Our friendship can bear that strain, surely." "No, it can't," said Hans, impetuously, throwing down his tools, thrusting his hands into his coat-pockets, and turning round to face Deronda, who drew back a little and looked at him with amazement. Hans went on in the same tone, "Our friendship--my friendship--can't bear the strain of behaving to you like an ungrateful dastard and grudging you your happiness. For you _are_ the happiest dog in the world. If Mirah loves anybody better than her brother, _you are the man_." Hans turned on his heel and threw himself into his chair, looking up at Deronda with an expression the reverse of tender. Something like a shock passed through Deronda, and, after an instant, he said, "It is a good-natured fiction of yours, Hans." "I am not in a good-natured mood. I assure you I found the fact disagreeable when it was thrust on me--all the more, or perhaps all the less, because I believed then that your heart was pledged to the duchess. But now, confound you! you turn out to be in love in the right place--a Jew--and everything eligible." "Tell me what convinced you--there's a good fellow," said Deronda, distrusting a delight that he was unused to. "Don't ask. Little mother was witness. The upshot is, that Mirah is jealous of the duchess, and the sooner you relieve your mind the better. There! I've cleared off a score or two, and may be allowed to swear at you for getting what you deserve--which is just the very best luck I know of." "God bless you, Hans!" said Deronda, putting out his hand, which the other took and wrung in silence.

It was an unpleasant surprise to Deronda when he returned to find the undesirable father installed in the lodgings at Brompton. Mirah had felt it necessary to speak of Deronda to her father, making him aware of how the friendship with Ezra had begun, but omitting altogether the rescue from drowning, and letting her father suppose that she had met Deronda through the Meyricks. Lapidoth was much interested in the fact of his children having a friend high in the world. "I am become calm in beholding him now," Ezra told Deronda, "and I try to think it possible that my sister's tenderness may keep him from temptation. We have agreed to trust him with no money, for he will buy with it his own destruction." The first time Deronda came after the father's arrival, Lapidoth did not present himself, for his new clothes were not yet ready. Watching from the window, he was surprised at Deronda's youthfulness; he had assumed him an older man who had taken up a grave friendship with the sepulchral Ezra, and began to imagine that Deronda's real motive must be that he was in love with Mirah; which might make it easier for Lapidoth to recommend himself to him. He was behaving amiably, and trying to get himself into easy domestication with his children - entering into Mirah's music, showing himself docile about smoking, and walking out in the square with his pipe and the tobacco which Mirah gave him. He was too acute to remonstrate against the refusal of money: he was comfortable enough to wait. The next time Deronda came, Lapidoth, satisfied with his own appearance in his new clothes, was in the room with Ezra, who was teaching himself, as a part of his severe duty, to tolerate his father's presence. Deronda was cold and distant, the sight of this man who had blighted the lives of his family creating in him a physical repulsion. But Lapidoth was not discouraged: he asked leave to stay and hear the reading of papers from the old chest, and actually made himself useful in helping to decipher some difficult German manuscript. This led him to suggest that it might be desirable to make a transcription of the manuscript, and he offered his services for this purpose. Deronda accepted the offer, thinking that Lapidoth showed a sign of grace in this willingness to be employed usefully; and he saw a gratified expression in Ezra's face, who, however, said, "Let all the writing be done here; for I cannot trust the papers out of my sight, lest there be an accident." Poor Ezra felt as if he had a convict under his charge. But by this arrangement he fastened on himself the burden of his father's presence, with all its restlessness, which showed itself more as Lapidoth become familiarized with his situation, and lost his awe of his son. The fact was, he was putting a strong constraint on himself for the sake of winning Deronda's favour; and like a man in an uncomfortable garment he gave himself relief at every opportunity, going out to smoke, or moving about and talking; and if Mirah were in the room, he would fall into his old habit of gossiping, or repeating stories, in the belief that he could command his old vivacity. All this was a mortal infliction to Ezra; and when Mirah was at home she tried to relieve him, by taking her father down into the parlour. The prospect of this duty to an unworthy father seemed to Mirah to stretch onward through her life. Meanwhile Lapidoth's presence had raised a new partition between Deronda and Mirah - each of them dreading the soiling inferences of his mind, each interpreting mistakenly the increased reserve of the other. But it was not long before some light came to Deronda. He had called at Hans Meyrick's rooms to let him know the outcome of his recent journey. Hans was not there; and Deronda, after leaving a note, waited a week. But receiving no word, he at length made a second call, and was admitted into the painting-room, where he found his friend looking worn and wizened. He stood before his easel when Deronda entered, but seemed not to be painting. As they shook hands, Deronda said, "You don't look well, old fellow. Is it Cambridge you have been to?" "No," said Hans curtly, throwing himself into a chair. "I've been to No man's land - and a mortally unpleasant country it is." "Have you been drinking, Hans?" said Deronda, in anxious survey. "I've been smoking opium. I always meant to try it some time or other, when I was feeling low. But I shall never do it again. It disagrees with me." "What has been the matter? You were in good spirits enough when you wrote to me." "Oh, nothing in particular. The world began to look seedy - a sort of cabbage-garden with all the cabbages cut. A malady of genius, you may be sure," said Hans, creasing his face into a smile. "Nothing else?" said Deronda. "I came to tell you of my own affairs, but I can't do it with a good grace if you hide yours." "Haven't an affair in the world," said Hans, in a flighty way. "Besides, as it is the first time in our lives that you ever spoke to me about your own affairs, you are beginning to pay a pretty long debt." Deronda felt convinced that Hans was behaving artificially, but he trusted to a return of the old frankness if he gave his own confidence. "You laughed at the mystery of my journey to Italy, Hans," he began. "I had never known anything about my parents, and I went to Genoa to meet my mother. My father died when I was an infant. My mother was the daughter of an eminent Jew; my father was her cousin. Many things had caused me to think of this origin as almost a probability before I set out. I was so far prepared that I was glad of it - glad to find myself a Jew." "You must not expect me to look surprised, Deronda," said Hans, laying one leg across the other and examining his slipper. "You knew it?" "My mother told me, after Mirah and Ezra told her. We can't rejoice as they do. But whatever you are glad of, I shall come to be glad of in the end," said Hans, speaking in a low tone. "I quite understand that you can't share my feeling," said Deronda; "but I could not let silence lie between us on my future. I have taken up some of Mordecai's ideas, and I mean to try and carry them out, so far as one man's efforts can go. I shall travel to the East and be away for some years." Hans said nothing, but rose, seized his palette and began to work his brush on it, standing with his back to Deronda, who felt himself embarrassed by Hans's embarrassment. Presently Hans said, without turning, "Does Mrs. Grandcourt know of all this?" "No; and I must beg of you, Hans," said Deronda, rather angrily, "to cease joking on that subject. Any notions you have are the very reverse of the truth." "I am not sure that you are aware what are my notions on that subject." "Perhaps not," said Deronda. "But let me say, once for all, that in relation to Mrs. Grandcourt, I never have had, and never shall have the position of a lover. If you have ever thought that, you are supremely mistaken." There was an uncomfortable silence. "Perhaps I have been mistaken in another interpretation, also," said Hans. "What is that?" "That you had no wish to hold the position of a lover toward another woman, who is neither wife nor widow." "I can't pretend not to understand you, Meyrick. It is painful that our wishes should clash. I hope you will tell me if you have any ground for supposing that you would succeed." "That seems rather a superfluous inquiry on your part, Deronda," said Hans, with some irritation. "You are perfectly convinced on the subject - and you probably have had the very best evidence to convince you." "I will be more frank with you than you are with me," said Deronda, still heated. "I have never had the slightest evidence that I should succeed. In fact, I have very little hope. And in our present situation, I don't see how I can make known my feeling to her. If she could not return it, I should have embittered her best comfort; for we should have to meet continually to tend to her brother. You have no reason to envy me." "Oh, not the slightest," said Hans, with bitter irony. "You have measured my conceit and know that it out-tops all your advantages." "I am a nuisance to you, Meyrick. I am sorry, but I can't help it," said Deronda, rising. "I don't see that any pretensions of mine have made a difference to you. They are not likely to make any pleasant difference to myself. Now the father is there, she and I meet under greater constraint than ever. Things might go on in this way for two years without my getting any insight into her feeling toward me. That is the whole state of affairs, Hans. Neither you nor I have injured the other, that I can see. We are rivals without hope: our friendship can bear that strain, surely." "No, it can't," said Hans, throwing down his tools, and turning to face Deronda, who looked at him with amazement. Hans went on, with a fierce expression- "Our friendship can't bear the strain of my behaving to you like an ungrateful dastard and grudging you your happiness. If Mirah loves anybody better than her brother, you are the man." A shock passed through Deronda. After an instant, he said- "It is a good-natured fiction of yours, Hans." "I am not in a good-natured mood. I found the fact disagreeable when it was thrust on me: I believed then that your heart was pledged to the duchess. But now, confound you! you turn out to be in love in the right place - a Jew - and everything eligible." "Tell me what convinced you - there's a good fellow," said Deronda, distrusting his unfamiliar delight. "Don't ask. Little mother was witness. The upshot is, that Mirah is jealous of the duchess, and I may be allowed to swear at you for getting what you deserve - which is just the very best luck." "God bless you, Hans!" said Deronda, putting out his hand, which the other shook in silence.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 67

"Much adoe there was, God wot; He wold love and she wold not." --NICHOLAS BRETON. Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the length of the sun's journeying can no more tell us how life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of races; or he may head an expedition that opens new continental pathways, get himself maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may come back to find his neighbors grumbling at the same parish grievance as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive butcher's boy, and pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same prints. If the swiftest thinking has about the pace of a greyhound, the slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight progression. Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the heavens. Something of this contrast was seen in the year's experience which had turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness where it would have been her happiness to be held worthy; while it had left her family in Pennicote without deeper change than that of some outward habits, and some adjustment of prospects and intentions to reduced income, fewer visits, and fainter compliments. The rectory was as pleasant a home as before: and the red and pink peonies on the lawn, the rows of hollyhocks by the hedges, had bloomed as well this year as last: the rector maintained his cheerful confidence in the good will of patrons and his resolution to deserve it by diligence in the fulfillment of his duties, whether patrons were likely to hear of it or not; doing nothing solely with an eye to promotion except, perhaps, the writing of two ecclesiastical articles, which having no signature, were attributed to some one else, except by the patrons who had a special copy sent them, and these certainly knew the author but did not read the articles. The rector, however, chewed no poisonous cud of suspicion on this point: he made marginal notes on his own copies to render them a more interesting loan, and was gratified that the Archdeacon and other authorities had nothing to say against the general tenor of his argument. Peaceful authorship!--living in the air of the fields and downs, and not in the thrice-breathed breath of criticism--bringing no Dantesque leanness; rather, assisting nutrition by complacency, and perhaps giving a more suffusive sense of achievement than the production of a whole _Divina Commedia_. Then there was the father's recovered delight in his favorite son, which was a happiness outweighing the loss of eighteen hundred a year. Of whatever nature might be the hidden change wrought in Rex by the disappointment of his first love, it was apparently quite secondary to that evidence of more serious ambition which dated from the family misfortune; indeed, Mr. Gascoigne was inclined to regard the little affair which had caused him so much anxiety the year before as an evaporation of superfluous moisture, a kind of finish to the baking process which the human dough demands. Rex had lately come down for a summer visit to the rectory, bringing Anna home, and while he showed nearly the old liveliness with his brothers and sisters, he continued in his holiday the habits of the eager student, rising early in the morning and shutting himself up early in the evenings to carry on a fixed course of study. "You don't repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?" said his father. "There is no profession I would choose before it," said Rex. "I should like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code. I reverse the famous dictum. I should say, 'Give me something to do with making the laws, and let who will make the songs.'" "You will have to stow in an immense amount of rubbish, I suppose--that's the worst of it," said the rector. "I don't see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with. It doesn't make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers. Any orderly way of looking at things as cases and evidence seems to me better than a perpetual wash of odds and ends bearing on nothing in particular. And then, from a higher point of view, the foundations and the growth of law make the most interesting aspects of philosophy and history. Of course there will be a good deal that is troublesome, drudging, perhaps exasperating. But the great prizes in life can't be won easily--I see that." "Well, my boy, the best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world. But I fancy it so with most work when a man goes into it with a will. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said to me the other day that his 'prentice had no mind to his trade; 'and yet, sir,' said Brewitt, 'what would a young fellow have if he doesn't like the blacksmithing?" The rector cherished a fatherly delight, which he allowed to escape him only in moderation. Warham, who had gone to India, he had easily borne parting with, but Rex was that romance of later life which a man sometimes finds in a son whom he recognizes as superior to himself, picturing a future eminence for him according to a variety of famous examples. It was only to his wife that he said with decision: "Rex will be a distinguished man, Nancy, I am sure of it--as sure as Paley's father was about his son." "Was Paley an old bachelor?" said Mrs. Gascoigne. "That is hardly to the point, my dear," said the rector, who did not remember that irrelevant detail. And Mrs. Gascoigne felt that she had spoken rather weakly. This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by the group who had exchanged the faded dignity of Offendene for the low white house not a mile off, well enclosed with evergreens, and known to the villagers, as "Jodson's." Mrs. Davilow's delicate face showed only a slight deepening of its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more silver lines, in consequence of the last year's trials; the four girls had bloomed out a little from being less in the shade; and the good Jocosa preserved her serviceable neutrality toward the pleasures and glories of the world as things made for those who were not "in a situation." The low narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows, with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of monthly roses, the faint murmurs of the garden, and the occasional rare sound of hoofs and wheels seeming to clarify the succeeding silence, made rather a crowded, lively scene, Rex and Anna being added to the usual group of six. Anna, always a favorite with her younger cousins, had much to tell of her new experience, and the acquaintances she had made in London, and when on her first visit she came alone, many questions were asked her about Gwendolen's house in Grosvenor Square, what Gwendolen herself had said, and what any one else had said about Gwendolen. Had Anna been to see Gwendolen after she had known about the yacht? No:--an answer which left speculation free concerning everything connected with that interesting unknown vessel beyond the fact that Gwendolen had written just before she set out to say that Mr. Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the Mediterranean, and again from Marseilles to say that she was sure to like the yachting, the cabins were very elegant, and she would probably not send another letter till she had written quite a long diary filled with _dittos_. Also, this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in "the newspaper;" so that altogether this new phase of Gwendolen's exalted life made a striking part of the sisters' romance, the book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or two to make an adventure that might end well. But when Rex was present, the girls, according to instructions, never started this fascinating topic, and to-day there had only been animated descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends, which caused some astonished questioning from minds to which the idea of live Jews, out of a book, suggested a difference deep enough to be almost zoological, as of a strange race in Pliny's Natural History that might sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha could not imagine what Jews believed now; and she had a dim idea that they rejected the Old Testament since it proved the New; Miss Merry thought that Mirah and her brother could "never have been properly argued with," and the amiable Alice did not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she "couldn't bear them." Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the great Jewish families who were in society were quite what they ought to be both in London and Paris, but admitted that the commoner unconverted Jews were objectionable; and Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as they did, or whether you might be with her and not find out that she was a Jewess. Rex, who had no partisanship with the Israelites, having made a troublesome acquaintance with the minutiae of their ancient history in the form of "cram," was amusing himself by playfully exaggerating the notion of each speaker, while Anna begged them all to understand that he was only joking, when the laughter was interrupted by the bringing in of a letter for Mrs. Davilow. A messenger had run with it in great haste from the rectory. It enclosed a telegram, and as Mrs. Davilow read and re-read it in silence and agitation, all eyes were turned on her with anxiety, but no one dared to speak. Looking up at last and seeing the young faces "painted with fear," she remembered that they might be imagining something worse than the truth, something like her own first dread which made her unable to understand what was written, and she said, with a sob which was half relief, "My dears, Mr. Grandcourt--" She paused an instant, and then began again, "Mr. Grandcourt is drowned." Rex started up as if a missile had been suddenly thrown into the room. He could not help himself, and Anna's first look was at him. But then, gathering some self-command while Mrs. Davilow was reading what the rector had written on the enclosing paper, he said, "Can I do anything, aunt? Can I carry any word to my father from you?" "Yes, dear. Tell him I will be ready--he is very good. He says he will go with me to Genoa--he will be here at half-past six. Jocosa and Alice, help me to get ready. She is safe--Gwendolen is safe--but she must be ill. I am sure she must be very ill. Rex, dear--Rex and Anna--go and and tell your father I will be quite ready. I would not for the world lose another night. And bless him for being ready so soon. I can travel night and day till we get there." Rex and Anna hurried away through the sunshine which was suddenly solemn to them, without uttering a word to each other: she chiefly possessed by solicitude about any reopening of his wound, he struggling with a tumultuary crowd of thoughts that were an offence against his better will. The tumult being undiminished when they were at the rectory gate, he said, "Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants me immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten minutes--only ten minutes." Who has been quite free from egoistic escapes of the imagination, picturing desirable consequences on his own future in the presence of another's misfortune, sorrow, or death? The expected promotion or legacy is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even prayer a severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other form of unpleasant companionship. In Rex's nature the shame was immediate, and overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of what might come, which thrust themselves in with the idea that Gwendolen was again free--overspread them, perhaps, the more persistently because every phantasm of a hope was quickly nullified by a more substantial obstacle. Before the vision of "Gwendolen free" rose the impassable vision of "Gwendolen rich, exalted, courted;" and if in the former time, when both their lives were fresh, she had turned from his love with repugnance, what ground was there for supposing that her heart would be more open to him in the future? These thoughts, which he wanted to master and suspend, were like a tumultuary ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape from by running. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of calm resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to undo all that difficult work, and cast him back into the wretched fluctuations of a longing which he recognized as simply perturbing and hopeless. And at this moment the activity of such longing had an untimeliness that made it repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor Rex; it was not much more than eighteen months since he had been laid low by an archer who sometimes touches his arrow with a subtle, lingering poison. The disappointment of a youthful passion has effects as incalculable as those of small-pox which may make one person plain and a genius, another less plain and more foolish, another plain without detriment to his folly, and leave perhaps the majority without obvious change. Everything depends--not on the mere fact of disappointment, but--on the nature affected and the force that stirs it. In Rex's well-endowed nature, brief as the hope had been, the passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was revolutionary, though fraught with a beneficent new order which retained most of the old virtues; in certain respects he believed that it had finally determined the bias and color of his life. Now, however, it seemed that his inward peace was hardly more than that of republican Florence, and his heart no better than the alarm-bell that made work slack and tumult busy. Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which the ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for many moderns whose experience has by no means a fiery, demonic character. To have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another's personality, to have the strongest inclinations possessed by an image which retains its dominance in spite of change and apart from worthiness--nay, to feel a passion which clings faster for the tragic pangs inflicted by a cruel, reorganized unworthiness--is a phase of love which in the feeble and common-minded has a repulsive likeness to his blind animalism insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity or heaven-lit admiration. But when this attaching force is present in a nature not of brutish unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can risk itself safely, it may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be called divine in a higher sense than the ancient. Phlegmatic rationality stares and shakes its head at these unaccountable prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and waves, determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage. This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the future of tenderness into a shadow of the past. But he had also made up his mind that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new counting-up of the treasures that remained to him, and he had even felt a release of power such as may come from ceasing to be afraid of your own neck. And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the sense of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been as strong as ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that could make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth quite roughly, "She would never love me; and that is not the question--I could never approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no consequence at all, and am not likely to be of much consequence till my head is turning gray. But what has that to do with it? She would not have me on any terms, and I would not ask her. It is a meanness to be thinking about it now--no better than lurking about the battle-field to strip the dead; but there never was more gratuitous sinning. I have nothing to gain there--absolutely nothing. Then why can't I face the facts, and behave as they demand, instead of leaving my father to suppose that there are matters he can't speak to me about, though I might be useful in them?" The last thought made one wave with the impulse that sent Rex walking firmly into the house and through the open door of the study, where he saw his father packing a traveling-desk. "Can I be of any use, sir?" said Rex, with rallied courage, as his father looked up at him. "Yes, my boy; when I'm gone, just see to my letters, and answer where necessary, and send me word of everything. Dymock will manage the parish very well, and you will stay with your mother, or, at least, go up and down again, till I come back, whenever that may be." "You will hardly be very long, sir, I suppose," said Rex, beginning to strap a railway rug. "You will perhaps bring my cousin back to England?" He forced himself to speak of Gwendolen for the first time, and the rector noticed the epoch with satisfaction. "That depends," he answered, taking the subject as a matter-of-course between them. "Perhaps her mother may stay there with her, and I may come back very soon. This telegram leaves us in ignorance which is rather anxious. But no doubt the arrangements of the will lately made are satisfactory, and there may possibly be an heir yet to be born. In any case, I feel confident that Gwendolen will be liberally--I should expect, splendidly--provided for." "It must have been a great shock for her," said Rex, getting more resolute after the first twinge had been borne. "I suppose he was a devoted husband." "No doubt of it," said the rector, in his most decided manner. "Few men of his position would have come forward as he did under the circumstances." Rex had never seen Grandcourt, had never been spoken to about him by any one of the family, and knew nothing of Gwendolen's flight from her suitor to Leubronn. He only knew that Grandcourt, being very much in love with her, had made her an offer in the first weeks of her sudden poverty, and had behaved very handsomely in providing for her mother and sisters. That was all very natural and what Rex himself would have liked to do. Grandcourt had been a lucky fellow, and had had some happiness before he got drowned. Yet Rex wondered much whether Gwendolen had been in love with the successful suitor, or had only forborne to tell him that she hated being made love to.

Length of time is a very imperfect measure of things; a man may head an expedition that opens new continental pathways, and at the end of a few months come back to find his neighbours grumbling at the same parish grievance as before. If the swiftest thinking has the pace of a greyhound, the slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight progression. Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity of human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change to the quiet recurrence of the familiar. Something of this contrast was seen in the year's experience which had turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness; while it had left her family in Pennicote without deeper change than some adjustment of prospects as to reduced income and fewer visits. The rectory was as pleasant a home as before: the red and pink peonies and hollyhocks had bloomed as well this year as last: the rector maintained his cheerful confidence in the good will of patrons, doing nothing with an eye to promotion except, perhaps, the writing of two ecclesiastical articles, which having no signature, were attributed to some one else, except by the patrons who had a special copy sent them, and these certainly knew the author but did not read the articles. The rector, however, was gratified that the Archdeacon and other authorities had nothing to say against his argument. Then there was the father's delight in his favourite son, which was a happiness outweighing the loss of eighteen hundred a year. However Rex had been changed by the disappointment of his first love, his serious ambition dated from the family misfortune; indeed, Mr. Gascoigne was inclined to regard the little affair which had caused him so much anxiety as a kind of finish to the baking process which the human dough demands. Rex had lately come for a summer visit to the rectory, bringing Anna home, and while still lively with his brothers and sisters, he rose early in the morning and shut himself up in the evenings to study. "You don't repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?" said his father. "There is no profession I would choose before it," said Rex. "I should like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code." "You have to learn an immense amount of rubbish, I suppose," said the rector. "I don't see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with. It doesn't make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers. Of course there will be a good deal that is troublesome and drudging. But the great prizes in life can't be won easily." "Well, my boy, the best augury of a man's success in any line of work is that he thinks it the finest in the world. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said to me the other day that his apprentice had no mind to his trade; 'and yet, sir,' said Brewitt, 'what would a young fellow have if he doesn't like the blacksmithing?'" The rector cherished a fatherly delight in his son, which he showed in moderation. It was only to his wife that he said: "Rex will be a distinguished man, Nancy, I am sure of it." This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by Mrs Davilow and her family at the low white house not a mile off, enclosed with evergreens, and known to the villagers as "Jodson's." Mrs. Davilow's delicate face showed only a slight deepening of its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more silver lines; the four girls had bloomed a little from being less in the shade; and the good Jocosa preserved her serviceable neutrality of feeling. The narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows, with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of roses, made rather a crowded, lively scene. Rex and Anna were added to the usual group of six. Anna had much to tell her cousins of her experience of London, and when she came alone, many questions were asked her about Gwendolen's house in Grosvenor Square, what Gwendolen had said, and what anyone else had said about her. Gwendolen had written to her family to say that Mr. Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the Mediterranean, and again from Marseilles to say that the cabins were very elegant, and that she would probably not send another letter for a while. This movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in "the newspaper;" so that altogether this phase of Gwendolen's exalted life made a striking part of the sisters' romantic speculations. But when Rex was present, the girls never started this fascinating topic. Today there had only been animated descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends. To the sisters, who knew of Jews only from books, these accounts were as alien as the depiction of a strange race in Pliny's Natural History, that could sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha had a dim idea that Jews rejected the Old Testament since it proved the New; Miss Merry thought that Mirah and her brother could "never have been properly argued with," and the amiable Alice did not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she "couldn't bear them." Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the great Jewish families in society were quite what they ought to be, but admitted that the commoner unconverted Jews were objectionable; and Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as they did. Rex was amusing himself by playfully exaggerating the notion of each speaker, when the laughter was interrupted by the bringing in of a letter for Mrs. Davilow. A messenger had run with it in great haste from the rectory. It enclosed a telegram, which Mrs. Davilow read in agitated silence, while all eyes were turned anxiously on her. Looking up at last at their troubled faces, with a sob which was half relief that the news was not worse- "My dears, Mr. Grandcourt-" She paused, and then began again. "Mr. Grandcourt is drowned." Rex started up as if a missile had been suddenly thrown into the room. Then, gathering some self-command while Mrs. Davilow was reading what the rector had written on the enclosing paper, he said- "Can I do anything, aunt? Can I carry any word to my father from you?" "Yes, dear. Tell him I will be ready - he is very good. He says he will go with me to Genoa - he will be here at half-past six. She is safe - Gwendolen is safe - but I am sure she must be very ill. Rex, dear, go and tell your father I will be quite ready. I would not for the world lose another night. I can travel night and day till we get there." Rex and Anna hurried away through the sunshine which was suddenly solemn to them, without uttering a word to each other: she anxious about any reopening of his wound, he struggling with a tumult of thoughts that were an offence against his better will. At the rectory gate, he said- "Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants me immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten minutes." Who has been quite free from egoistic imaginings, picturing desirable consequences on his own future based on another's misfortune or death? This type of temptation sometimes raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other form of unpleasant companionship. In Rex's nature the shame was immediate, and overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of what might come now that Gwendolen was again free - overspread them, perhaps, the more persistently because every phantom hope was quickly nullified by an obstacle. If formerly, when both their lives were fresh, she had turned from his love with repugnance, what ground was there for supposing that her heart would be more open to him in the future? These thoughts were like a ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of calm resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to undo all that difficult work, and cast him back into a hopeless longing, whose untimeliness was repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor Rex; it was only eighteen months since he had been laid low by an archer who sometimes touches his arrow with a subtle, lingering poison, which affects each nature differently. In Rex's nature, brief as the hope had been, the passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was revolutionary; he believed that it had determined the colour of his life. Now, however, it seemed that his inward peace was overturned. Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which the ancients knew and sung. To have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another's personality, which retains its dominance in spite of change and apart from worthiness, is a type of love which the common-minded may call blind animalism, insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity. But when this attaching force is present in a dignified nature that can risk itself safely, it may result in a devotedness not unfit to be called divine. This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless. But he had also decided that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new counting-up of the treasures that remained to him. And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the sense of irrevocableness in his lot had been shaken by a change of circumstances that could make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth quite roughly- "She would never love me; and I could never approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no consequence at all. She would not have me on any terms, and I would not ask her. It is a meanness to be thinking about it now - no better than lurking about the battle-field to strip the dead. Then why can't I face the facts, and behave as they demand, instead of leaving my father to suppose that there are matters he can't speak to me about?" The last thought sent Rex walking firmly inside and into the study, where he saw his father packing a travelling-desk. "Can I be of any use, sir?" said Rex, with rallied courage, as his father looked up. "Yes, my boy; when I'm gone, just see to my letters, and answer where necessary, and send me word of everything, till I come back, whenever that may be." "You will hardly be very long, sir, I suppose," said Rex, beginning to strap a railway rug. "You will perhaps bring my cousin back to England?" He forced himself to speak of Gwendolen for the first time, and the rector noticed this with satisfaction. "That depends," he answered, taking the subject as a matter-of-course between them. "Perhaps her mother may stay there with her, and I may come back very soon. This telegram leaves us in ignorance which is rather anxious. But no doubt the arrangements of the will are satisfactory, and I feel confident that Gwendolen will be liberally provided for." "It must have been a great shock for her," said Rex, with resolution. "I suppose he was a devoted husband." "No doubt of it," said the rector. "Few men of his position would have come forward as he did under the circumstances." Rex had never seen Grandcourt, and knew nothing of Gwendolen's flight from her suitor to Leubronn. He only knew that Grandcourt, being in love with her, had made her an offer in the first weeks of her sudden poverty, and had behaved very handsomely in providing for her family. That was all very natural and what Rex himself would have liked to do. Grandcourt had been a lucky fellow, and had had some happiness before he got drowned. Yet Rex wondered much whether Gwendolen had been in love with him, or had only refrained from telling him that she hated being made love to.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 58

There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound not _after_ but _before_ he had well got the celestial fire into the _narthex_ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of poverty and disease--a solitude where many pass by, but none regard. "Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions--nay, traveled conclusions--continually take the form of images which have a foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators of the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a greater and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-watched portal. No doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary, as there is a minim mammal which you might imprison in the finger of your glove. That small relative of the elephant has no harm in him; but what great mental or social type is free from specimens whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? One is afraid to think of all that the genus "patriot" embraces; or of the elbowing there might be at the day of judgment for those who ranked as authors, and brought volumes either in their hands or on trucks. This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts about Mordecai, whose figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a new question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the interest was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind, getting his crust by a quiet handicraft, like Spinoza, fitted into none of Deronda's anticipations. It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had concentrated itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to be executed. It was remarkable that the hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, was in Mordecai wholly diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried into the current of this yearning for transmission. The yearning, which had panted upward from out of over-whelming discouragements, had grown into a hope--the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being checked by the clear conception he had of his hastening decline, took rather the intensity of expectant faith in a prophecy which has only brief space to get fulfilled in. Some years had now gone since he had first begun to measure men with a keen glance, searching for a possibility which became more and more a distinct conception. Such distinctness as it had at first was reached chiefly by a method of contrast: he wanted to find a man who differed from himself. Tracing reasons in that self for the rebuffs he had met with and the hindrances that beset him, he imagined a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, morally fervid--in all this a nature ready to be plenished from Mordecai's; but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have been used to all the refinements of social life, his voice must flow with a full and easy current, his circumstances be free from sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit and wonder as Mordecai did, bearing the stamp of his people amid the sign of poverty and waning breath. Sensitive to physical characteristics, he had, both abroad and in England, looked at pictures as well as men, and in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and noble types of the human form, such as might well belong to men of his own race. But he returned in disappointment. The instances are scattered but thinly over the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune or selection even of the chief masters has given to art a face at once young, grand, and beautiful, where, if there is any melancholy, it is no feeble passivity, but enters into the foreshadowed capability of heroism. Some observant persons may perhaps remember his emaciated figure, and dark eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture that had touched him either to new or habitual meditation: he commonly wore a cloth cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to the excusable prejudices of others; certain incapacities of his own had made the sentence of exclusion; and hence it was that his imagination had constructed another man who would be something more ample than the second soul bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabalists, to help out the insufficient first--who would be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate all that was worthiest in an existence whose visible, palpable part was burning itself fast away. His inward need for the conception of this expanded, prolonged self was reflected as an outward necessity. The thoughts of his heart (that ancient phrase best shadows the truth) seemed to him too precious, too closely interwoven with the growth of things not to have a further destiny. And as the more beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self took shape in his mind, he loved it beforehand with an affection half identifying, half contemplative and grateful. Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images, that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments: nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distantly approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriar's Bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses of tall forms of buildings which were the signs of world-commerce, the oncoming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his imagination toward fuller detail, he ceased to see the figure with its back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor; keeping a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart waketh"--when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years. Of late the urgency of irremediable time, measured by the gradual choking of life, had turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch for the fulfillment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of tolling, the sentence about to be executed? The deliverer's footstep must be near--the deliverer who was to rescue Mordecai's spiritual travail from oblivion, and give it an abiding-place in the best heritage of his people. An insane exaggeration of his own value, even if his ideas had been as true and precious as those of Columbus or Newton, many would have counted this yearning, taking it as the sublimer part for a man to say, "If not I, then another," and to hold cheap the meaning of his own life. But the fuller nature desires to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look on: strong love hungers to bless, and not merely to behold blessing. And while there is warmth enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there will still be men to feel, "I am lord of this moment's change, and will charge it with my soul." But with that mingling of inconsequence which belongs to us all, and not unhappily, since it saves us from many effects of mistake, Mordecai's confidence in the friend to come did not suffice to make him passive, and he tried expedients, pathetically humble, such as happened to be within his reach, for communicating something of himself. It was now two years since he had taken up his abode under Ezra Cohen's roof, where he was regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman, dominie, vessel of charity, inspired idiot, man of piety, and (if he were inquired into) dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob had advanced into knickerbockers, and into that quickness of apprehension which has been already made manifest in relation to hardware and exchange. He had also advanced in attachment to Mordecai, regarding him as an inferior, but liking him none the worse, and taking his helpful cleverness as he might have taken the services of an enslaved Djinn. As for Mordecai, he had given Jacob his first lessons, and his habitual tenderness easily turned into the teacher's fatherhood. Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual distance between the parents and himself, and would never have attempted any communication to them from his peculiar world, the boy moved him with that idealizing affection which merges the qualities of the individual child in the glory of childhood and the possibilities of a long future. And this feeling had drawn him on, at first without premeditation, and afterward with conscious purpose, to a sort of outpouring in the ear of the boy which might have seemed wild enough to any excellent man of business who overheard it. But none overheard when Jacob went up to Mordecai's room one day, for example, in which there was little work to be done, or at an hour when the work was ended, and after a brief lesson in English reading or in numeration, was induced to remain standing at his teacher's knees, or chose to jump astride them, often to the patient fatigue of the wasted limbs. The inducement was perhaps the mending of a toy, or some little mechanical device in which Mordecai's well-practiced finger-tips had an exceptional skill; and with the boy thus tethered, he would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of his own, into which years before he had poured his first youthful ardors for that conception of a blended past and future which was the mistress of his soul, telling Jacob to say the words after him. "The boy will get them engraved within him," thought Mordecai; "it is a way of printing." None readier than Jacob at this fascinating game of imitating unintelligible words; and if no opposing diversion occurred he would sometimes carry on his share in it as long as the teacher's breath would last out. For Mordecai threw into each repetition the fervor befitting a sacred occasion. In such instances, Jacob would show no other distraction than reaching out and surveying the contents of his pockets; or drawing down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look awful, and rolling his head to complete the effect; or alternately handling his own nose and Mordecai's as if to test the relation of their masses. Under all this the fervid reciter would not pause, satisfied if the young organs of speech would submit themselves. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some antic or active amusement, when, instead of following the recitation he would return upon the foregoing words most ready to his tongue, and mouth or gabble, with a see-saw suited to the action of his limbs, a verse on which Mordecai had spent some of his too scanty heart's blood. Yet he waited with such patience as a prophet needs, and began his strange printing again undiscouraged on the morrow, saying inwardly, "My words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him. It is so with a nation--after many days." Meanwhile Jacob's sense of power was increased and his time enlivened by a store of magical articulation with which he made the baby crow, or drove the large cat into a dark corner, or promised himself to frighten any incidental Christian of his own years. One week he had unfortunately seen a street mountebank, and this carried off his muscular imitativeness in sad divergence from New Hebrew poetry, after the model of Jehuda ha-Levi. Mordecai had arrived at a fresh passage in his poem; for as soon as Jacob had got well used to one portion, he was led on to another, and a fresh combination of sounds generally answered better in keeping him fast for a few minutes. The consumptive voice, generally a strong high baritone, with its variously mingling hoarseness, like a haze amidst illuminations, and its occasional incipient gasp had more than the usual excitement, while it gave forth Hebrew verses with a meaning something like this: "Away from me the garment of forgetfulness. Withering the heart; The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim, Poisoned with scorn. Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo, In its heart a tomb: There the buried ark and golden cherubim Make hidden light: There the solemn gaze unchanged, The wings are spread unbroken: Shut beneath in silent awful speech The Law lies graven. Solitude and darkness are my covering, And my heart a tomb; Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel! Shatter it as the clay of the founder Around the golden image." In the absorbing enthusiasm with which Mordecai had intoned rather than spoken this last invocation, he was unconscious that Jacob had ceased to follow him and had started away from his knees; but pausing he saw, as by a sudden flash, that the lad had thrown himself on his hands with his feet in the air, mountebank fashion, and was picking up with his lips a bright farthing which was a favorite among his pocket treasures. This might have been reckoned among the tricks Mordecai was used to, but at this moment it jarred him horribly, as if it had been a Satanic grin upon his prayer. "Child! child!" he called out with a strange cry that startled Jacob to his feet, and then he sank backward with a shudder, closing his eyes. "What?" said Jacob, quickly. Then, not getting an immediate answer, he pressed Mordecai's knees with a shaking movement, in order to rouse him. Mordecai opened his eyes with a fierce expression in them, leaned forward, grasped the little shoulders, and said in a quick, hoarse whisper, "A curse is on your generation, child. They will open the mountain and drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money, and the solemn faces they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." The aspect and action of Mordecai were so new and mysterious to Jacob--they carried such a burden of obscure threat--it was as if the patient, indulgent companion had turned into something unknown and terrific: the sunken dark eyes and hoarse accents close to him, the thin grappling fingers, shook Jacob's little frame into awe, and while Mordecai was speaking he stood trembling with a sense that the house was tumbling in and they were not going to have dinner any more. But when the terrible speech had ended and the pinch was relaxed, the shock resolved itself into tears; Jacob lifted up his small patriarchal countenance and wept aloud. This sign of childish grief at once recalled Mordecai to his usual gentle self: he was not able to speak again at present, but with a maternal action he drew the curly head toward him and pressed it tenderly against his breast. On this Jacob, feeling the danger well-nigh over, howled at ease, beginning to imitate his own performance and improve upon it--a sort of transition from impulse into art often observable. Indeed, the next day he undertook to terrify Adelaide Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded very well. But Mordecai suffered a check which lasted long, from the consciousness of a misapplied agitation; sane as well as excitable, he judged severely his moments of aberration into futile eagerness, and felt discredited with himself. All the more his mind was strained toward the discernment of that friend to come, with whom he would have a calm certainty of fellowship and understanding. It was just then that, in his usual midday guardianship of the old book-shop, he was struck by the appearance of Deronda, and it is perhaps comprehensible now why Mordecai's glance took on a sudden eager interest as he looked at the new-comer: he saw a face and frame which seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type. But the disclaimer of Jewish birth was for the moment a backward thrust of double severity, the particular disappointment tending to shake his confidence in the more indefinite expectation. Nevertheless, when he found Deronda seated at the Cohens' table, the disclaimer was for the moment nullified: the first impression returned with added force, seeming to be guaranteed by this second meeting under circumstance more peculiar than the former; and in asking Deronda if he knew Hebrew, Mordecai was so possessed by the new inrush of belief, that he had forgotten the absence of any other condition to the fulfillment of his hopes. But the answering "No" struck them all down again, and the frustration was more painful than before. After turning his back on the visitor that Sabbath evening, Mordecai went through days of a deep discouragement, like that of men on a doomed ship, who having strained their eyes after a sail, and beheld it with rejoicing, behold it never advance, and say, "Our sick eyes make it." But the long-contemplated figure had come as an emotional sequence of Mordecai's firmest theoretic convictions; it had been wrought from the imagery of his most passionate life; and it inevitably reappeared--reappeared in a more specific self-asserting form than ever. Deronda had that sort of resemblance to the preconceived type which a finely individual bust or portrait has to the more generalized copy left in our minds after a long interval: we renew our memory with delight, but we hardly know with how much correction. And now, his face met Mordecai's inward gaze as it had always belonged to the awaited friend, raying out, moreover, some of that influence which belongs to breathing flesh; till by-and-by it seemed that discouragement had turned into a new obstinacy of resistance, and the ever-recurrent vision had the force of an outward call to disregard counter-evidence, and keep expectation awake. It was Deronda now who was seen in the often painful night-watches, when we are all liable to be held with the clutch of a single thought--whose figure, never with its back turned, was seen in moments of soothed reverie or soothed dozing, painted on that golden sky which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest. Mordecai knew that the nameless stranger was to come and redeem his ring; and, in spite of contrary chances, the wish to see him again was growing into a belief that he should see him. In the January weeks, he felt an increasing agitation of that subdued hidden quality which hinders nervous people from any steady occupation on the eve of an anticipated change. He could not go on with his printing of Hebrew on little Jacob's mind; or with his attendance at a weekly club, which was another effort of the same forlorn hope: something else was coming. The one thing he longed for was to get as far as the river, which he could do but seldom and with difficulty. He yearned with a poet's yearning for the wide sky, the far-reaching vista of bridges, the tender and fluctuating lights on the water which seems to breathe with a life that can shiver and mourn, be comforted and rejoice.

"Second-sight" is disputed. But there are people whose yearnings and ideas have a foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in complete shape; the event they hunger for, or dread, rises into vision. These people are not always less sane or logical than others: but it may be that their natures are more open to impressions. The figure of Mordecai had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a new question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the interest was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind, fitted into none of Deronda's anticipations. It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many winters, he had been conscious both of ebbing physical life, and a widening spiritual loneliness. All his desire had concentrated in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his mind, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life. The yearning had grown into a hope - the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being checked by his knowledge of his hastening decline, became an intense expectant faith as if in a prophecy which has only a brief time to be fulfilled. Some years had now gone by since he had first begun to measure men with a keen glance, searching for such a person. He imagined a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in a body unlike his own: he must be a Jew, cultured, morally fervent; but he must be beautiful and strong, he must be socially refined, his voice must flow with a full and easy current. His circumstances must be free from sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit amidst poverty as Mordecai did. He had looked at pictures as well as men, and had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with noble types of humanity that might be Jews - but he was disappointed. Observant persons might note his emaciated figure, and dark deep-set eyes, as he stood in front of a picture that had touched him: he commonly wore a cloth cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to regard him as an odd-looking Jew, who probably made money from pictures; and Mordecai was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty in cheapening his ideas. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to prejudice; his own incapacities played a part; and hence he imagined another, flourishing man, ready to incorporate all that was worthiest from an existence which was burning itself fast away. As the more beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self took shape in his mind, he loved it beforehand with an affection half identifying, half contemplative and grateful. Mordecai's mind worked so constantly in images, that his trains of thought often resembled dreams. Thus, he thought of the Being answering to his need as one distantly approaching, dark against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits: he liked to visit London's bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, his imagination took him to a far-stretching scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he tried to see them in reality. As he leaned on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge, the calm breadth of the river with its long hazy vista, the grand dim masses of tall buildings, the oncoming of boats and barges from the still distance, entered into his mood like a fine symphony. Thus the figure that represented Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the bright sky in the background. But in the progress of his imagination toward fuller detail, the figure began to advance, and a face became discernible; he saw youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth and noble gravity. This spiritual need was akin to the boy's and girl's picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passion of an ideal life straining to embody itself, in intense resistance to oncoming death. This visionary form became a companion not only in his waking imagination, but in his sleep. Of late the urgency of time, measured by the gradual choking of life, had turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch for the fulfilment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of tolling? The deliverer must be near - the deliverer who would save Mordecai's spiritual work from oblivion, and preserve it in the heritage of his people. Many would have seen this yearning as an insane exaggeration of his own value. But love hungers to bless, not merely to behold blessing. And while there is warmth enough in the sun to feed life, there will still be men to feel, "I am lord of this moment, and will charge it with my soul." Mordecai was not passive while he waited. He tried expedients, pathetically humble, for communicating himself. It was now two years since he had made his home under Ezra Cohen's roof, where he was regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman, scholar, inspired idiot, man of piety, and dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob had become attached to Mordecai, viewing him as an inferior, but liking him none the worse, and taking his helpful cleverness as he might have taken the services of an enslaved Djinn. As for Mordecai, he had given Jacob his first lessons, with his habitual tenderness. Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual distance between the parents and himself, the boy moved him with that idealizing affection that comes from the glory of childhood. This feeling had drawn him on to a sort of outpouring in the boy's ear. When Jacob went up to Mordecai's room after work, for example, to have a brief lesson in reading or arithmetic, he was induced to remain standing at his teacher's knees, or chose to jump astride them, often to the patient fatigue of the wasted limbs. The inducement was perhaps the mending of a toy; and with the boy thus tethered, Mordecai would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of his own, into which he had poured his youthful ardent idea of a blended past and future, telling Jacob to say the words after him. "The boy will get them engraved within him," he thought. None readier than Jacob at this fascinating game of imitating unintelligible words; and he would sometimes carry on as long as the teacher's breath would last out, showing no other distraction than surveying the contents of his pockets; or pulling down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look awful, or alternately handling his own nose and Mordecai's to compare them. Under all this the fervid reciter would not pause. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some active amusement. Yet Mordecai waited with such patience as a prophet needs, and began again undiscouraged on the morrow, saying inwardly- "My words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him." Meanwhile Jacob's sense of power was increased by a store of magical chants with which he made the baby laugh, or drove the cat away, or promised himself to frighten any incidental Christian his own age. As soon as he got used to one portion of the poem, Mordecai began a fresh passage. The consumptive voice, with its hoarseness and its occasional gasp, was on one occasion chanting Hebrew verses with this meaning: "Away from me the garment of forgetfulness Withering the heart; The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim, Poisoned with scorn. Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo, In its heart a tomb: There the buried ark and golden cherubim Make hidden light: There the solemn faces gaze unchanged, The wings are spread unbroken: Shut beneath in silent awful speech The Law lies graven. Solitude and darkness are my covering, And my heart a tomb; Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel! Shatter it as the clay of the founder Around the golden image." As Mordecai intoned this last invocation, he was unaware that Jacob had ceased to follow him and had moved away. Having recently watched a mountebank in the street, the lad threw himself on his hands with his feet in the air, and was picking up a coin with his lips. The sudden sight jarred Mordecai horribly, as if it had been a Satanic grin upon his prayer. "Child! child!" he called out with a strange cry that startled Jacob to his feet, and then he sank backward with a shudder, closing his eyes. "What?" said Jacob, quickly. Not getting an answer, he shook Mordecai's knees to rouse him. Mordecai opened his eyes with a fierce expression, leaned forward, grasped the little shoulders, and said in a hoarse whisper- "A curse is on your generation, child. They will open the mountain and drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." Mordecai's behaviour was so new and mysterious to Jacob that it was as if the indulgent companion had turned into something unknown and terrifying. Little Jacob was shaken into awe, and he stood trembling with a sense that the house was tumbling in and they were not going to have dinner any more. But when the terrible speech had ended, the shock resolved itself into tears; Jacob lifted up his face and wept aloud. This sign of childish grief at once recalled Mordecai to his usual gentle self: he drew the curly head toward him and pressed it tenderly against his breast. On this, Jacob, feeling the danger over, howled at ease, improving upon his own performance - a transition from impulse into art. Indeed, the next day he undertook to terrify Adelaide Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded very well. But Mordecai suffered a check: he judged himself severely. All the more his mind was strained toward that friend to come, with whom he would have a calm certainty of fellowship and understanding. It was just then that, in the old book-shop, he was struck by Deronda's appearance; and it is perhaps comprehensible now why he looked at the newcomer with a sudden eager interest: he saw a face and frame which seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type. But the disclaimer of Jewish birth was a severe backward thrust, shaking his confidence. Nevertheless, when he found Deronda at the Cohens' table, the first impression returned with added force; and in asking Deronda if he knew Hebrew, Mordecai was so possessed by the new inrush of belief, that he had forgotten the absence of any other condition to the fulfilment of his hopes. But the answering "No" struck them all down again, and the frustration was more painful than before. After turning his back on the visitor that Sabbath evening, Mordecai went through days of deep discouragement, like that of men on a doomed ship, who having strained their eyes after a sail, and beheld it with rejoicing, see it drift away. But the long-contemplated figure in his mind came to take on Deronda's face, until the vision had the force of an outward call, keeping his expectation awake. It was Deronda now who was seen in the often painful night-watches - whose figure, never with its back turned, was seen in moments of soothed reverie, painted on that golden sky which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest. Mordecai knew that the nameless stranger was to come and redeem his ring; and the wish to see him again was growing into a belief that he should see him. He felt an increasing agitation which hindered him from steady occupation. He could not go on with his printing of Hebrew on little Jacob's mind; or with his attendance at a weekly club, which was another effort of the same forlorn hope: something else was coming. The one thing he longed for was to get to the river, which he could do but seldom and with difficulty. He yearned with a poet's yearning for the wide sky, the far-reaching vista of bridges, the tender, fluctuating lights on the water, which seems to breathe with a life that can shiver and mourn, be comforted and rejoice.

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 38

"Wenn es eine Stufenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die hchste Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den Hochgeborenen aller Lnder auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz gebhrt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt, gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber?"--ZUNZ: _Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters._ "If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations--if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land--if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?" Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be favored with that success which has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai's--a frail incorporation of the national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath--was nested in the self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens? Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared among them. Cohen himself took occasion to intimate that although the diamond ring, let alone a little longer, would have bred more money, he did not mind _that_--not a sixpence--when compared with the pleasure of the women and children in seeing a young gentleman whose first visit had been so agreeable that they had "done nothing but talk of it ever since." Young Mrs. Cohen was very sorry that baby was asleep, and then very glad that Adelaide was not yet gone to bed, entreating Deronda not to stay in the shop, but to go forthwith into the parlor to see "mother and the children." He willingly accepted the invitation, having provided himself with portable presents; a set of paper figures for Adelaide, and an ivory cup and ball for Jacob. The grandmother had a pack of cards before her and was making "plates" with the children. A plate had just been thrown down and kept itself whole. "Stop!" said Jacob, running to Deronda as he entered. "Don't tread on my plate. Stop and see me throw it up again." Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of understanding with the grandmother, and the plate bore several tossings before it came to pieces; then the visitor was allowed to come forward and seat himself. He observed that the door from which Mordecai had issued on the former visit was now closed, but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens before disclosing a yet stronger interest in their singular inmate. It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was setting up the paper figures in their dance on the table, while Jacob was already practicing with the cup and ball, that Deronda said, "Is Mordecai in just now?" "Where is he, Addy?" said Cohen, who had seized an interval of business to come and look on. "In the workroom there," said his wife, nodding toward the closed door. "The fact is, sir," said Cohen, "we don't know what's come to him this last day or two. He's always what I may call a little touched, you know"--here Cohen pointed to his own forehead--"not quite so rational in all things, like you and me; but he's mostly wonderful regular and industrious so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight in the boy as anybody could. But this last day or two he's been moving about like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure." "It's the disease, poor dear creature," said the grandmother, tenderly. "I doubt whether he can stand long against it." "No; I think its only something he's got in his head," said Mrs. Cohen the younger. "He's been turning over writing continually, and when I speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer." "You may think us a little weak ourselves," said Cohen, apologetically. "But my wife and mother wouldn't part with him if he was a still worse encumbrance. It isn't that we don't know the long and short of matters, but it's our principle. There's fools do business at a loss and don't know it. I'm not one of 'em." "Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him," said the grandmother. "He's got something the matter inside him," said Jacob, coming up to correct this erratum of his grandmother's. "He said he couldn't talk to me, and he wouldn't have a bit o' bun." "So far from wondering at your feeling for him," said Deronda, "I already feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to him at Ram's book-shop--in fact, I promised to call for him here, that we might go out together." "That's it, then!" said Cohen, slapping his knee. "He's been expecting you, and it's taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning to you. It's uncommonly kind of _you_, sir; for I don't suppose there's much to be got out of it, else it wouldn't have left him where he is. But there's the shop." Cohen hurried out, and Jacob, who had been listening inconveniently near to Deronda's elbow, said to him with obliging familiarity, "I'll call Mordecai for you, if you like." "No, Jacob," said his mother; "open the door for the gentleman, and let him go in himself Hush! Don't make a noise." Skillful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, and turned the handle of the door as noiselessly as possible, while Deronda went behind him and stood on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and one candle with a shade over it. On the board fixed under the window, various objects of jewelry were scattered: some books were heaped in the corner beyond them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at the board with his back to the door, his hands resting on each other and on the board, a watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of expectation as sickening as that of a prisoner listening for the delayed deliverance--when he heard Deronda's voice saying, "I am come for you. Are you ready?" Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his furred cap which lay near, and moved to join Deronda. It was but a moment before they were both in the sitting-room, and Jacob, noticing the change in his friend's air and expression, seized him by the arm and said, "See my cup and ball!" sending the ball up close to Mordecai's face, as something likely to cheer a convalescent. It was a sign of the relieved tension in Mordecai's mind that he could smile and say, "Fine, fine!" "You have forgotten your greatcoat and comforter," said young Mrs. Cohen, and he went back into the work-room and got them. "He's come to life again, do you see?" said Cohen, who had re-entered--speaking in an undertone. "I told you so: I'm mostly right." Then in his usual voice, "Well, sir, we mustn't detain you now, I suppose; but I hope this isn't the last time we shall see you." "Shall you come again?" said Jacob, advancing. "See, I can catch the ball; I'll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again." "He has clever hands," said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. "Which side of the family does he get them from?" But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, "My side. My wife's family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which way you like. There's nothing some old gentlemen won't do if you set 'em to it." Here Cohen winked down at Jacob's back, but it was doubtful whether this judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for its subject gave a nasal whinnying laugh and stamped about singing, "Old gentlemen, old gentlemen," in chiming cadence. Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive about these people until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six years old." The decisive moment did not yet seem easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman, whose mental distinction impressed them chiefly as a harmless, silent raving. "The Cohens seem to have an affection for you," said Deronda, as soon as he and Mordecai were off the doorstep. "And I for them," was the immediate answer. "They have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread." "I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear," said Deronda, "by my slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I found it impossible." "Yes--yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him threatens to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh." "You must not speak too much in this evening air," said Deronda, feeling Mordecai's words of reliance like so many cords binding him painfully. "Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the _Hand and Banner_, I suppose, and shall be in private there?" "No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better seek another place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there are familiar with my face." "I don't mind the club if I am allowed to go in," said Deronda. "It is enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will come again. What sort of club is it?" "It is called 'The Philosophers.' They are few--like the cedars of Lebanon--poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most of them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my race who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased myself with a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the Masters who handed down the thought of our race--the great Transmitters, who labored with their hands for scant bread, but preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases itself with faint resemblances." "I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you. It is a sort of meeting I should like to join in," said Deronda, not without relief in the prospect of an interval before he went through the strain of his next private conversation with Mordecai. In three minutes they had opened the glazed door with the red curtain, and were in the little parlor, hardly much more than fifteen feet square, where the gaslight shone through a slight haze of smoke on what to Deronda was a new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various ages, from between twenty and thirty to fifty, all shabbily dressed, most of them with clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a look of concentrated intelligence to a man in a pepper-and-salt dress, with blonde hair, short nose, broad forehead and general breadth, who, holding his pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, and beating his knee with the right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley (the comparison of the avalanche in his "Prometheus Unbound") "As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round." The entrance of the new-comers broke the fixity of attention, and called for re-arrangement of seats in the too narrow semicircle round the fire-place and the table holding the glasses, spare pipes and tobacco. This was the soberest of clubs; but sobriety is no reason why smoking and "taking something" should be less imperiously needed as a means of getting a decent status in company and debate. Mordecai was received with welcoming voices which had a slight cadence of compassion in them, but naturally all glances passed immediately to his companion. "I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects," said Mordecai. "He has traveled and studied much." "Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great Unknown?" said the broad-chested quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air. "My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great." The smile breaking over the stranger's grave face as he said this was so agreeable that there was a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to a "Hear, hear," and the broad man said, "You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to this corner against me," he added, evidently wishing to give the coziest place to the one who most needed it. Deronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the opposite side, where his general survey of the party easily included Mordecai, who remained an eminently striking object in this group of sharply-characterized figures, more than one of whom, even to Daniel's little exercised discrimination, seemed probably of Jewish descent. In fact pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us with the precise product) did not declare itself predominantly in the party at present assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional second-hand bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more Celtic than he knew. Only three would have been discernable everywhere as Englishmen: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced, pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily, the pale, neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up in a small parallelogram above his well-filled forehead, and whose shirt, taken with an otherwise seedy costume, had a freshness that might be called insular, and perhaps even something narrower. Certainly a company select of the select among poor men, being drawn together by a taste not prevalent even among the privileged heirs of learning and its institutions; and not likely to amuse any gentleman in search of crime or low comedy as the ground of interest in people whose weekly income is only divisible into shillings. Deronda, even if he had not been more than usually inclined to gravity under the influence of what was pending between him and Mordecai, would not have set himself to find food for laughter in the various shades of departure from the tone of polished society sure to be observable in the air and talk of these men who had probably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch indulgences, making the utmost of scant opportunity. He looked around him with the quiet air of respect habitual to him among equals, ordered whisky and water, and offered the contents of his cigar-case, which, characteristically enough, he always carried and hardly ever used for his own behoof, having reasons for not smoking himself, but liking to indulge others. Perhaps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming straight-laced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a growth which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he made a decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their showing themselves no less at ease than before, and desirous of quickly resuming their interrupted talk. "This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir," said Miller, who was implicitly accepted as a sort of moderator--on addressing Deronda by way of explanation, and nodding toward each person whose name he mentioned. "Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But tonight our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we got on statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain the same, than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation to society numbers are qualities--the number of drunkards is a quality in society--the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference between different social states--Lily saying this, we went off on the causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause." "I don't hold with you there, Miller," said Goodwin, the inlayer, more concerned to carry on the subject than to wait for a word from the new guest. "For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas--say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves into life and go on growing with it, but they can't go apart from the material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It's the nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on. I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with 'em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way--ideas are a sort of parliament, but there's a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing." "But if you take ready mixing as your test of power," said Pash, "some of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of." "They may act by changing the distribution of gases," said Marrables; "instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves." "Yes," said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, "there is the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious." "You don't share that idea?" said Deronda, finding a piquant incongruity between Pash's sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his features. "Say, rather, he does not share that spirit," said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?" "Granted, Mordecai," said Pash, quite good-humoredly. "And as the feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a ghost, already walking to announce the death." "A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life," said Deronda. "Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal." "Amen, amen," said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which was the beginning of recovered energy: his attitude was more upright, his face was less worn. "That may hold with backward nations," said Pash, "but with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it." "Ay," said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the letting in of a little cool air on the conversation, "ye've done well to bring us round to the point. Ye're all agreed that societies change--not always and everywhere--but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?" But Buchan's attempt to impose his method on the talk was a failure. Lily immediately said, "Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion of progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake." "I really can't see how you arrive at that sort of certitude about changes by calling them development," said Deronda. "There will still remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to,--which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophizing." "That is a truth," said Mordecai. "Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may come a check, an arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint for the lack of them; or memories may shrink into withered relics--the soul of a people, whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to be dying for want of common action. But who shall say, 'The fountain of their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?' Who shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within his own. Shall he say, 'That way events are wending, I will not resist?' His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events." "I don't deny patriotism," said Gideon, "but we all know you have a particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of thinking, I suppose." Here Gideon had turned to Deronda, who sat next to him, but without waiting for an answer he went on. "I'm a rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up our worship in a rational way. I don't approve of our people getting baptised, because I don't believe in a Jew's conversion to the Gentile part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there's no excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of our superstitions and exclusiveness. There's no reason now why we shouldn't melt gradually into the populations we live among. That's the order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians as Jews. And I'm for the old maxim, 'A man's country is where he's well off.'" "That country's not so easy to find, Gideon," said the rapid Pash, with a shrug and grimace. "You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and have only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a brisk trade in watches among the 'Jerusalem wares,' I'll go--eh, Mordecai, what do you say?" Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai's opinion, was inwardly wondering at his persistence in coming to this club. For an enthusiastic spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference of men familiar with the object of his enthusiasm is the acceptance of a slow martyrdom, beside which the fate of a missionary tomahawked without any considerate rejection of his doctrines seems hardly worthy of compassion. But Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: this was a moment of spiritual fullness, and he cared more for the utterance of his faith than for its immediate reception. With a fervor which had no temper in it, but seemed rather the rush of feeling in the opportunity of speech, he answered Pash:, "What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 'I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,' they all the while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are Jews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made garment of citizenship weave itself straightway into the flesh and change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship of him who walks among a people he has no hardy kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?" "Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, "if you mean that I think the worse of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you are right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it." "Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better," said the genial Gideon. "We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out. Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our expectations rational." "And so am I!" said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the eagerness of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin hands clasped together on his lap. "I, too, claim to be a rational Jew. But what is it to be rational--what is it to feel the light of the divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our nationality--let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who fought foremost at Marathon--let him learn to say that was noble in the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities--let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile." Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment's silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view or his emotion; but his whole personality and speech had on them the effect of a dramatic representation which had some pathos in it, though no practical consequences; and usually he was at once indulged and contradicted. Deronda's mind went back upon what must have been the tragic pressure of outward conditions hindering this man, whose force he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought in the minds of others--like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother tongue. The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and hint the loss of time. "I submit," said he, "that ye're traveling away from the questions I put concerning progress." "Say they're levanting, Buchan," said Miller, who liked his joke, and would not have objected to be called Voltairian. "Never mind. Let us have a Jewish night; we've not had one for a long while. Let us take the discussion on Jewish ground. I suppose we've no prejudice here; we're all philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and Gideon, as well as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of us. We're all related through Adam, until further showing to the contrary, and if you look into history we've all got some discreditable forefathers. So I mean no offence when I say I don't think any great things of the part the Jewish people have played in the world. What then? I think they were iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I suppose we don't want any men to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or yellow--I know I've just given my half-crown to the contrary. And that reminds me, I've a curious old German book--I can't read it myself, but a friend of mine was reading out of it to me the other day--about the prejudicies against the Jews, and the stories used to be told against 'em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they're punished with a bad odor in their bodies; and _that_, says the author, date 1715 (I've just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)--that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they're baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment over and above the smell:--Asher, I remember, has the right arm a handbreadth shorter than the left, and Naphthali has pig's ears and a smell of live pork. What do you think of that? There's been a good deal of fun made of rabbinical fables, but in point of fables my opinion is, that all over the world it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. However, as I said before, I hold with the philosophers of the last century that the Jews have played no great part as a people, though Pash will have it they're clever enough to beat all the rest of the world. But if so, I ask, why haven't they done it?" "For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don't get themselves or their ideas into Parliament," said the ready Pash; "because the blockheads are too many for 'em." "That is a vain question," said Mordecai, "whether our people would beat the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us." "They're not behind any nation in arrogance," said Lily; "and if they have got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest." "Oh, every nation brags in its turn," said Miller. "Yes," said Pash, "and some of them in the Hebrew text." "Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a stand-still people," said Lily. "They are the type of obstinate adherence to the superannuated. They may show good abilities when they take up liberal ideas, but as a race they have no development in them." "That is false!" said Mordecai, leaning forward again with his former eagerness. "Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness--the more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth--where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes--yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung with their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters, they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation--lasting because movable--so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.' They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had said, 'What is yours is ours, and no longer yours,' was reading the letter of our law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were still enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as well as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their hiding-place in a cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow, superstitious? What wonder?" Here Mordecai, whose seat was next the fireplace, rose and leaned his arm on the little shelf; his excitement had risen, though his voice, which had begun with unusual strength, was getting hoarser. "What wonder? The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in their darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West--which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories." Mordecai's voice had sunk, but with the hectic brilliancy of his gaze it was not the less impressive. His extraordinary excitement was certainly due to Deronda's presence: it was to Deronda that he was speaking, and the moment had a testamentary solemnity for him which rallied all his powers. Yet the presence of those other familiar men promoted expression, for they embodied the indifference which gave a resistant energy to his speech. Not that he looked at Deronda: he seemed to see nothing immediately around him, and if any one had grasped him he would probably not have known it. Again the former words came back to Deronda's mind,--"You must hope my hopes--see the vision I point to--behold a glory where I behold it." They came now with gathered pathos. Before him stood, as a living, suffering reality, what hitherto he had only seen as an effort of imagination, which, in its comparative faintness, yet carried a suspicion, of being exaggerated: a man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except for its possible making some obstruction to a conceived good which he would never share except as a brief inward vision--a day afar off, whose sun would never warm him, but into which he threw his soul's desire, with a passion often wanting to the personal motives of healthy youth. It was something more than a grandiose transfiguration of the parental love that toils, renounces, endures, resists the suicidal promptings of despair--all because of the little ones, whose future becomes present to the yearning gaze of anxiety. All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat down again, and none with unkindness; but it happened that the one who felt the most kindly was the most prompted to speak in opposition. This was the genial and rational Gideon, who also was not without a sense that he was addressing the guest of the evening. He said, "You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai, and as you say, your own way seems to you rational. I know you don't hold with the restoration of Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it's as demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they die. It's no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point; that's what I call rationality. The most learned and liberal men among us who are attached to our religion are for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfillment of the prophecies about restoration, and so on. Prune it of a few useless rites and literal interpretations of that sort, and our religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no barrier, but a union, between us and the rest of the world." "As plain as a pike-staff," said Pash, with an ironical laugh. "You pluck it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the knots, and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where you will, it will do no harm, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you may throw it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don't see why our rubbish is to be held sacred any more than the rubbish of Brahmanism or Buddhism." "No," said Mordecai, "no, Pash, because you have lost the heart of the Jew. Community was felt before it was called good. I praise no superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What is growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I apply it to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfillment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people, whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar; they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jeweled breastplate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political counselors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which difficulty means new device--let them say, 'we will lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood.' They have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old--a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishmen of America. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom: there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin." "Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai," said Pash. "When there are great men on 'Change, and high-flying professors converted to your doctrine, difficulties will vanish like smoke." Deronda, inclined by nature to take the side of those on whom the arrows of scorn were falling, could not help replying to Pash's outfling, and said, "If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those who looked on in the beginning. "Take what we have all heard and seen something of--the effort after the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished to the very last boundary. Look into Mazzini's account of his first yearning, when he was a boy, after a restored greatness and a new freedom to Italy, and of his first efforts as a young man to rouse the same feelings in other young men, and get them to work toward a united nationality. Almost everything seemed against him; his countrymen were ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay with him. As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, I suppose nobody will deny that there may be a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous action." "Amen," said Mordecai, to whom Deronda's words were a cordial. "What is needed is the leaven--what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say 'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father's nakedness and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames." Mordecai had stretched his arms upward, and his long thin hands quivered in the air for a moment after he had ceased to speak. Gideon was certainly a little moved, for though there was no long pause before he made a remark in objection, his tone was more mild and deprecatory than before; Pash, meanwhile, pressing his lips together, rubbing his black head with both his hands and wrinkling his brow horizontally, with the expression of one who differs from every speaker, but does not think it worth while to say so. There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape. "It may seem well enough on one side to make so much of our memories and inheritance as you do, Mordecai," said Gideon; "but there's another side. It isn't all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have inherited a good deal of hatred. There's a pretty lot of curses still flying about, and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of persecution. How will you justify keeping one sort of memory and throwing away the other? There are ugly debts standing on both sides." "I justify the choice as all other choice is justified," said Mordecai. "I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified and enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting waters--they were various in habit and sect--there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised between East and West--a covenant of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of progress has no message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the paid workers to lay open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world--not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled." With the last sentence, which was no more than a loud whisper, Mordecai let his chin sink on his breast and his eyelids fall. No one spoke. It was not the first time that he had insisted on the same ideas, but he was seen to-night in a new phase. The quiet tenacity of his ordinary self differed as much from his present exaltation of mood as a man in private talk, giving reasons for a revolution of which no sign is discernable, differs from one who feels himself an agent in a revolution begun. The dawn of fulfillment brought to his hope by Deronda's presence had wrought Mordecai's conception into a state of impassioned conviction, and he had found strength in his excitement to pour forth the unlocked floods of emotive argument, with a sense of haste as at a crisis which must be seized. But now there had come with the quiescence of fatigue a sort of thankful wonder that he had spoken--a contemplation of his life as a journey which had come at last to this bourne. After a great excitement, the ebbing strength of impulse is apt to leave us in this aloofness from our active self. And in the moments after Mordecai had sunk his head, his mind was wandering along the paths of his youth, and all the hopes which had ended in bringing him hither. Every one felt that the talk was ended, and the tone of phlegmatic discussion made unseasonable by Mordecai's high-pitched solemnity. It was as if they had come together to hear the blowing of the _shophar_, and had nothing to do now but to disperse. The movement was unusually general, and in less than ten minutes the room was empty of all except Mordecai and Deronda. "Good-nights" had been given to Mordecai, but it was evident he had not heard them, for he remained rapt and motionless. Deronda would not disturb this needful rest, but waited for a spontaneous movement.

"If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations - if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land - if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years?" Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and he felt in contrast when visiting the Cohens that they bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, nor was he a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai's - a frail incorporation of the national consciousness - was nested in the self-congratulatory prosperity of the Cohens? Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared among them. Cohen hinted that although the diamond ring, left a little longer, would have bred more money, he did not mind that compared with the pleasure of his family, who had "talked of nothing else" since the agreeable young gentleman's first visit. Young Mrs. Cohen was sorry that baby was asleep, and glad that Adelaide was not yet gone to bed, entreating Deronda to go into the parlour to see "mother and the children." He willingly accepted, having provided himself with presents; a set of paper figures for Adelaide, and an ivory cup and ball for Jacob. The grandmother was playing with the children. When Deronda entered and seated himself, he observed that the door to Mordecai's quarters was now closed; but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens before disclosing his stronger interest in their singular inmate. It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was making the paper figures dance on the table, while Jacob was already practising with the cup and ball, that Deronda said- "Is Mordecai in just now?" "He's in the workroom there," said Mrs. Cohen, nodding toward the closed door. "The fact is, sir," said Cohen, "we don't know what's come over him this last day or two. He's always what I may call a little touched, you know" - Cohen pointed to his own forehead - "not quite rational; but he's mostly regular and industrious so far as a poor creature can be. But lately he's been moving like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure." "It's the disease, poor dear creature," said the grandmother, tenderly. "I doubt whether he can stand long against it." "No; I think it's only something in his head," said Mrs. Cohen the younger. "He's been turning over writing continually, and when I speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer." "You may think us a little weak," said Cohen, apologetically. "But we wouldn't part with him if he was a still worse encumbrance. It isn't that we don't know the long and short of matters, but it's our principle." "Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him," said the grandmother. "He's got something the matter inside him," said Jacob, correcting his grandmother. "He said he couldn't talk to me, and he wouldn't have a bit o' bun." "So far from wondering at your feeling for him," said Deronda, "I feel something of the same sort myself. I talked to him recently at Ram's book-shop - in fact, I promised to call for him here, that we might go out together." "That's it, then!" said Cohen, slapping his knee. "He's been expecting you, and it's taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning to you. It's uncommonly kind of you, sir." Jacob said obligingly, "I'll call Mordecai for you, if you like." "No, Jacob," said his mother; "open the door, and let the gentleman go in himself. Hush! don't make a noise." Jacob turned the handle of the door noiselessly, while Deronda went to stand on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and one shaded candle. On the board under the window, various objects of jewellery were scattered: books were heaped in the corner. Mordecai sat with his back to the door, a watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of expectation as sickening as that of a prisoner listening for deliverance, when he heard Deronda's voice saying, "I am come for you. Are you ready?" Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his fur cap, and moved to join Deronda. In a moment they were both in the sitting-room, where Jacob seized him by the arm and said, "See my cup and ball!" It was a sign of the relieved tension in Mordecai's mind that he could smile and say, "Fine, fine!" "He's come to life again," said Cohen in an undertone. Then in his usual voice, "Well, sir, we mustn't detain you; but I hope this isn't the last time we shall see you." "Shall you come again?" said Jacob. "See, I can catch the ball." "He has clever hands," said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. "Which side of the family does he get them from?" But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, "My side," while Jacob began to stamp about, singing. Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive until I ask Cohen point-blank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six." The decisive moment was not yet easy for him to face. Still, he felt more kindly towards these people than at first, seeing their gentle treatment of the consumptive workman. "The Cohens seem to have an affection for you," said Deronda, as soon as he and Mordecai had left. "And I for them," was the answer. "They have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread." "I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear," said Deronda, "by my slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but it was impossible." "I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the spirit of my youth has been stirred, and this body is not strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and imprisoned through long years: behold him set free, and he weeps, he totters, his joy threatens to break the tabernacle of flesh." "You must not speak too much in this evening air," said Deronda, feeling painfully responsible. "We are going to the Hand and Banner, I suppose, to be private there?" "No, this is the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have much time alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better seek another place. But I am used to that one. In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there are familiar with my face." "I don't mind the club if I am allowed in," said Deronda. "What sort of club is it?" "It is called 'The Philosophers.' They are a few poor men given to thought; but none so poor as I am. We are allowed to introduce a friend who is interested in our topics. Each orders beer or some other drink, in payment for the room. I have gone when I could, for there are other Jews who come, and I have seen a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the Masters who handed down the thought of our race. The heart pleases itself with faint resemblances." "I shall be very glad to sit among them, if that will suit you," said Deronda, relieved at the prospect of an interval before he went through the strain of his next private conversation with Mordecai. In three minutes they were in the little parlour, where the gaslight shone through a haze of smoke on to a striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various ages, between twenty and fifty, all shabbily dressed, most of them with clay pipes, were listening with a look of concentrated intelligence to a man in pepper-and-salt clothes, with blonde hair and broad forehead, who, holding his pipe in his left hand, and beating his knee with the right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley: "As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round." The entrance of the new-comers called for a re-arrangement of seats in the narrow semicircle round the fire-place and the table. Mordecai was received with welcoming voices which had compassion in them, but naturally all glances passed immediately to his companion. "I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects," said Mordecai. "He has travelled and studied much." "Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great 'Unknown?'" said the quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air. "My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great." His smile caused a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to a "Hear, hear." "You are welcome, sir." Deronda sat down on the opposite side to Mordecai and the other men, several of whom seemed probably of Jewish descent. Miller, the quoter of Shelley, was an exceptional second-hand bookseller who knew the insides of book, with grand-parents who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious Jew; Gideon, the optical instrument maker, was a red-headed Jew easily passing for an Englishman of unusually cordial manners: and Croop, the shoemaker, was probably Celtic. Only three were obviously English: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, open-faced and pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily, the pale, neat copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up in a small parallelogram above his forehead. Certainly a select company, not likely to amuse any gentleman in search of crime or low comedy. Deronda, even if he had not been made grave by his ponderings about Mordecai, would not have found food for laughter in the talk of these men, who had probably snatched knowledge as we snatch indulgences, making the most of scant opportunity. He looked around him with a quiet air of respect, and offered the contents of his cigar-case. That he made a decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their being as much at ease as before, and quickly resuming their interrupted talk. "This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir," said Miller, who seemed to act as a sort of moderator. "Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But tonight our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we got onto statistics; Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen, and numbers give us no instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference between different social states; at which we went off on the causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause." "I don't hold with you there, Miller," said Goodwin, the inlayer. "For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas - say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas can't go apart from the material that set them to work. It's the nature of wood yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping it. Such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with 'em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I see it this way - ideas are a sort of parliament, but there's a commonwealth outside that doesn't know what the parliament is doing." "But some of the least practical ideas beat everything," said Pash. "They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of." "They may act by changing the distribution of gases," said Marrables; "Instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread of a theory by changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves." "Yes," said Pash, his dark face lighting up impishly, "take the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious." "You don't share that idea?" said Deronda, finding a piquant incongruity between Pash's sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his features. "Say, rather, he does not share that spirit," said Mordecai, turning a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?" "Granted, Mordecai," said Pash good-humouredly. "And as the feeling of nationality is dying, the idea is no better than a ghost." "A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life," said Deronda. "Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal." "Amen, amen," said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with delight and recovered energy. "Maybe," said Pash, "but in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little longer where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of progress is against it." "Ay," said Buchan, in a rapid, cool, Scotch tone, "ye've done well to bring us round to the point. Ye're all agreed that societies change in the long run. Now, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we call them progress. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is harmful?" But Lily immediately said- "Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to them are necessarily progressive." "I really can't see how you arrive at that certainty about changes by calling them development," said Deronda. "There will still be degrees of wisdom in hastening or slowing; there will still remain the danger of mistaking an undesirable tendency for an inevitable law." "That is true," said Mordecai. "Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows and is knit together in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. Though memories may wither, and love may be faint for the lack of them, who shall say, 'The fountain of their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?' Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within his own. His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle multitudes, and make a new pathway for events." "I don't deny patriotism," said Gideon, "but we all know you have a particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of thinking, I suppose." Here Gideon turned to Deronda. "I'm a rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up our worship in a rational way. I am for getting rid of our superstitions and exclusiveness. There's no reason now why we shouldn't melt gradually into the populations we live among. That's the order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians as Jews. And I'm for the old maxim, 'A man's country is where he's well off.'" "That country's not so easy to find, Gideon," said Pash, with a grimace. "You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and have only half the number of children." Deronda inwardly wondered at Mordecai's persistence in coming to this club. To meet continually the fixed indifference of men familiar with his enthusiasm must be like a slow martyrdom. But Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: he cared more for the utterance of his faith than for its immediate reception. With a fervent feeling, he answered Pash:- "Let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and inheritance he despises. Thousands of our race have mixed with the Gentiles, and they may inherit the blessing that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the multitudes who must walk among the nations and be known as Jews, and if they say 'I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown any bond with my race, I will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,' they all the while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt. What is the citizenship of him who walks among a people he has no kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is alien in spirit; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man, he shares in no love, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?" "Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, "if you mean that I think the worse of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you are right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it." "Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better," said the genial Gideon. "We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out. Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our expectations rational." "And so am I!" said Mordecai with quick eagerness. "But what is it to be rational? It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that consecrate change: the past becomes my parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of kindred that makes the families of men rich and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish our nationality - let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be as dead as ancient wall-paintings. Let his child learn Greek by rote - let him learn to speak of nobility in that immortal tongue! For the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded; let him hold the monuments of his law, the energy of the prophets, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile.' " Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment's silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view; but his personality and speech had a strong dramatic effect upon them. Deronda reflected on what must have been the tragic pressure of outward conditions hindering this man from influencing the minds of others - like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his. The cool Buchan was the first to speak. "I submit," said he, "that ye're travelling away from the questions I put concerning progress." "Say they're levanting, Buchan," said Miller, who liked his joke. "Never mind. Let us have a Jewish night; we've not had one for a long while. Let us take the discussion on Jewish ground. We've no prejudice here; we're all philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and Gideon, as well as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of us. We're all related through Adam, and if you look into history we've all got some discreditable forefathers. So I mean no offence when I say I don't think any great things of the part the Jewish people have played in the world. I think they were iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I suppose we don't want any men to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or yellow. However, I hold with the philosophers of the last century that the Jews have played no great part as a people, though Pash will have it they're clever enough to beat all the rest of the world. But if so, I ask, why haven't they done it?" "For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don't get themselves or their ideas into Parliament," said the ready Pash; "because the blockheads are too many for 'em." "That is a vain question," said Mordecai, "whether our people would beat the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak." "They're not behind any nation in arrogance," said Lily; "and if they have got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest." "Oh, every nation brags," said Miller. "Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a stand-still people," said Lily. "They stick obstinately to the past. They have no development in them." "That is false!" said Mordecai, leaning forward. "Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness - the more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is there a nation whose religion and law and moral life mingled and made one growth - where else a people who enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hated with a hatred as fierce as a forest fire? Our race struggled like heroes to keep their place among the nations; but when the plough and the harrow had passed over their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers, they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a movable habitation, so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.' They said it and they wrought it. The Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it. The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed of knowledge to be enlarged and illuminated with fresh interpretation. But the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where the consciousness of his race was dimmed. What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow, superstitious? What wonder?" Mordecai's excitement had risen, though his voice, which had begun with unusual strength, was getting hoarser. "What wonder? The night is unto them, they have no vision; the sun is gone down over the prophets; their observances are as nameless relics. But which among the Gentile nations has not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel be a reality. Let our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the world - which will plant the wisdom of our race. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories." Mordecai's voice had sunk, but was not the less impressive. His extraordinary excitement was certainly due to Deronda's presence: it was to Deronda that he was speaking, and the moment had a solemnity for him which rallied all his powers. Not that he looked at Deronda: he seemed to see nothing immediately around him. His former words came to Deronda's mind, but now with gathered pathos:- "You must hope my hopes - behold a glory where I behold it." Before him stood a man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, under the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, but throwing his soul's desire into his far-off inward vision with a passion often wanting in the healthy young. All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat down, and none unkindly; but the most kindly was the most prompted to speak in opposition. This was the genial Gideon, who said- "You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai. But you are as well aware as I am that the subject of a Jewish land has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews and Christians. The connection of our race with Palestine has been perverted by superstition. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they die. It's no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point. The most learned and liberal men among us are for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfilment of the prophecies about restoration, and so on. Prune it of a few useless rites and literal interpretations of that sort, and our religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no barrier, but a union, between us and the rest of the world." "As plain as a pike-staff," said Pash, with an ironical laugh. "You pluck it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark and shave off the knots; put it where you will, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you may throw it on the bonfire." "No," said Mordecai, "I praise no superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What is growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I apply it to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfilment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people. What is it to me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentiles? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar; they are torn and soiled; but there is a jewelled breastplate. Let the wealthy men, the learned, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the counsellors who carry Hebrew blood in their veins - let them say, 'we will unite in a labour hard but glorious, like that of Moses and Ezra, a labour which shall be worthy of the long anguish of our fathers.' There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old - a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom: there will be a neutral land set for the halting of enmities. I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move among our people, and the work will begin." "Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai," said Pash. "When high-flying professors convert to your doctrine, difficulties will vanish like smoke." Deronda, inclined to take the side of those on whom the arrows of scorn were falling, said- "If we look at the history of efforts which have made great changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless in the beginning. Take the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished. Look into Mazzini's account of his first yearning to restore greatness to Italy; everything seemed against him; his countrymen were ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay with him. As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, there may be a new stirring of memories and hopes to inspire action." "Amen," said Mordecai, revived by Deronda's words. "What is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding. Let the torch of community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, but who have a national hearth. Will any say 'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, yet he confessed that he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions and enkindled the thought of Europe? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames." Mordecai had stretched his arms upward as he spoke. Gideon was moved, and replied more mildly than before. "It may seem well enough to make so much of our memories and inheritance, Mordecai," he said; "but there's another side. It isn't all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have inherited a good deal of hatred and rancour. How will you justify keeping one sort of memory and throwing away the other?" "I seek nothing for the Jewish nation but good," said Mordecai. "Our religion does not hate anything but wrong. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order, purified and enriched by the experience of the ages. It is only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better? A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised between East and West - a covenant of reconciliation. Will any say that the angel of progress has no message for Judaism? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have to choose, that God may again choose them. Shall man deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world. Let us choose our full heritage and claim the brotherhood of our nation. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled." With the last sentence, which was no more than a whisper, Mordecai let his eyelids fall. No one spoke. The dawn of fulfilment brought to his hope by Deronda's presence had wrought Mordecai's mind into a state of impassioned conviction, and he had found strength in his excitement to pour forth the unlocked floods of emotive argument, with a sense of haste. But now there had come with his fatigue a sort of thankful wonder that he had spoken - a contemplation of his life as a journey which had at last reached this destination. After a great excitement, the ebbing strength of impulse is apt to make us aloof from our active self. Mordecai's mind was wandering along the paths of his youth, and all the hopes which had brought him hither. Everyone felt that the talk was ended, and made a general movement to disperse. Soon the room was empty of all except Mordecai and Deronda. "Good-nights" had been given to Mordecai, but he had not heard them; he remained rapt and motionless, and Deronda waited for him to stir.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 42

"_Perigot_. As the bonny lasse passed by, _Willie_. Hey, ho, bonnilasse! _P_. She roode at me with glauncing eye, _W_. As clear as the crystal glasse. _P_. All as the sunny beame so bright, _W_. Hey, ho, the sunnebeame! _P_. Glaunceth from Phoebus' face forthright, _W_. So love into thy heart did streame." --SPENSER: _Shepard's Calendar_. "The kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and destroyer of hopeful wits; * * * the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind's religion; the liberal superstition."--CHARLES LAMB. The first sign of the unimagined snow-storm was like the transparent white cloud that seems to set off the blue. Anna was in the secret of Rex's feeling; though for the first time in their lives he had said nothing to her about what he most thought of, and he only took it for granted that she knew it. For the first time, too, Anna could not say to Rex what was continually in her mind. Perhaps it might have been a pain which she would have had to conceal, that he should so soon care for some one else more than for herself, if such a feeling had not been thoroughly neutralized by doubt and anxiety on his behalf. Anna admired her cousin--would have said with simple sincerity, "Gwendolen is always very good to me," and held it in the order of things for herself to be entirely subject to this cousin; but she looked at her with mingled fear and distrust, with a puzzled contemplation as of some wondrous and beautiful animal whose nature was a mystery, and who, for anything Anna knew, might have an appetite for devouring all the small creatures that were her own particular pets. And now Anna's heart was sinking under the heavy conviction which she dared not utter, that Gwendolen would never care for Rex. What she herself held in tenderness and reverence had constantly seemed indifferent to Gwendolen, and it was easier to imagine her scorning Rex than returning any tenderness of his. Besides, she was always thinking of being something extraordinary. And poor Rex! Papa would be angry with him if he knew. And of course he was too young to be in love in that way; and she, Anna had thought that it would be years and years before any thing of that sort came, and that she would be Rex's housekeeper ever so long. But what a heart must that be which did not return his love! Anna, in the prospect of his suffering, was beginning to dislike her too fascinating cousin. It seemed to her, as it did to Rex, that the weeks had been filled with a tumultuous life evident to all observers: if he had been questioned on the subject he would have said that he had no wish to conceal what he hoped would be an engagement which he should immediately tell his father of: and yet for the first time in his life he was reserved not only about his feelings but--which was more remarkable to Anna--about certain actions. She, on her side, was nervous each time her father or mother began to speak to her in private lest they should say anything about Rex and Gwendolen. But the elders were not in the least alive to this agitating drama, which went forward chiefly in a sort of pantomime extremely lucid in the minds thus expressing themselves, but easily missed by spectators who were running their eyes over the _Guardian_ or the _Clerical Gazette_, and regarded the trivialities of the young ones with scarcely more interpretation than they gave to the action of lively ants. "Where are you going, Rex?" said Anna one gray morning when her father had set off in his carriage to the sessions, Mrs. Gascoigne with him, and she had observed that her brother had on his antigropelos, the utmost approach he possessed to a hunting equipment. "Going to see the hounds throw off at the Three Barns." "Are you going to take Gwendolen?" said Anna, timidly. "She told you, did she?" "No, but I thought--Does papa know you are going?" "Not that I am aware of. I don't suppose he would trouble himself about the matter." "You are going to use his horse?" "He knows I do that whenever I can." "Don't let Gwendolen ride after the hounds, Rex," said Anna, whose fears gifted her with second-sight. "Why not?" said Rex, smiling rather provokingly. "Papa and mamma and aunt Davilow all wish her not to. They think it is not right for her." "Why should you suppose she is going to do what is not right?" "Gwendolen minds nobody sometimes," said Anna getting bolder by dint of a little anger. "Then she would not mind me," said Rex, perversely making a joke of poor Anna's anxiety. "Oh Rex, I cannot bear it. You will make yourself very unhappy." Here Anna burst into tears. "Nannie, Nannie, what on earth is the matter with you?" said Rex, a little impatient at being kept in this way, hat on and whip in hand. "She will not care for you one bit--I know she never will!" said the poor child in a sobbing whisper. She had lost all control of herself. Rex reddened and hurried away from her out of the hall door, leaving her to the miserable consciousness of having made herself disagreeable in vain. He did think of her words as he rode along; they had the unwelcomeness which all unfavorable fortune-telling has, even when laughed at; but he quickly explained them as springing from little Anna's tenderness, and began to be sorry that he was obliged to come away without soothing her. Every other feeling on the subject, however, was quickly merged in a resistant belief to the contrary of hers, accompanied with a new determination to prove that he was right. This sort of certainty had just enough kinship to doubt and uneasiness to hurry on a confession which an untouched security might have delayed. Gwendolen was already mounted and riding up and down the avenue when Rex appeared at the gate. She had provided herself against disappointment in case he did not appear in time by having the groom ready behind her, for she would not have waited beyond a reasonable time. But now the groom was dismissed, and the two rode away in delightful freedom. Gwendolen was in her highest spirits, and Rex thought that she had never looked so lovely before; her figure, her long white throat, and the curves of her cheek and chin were always set off to perfection by the compact simplicity of her riding dress. He could not conceive a more perfect girl; and to a youthful lover like Rex it seems that the fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful, is already extant and manifest in the object of his love. Most observers would have held it more than equally accountable that a girl should have like impressions about Rex, for in his handsome face there was nothing corresponding to the undefinable stinging quality--as it were a trace of demon ancestry--which made some beholders hesitate in their admiration of Gwendolen. It was an exquisite January morning in which there was no threat of rain, but a gray sky making the calmest background for the charms of a mild winter scene--the grassy borders of the lanes, the hedgerows sprinkled with red berries and haunted with low twitterings, the purple bareness of the elms, the rich brown of the furrows. The horses' hoofs made a musical chime, accompanying their young voices. She was laughing at his equipment, for he was the reverse of a dandy, and he was enjoying her laughter; the freshness of the morning mingled with the freshness of their youth; and every sound that came from their clear throats, every glance they gave each other, was the bubbling outflow from a spring of joy. It was all morning to them, within and without. And thinking of them in these moments one is tempted to that futile sort of wishing--if only things could have been a little otherwise then, so as to have been greatly otherwise after--if only these two beautiful young creatures could have pledged themselves to each other then and there, and never through life have swerved from that pledge! For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there. Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future; is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul land which rears or neighbors it, or by damage brought from foulness afar. "Anna had got it into her head that you would want to ride after the hounds this morning," said Rex, whose secret associations with Anna's words made this speech seem quite perilously near the most momentous of subjects. "Did she?" said Gwendolen, laughingly. "What a little clairvoyant she is!" "Shall you?" said Rex, who had not believed in her intending to do it if the elders objected, but confided in her having good reasons. "I don't know. I can't tell what I shall do till I get there. Clairvoyants are often wrong: they foresee what is likely. I am not fond of what is likely: it is always dull. I do what is unlikely." "Ah, there you tell me a secret. When once I knew what people in general would be likely to do, I should know you would do the opposite. So you would have come round to a likelihood of your own sort. I shall be able to calculate on you. You couldn't surprise me." "Yes, I could. I should turn round and do what was likely for people in general," said Gwendolen, with a musical laugh. "You see you can't escape some sort of likelihood. And contradictoriness makes the strongest likelihood of all. You must give up a plan." "No, I shall not. My plan is to do what pleases me." (Here should any young lady incline to imitate Gwendolen, let her consider the set of her head and neck: if the angle there had been different, the chin protrusive, and the cervical vertebrae a trifle more curved in their position, ten to one Gwendolen's words would have had a jar in them for the sweet-natured Rex. But everything odd in her speech was humor and pretty banter, which he was only anxious to turn toward one point.) "Can you manage to feel only what pleases you?" said he. "Of course not; that comes from what other people do. But if the world were pleasanter, one would only feel what was pleasant. Girls' lives are so stupid: they never do what they like." "I thought that was more the case of the men. They are forced to do hard things, and are often dreadfully bored, and knocked to pieces too. And then, if we love a girl very dearly we want to do as she likes, so after all you have your own way." "I don't believe it. I never saw a married woman who had her own way." "What should you like to do?" said Rex, quite guilelessly, and in real anxiety. "Oh, I don't know!--go to the North Pole, or ride steeple-chases, or go to be a queen in the East like Lady Hester Stanhope," said Gwendolen, flightily. Her words were born on her lips, but she would have been at a loss to give an answer of deeper origin. "You don't mean you would never be married?" "No; I didn't say that. Only when I married, I should not do as other women do." "You might do just as you liked if you married a man who loved you more dearly than anything else in the world," said Rex, who, poor youth, was moving in themes outside the curriculum in which he had promised to win distinction. "I know one who does." "Don't talk of Mr. Middleton, for heaven's sake," said Gwendolen, hastily, a quick blush spreading over her face and neck; "that is Anna's chant. I hear the hounds. Let us go on." She put her chestnut to a canter, and Rex had no choice but to follow her. Still he felt encouraged. Gwendolen was perfectly aware that her cousin was in love with her; but she had no idea that the matter was of any consequence, having never had the slightest visitation of painful love herself. She wished the small romance of Rex's devotion to fill up the time of his stay at Pennicote, and to avoid explanations which would bring it to an untimely end. Besides, she objected, with a sort of physical repulsion, to being directly made love to. With all her imaginative delight in being adored, there was a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her. But all other thoughts were soon lost for her in the excitement of the scene at the Three Barns. Several gentlemen of the hunt knew her, and she exchanged pleasant greetings. Rex could not get another word with her. The color, the stir of the field had taken possession of Gwendolen with a strength which was not due to habitual associations, for she had never yet ridden after the hounds--only said she should like to do it, and so drawn forth a prohibition; her mamma dreading the danger, and her uncle declaring that for his part he held that kind of violent exercise unseemly in a woman, and that whatever might be done in other parts of the country, no lady of good position followed the Wessex hunt: no one but Mrs. Gadsby, the yeomanry captain's wife, who had been a kitchenmaid and still spoke like one. This last argument had some effect on Gwendolen, and had kept her halting between her desire to assert her freedom and her horror of being classed with Mrs. Gadsby. Some of the most unexceptionable women in the neighborhood occasionally went to see the hounds throw off; but it happened that none of them were present this morning to abstain from following, while Mrs. Gadsby, with her doubtful antecedents, grammatical and otherwise, was not visible to make following seem unbecoming. Thus Gwendolen felt no check on the animal stimulus that came from the stir and tongue of the hounds, the pawing of the horses, the varying voices of men, the movement hither and thither of vivid color on the background of green and gray stillness:--that utmost excitement of the coming chase which consists in feeling something like a combination of dog and horse, with the superadded thrill of social vanities and consciousness of centaur-power which belongs to humankind. Rex would have felt more of the same enjoyment if he could have kept nearer to Gwendolen, and not seen her constantly occupied with acquaintances, or looked at by would-be acquaintances, all on lively horses which veered about and swept the surrounding space as effectually as a revolving lever. "Glad to see you here this fine morning, Miss Harleth," said Lord Brackenshaw, a middle-aged peer of aristocratic seediness in stained pink, with easy-going manners which would have made the threatened deluge seem of no consequence. "We shall have a first-rate run. A pity you didn't go with us. Have you ever tried your little chestnut at a ditch? you wouldn't be afraid, eh?" "Not the least in the world," said Gwendolen. And that was true: she was never fearful in action and companionship. "I have often taken him at some rails and a ditch too, near--" "Ah, by Jove!" said his lordship, quietly, in notation that something was happening which must break off the dialogue: and as he reined off his horse, Rex was bringing his sober hackney up to Gwendolen's side when--the hounds gave tongue, and the whole field was in motion as if the whirl of the earth were carrying it; Gwendolen along with everything else; no word of notice to Rex, who without a second thought followed too. Could he let Gwendolen go alone? under other circumstances he would have enjoyed the run, but he was just now perturbed by the check which had been put on the impetus to utter his love, and get utterance in return, an impetus which could not at once resolve itself into a totally different sort of chase, at least with the consciousness of being on his father's gray nag, a good horse enough in his way, but of sober years and ecclesiastical habits. Gwendolen on her spirited little chestnut was up with the best, and felt as secure as an immortal goddess, having, if she had thought of risk, a core of confidence that no ill luck would happen to her. But she thought of no such thing, and certainly not of any risk there might be for her cousin. If she had thought of him, it would have struck her as a droll picture that he should be gradually falling behind, and looking round in search of gates: a fine lithe youth, whose heart must be panting with all the spirit of a beagle, stuck as if under a wizard's spell on a stiff clerical hackney, would have made her laugh with a sense of fun much too strong for her to reflect on his mortification. But Gwendolen was apt to think rather of those who saw her than of those whom she could not see; and Rex was soon so far behind that if she had looked she would not have seen him. For I grieve to say that in the search for a gate, along a lane lately mended, Primrose fell, broke his knees, and undesignedly threw Rex over his head. Fortunately a blacksmith's son who also followed the hounds under disadvantages, namely, on foot (a loose way of hunting which had struck some even frivolous minds as immoral), was naturally also in the rear, and happened to be within sight of Rex's misfortune. He ran to give help which was greatly needed, for Rex was a great deal stunned, and the complete recovery of sensation came in the form of pain. Joel Dagge on this occasion showed himself that most useful of personages, whose knowledge is of a kind suited to the immediate occasion: he not only knew perfectly well what was the matter with the horse, how far they were both from the nearest public-house and from Pennicote Rectory, and could certify to Rex that his shoulder was only a bit out of joint, but also offered experienced surgical aid. "Lord, sir, let me shove it in again for you! I's seen Nash, the bone-setter, do it, and done it myself for our little Sally twice over. It's all one and the same, shoulders is. If you'll trusten to me and tighten your mind up a bit, I'll do it for you in no time." "Come then, old fellow," said Rex, who could tighten his mind better than his seat in the saddle. And Joel managed the operation, though not without considerable expense of pain to his patient, who turned so pitiably pale while tightening his mind, that Joel remarked, "Ah, sir, you aren't used to it, that's how it is. I's see lots and lots o' joints out. I see a man with his eye pushed out once--that was a rum go as ever I see. You can't have a bit o' fun wi'out such sort o' things. But it went in again. I's swallowed three teeth mysen, as sure as I'm alive. Now, sirrey" (this was addressed to Primrose), "come alonk--you musn't make believe as you can't." Joel being clearly a low character, it is, happily, not necessary to say more of him to the refined reader, than that he helped Rex to get home with as little delay as possible. There was no alternative but to get home, though all the while he was in anxiety about Gwendolen, and more miserable in the thought that she, too, might have had an accident, than in the pain of his own bruises and the annoyance he was about to cause his father. He comforted himself about her by reflecting that every one would be anxious to take care of her, and that some acquaintance would be sure to conduct her home. Mr. Gascoigne was already at home, and was writing letters in his study, when he was interrupted by seeing poor Rex come in with a face which was not the less handsome and ingratiating for being pale and a little distressed. He was secretly the favorite son, and a young portrait of the father; who, however, never treated him with any partiality--rather, with an extra rigor. Mr. Gascoigne having inquired of Anna, knew that Rex had gone with Gwendolen to the meet at the Three Barns. "What is the matter?" he said hastily, not laying down his pen. "I'm very sorry, sir; Primrose has fallen down and broken his knees." "Where have you been with him?" said Mr. Gascoigne, with a touch of severity. He rarely gave way to temper. "To the Three Barns to see the hounds throw off." "And you were fool enough to follow?" "Yes, sir. I didn't go at any fences, but the horse got his leg into a hole." "And you got hurt yourself, I hope, eh!" "I got my shoulder put out, but a young blacksmith put it in again for me. I'm just a little battered, that's all." "Well, sit down." "I'm very sorry about the horse, sir; I knew it would be a vexation to you." "And what has become of Gwendolen?" said Mr. Gascoigne, abruptly. Rex, who did not imagine that his father had made any inquiries about him, answered at first with a blush, which was the more remarkable for his previous paleness. Then he said, nervously, "I am anxious to know--I should like to go or send at once to Offendene--but she rides so well, and I think she would keep up--there would most likely be many round her." "I suppose it was she who led you on, eh?" said Mr. Gascoigne, laying down his pen, leaning back in his chair, and looking at Rex with more marked examination. "It was natural for her to want to go: she didn't intend it beforehand--she was led away by the spirit of the thing. And, of course, I went when she went." Mr. Gascoigne left a brief interval of silence, and then said, with quiet irony,--"But now you observe, young gentleman, that you are not furnished with a horse which will enable you to play the squire to your cousin. You must give up that amusement. You have spoiled my nag for me, and that is enough mischief for one vacation. I shall beg you to get ready to start for Southampton to-morrow and join Stilfox, till you go up to Oxford with him. That will be good for your bruises as well as your studies." Poor Rex felt his heart swelling and comporting itself as if it had been no better than a girl's. "I hope you will not insist on my going immediately, sir." "Do you feel too ill?" "No, not that--but--" here Rex bit his lips and felt the tears starting, to his great vexation; then he rallied and tried to say more firmly, "I want to go to Offendene, but I can go this evening." "I am going there myself. I can bring word about Gwendolen, if that is what you want." Rex broke down. He thought he discerned an intention fatal to his happiness, nay, his life. He was accustomed to believe in his father's penetration, and to expect firmness. "Father, I can't go away without telling her that I love her, and knowing that she loves me." Mr. Gascoigne was inwardly going through some self-rebuke for not being more wary, and was now really sorry for the lad; but every consideration was subordinate to that of using the wisest tactics in the case. He had quickly made up his mind and to answer the more quietly, "My dear boy, you are too young to be taking momentous, decisive steps of that sort. This is a fancy which you have got into your head during an idle week or two: you must set to work at something and dismiss it. There is every reason against it. An engagement at your age would be totally rash and unjustifiable; and moreover, alliances between first cousins are undesirable. Make up your mind to a brief disappointment. Life is full of them. We have all got to be broken in; and this is a mild beginning for you." "No, not mild. I can't bear it. I shall be good for nothing. I shouldn't mind anything, if it were settled between us. I could do anything then," said Rex, impetuously. "But it's of no use to pretend that I will obey you. I can't do it. If I said I would, I should be sure to break my word. I should see Gwendolen again." "Well, wait till to-morrow morning, that we may talk of the matter again--you will promise me that," said Mr. Gascoigne, quietly; and Rex did not, could not refuse. The rector did not even tell his wife that he had any other reason for going to Offendene that evening than his desire to ascertain that Gwendolen had got home safely. He found her more than safe--elated. Mr. Quallon, who had won the brush, had delivered the trophy to her, and she had brought it before her, fastened on the saddle; more than that, Lord Brackenshaw had conducted her home, and had shown himself delighted with her spirited riding. All this was told at once to her uncle, that he might see how well justified she had been in acting against his advice; and the prudential rector did feel himself in a slight difficulty, for at that moment he was particularly sensible that it was his niece's serious interest to be well regarded by the Brackenshaws, and their opinion as to her following the hounds really touched the essence of his objection. However, he was not obliged to say anything immediately, for Mrs. Davilow followed up Gwendolen's brief triumphant phrases with, "Still, I do hope you will not do it again, Gwendolen. I should never have a moment's quiet. Her father died by an accident, you know." Here Mrs. Davilow had turned away from Gwendolen, and looked at Mr. Gascoigne. "Mamma, dear," said Gwendolen, kissing her merrily, and passing over the question of the fears which Mrs. Davilow had meant to account for, "children don't take after their parents in broken legs." Not one word had yet been said about Rex. In fact there had been no anxiety about him at Offendene. Gwendolen had observed to her mamma, "Oh, he must have been left far behind, and gone home in despair," and it could not be denied that this was fortunate so far as it made way for Lord Brackenshaw's bringing her home. But now Mr. Gascoigne said, with some emphasis, looking at Gwendolen, "Well, the exploit has ended better for you than for Rex." "Yes, I dare say he had to make a terrible round. You have not taught Primrose to take the fences, uncle," said Gwendolen, without the faintest shade of alarm in her looks and tone. "Rex has had a fall," said Mr. Gascoigne, curtly, throwing himself into an arm-chair resting his elbows and fitting his palms and fingers together, while he closed his lips and looked at Gwendolen, who said, "Oh, poor fellow! he is not hurt, I hope?" with a correct look of anxiety such as elated mortals try to super-induce when their pulses are all the while quick with triumph; and Mrs. Davilow, in the same moment, uttered a low "Good heavens! There!" Mr. Gascoigne went on: "He put his shoulder out, and got some bruises, I believe." Here he made another little pause of observation; but Gwendolen, instead of any such symptoms as pallor and silence, had only deepened the compassionateness of her brow and eyes, and said again, "Oh, poor fellow! it is nothing serious, then?" and Mr. Gascoigne held his diagnosis complete. But he wished to make assurance doubly sure, and went on still with a purpose. "He got his arm set again rather oddly. Some blacksmith--not a parishioner of mine--was on the field--a loose fish, I suppose, but handy, and set the arm for him immediately. So after all, I believe, I and Primrose come off worst. The horse's knees are cut to pieces. He came down in a hole, it seems, and pitched Rex over his head." Gwendolen's face had allowably become contented again, since Rex's arm had been reset; and now, at the descriptive suggestions in the latter part of her uncle's speech, her elated spirits made her features less unmanageable than usual; the smiles broke forth, and finally a descending scale of laughter. "You are a pretty young lady--to laugh at other people's calamities," said Mr. Gascoigne, with a milder sense of disapprobation than if he had not had counteracting reasons to be glad that Gwendolen showed no deep feeling on the occasion. "Pray forgive me, uncle. Now Rex is safe, it is so droll to fancy the figure he and Primrose would cut--in a lane all by themselves--only a blacksmith running up. It would make a capital caricature of 'Following the Hounds.'" Gwendolen rather valued herself on her superior freedom in laughing where others might only see matter for seriousness. Indeed, the laughter became her person so well that her opinion of its gracefulness was often shared by others; and it even entered into her uncle's course of thought at this moment, that it was no wonder a boy should be fascinated by this young witch--who, however, was more mischievous than could be desired. "How can you laugh at broken bones, child?" said Mrs. Davilow, still under her dominant anxiety. "I wish we had never allowed you to have the horse. You will see that we were wrong," she added, looking with a grave nod at Mr. Gascoigne--"at least I was, to encourage her in asking for it." "Yes, seriously, Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne, in a judicious tone of rational advice to a person understood to be altogether rational, "I strongly recommend you--I shall ask you to oblige me so far--not to repeat your adventure of to-day. Lord Brackenshaw is very kind, but I feel sure that he would concur with me in what I say. To be spoken of as 'the young lady who hunts' by way of exception, would give a tone to the language about you which I am sure you would not like. Depend upon it, his lordship would not choose that Lady Beatrice or Lady Maria should hunt in this part of the country, if they were old enough to do so. When you are married, it will be different: you may do whatever your husband sanctions. But if you intend to hunt, you must marry a man who can keep horses." "I don't know why I should do anything so horrible as to marry without _that_ prospect, at least," said Gwendolen, pettishly. Her uncle's speech had given her annoyance, which she could not show more directly; but she felt that she was committing herself, and after moving carelessly to another part of the room, went out. "She always speaks in that way about marriage," said Mrs. Davilow; "but it will be different when she has seen the right person." "Her heart has never been in the least touched, that you know of?" said Mr. Gascoigne. Mrs. Davilow shook her head silently. "It was only last night she said to me, 'Mamma, I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous.'" Mr. Gascoigne laughed a little, and made no further remark on the subject. The next morning at breakfast he said, "How are your bruises, Rex?" "Oh, not very mellow yet, sir; only beginning to turn a little." "You don't feel quite ready for a journey to Southampton?" "Not quite," answered Rex, with his heart metaphorically in his mouth. "Well, you can wait till to-morrow, and go to say goodbye to them at Offendene." Mrs. Gascoigne, who now knew the whole affair, looked steadily at her coffee lest she also should begin to cry, as Anna was doing already. Mr. Gascoigne felt that he was applying a sharp remedy to poor Rex's acute attack, but he believed it to be in the end the kindest. To let him know the hopelessness of his love from Gwendolen's own lips might be curative in more ways than one. "I can only be thankful that she doesn't care about him," said Mrs. Gascoigne, when she joined her husband in his study. "There are things in Gwendolen I cannot reconcile myself to. My Anna is worth two of her, with all her beauty and talent. It looks very ill in her that she will not help in the schools with Anna--not even in the Sunday-school. What you or I advise is of no consequence to her: and poor Fannie is completely under her thumb. But I know you think better of her," Mrs. Gascoigne ended with a deferential hesitation. "Oh, my dear, there is no harm in the girl. It is only that she has a high spirit, and it will not do to hold the reins too tight. The point is, to get her well married. She has a little too much fire in her for her present life with her mother and sisters. It is natural and right that she should be married soon--not to a poor man, but one who can give her a fitting position." Presently Rex, with his arm in a sling, was on his two miles' walk to Offendene. He was rather puzzled by the unconditional permission to see Gwendolen, but his father's real ground of action could not enter into his conjectures. If it had, he would first have thought it horribly cold-blooded, and then have disbelieved in his father's conclusions. When he got to the house, everybody was there but Gwendolen. The four girls, hearing him speak in the hall, rushed out of the library, which was their school-room, and hung round him with compassionate inquiries about his arm. Mrs. Davilow wanted to know exactly what had happened, and where the blacksmith lived, that she might make him a present; while Miss Merry, who took a subdued and melancholy part in all family affairs, doubted whether it would not be giving too much encouragement to that kind of character. Rex had never found the family troublesome before, but just now he wished them all away and Gwendolen there, and he was too uneasy for good-natured feigning. When at last he had said, "Where is Gwendolen?" and Mrs. Davilow had told Alice to go and see if her sister were come down, adding, "I sent up her breakfast this morning. She needed a long rest." Rex took the shortest way out of his endurance by saying, almost impatiently, "Aunt, I want to speak to Gwendolen--I want to see her alone." "Very well, dear; go into the drawing-room. I will send her there," said Mrs. Davilow, who had observed that he was fond of being with Gwendolen, as was natural, but had not thought of this as having any bearing on the realities of life: it seemed merely part of the Christmas holidays which were spinning themselves out. Rex for his part thought that the realities of life were all hanging on this interview. He had to walk up and down the drawing-room in expectation for nearly ten minutes--ample space for all imaginative fluctuations; yet, strange to say, he was unvaryingly occupied in thinking what and how much he could do, when Gwendolen had accepted him, to satisfy his father that the engagement was the most prudent thing in the world, since it inspired him with double energy for work. He was to be a lawyer, and what reason was there why he should not rise as high as Eldon did? He was forced to look at life in the light of his father's mind. But when the door opened and she whose presence he was longing for entered, there came over him suddenly and mysteriously a state of tremor and distrust which he had never felt before. Miss Gwendolen, simple as she stood there, in her black silk, cut square about the round white pillar of her throat, a black band fastening her hair which streamed backward in smooth silky abundance, seemed more queenly than usual. Perhaps it was that there was none of the latent fun and tricksiness which had always pierced in her greeting of Rex. How much of this was due to her presentiment from what he had said yesterday that he was going to talk of love? How much from her desire to show regret about his accident? Something of both. But the wisdom of ages has hinted that there is a side of the bed which has a malign influence if you happen to get out on it; and this accident befalls some charming persons rather frequently. Perhaps it had befallen Gwendolen this morning. The hastening of her toilet, the way in which Bugle used the brush, the quality of the shilling serial mistakenly written for her amusement, the probabilities of the coming day, and, in short, social institutions generally, were all objectionable to her. It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism. However it might be, Rex saw an awful majesty about her as she entered and put out her hand to him, without the least approach to a smile in eyes or mouth. The fun which had moved her in the evening had quite evaporated from the image of his accident, and the whole affair seemed stupid to her. But she said with perfect propriety, "I hope you are not much hurt, Rex; I deserve that you should reproach me for your accident." "Not at all," said Rex, feeling the soul within him spreading itself like an attack of illness. "There is hardly any thing the matter with me. I am so glad you had the pleasure: I would willingly pay for it by a tumble, only I was sorry to break the horse's knees." Gwendolen walked to the hearth and stood looking at the fire in the most inconvenient way for conversation, so that he could only get a side view of her face. "My father wants me to go to Southampton for the rest of the vacation," said Rex, his baritone trembling a little. "Southampton! That's a stupid place to go to, isn't it?" said Gwendolen, chilly. "It would be to me, because you would not be there." Silence. "Should you mind about me going away, Gwendolen?" "Of course. Every one is of consequence in this dreary country," said Gwendolen, curtly. The perception that poor Rex wanted to be tender made her curl up and harden like a sea-anemone at the touch of a finger. "Are you angry with me, Gwendolen? Why do you treat me in this way all at once?" said Rex, flushing, and with more spirit in his voice, as if he too were capable of being angry. Gwendolen looked round at him and smiled. "Treat you? Nonsense! I am only rather cross. Why did you come so very early? You must expect to find tempers in dishabille." "Be as cross with me as you like--only don't treat me with indifference," said Rex, imploringly. "All the happiness of my life depends on your loving me--if only a little--better than any one else." He tried to take her hand, but she hastily eluded his grasp and moved to the other end of the hearth, facing him. "Pray don't make love to me! I hate it!" she looked at him fiercely. Rex turned pale and was silent, but could not take his eyes off her, and the impetus was not yet exhausted that made hers dart death at him. Gwendolen herself could not have foreseen that she should feel in this way. It was all a sudden, new experience to her. The day before she had been quite aware that her cousin was in love with her; she did not mind how much, so that he said nothing about it; and if any one had asked her why she objected to love-making speeches, she would have said, laughingly, "Oh I am tired of them all in the books." But now the life of passion had begun negatively in her. She felt passionately averse to this volunteered love. To Rex at twenty the joy of life seemed at an end more absolutely than it can do to a man at forty. But before they had ceased to look at each other, he did speak again. "Is that last word you have to say to me, Gwendolen? Will it always be so?" She could not help seeing his wretchedness and feeling a little regret for the old Rex who had not offended her. Decisively, but yet with some return of kindness, she said, "About making love? Yes. But I don't dislike you for anything else." There was just a perceptible pause before he said a low "good-bye." and passed out of the room. Almost immediately after, she heard the heavy hall door bang behind him. Mrs. Davilow, too, had heard Rex's hasty departure, and presently came into the drawing-room, where she found Gwendolen seated on the low couch, her face buried, and her hair falling over her figure like a garment. She was sobbing bitterly. "My child, my child, what is it?" cried the mother, who had never before seen her darling struck down in this way, and felt something of the alarmed anguish that women, feel at the sight of overpowering sorrow in a strong man; for this child had been her ruler. Sitting down by her with circling arms, she pressed her cheek against Gwendolen's head, and then tried to draw it upward. Gwendolen gave way, and letting her head rest against her mother, cried out sobbingly, "Oh, mamma, what can become of my life? there is nothing worth living for!" "Why, dear?" said Mrs. Davilow. Usually she herself had been rebuked by her daughter for involuntary signs of despair. "I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them." "The time will come, dear, the time will come." Gwendolen was more and more convulsed with sobbing; but putting her arms round her mother's neck with an almost painful clinging, she said brokenly, "I can't bear any one to be very near me but you." Then the mother began to sob, for this spoiled child had never shown such dependence on her before: and so they clung to each other.

The first sign of the unimagined snow-storm was like the transparent white cloud that sets off the blue. Anna was in the secret of Rex's feeling; though he had said nothing to her about it, and took it for granted that she knew. For the first time, Anna could not tell Rex what was in her mind: she had to conceal her doubt and anxiety on his behalf. Anna admired her cousin - would have said sincerely, "Gwendolen is always very good to me;" but she looked at her with mingled fear and distrust, as at some wondrous animal whose nature was a mystery, and who, for anything Anna knew, might have an appetite for devouring small creatures. And now Anna's heart was sinking under the heavy conviction that Gwendolen would never care for Rex. Poor Rex! Papa would be angry with him if he knew. He was too young to be in love; and Anna had thought that it would be years before anything of that sort, and that she would be Rex's housekeeper ever so long. But what a heart must that be which did not return his love! Anna, in the prospect of his suffering, was beginning to dislike her too fascinating cousin. If Rex had been questioned on the subject he would have said that he had no wish to conceal what he hoped would be an engagement: and yet for the first time in his life he was reserved. Anna was nervous each time her father or mother began to speak to her in private lest they should say anything about Rex and Gwendolen. But the elders were not aware of this agitating drama: they regarded the doings of the young ones with scarcely more attention than they gave to the action of lively ants. "Where are you going, Rex?" said Anna one grey morning when her father had set off in his carriage with Mrs. Gascoigne, and she had observed that her brother had on his hunting gear. "Going to see the hounds set off at the Three Barns." "Are you going to take Gwendolen?" said Anna timidly. "She told you, did she?" "No, but - does papa know you are going?" "No, but I don't suppose he would mind." "You are taking his horse?" "He knows I do that whenever I can." "Don't let Gwendolen ride after the hounds, Rex," said Anna, whose fears gifted her with second-sight. "Why not?" said Rex, smiling rather provokingly. "Papa and mamma think it is not right." "Why should you suppose she is going to do what is not right?" "Gwendolen minds nobody sometimes," said Anna. "Then she would not mind me," said Rex. "Oh Rex, I cannot bear it. You will make yourself very unhappy." Here Anna burst into tears. "Nannie, Nannie, what on earth is the matter with you?" said Rex, a little impatient. "She will not care for you one bit - I know she never will!" sobbed the poor child. Rex reddened and hurried away. He thought of her unwelcome words as he rode along; but he quickly explained them as springing from little Anna's tenderness, and began to be sorry he had come away without soothing her. While he did not believe she was right, he had just enough doubt and uneasiness to hurry on a confession which he might have delayed. Gwendolen was already mounted and riding up and down the avenue when Rex appeared. The groom was dismissed, and the two rode away in delightful freedom. Gwendolen was in her highest spirits, and Rex thought that she had never looked so lovely; her figure, her long white throat, and her face were set off to perfection by her riding dress. He could not conceive a more perfect girl. It was an exquisite January morning, with the charms of a mild winter scene - the hedgerows sprinkled with red berries and haunted with low twitterings, the purple bareness of the elms, the rich brown of the furrows. The horses' hoofs made a musical chime, accompanying their young voices. She was laughing at his plain equipment, and he was enjoying her laughter; the freshness of the morning mingled with the freshness of their youth; and every sound, every glance flowed from a spring of joy. It was all morning to them. "Anna got it into her head that you would want to ride after the hounds this morning," said Rex. "Did she?" said Gwendolen, laughingly. "What a little clairvoyant she is!" "Shall you?" said Rex, who had not believed in her intending to do it if the elders objected, but assumed she had good reasons. "I don't know. I can't tell what I shall do till I get there. Clairvoyants foresee what is likely, but I am not fond of what is likely: it is always dull. I do what is unlikely." "Ah, there you tell me a secret. Now that I know you would do the opposite of what is likely for people in general, you have come round to a likelihood of your own sort. Now you couldn't surprise me." "Yes, I could. I should turn round and do what was likely for people in general," said Gwendolen, with a musical laugh. "You see you can't escape some sort of likelihood." "I shall do what pleases me." (If Gwendolen had been any less attractive, ten to one her words would have jarred on the sweet-natured Rex. But he saw only humour and pretty banter.) "Girls' lives are so stupid: they never do what they like." "I thought that was more the case of men. They are forced to do hard things, and are often dreadfully bored, and knocked to pieces too. And then, if we love a girl very dearly we want to do as she likes, so after all you have your own way." "I don't believe it. I never saw a married woman who had her own way." "What should you like to do?" said Rex guilelessly, and in real anxiety. "Oh, I don't know! - go to the North Pole, or ride steeple-chases, or be a queen in the East like Lady Hester Stanhope," said Gwendolen, flightily. She would have been at a loss to give a deeper answer. "You don't mean you would never be married?" "No; I didn't say that. Only when I married, I should not do as other women do." "You might do as you liked if you married a man who loved you more dearly than anything else in the world," said Rex. "I know one who does." "Don't talk of Mr. Middleton, for heaven's sake," said Gwendolen, hastily, a quick blush spreading over her face; "I hear the hounds. Let us go." She put her chestnut to a canter, and Rex had no choice but to follow. Still he felt encouraged. Gwendolen was perfectly aware that he was in love with her; but she had no idea of the importance of the matter to him, having never felt painful love herself. She wished the small romance of Rex's devotion to fill the time, and to avoid explanations which would bring it to an untimely end. Besides, she objected, with a physical repulsion, to being directly made love to. With all her imaginative delight in being adored, there was a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her. But all other thoughts were soon lost for her in the excitement of the scene at the Three Barns. Several gentlemen of the hunt knew her, and exchanged pleasant greetings. Rex could not get another word with her. The stir of the field had taken possession of Gwendolen, although she had never yet ridden after the hounds - only said she should like to do it, and been forbidden; her mamma dreading the danger, and her uncle declaring that it was unseemly in a lady. Some of the most respectable women in the neighbourhood occasionally went to see the hounds throw off; but none of them were present this morning. At the stir of the hounds and horses, Gwendolen felt that excitement of the coming chase, which consists in feeling something like a combination of dog and horse, with the superadded thrill of centaur-power. Rex would have felt the same enjoyment if he could have kept nearer to Gwendolen, and not seen her constantly occupied with acquaintances on lively horses which veered about and swept the surrounding space. "Glad to see you here this fine morning, Miss Harleth," said Lord Brackenshaw, an easy-going, middle-aged peer of aristocratic seediness in stained pink. "We shall have a first-rate run. Have you ever tried your little chestnut at a ditch? you wouldn't be afraid, eh?" "Not at all," said Gwendolen. Just then the hounds gave tongue, and the whole field was in motion as if the whirl of the earth were carrying it; Gwendolen along with everything else. Rex followed her without a second thought. Under other circumstances he would have enjoyed the run, but he was perturbed by her check on his attempt to utter his love; and hampered by his father's grey nag, Primrose, a good horse enough in his way, but of sober years and ecclesiastical habits. Gwendolen on her spirited little chestnut was up with the best, and felt as secure as an immortal goddess, having no idea of risk for herself or her cousin. If she had thought of Rex, it would have struck her as a droll picture: a fine lithe youth falling behind, stuck on a stiff clerical hackney. But Gwendolen was apt to think rather of those who saw her than of those whom she could not see; and Rex was soon so far behind that if she had looked she would not have seen him. For I grieve to say that in the search for a gate, Primrose fell, broke his knees, and threw Rex over his head. Fortunately a blacksmith's son following the hounds on foot happened to see Rex's misfortune. He ran to give help which was greatly needed, for Rex was stunned and in considerable pain. Joel Dagge assured Rex that his shoulder was only a bit out of joint, and offered experienced surgical aid. "Lord, sir, let me shove it in again for you! I's seen Nash, the bone-setter, do it, and done it myself for our little Sally. If you'll trusten to me and tighten your mind up a bit, I'll do it for you in no time." "Come then, old fellow," said Rex, who could tighten his mind better than his seat in the saddle. And Joel managed the operation, though not without much pain to his patient, who turned so pale that Joel remarked, "Ah, sir, you aren't used to it, that's how it is. I's see lots and lots o' joints out. Now, sirrey" (this was addressed to Primrose), "you come alonk." Joel being clearly a low character, it is, happily, not necessary to say more of him to the refined reader, than that he helped Rex to get home with as little delay as possible. All the while Rex was anxious about Gwendolen. He comforted himself by reflecting that everyone would take care of her, and that some acquaintance would be sure to conduct her home. Mr. Gascoigne was at home writing in his study, having learnt from Anna that Rex and Gwendolen had gone to the meet, when he was interrupted by seeing poor Rex come in looking pale and distressed. "What is the matter?" he said hastily. "I'm very sorry, sir; Primrose has fallen down and broken his knees." "Where have you been with him?" said Mr. Gascoigne, with a touch of severity. "To the Three Barns to see the hounds throw off." "And you were fool enough to follow?" "Yes, sir. I didn't go at any fences, but the horse got his leg into a hole." "And you got hurt yourself, I hope, eh!" "I got my shoulder put out, but a young blacksmith put it in again for me. I'm just a little battered, that's all." "Well, sit down." "I'm very sorry about the horse, sir." "And what has become of Gwendolen?" said Mr. Gascoigne, abruptly. Rex answered with a nervous blush that was the more remarkable for his previous paleness- "I am anxious to know - I would like to go to Offendene - but she rides so well, and there would most likely be many round her." "I suppose it was she who led you on, eh?" said Mr. Gascoigne, looking at Rex with more marked examination. "She didn't intend it beforehand - she was led away by the spirit of the thing. And, of course, I went when she went." Mr. Gascoigne, after a brief interval of silence, said, with quiet irony, "But now you see that you are not furnished with a horse which will enable you to play the squire to your cousin. You must give up that amusement. You have spoiled my nag for me, and that is enough mischief for one vacation. I shall beg you to get ready to start for Southampton tomorrow and join Stilfox, till you go up to Oxford with him." Poor Rex felt his heart swelling. "I hope you will not insist on my going immediately, sir." He bit his lips and felt the tears starting, to his great vexation; then he tried to say more firmly, "I want to go to Offendene." "I am going there myself. I can bring word about Gwendolen, if that is what you want." Rex broke down. "Father, I can't go away without telling her that I love her, and knowing that she loves me." Mr. Gascoigne was inwardly going through some self-rebuke for not being more wary, and was now really sorry for the lad; but deciding on the wisest tactics in the case, he answered quietly- "My dear boy, you are too young to be taking momentous steps of that sort. This is the fancy of an idle week or two: you must dismiss it. There is every reason against it. An engagement at your age would be totally rash; and moreover, alliances between first cousins are undesirable. Make up your mind to a brief disappointment. Life is full of them. We have all got to be broken in; and this is a mild beginning for you." "No, not mild. I can't bear it. I shall be good for nothing. If it were settled between us, I could do anything," said Rex, impetuously. "But it's of no use to pretend that I will obey you, and never see Gwendolen again." "Well, wait till tomorrow morning, that we may talk of it again," said Mr. Gascoigne; and Rex could not refuse. When the rector went to Offendene that evening, he found Gwendolen not only safe, but elated. She had been given the fox's brush, and had fastened it on her saddle; and Lord Brackenshaw had conducted her home, and had shown himself delighted with her spirited riding. All this was told to her uncle, to justify her acting against his advice; and the rector did feel himself in a slight difficulty, for he wished his niece to be well-regarded by the Brackenshaws. Mrs. Davilow put in- "I do hope you will not do it again, Gwendolen. I should never have a moment's quiet. Her father died by an accident, you know." "Mamma, dear," said Gwendolen merrily, "children don't take after their parents in broken legs." Not one word had yet been said about Rex. In fact there had been no anxiety about him at Offendene. Gwendolen had observed to her mamma, "Oh, he must have been left far behind, and gone home in despair." But now Mr. Gascoigne said, with some emphasis- "Well, the exploit has ended better for you than for Rex." "Yes, I dare say he had a terrible round." said Gwendolen, without the faintest sign of alarm. "Rex has had a fall," said Mr. Gascoigne, curtly, throwing himself into an arm-chair while he watched Gwendolen, who said- "Oh, poor fellow! he is not hurt, I hope?" with a correct look of superficial anxiety. "He put his shoulder out, and got some bruises." Here Mr Gascoigne made another pause of observation; but Gwendolen, instead of turning pale and silent, only said again, "Oh, poor fellow! it is nothing serious, then?" and Mr. Gascoigne held his diagnosis complete. But wishing to make assurance doubly sure, he went on. "He got his arm set again rather oddly. Some blacksmith set it for him immediately. I believe Primrose came off worst. His knees are cut to pieces. He came down in a hole, and pitched Rex over his head." Gwendolen's face had become contented again, since Rex's arm had been reset; and now laughter broke forth. "Pray forgive me, uncle," she said. "Now Rex is safe, it is so droll to fancy the scene. It would make a capital caricature of 'Following the Hounds.'" Gwendolen rather valued herself on her superior freedom in laughing where others might only see matter for seriousness. Indeed, she laughed so gracefully that her opinion was often shared by others; and it even entered into her uncle's head that it was no wonder a boy should be fascinated by this young witch. "How can you laugh at broken bones, child?" said Mrs. Davilow. "I was wrong to encourage you in asking for that horse." "Yes, seriously, Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne, in a judicious tone, "I strongly recommend you not to repeat today's adventure. Lord Brackenshaw is very kind, but I feel sure he would agree. Depend upon it, his lordship would not let his daughters hunt, if they were old enough to do so. When you are married, you may do whatever your husband sanctions. But if you intend to hunt, you must marry a man who can keep horses." "I should certainly not marry without that prospect, at least," said Gwendolen, pettishly. Her uncle's speech had annoyed her, and she went out. "She always speaks in that way about marriage," said Mrs. Davilow; "but it will be different when she has seen the right person." "Her heart has never been touched?" said Mr. Gascoigne. Mrs. Davilow shook her head. "It was only last night she said to me, 'Mamma, I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. Men are too ridiculous.'" Mr. Gascoigne laughed a little, and made no further remark. The next morning at breakfast he said- "How are your bruises, Rex? Do you feel ready for a journey to Southampton?" "Not quite," answered Rex, with his heart in his mouth. "Well, you can wait till tomorrow, and go to say goodbye to them at Offendene." Mrs. Gascoigne, who now knew the whole affair, looked steadily at her coffee lest she should begin to cry, as Anna was doing already. Mr. Gascoigne felt that he was applying a sharp remedy to poor Rex, but he believed it to be kindest to let him know the hopelessness of his love from Gwendolen's own lips. Presently Rex, with his arm in a sling, was on his two miles' walk to Offendene. He was rather puzzled by the unconditional permission to see Gwendolen, but his father's real reason never entered his head. When he got to the house, the four younger girls rushed out and hung round him with compassionate inquiries about his arm, while Mrs. Davilow wanted to know exactly what had happened. Rex had never found the family troublesome before, but just now he wished them all away and Gwendolen there. "Where is Gwendolen?" he said. "Aunt, I want to speak to Gwendolen - I want to see her alone." "Very well, dear; go into the drawing-room. I will send her there," said Mrs. Davilow, who had observed that he was fond of being with Gwendolen, but had not thought of this as significant. Rex for his part felt that his life was hanging on this interview. He had to walk up and down the drawing-room in expectation for nearly ten minutes; yet, strange to say, he was occupied only in thinking how, once Gwendolen had accepted him, he could satisfy his father that the engagement was prudent. But when the door opened and Gwendolen entered, he felt suddenly a tremor and distrust which he had never felt before. Miss Gwendolen, in her black silk, a black band fastening her silky abundance of hair, seemed more queenly than usual, with none of her usual latent fun. How much of this was due to her fear that he was going to talk of love? How much from her desire to show regret about his accident? Something of both. But perhaps Gwendolen was also out of temper - or not exactly that, but felt the world unequal to her demands. However it might be, Rex saw an awful majesty about her as she entered and put out her hand without a smile. She said with perfect propriety, "I hope you are not much hurt, Rex. You should reproach me for your accident." "Not at all," said Rex, feeling the soul within him spreading like an attack of illness. "There is hardly any thing the matter with me. I am so glad you had the pleasure, only I was sorry to break the horse's knees." Gwendolen walked to the hearth and stood looking at the fire. "My father wants me to go to Southampton," said Rex, his voice trembling a little. "Southampton! That's a stupid place to go to, isn't it?" said Gwendolen, chilly. "It would be to me, because you would not be there." Silence. "Should you mind about me going away?" "Of course. All company matters in this dreary country," she said curtly. The perception that poor Rex wanted to be tender made her curl up and harden. "Are you angry with me, Gwendolen? Why do you treat me in this way?" said Rex, flushing, and with spirit. Gwendolen looked round at him and smiled. "Treat you? Nonsense! I am only rather cross." "Be as cross as you like - only don't treat me with indifference," implored Rex. "All the happiness of my life depends on your loving me." He tried to take her hand, but she hastily eluded his grasp and moved away. "Pray don't make love to me! I hate it!" she said fiercely. Rex turned pale and was silent, but could not take his eyes off her. Gwendolen herself had not foreseen that she should feel this way. It was all a sudden, new experience to her. The day before she had been quite aware that her cousin was in love with her; she did not mind, so long as he said nothing about it. But now she felt passionately averse to this volunteered love. To Rex the joy of life seemed at an end. "Is that last word you have to say to me, Gwendolen? Will it always be so?" She could not help feeling a little regret for the old Rex. Decisively, but yet with some return of kindness, she said- "About making love? Yes. But I don't dislike you for anything else." There was a pause before he said a low "good-bye" and left the room. She heard the heavy hall door bang behind him. Mrs. Davilow, too, heard it, and came into the drawing-room, where she found Gwendolen seated on the low couch, her face buried, sobbing bitterly. "My child, my child, what is it?" cried the mother, who had never before seen her darling struck down in this way, and felt an alarmed anguish; for this child had been her ruler. She pressed her cheek against Gwendolen's, and Gwendolen, letting her head rest against her mother, cried out sobbingly, "Oh, mamma, what can become of my life? there is nothing worth living for! I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them." "The time will come, dear, the time will come." Gwendolen was convulsed with sobbing; but putting her arms round her mother's neck with an almost painful clinging, she said brokenly, "I can't bear anyone to be very near me but you." Then the mother began to sob, for this spoiled child had never shown such dependence on her before: and so they clung to each other.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 7

"One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm." --BROWNING: _The King and the Book_. Meanwhile Ezra and Mirah, whom Gwendolen did not include in her thinking about Deronda, were having their relation to him drawn closer and brought into fuller light. The father Lapidoth had quitted his daughter at the doorstep, ruled by that possibility of staking something in play or betting which presented itself with the handling of any sum beyond the price of staying actual hunger, and left no care for alternative prospects or resolutions. Until he had lost everything he never considered whether he would apply to Mirah again or whether he would brave his son's presence. In the first moment he had shrunk from encountering Ezra as he would have shrunk from any other situation of disagreeable constraint; and the possession of Mirah's purse was enough to banish the thought of future necessities. The gambling appetite is more absolutely dominant than bodily hunger, which can be neutralized by an emotional or intellectual excitation; but the passion for watching chances--the habitual suspensive poise of the mind in actual or imaginary play--nullifies the susceptibility of other excitation. In its final, imperious stage, it seems the unjoyous dissipation of demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition. But every form of selfishness, however abstract and unhuman, requires the support of at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's appetite for food and drink was extremely moderate, he had slipped into a shabby, unfriendly form of life in which the appetite could not be satisfied without some ready money. When, in a brief visit at a house which announced "Pyramids" on the window-blind, he had first doubled and trebled and finally lost Mirah's thirty shillings, he went out with her empty purse in his pocket, already balancing in his mind whether he should get another immediate stake by pawning the purse, or whether he should go back to her giving himself a good countenance by restoring the purse, and declaring that he had used the money in paying a score that was standing against him. Besides, among the sensibilities still left strong in Lapidoth was the sensibility to his own claims, and he appeared to himself to have a claim on any property his children might possess, which was stronger than the justice of his son's resentment. After all, to take up his lodging with his children was the best thing he could do; and the more he thought of meeting Ezra the less he winced from it, his imagination being more wrought on by the chances of his getting something into his pocket with safety and without exertion, than by the threat of a private humiliation. Luck had been against him lately; he expected it to turn--and might not the turn begin with some opening of supplies which would present itself through his daughter's affairs and the good friends she had spoken of? Lapidoth counted on the fascination of his cleverness--an old habit of mind which early experience had sanctioned: and it is not only women who are unaware of their diminished charm, or imagine that they can feign not to be worn out. The result of Lapidoth's rapid balancing was that he went toward the little square in Brompton with the hope that, by walking about and watching, he might catch sight of Mirah going out or returning, in which case his entrance into the house would be made easier. But it was already evening--the evening of the day next to that which he had first seen her; and after a little waiting, weariness made him reflect that he might ring, and if she were not at home he might ask the time at which she was expected. But on coming near the house he knew that she was at home: he heard her singing. Mirah, seated at the piano, was pouring forth "_Herz, mein Herz_," while Ezra was listening with his eyes shut, when Mrs. Adam opened the door, and said in some embarrassment, "A gentleman below says he is your father, miss." "I will go down to him," said Mirah, starting up immediately and looking at her brother. "No, Mirah, not so," said Ezra, with decision. "Let him come up, Mrs. Adam." Mirah stood with her hands pinching each other, and feeling sick with anxiety, while she continued looking at Ezra, who had also risen, and was evidently much shaken. But there was an expression in his face which she had never seen before; his brow was knit, his lips seemed hardened with the same severity that gleamed from his eye. When Mrs. Adam opened the door to let in the father, she could not help casting a look at the group, and after glancing from the younger man to the elder, said to herself as she closed the door, "Father, sure enough." The likeness was that of outline, which is always most striking at the first moment; the expression had been wrought into the strongest contrasts by such hidden or inconspicuous differences as can make the genius of a Cromwell within the outward type of a father who was no more than a respectable parishioner. Lapidoth had put on a melancholy expression beforehand, but there was some real wincing in his frame as he said, "Well, Ezra, my boy, you hardly know me after so many years." "I know you--too well--father," said Ezra, with a slow biting solemnity which made the word father a reproach. "Ah, you are not pleased with me. I don't wonder at it. Appearances have been against me. When a man gets into straits he can't do just as he would by himself or anybody else, _I_'ve suffered enough, I know," said Lapidoth, quickly. In speaking he always recovered some glibness and hardihood; and now turning toward Mirah, he held out her purse, saying, "Here's your little purse, my dear. I thought you'd be anxious about it because of that bit of writing. I've emptied it, you'll see, for I had a score to pay for food and lodging. I knew you would like me to clear myself, and here I stand--without a single farthing in my pocket--at the mercy of my children. You can turn me out if you like, without getting a policeman. Say the word, Mirah; say, 'Father, I've had enough of you; you made a pet of me, and spent your all on me, when I couldn't have done without you; but I can do better without you now,'--say that, and I'm gone out like a spark. I shan't spoil your pleasure again." The tears were in his voice as usual, before he had finished. "You know I could never say it, father," answered Mirah, with not the less anguish because she felt the falsity of everything in his speech except the implied wish to remain in the house. "Mirah, my sister, leave us!" said Ezra, in a tone of authority. She looked at her brother falteringly, beseechingly--in awe of his decision, yet unable to go without making a plea for this father who was like something that had grown in her flesh with pain. She went close to her brother, and putting her hand in his, said, in a low voice, but not so low as to be unheard by Lapidoth, "Remember, Ezra--you said my mother would not have shut him out." "Trust me, and go," said Ezra. She left the room, but after going a few steps up the stairs, sat down with a palpitating heart. If, because of anything her brother said to him, he went away-- Lapidoth had some sense of what was being prepared for him in his son's mind, but he was beginning to adjust himself to the situation and find a point of view that would give him a cool superiority to any attempt at humiliating him. This haggard son, speaking as from a sepulchre, had the incongruity which selfish levity learns to see in suffering, and until the unrelenting pincers of disease clutch its own flesh. Whatever preaching he might deliver must be taken for a matter of course, as a man finding shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take a little religious howling that happened to be going on there. Lapidoth was not born with this sort of callousness: he had achieved it. "This home that we have here," Ezra began, "is maintained partly by the generosity of a beloved friend who supports me, and partly by the labors of my sister, who supports herself. While we have a home we will not shut you out from it. We will not cast you out to the mercy of your vices. For you are our father, and though you have broken your bond, we acknowledge ours. But I will never trust you. You absconded with money, leaving your debts unpaid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her of her little child and broke her heart; you have become a gambler, and where shame and conscience were there sits an insatiable desire; you were ready to sell my sister--you had sold her, but the price was denied you. The man who has done these things must never expect to be trusted any more. We will share our food with you--you shall have a bed, and clothing. We will do this duty to you, because you are our father. But you will never be trusted. You are an evil man: you made the misery of our mother. That such a man is our father is a brand on our flesh which will not cease smarting. But the Eternal has laid it upon us; and though human justice were to flog you for crimes, and your body fell helpless before the public scorn, we would still say, 'This is our father; make way, that we may carry him out of your sight.'" Lapidoth, in adjusting himself to what was coming, had not been able to foresee the exact intensity of the lightning or the exact course it would take--that it would not fall outside his frame but through it. He could not foresee what was so new to him as this voice from the soul of his son. It touched that spring of hysterical excitability which Mirah used to witness in him when he sat at home and sobbed. As Ezra ended, Lapidoth threw himself into a chair and cried like a woman, burying his face against the table--and yet, strangely, while this hysterical crying was an inevitable reaction in him under the stress of his son's words, it was also a conscious resource in a difficulty; just as in early life, when he was a bright-faced curly young man, he had been used to avail himself of this subtly-poised physical susceptibility to turn the edge of resentment or disapprobation. Ezra sat down again and said nothing--exhausted by the shock of his own irrepressible utterance, the outburst of feelings which for years he had borne in solitude and silence. His thin hands trembled on the arms of the chair; he would hardly have found voice to answer a question; he felt as if he had taken a step toward beckoning Death. Meanwhile Mirah's quick expectant ear detected a sound which her heart recognized: she could not stay out of the room any longer. But on opening the door her immediate alarm was for Ezra, and it was to his side that she went, taking his trembling hand in hers, which he pressed and found support in; but he did not speak or even look at her. The father with his face buried was conscious that Mirah had entered, and presently lifted up his head, pressed his handkerchief against his eyes, put out his hand toward her, and said with plaintive hoarseness, "Good-bye, Mirah; your father will not trouble you again. He deserves to die like a dog by the roadside, and he will. If your mother had lived, she would have forgiven me--thirty-four years ago I put the ring on her finger under the _Chuppa_, and we were made one. She would have forgiven me, and we should have spent our old age together. But I haven't deserved it. Good-bye." He rose from the chair as he said the last "good-bye." Mirah had put her hand in his and held him. She was not tearful and grieving, but frightened and awe-struck, as she cried out, "No, father, no!" Then turning to her brother, "Ezra, you have not forbidden him?--Stay, father, and leave off wrong things. Ezra, I cannot bear it. How can I say to my father, 'Go and die!'" "I have not said it," Ezra answered, with great effort. "I have said, stay and be sheltered." "Then you will stay, father--and be taken care of--and come with me," said Mirah, drawing him toward the door. This was really what Lapidoth wanted. And for the moment he felt a sort of comfort in recovering his daughter's dutiful attendance, that made a change of habits seem possible to him. She led him down to the parlor below, and said, "This is my sitting-room when I am not with Ezra, and there is a bed-room behind which shall be yours. You will stay and be good, father. Think that you are come back to my mother, and that she has forgiven you--she speaks to you through me." Mirah's tones were imploring, but she could not give one of her former caresses. Lapidoth quickly recovered his composure, began to speak to Mirah of the improvement in her voice, and other easy subjects, and when Mrs. Adam came to lay out his supper, entered into converse with her in order to show her that he was not a common person, though his clothes were just now against him. But in his usual wakefulness at night, he fell to wondering what money Mirah had by her, and went back over old Continental hours at _Roulette_, reproducing the method of his play, and the chances that had frustrated it. He had had his reasons for coming to England, but for most things it was a cursed country. These were the stronger visions of the night with Lapidoth, and not the worn frame of his ireful son uttering a terrible judgment. Ezra did pass across the gaming-table, and his words were audible; but he passed like an insubstantial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten out of them by numbers and movements that seemed to make the very tissue of Lapidoth's consciousness.

When the father Lapidoth quitted his daughter at the doorstep, he was ruled by that lure of gambling which left no care for alternative prospects or resolutions. Until he had lost everything, he never considered whether he would apply to Mirah again or whether he would brave his son's presence. In the first moment he had shrunk from encountering Ezra; and the possession of Mirah's purse was enough to banish the thought of future necessities. The gambling appetite is more absolutely dominant than hunger. In its final, imperious stage, it seems the joyless dissipation of demons, seeking diversion amidst the burning rocks of hell. But every form of selfishness requires the support of at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's appetite for food and drink was extremely moderate, he had slipped into a shabby form of life in which he could not eat without some ready money. When, in a brief visit to a gambling-house, he had first doubled and trebled and finally lost Mirah's thirty shillings, he went out with her empty purse in his pocket, wondering whether he should get another stake by pawning the purse, or go back to her, giving himself a good countenance by restoring the purse, and declaring that he had used the money in paying a debt. Lapidoth felt himself to have a claim on any property his children might possess. After all, to take up his lodging with his children was the best thing he could do; and the more he thought of meeting Ezra the less he winced from it, influenced more by the chances of getting money without exertion, than by the threat of a private humiliation. Luck had been against him lately; he expected it to turn - and might not the turn begin with some supplies from his daughter and the good friends she had spoken of? Lapidoth counted on the fascination of his cleverness: it is not only women who are unaware of their diminished charm, or imagine that they can feign not to be worn out. The result was that he went toward the little square in Brompton in hope of catching sight of Mirah. It was evening, two days after he had first seen her; and on coming near the house he knew that she was at home: he heard her singing. Mirah, seated at the piano, was pouring forth "Herz, mein Herz," while Ezra was listening, when Mrs. Adam opened the door, and said in some embarrassment, "A gentleman below says he is your father, miss." "I will go down to him," said Mirah, starting up immediately. "No, Mirah, not so," said Ezra, with decision. "Let him come up." Mirah stood, feeling sick with anxiety. Ezra had also risen, evidently much shaken. But there was a severe expression in his face which she had never seen before. Mrs Adam brought up Lapidoth. He had put on a melancholy expression, but there was some real wincing in his frame as he said- "Well, Ezra, my boy, you hardly know me after so many years." "I know you too well - father," said Ezra, with a slow biting solemnity which made the word father a reproach. "Ah, you are not pleased with me. I don't wonder at it. When a man gets into straits he can't do just as he would by others. I've suffered enough, I know," said Lapidoth glibly; and turning toward Mirah, he said, "Here's your purse, my dear. I thought you'd be anxious about it because of that bit of writing. I've emptied it, for I had a debt to pay for food and lodging. I knew you would like me to clear myself, and here I stand - without a farthing - at the mercy of my children. You can turn me out if you like. Say the word, Mirah; say, 'Father, I've had enough of you; you made a pet of me, and spent your all on me; but I can do without you now,' - say that, and I'm gone out like a spark. I shan't spoil your pleasure again." The tears were in his voice before he had finished. "You know I could never say it, father," answered Mirah, with not the less anguish because she felt the falsity of his speech. "Mirah, my sister, leave us!" said Ezra, with authority. She looked at her brother beseechingly - in awe, yet unable to go without making a plea for this father who was like something that had grown painfully in her flesh. Going close to her brother, she said, "Remember, Ezra - you said my mother would not have shut him out." "Trust me, and go," said Ezra. She left the room, but sat a little way up the stairs, with a palpitating heart. Lapidoth had some sense of what was being prepared for him in his son's mind, but he was beginning to adjust himself to a cool superiority. This haggard son, speaking as from a sepulchre, had an incongruous appearance to his selfish levity. Whatever preaching his son might deliver must be taken for a matter of course, as a man finding shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take a little religious howling that happened to be going on there. Lapidoth was not born with this sort of callousness: he had achieved it. "This home that we have here," Ezra began, "is maintained partly by the generosity of a beloved friend, and partly by the labours of my sister. While we have a home we will not shut you out from it. For you are our father, and though you have broken your bond, we acknowledge ours. But I will never trust you. You absconded with money, leaving your debts unpaid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her of her little child and broke her heart; you have become a gambler, and where shame and conscience were there sits an insatiable desire; you were ready to sell my sister - you had sold her, but the price was denied you. The man who has done these things must never expect to be trusted any more. We will share our food with you - you shall have a bed, and clothing, because you are our father. But you will never be trusted. You are an evil man: you made the misery of our mother. That such a man is our father is a painful brand on our flesh. But the Eternal has laid it upon us; and though human justice were to flog you for crimes, and your body fell helpless before public scorn, we would still say, 'This is our father; make way, that we may carry him out of your sight.'" Lapidoth, in adjusting himself to what was coming, had not been able to foresee the intensity of the lightning or the exact course it would take - that it would not fall outside his frame but through it. He could not foresee this voice from the soul of his son. It touched his spring of hysterical excitability. He threw himself into a chair and cried like a woman, burying his face - and yet, strangely, while this hysterical crying was a reaction under the stress of his son's words, it was also a conscious resource in a difficulty; just as in early life, when he was a bright-faced curly-haired young man, he had been used to avail himself of his ready tears to turn the edge of disapproval. Ezra sat down again and said nothing - exhausted by the outburst of feelings which for years he had borne in silence. His thin hands trembled on the arms of the chair; he felt as if he had taken a step toward beckoning Death. Meanwhile Mirah recognized the sound of weeping, and opened the door. But her immediate alarm was for Ezra, and it was to his side that she went, taking his trembling hand, which he pressed without looking at her. The father was conscious that Mirah had entered, and presently lifted up his head, pressed his handkerchief against his eyes, and said with plaintive hoarseness, "Good-bye, Mirah; your father will not trouble you again. He deserves to die like a dog by the roadside, and he will. If your mother had lived, she would have forgiven me, and we should have spent our old age together. But I haven't deserved it. Good-bye." He rose from the chair. Mirah, frightened and awe-struck, cried out- "No, father, no!" Then turning to her brother, "Ezra, you have not forbidden him? I cannot bear it. How can I say to my father, 'Go and die!'" "I have not said it," Ezra answered, with great effort. "I have said, stay and be sheltered." "Then you will stay, father - and be taken care of - and come with me," said Mirah, drawing him toward the door. This was really what Lapidoth wanted. And for the moment he felt a sort of comfort in his daughter's care that made a change of habits seem possible. She led him down to the parlour below, and said- "This is my sitting-room when I am not with Ezra, and there is a bedroom behind which shall be yours. You will stay and be good, father. Think that you are come back to my mother, and that she has forgiven you through me." Mirah's tones were imploring. Lapidoth quickly recovered his composure, and began to speak to Mirah of the improvement in her voice. When Mrs. Adam came to lay out his supper, he talked to her to show her that he was not a common person, though his clothes were just now against him. But that night, he fell to wondering what money Mirah had by her, and went back over old times at Roulette, reproducing the method of his play, and the chances that had frustrated it. These were the stronger visions of the night with Lapidoth, and not the worn frame of his son uttering a terrible judgment. Ezra did pass across the gaming-table, and his words were audible; but he passed like an insubstantial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten out of them by numbers that seemed to make the very tissue of Lapidoth's consciousness.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 66

"No man," says a Rabbi, by way of indisputable instance, "may turn the bones of his father and mother into spoons"--sure that his hearers felt the checks against that form of economy. The market for spoons has never expanded enough for any one to say, "Why not?" and to argue that human progress lies in such an application of material. The only check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not hold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth. Deronda meanwhile took to a less fashionable form of exercise than riding in Rotten Row. He went often rambling in those parts of London which are most inhabited by common Jews. He walked to the synagogues at times of service, he looked into shops, he observed faces:--a process not very promising of particular discovery. Why did he not address himself to an influential Rabbi or other member of a Jewish community, to consult on the chances of finding a mother named Cohen, with a son named Ezra, and a lost daughter named Mirah? He thought of doing so--after Christmas. The fact was, notwithstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual, which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect. Enthusiasm, we know, dwells at ease among ideas, tolerates garlic breathed in the middle ages, and sees no shabbiness in the official trappings of classic processions: it gets squeamish when ideals press upon it as something warmly incarnate, and can hardly face them without fainting. Lying dreamily in a boat, imagining one's self in quest of a beautiful maiden's relatives in Cordova elbowed by Jews in the time of Ibn-Gebirol, all the physical incidents can be borne without shock. Or if the scenery of St. Mary Axe and Whitechapel were imaginatively transported to the borders of the Rhine at the end of the eleventh century, when in the ears listening for the signals of the Messiah, the Hep! Hep! Hep! of the Crusaders came like the bay of blood-hounds; and in the presence of those devilish missionaries with sword and firebrand the crouching figure of the reviled Jew turned round erect, heroic, flashing with sublime constancy in the face of torture and death--what would the dingy shops and unbeautiful faces signify to the thrill of contemplative emotion? But the fervor of sympathy with which we contemplate a grandiose martyrdom is feeble compared with the enthusiasm that keeps unslacked where there is no danger, no challenge--nothing but impartial midday falling on commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive, objects which are really the beloved ideas made flesh. Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us. It lay in Deronda's nature usually to contemn the feeble, fastidious sympathy which shrinks from the broad life of mankind; but now, with Mirah before him as a living reality, whose experience he had to care for, he saw every common Jew and Jewess in the light of a comparison with her, and had a presentiment of the collision between her idea of the unknown mother and brother and the discovered fact--a presentiment all the keener in him because of a suppressed consciousness that a not unlike possibility of collision might lie hidden in his own lot. Not that he would have looked with more complacency of expectation at wealthy Jews, outdoing the lords of the Philistines in their sports; but since there was no likelihood of Mirah's friends being found among that class, their habits did not immediately affect him. In this mood he rambled, without expectation of a more pregnant result than a little preparation of his own mind, perhaps for future theorizing as well as practice--very much as if, Mirah being related to Welsh miners, he had gone to look more closely at the ways of those people, not without wishing at the same time to get a little light of detail on the history of Strikes. He really did not long to find anybody in particular; and when, as his habit was, he looked at the name over a shop door, he was well content that it was not Ezra Cohen. I confess, he particularly desired that Ezra Cohen should not keep a shop. Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is the more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happened to desire a squint you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment. Who is absolutely neutral? Deronda happening one morning to turn into a little side street out of the noise and obstructions of Holborn, felt the scale dip on the desponding side. He was rather tired of the streets and had paused to hail a hansom cab which he saw coming, when his attention was caught by some fine old clasps in chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His first thought was that Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet: then his eyes traveled over the other contents of the window, and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead is given to jewelry, lace and all equivocal objects introduced as _bric--brac_. A placard in one corner announced--_Watches and Jewelry exchanged and repaired_. But his survey had been noticed from within, and a figure appeared at the door, looking round at him and saying in a tone of cordial encouragement, "Good day, sir." The instant was enough for Deronda to see the face, unmistakably Jewish, belonged to a young man about thirty, and wincing from the shopkeeper's persuasiveness that would probably follow, he had no sooner returned the "good day," than he passed to the other side of the street and beckoned to the cabman to draw up there. From that station he saw the name over the shop window--_Ezra Cohen_. There might be a hundred Ezra Cohens lettered above shop windows, but Deronda had not seen them. Probably the young man interested in a possible customer was Ezra himself; and he was about the age to be expected in Mirah's brother, who was grown up while she was still a little child. But Deronda's first endeavor as he drove homeward was to convince himself that there was not the slightest warrantable presumption of this Ezra being Mirah's brother; and next, that even if, in spite of good reasoning, he turned out to be that brother, while on inquiry the mother was found to be dead, it was not his--Deronda's--duty to make known the discovery to Mirah. In inconvenient disturbance of this conclusion there came his lately-acquired knowledge that Mirah would have a religious desire to know of her mother's death, and also to learn whether her brother were living. How far was he justified in determining another life by his own notions? Was it not his secret complaint against the way in which others had ordered his own life, that he had not open daylight on all its relations, so that he had not, like other men, the full guidance of primary duties? The immediate relief from this inward debate was the reflection that he had not yet made any real discovery, and that by looking into the facts more closely he should be certified that there was no demand on him for any decision whatever. He intended to return to that shop as soon as he could conveniently, and buy the clasps for Lady Mallinger. But he was hindered for several days by Sir Hugo, who, about to make an after-dinner speech on a burning topic, wanted Deronda to forage for him on the legal part of the question, besides wasting time every day on argument which always ended in a drawn battle. As on many other questions, they held different sides, but Sir Hugo did not mind this, and when Deronda put his point well, said, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, "Confound it, Dan! why don't you make an opportunity of saying these things in public? You're wrong, you know. You won't succeed. You've got the massive sentiment--the heavy artillery of the country against you. But it's all the better ground for a young man to display himself on. When I was your age, I should have taken it. And it would be quite as well for you to be in opposition to me here and there. It would throw you more into relief. If you would seize an occasion of this sort to make an impression, you might be in Parliament in no time. And you know that would gratify me." "I am sorry not to do what would gratify you, sir," said Deronda. "But I cannot persuade myself to look at politics as a profession." "Why not? if a man is not born into public life by his position in the country, there's no way for him but to embrace it by his own efforts. The business of the country must be done--her Majesty's Government carried on, as the old Duke said. And it never could be, my boy, if everybody looked at politics as if they were prophecy, and demanded an inspired vocation. If you are to get into Parliament, it won't do to sit still and wait for a call either from heaven or constituents." "I don't want to make a living out of opinions," said Deronda; "especially out of borrowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame other men. I dare say many better fellows than I don't mind getting on to a platform to praise themselves, and giving their word of honor for a party." "I'll tell you what, Dan," said Sir Hugo, "a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered, impracticable fellow. There's a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style--one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It's no use having an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no action possible without a little acting." "One may be obliged to give way to an occasional necessity," said Deronda. "But it is one thing to say, 'In this particular case I am forced to put on this foolscap and grin,' and another to buy a pocket foolscap and practice myself in grinning. I can't see any real public expediency that does not keep an ideal before it which makes a limit of deviation from the direct path. But if I were to set up for a public man I might mistake my success for public expediency." It was after this dialogue, which was rather jarring to him, that Deronda set out on his meditated second visit to Ezra Cohen's. He entered the street at the end opposite to the Holborn entrance, and an inward reluctance slackened his pace while his thoughts were transferring what he had just been saying about public expediency to the entirely private difficulty which brought him back again into this unattractive thoroughfare. It might soon become an immediate practical question with him how far he could call it a wise expediency to conceal the fact of close kindred. Such questions turning up constantly in life are often decided in a rough-and-ready way; and to many it will appear an over-refinement in Deronda that he should make any great point of a matter confined to his own knowledge. But we have seen the reasons why he had come to regard concealment as a bane of life, and the necessity of concealment as a mark by which lines of action were to be avoided. The prospect of being urged against the confirmed habit of his mind was naturally grating. He even paused here and there before the most plausible shop-windows for a gentleman to look into, half inclined to decide that he would not increase his knowledge about that modern Ezra, who was certainly not a leader among his people--a hesitation which proved how, in a man much given to reasoning, a bare possibility may weigh more than the best-clad likelihood; for Deronda's reasoning had decided that all likelihood was against this man's being Mirah's brother. One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda's finding in it something that he wanted--namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind the counter a grimy personage showing that _nonchalance_ about sales which seems to belong universally to the second-hand book-business. In most other trades you find generous men who are anxious to sell you their wares for your own welfare; but even a Jew will not urge Simson's Euclid on you with an affectionate assurance that you will have pleasure in reading it, and that he wishes he had twenty more of the article, so much is it in request. One is led to fear that a secondhand bookseller may belong to that unhappy class of men who have no belief in the good of what they get their living by, yet keep conscience enough to be morose rather than unctuous in their vocation. But instead of the ordinary tradesman, he saw, on the dark background of books in the long narrow shop, a figure that was somewhat startling in its unusualness. A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess--from the dead yellowish flatness of the flesh, something like an old ivory carving--was seated on a stool against some bookshelves that projected beyond the short counter, doing nothing more remarkable than reading yesterday's _Times_; but when he let the paper rest on his lap and looked at the incoming customer, the thought glanced through Deronda that precisely such a physiognomy as that might possibly have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the medival time. It was a fine typical Jewish face, wrought into intensity of expression apparently by a strenuous eager experience in which all the satisfaction had been indirect and far off, and perhaps by some bodily suffering also, which involved that absence of ease in the present. The features were clear-cut, not large; the brow not high but broad, and fully defined by the crisp black hair. It might never have been a particularly handsome face, but it must always have been forcible; and now with its dark, far-off gaze, and yellow pallor in relief on the gloom of the backward shop, one might have imagined one's self coming upon it in some past prison of the Inquisition, which a mob had suddenly burst upon; while the look fixed on an incidental customer seemed eager and questioning enough to have been turned on one who might have been a messenger either of delivery or of death. The figure was probably familiar and unexciting enough to the inhabitants of this street; but to Deronda's mind it brought so strange a blending of the unwonted with the common, that there was a perceptible interval of mutual observation before he asked his question; "What is the price of this book?" After taking the book and examining the fly-leaves without rising, the supposed bookseller said, "There is no mark, and Mr. Ram is not in now. I am keeping the shop while he is gone to dinner. What are you disposed to give for it?" He held the book close on his lap with his hand on it and looked examiningly at Deronda, over whom there came the disagreeable idea, that possibly this striking personage wanted to see how much could be got out of a customer's ignorance of prices. But without further reflection he said, "Don't you know how much it is worth?" "Not its market-price. May I ask have you read it?" "No. I have read an account of it, which makes me want to buy it." "You are a man of learning--you are interested in Jewish history?" This was said in a deepened tone of eager inquiry. "I am certainly interested in Jewish history," said Deronda, quietly, curiosity overcoming his dislike to the sort of inspection as well as questioning he was under. But immediately the strange Jew rose from his sitting posture, and Deronda felt a thin hand pressing his arm tightly, while a hoarse, excited voice, not much above a loud whisper, said, "You are perhaps of our race?" Deronda colored deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with a slight shake of the head, "No." The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving further off as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distant civility, "I believe Mr. Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir." The effect of this change on Deronda--he afterward smiled when he recalled it--was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his _cong_. There was nothing further to be said, however: he paid his half-crown and carried off his _Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte_ with a mere "good-morning." He felt some vexation at the sudden arrest of the interview, and the apparent prohibition that he should know more of this man, who was certainly something out of the common way--as different probably as a Jew could well be from Ezra Cohen, through whose door Deronda was presently entering, and whose flourishing face glistening on the way to fatness was hanging over the counter in negotiation with some one on the other side of the partition, concerning two plated stoppers and three teaspoons, which lay spread before him. Seeing Deronda enter, he called out "Mother! Mother!" and then with a familiar nod and smile, said, "Coming, sir--coming directly." Deronda could not help looking toward the door from the back with some anxiety, which was not soothed when he saw a vigorous woman beyond fifty enter and approach to serve him. Not that there was anything very repulsive about her: the worst that could be said was that she had that look of having made her toilet with little water, and by twilight, which is common to unyouthful people of her class, and of having presumably slept in her large earrings, if not in her rings and necklace. In fact, what caused a sinking of heart in Deronda was her not being so coarse and ugly as to exclude the idea of her being Mirah's mother. Any one who has looked at a face to try and discern signs of known kinship in it will understand his process of conjecture--how he tried to think away the fat which had gradually disguised the outlines of youth, and to discern what one may call the elementary expressions of the face. He was sorry to see no absolute negative to his fears. Just as it was conceivable that this Ezra, brought up to trade, might resemble the scapegrace father in everything but his knowledge and talent, so it was not impossible that this mother might have had a lovely refined daughter whose type of feature and expression was like Mirah's. The eyebrows had a vexatious similarity of line; and who shall decide how far a face may be masked when the uncherishing years have thrust it far onward in the ever-new procession of youth and age? The good-humor of the glance remained and shone out in a motherly way at Deronda, as she said, in a mild guttural tone, "How can I serve you, sir?" "I should like to look at the silver clasps in the window," said Deronda; "the larger ones, please, in the corner there." They were not quite easy to get at from the mother's station, and the son seeing this called out, "I'll reach 'em, mother; I'll reach 'em," running forward with alacrity, and then handing the clasps to Deronda with the smiling remark, "Mother's too proud: she wants to do everything herself. That's why I called her to wait on you, sir. When there's a particular gentleman customer, sir, I daren't do any other than call her. But I can't let her do herself mischief with stretching." Here Mr. Cohen made way again for his parent, who gave a little guttural, amiable laugh while she looked at Deronda, as much as to say, "This boy will be at his jokes, but you see he's the best son in the world," and evidently the son enjoyed pleasing her, though he also wished to convey an apology to his distinguished customer for not giving him the advantage of his own exclusive attention. Deronda began to examine the clasps as if he had many points to observe before he could come to a decision. "They are only three guineas, sir," said the mother, encouragingly. "First-rate workmanship, sir--worth twice the money; only I get 'em a bargain from Cologne," said the son, parenthetically, from a distance. Meanwhile two new customers entered, and the repeated call, "Addy!" brought from the back of the shop a group that Deronda turned frankly to stare at, feeling sure that the stare would be held complimentary. The group consisted of a black-eyed young woman who carried a black-eyed little one, its head already covered with black curls, and deposited it on the counter, from which station it looked round with even more than the usual intelligence of babies: also a robust boy of six and a younger girl, both with black eyes and black-ringed hair--looking more Semitic than their parents, as the puppy lions show the spots of far-off progenitors. The young woman answering to "Addy"--a sort of paroquet in a bright blue dress, with coral necklace and earrings, her hair set up in a huge bush--looked as complacently lively and unrefined as her husband; and by a certain difference from the mother deepened in Deronda the unwelcome impression that the latter was not so utterly common a Jewess as to exclude her being the mother of Mirah. While that thought was glancing through his mind, the boy had run forward into the shop with an energetic stamp, and setting himself about four feet from Deronda, with his hands in the pockets of his miniature knickerbockers, looked at him with a precocious air of survey. Perhaps it was chiefly with a diplomatic design to linger and ingratiate himself that Deronda patted the boy's head, saying, "What is your name, sirrah?" "Jacob Alexander Cohen," said the small man, with much ease and distinctness. "You are not named after your father, then?" "No, after my grandfather; he sells knives and razors and scissors--my grandfather does," said Jacob, wishing to impress the stranger with that high connection. "He gave me this knife." Here a pocket-knife was drawn forth, and the small fingers, both naturally and artificially dark, opened two blades and a cork-screw with much quickness. "Is not that a dangerous plaything?" said Deronda, turning to the grandmother. "_He_'ll never hurt himself, bless you!" said she, contemplating her grandson with placid rapture. "Have _you_ got a knife?" says Jacob, coming closer. His small voice was hoarse in its glibness, as if it belonged to an aged commercial soul, fatigued with bargaining through many generations. "Yes. Do you want to see it?" said Deronda, taking a small penknife from his waistcoat-pocket. Jacob seized it immediately and retreated a little, holding the two knives in his palms and bending over them in meditative comparison. By this time the other clients were gone, and the whole family had gathered to the spot, centering their attention on the marvelous Jacob: the father, mother, and grandmother behind the counter, with baby held staggering thereon, and the little girl in front leaning at her brother's elbow to assist him in looking at the knives. "Mine's the best," said Jacob, at last, returning Deronda's knife as if he had been entertaining the idea of exchange and had rejected it. Father and mother laughed aloud with delight. "You won't find Jacob choosing the worst," said Mr. Cohen, winking, with much confidence in the customer's admiration. Deronda, looking at the grandmother, who had only an inward silent laugh, said, "Are these the only grandchildren you have?" "All. This is my only son," she answered in a communicative tone, Deronda's glance and manner as usual conveying the impression of sympathetic interest--which on this occasion answered his purpose well. It seemed to come naturally enough that he should say, "And you have no daughter?" There was an instantaneous change in the mother's face. Her lips closed more firmly, she looked down, swept her hands outward on the counter, and finally turned her back on Deronda to examine some Indian handkerchiefs that hung in pawn behind her. Her son gave a significant glance, set up his shoulders an instant and just put his fingers to his lips,--then said quickly, "I think you're a first-rate gentleman in the city, sir, if I may be allowed to guess." "No," said Deronda, with a preoccupied air, "I have nothing to do with the city." "That's a bad job. I thought you might be the young principal of a first-rate firm," said Mr. Cohen, wishing to make amends for the check on his customer's natural desire to know more of him and his. "But you understand silver-work, I see." "A little," said Deronda, taking up the clasps a moment and laying them down again. That unwelcome bit of circumstantial evidence had made his mind busy with a plan which was certainly more like acting than anything he had been aware of in his own conduct before. But the bare possibility that more knowledge might nullify the evidence now overpowered the inclination to rest in uncertainty. "To tell you the truth," he went on, "my errand is not so much to buy as to borrow. I dare say you go into rather heavy transactions occasionally." "Well, sir, I've accommodated gentlemen of distinction--I'm proud to say it. I wouldn't exchange my business with any in the world. There's none more honorable, nor more charitable, nor more necessary for all classes, from the good lady who wants a little of the ready for the baker, to a gentleman like yourself, sir, who may want it for amusement. I like my business, I like my street, and I like my shop. I wouldn't have it a door further down. And I wouldn't be without a pawn-shop, sir, to be the Lord Mayor. It puts you in connection with the world at large. I say it's like the government revenue--it embraces the brass as well as the gold of the country. And a man who doesn't get money, sir, can't accommodate. Now, what can I do for _you_, sir?" If an amiable self-satisfaction is the mark of earthly bliss, Solomon in all his glory was a pitiable mortal compared with Mr. Cohen--clearly one of those persons, who, being in excellent spirits about themselves, are willing to cheer strangers by letting them know it. While he was delivering himself with lively rapidity, he took the baby from his wife and holding it on his arm presented his features to be explored by its small fists. Deronda, not in a cheerful mood, was rashly pronouncing this Ezra Cohen to be the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: his phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament: and no shadow of a suffering race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous, pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage. It is naturally a Christian feeling that a Jew ought not to be conceited. However, this was no reason for not persevering in his project, and he answered at once in adventurous ignorance of technicalities, "I have a fine diamond ring to offer as security--not with me at this moment, unfortunately, for I am not in the habit of wearing it. But I will come again this evening and bring it with me. Fifty pounds at once would be a convenience to me." "Well, you know, this evening is the Sabbath, young gentleman," said Cohen, "and I go to the _Shool_. The shop will be closed. But accommodation is a work of charity; if you can't get here before, and are any ways pressed--why, I'll look at your diamond. You're perhaps from the West End--a longish drive?" "Yes; and your Sabbath begins early at this season. I could be here by five--will that do?" Deronda had not been without hope that by asking to come on a Friday evening he might get a better opportunity of observing points in the family character, and might even be able to put some decisive question. Cohen assented; but here the marvelous Jacob, whose _physique_ supported a precocity that would have shattered a Gentile of his years, showed that he had been listening with much comprehension by saying, "You are coming again. Have you got any more knives at home?" "I think I have one," said Deronda, smiling down at him. "Has it two blades and a hook--and a white handle like that?" said Jacob, pointing to the waistcoat-pocket. "I dare say it has." "Do you like a cork-screw?" said Jacob, exhibiting that article in his own knife again, and looking up with serious inquiry. "Yes," said Deronda, experimentally. "Bring your knife, then, and we'll shwop," said Jacob, returning the knife to his pocket, and stamping about with the sense that he had concluded a good transaction. The grandmother had now recovered her usual manners, and the whole family watched Deronda radiantly when he caressingly lifted the little girl, to whom he had not hitherto given attention, and seating her on the counter, asked for her name also. She looked at him in silence, and put her fingers to her gold earrings, which he did not seem to have noticed. "Adelaide Rebekah is her name," said her mother, proudly. "Speak to the gentleman, lovey." "Shlav'm Shabbes fyock on," said Adelaide Rebekah. "Her Sabbath frock, she means," said the father, in explanation. "She'll have her Sabbath frock on this evening." "And will you let me see you in it, Adelaide?" said Deronda, with that gentle intonation which came very easily to him. "Say yes, lovey--yes, if you please, sir," said her mother, enchanted with this handsome young gentleman, who appreciated remarkable children. "And will you give me a kiss this evening?" said Deronda with a hand on each of her little brown shoulders. Adelaide Rebekah (her miniature crinoline and monumental features corresponded with the combination of her names) immediately put up her lips to pay the kiss in advance; whereupon her father rising in still more glowing satisfaction with the general meritoriousness of his circumstances, and with the stranger who was an admiring witness, said cordially, "You see there's somebody will be disappointed if you don't come this evening, sir. You won't mind sitting down in our family place and waiting a bit for me, if I'm not in when you come, sir? I'll stretch a point to accommodate a gent of your sort. Bring the diamond, and I'll see what I can do for you." Deronda thus left the most favorable impression behind him, as a preparation for more easy intercourse. But for his own part those amenities had been carried on under the heaviest spirits. If these were really Mirah's relatives, he could not imagine that even her fervid filial piety could give the reunion with them any sweetness beyond such as could be found in the strict fulfillment of a painful duty. What did this vaunting brother need? And with the most favorable supposition about the hypothetic mother, Deronda shrank from the image of a first meeting between her and Mirah, and still more from the idea of Mirah's domestication with this family. He took refuge in disbelief. To find an Ezra Cohen when the name was running in your head was no more extraordinary than to find a Josiah Smith under like circumstances; and as to the coincidence about the daughter, it would probably turn out to be a difference. If, however, further knowledge confirmed the more undesirable conclusion, what would be wise expediency?--to try and determine the best consequences by concealment, or to brave other consequences for the sake of that openness which is the sweet fresh air of our moral life.

Deronda, meanwhile, often went rambling in those parts of London which are most inhabited by ordinary Jews. He walked to synagogues, he looked into shops, he observed faces: a process not very promising of discovery. Why did he not consult a Rabbi on the chances of finding a mother named Cohen, with a son named Ezra, and a lost daughter named Mirah? He thought of doing so - after Christmas. The fact was that Deronda, for all his sense of the poetic, could not escape the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual, which does not consult our taste. Enthusiasm dwells at ease among ideas; but it gets squeamish when faced with bodily reality. Dreamily imagining oneself in quest of a beautiful maiden's relatives in Cordova, elbowed by Jews in the time of Ibn Gebirol, the incidents can be borne without shock. Or suppose the Crusaders of the eleventh century were transported to Whitechapel as they hounded a reviled Jew, who turned round erect and heroic in the face of death - what would the dingy shops signify then? But the chief poetic energy lies in the enthusiasm that is not diminished by the commonplace nature of its beloved ideas made flesh: the force of imagination that pierces the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. Deronda was usually inclined to condemn the feeble, fastidious sympathy which shrinks from the broad life of mankind; but now, with Mirah before him as a living reality, he saw every Jew and Jewess in the light of comparison with her, and feared a collision between her idea of the unknown mother and brother, and the fact. His fear was all the keener because of a suppressed knowledge that a similar collision might lie hidden in his own lot. In this mood he rambled without expecting any more result than the preparation of his own mind - as if, Mirah being related to Welsh miners, he had gone to look more closely at the ways of those people, perhaps wishing at the same time to learn something about the history of Strikes. He did not wish to find anybody in particular; and whenever he looked at the name over a shop door, he was well content that it was not Ezra Cohen. I confess, he particularly desired that Ezra Cohen should not keep a shop. But wishes are held to be ominous; so Deronda felt the scale of superstition dip against him when one morning he turned out of the noise of Holborn into a little side street. He had paused to hail a hansom cab, when his attention was caught by some fine old silver clasps displayed in the window on his right. He thought that Lady Mallinger might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet: then he saw that the shop was a pawnbroker's, with most of its space given to jewellery, lace and bric-a-brac. A placard in one corner announced - Watches and Jewellery exchanged and repaired. A figure appeared at the door, saying in a tone of cordial encouragement, "Good day, sir." The face, unmistakably Jewish, belonged to a young man of about thirty. Deronda, wincing from the shopkeeper's persuasiveness that would probably follow, returned the "good day," then crossed the street and beckoned to the cabman. From there he saw the name over the shop window - Ezra Cohen. There might be a hundred Ezra Cohens lettered above shop windows, but Deronda had not seen them. Probably the young man was Ezra himself; and he was about the age to be expected in Mirah's brother, who was grown up while she was still a little child. But as he drove home Deronda tried to convince himself that there was not the slightest likelihood of this Ezra being Mirah's brother; and that even if he did turn out to be, and if the mother was found to be dead, it was not Deronda's duty to make the discovery known to Mirah. In inconvenient disturbance of this conclusion, he knew that Mirah would have a religious desire to know of her mother's death, and also to learn whether her brother were living. How far was he justified in determining her life by his own notions? Was it not his secret complaint that others had ordered his own life, so that he had not open daylight on all its relations? He found relief in reflecting that he had not yet made any discovery, and that by looking into the facts he could learn whether there was need for any decision. He intended to return to that shop as soon as he could, and buy the clasps for Lady Mallinger. But he was prevented for several days by Sir Hugo, who, about to make an after-dinner speech, wanted Deronda to help him on a legal question, besides wasting time every day on argument. As on many other questions, they held different sides, but Sir Hugo did not mind this; and when Deronda put his point well, he said with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, "Confound it, Dan! why don't you make an opportunity of saying these things in public? You might enter Parliament. You know that would gratify me." "I am sorry not to do what would gratify you, sir," said Deronda. "But I cannot persuade myself to look at politics as a profession." "Why not? If everybody looked at politics as if they demanded an inspired vocation, the business of the country would never get done." "I don't want to make a living out of opinions," said Deronda; "especially out of borrowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame other men. I dare say many better fellows than I am don't mind getting on to a platform to praise themselves, and giving their word of honour for a party." "I'll tell you what, Dan," said Sir Hugo, "a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply impracticable. There's a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style - one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible. There is no action possible without a little acting." "There may be an occasional necessity for it," said Deronda. "But it is one thing to say, 'In this particular case I am forced to put on this fool's cap and grin,' and another to buy a pocket fool's cap and practise grinning. Public expediency keeps an ideal before it; but if I were to enter politics I might mistake my success for public expediency." It was after this dialogue that Deronda set out on his second visit to Ezra Cohen's. As he entered the street, an inward reluctance slackened his pace along this unattractive thoroughfare. His thoughts of public expediency made him wonder how far he could call it a wise expediency to conceal the fact of Mirah's close kin. We have seen why he had come to regard concealment as a bane of life; and the prospect of being urged against his inclination was naturally grating. He even paused here and there before the most respectable shop-windows, half persuading himself not to increase his knowledge about Ezra Cohen, even though he had decided that this man was most unlikely to be Mirah's brother. One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, a mixture of the literature of the ages was represented, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. Deronda noticed a book that he wanted - the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which he picked up, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see a grimy personage behind the counter. But instead of the ordinary tradesman, he saw, on the dark background of books in the long narrow shop, a figure that was startlingly unusual. A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess, his skin being yellow like an old ivory carving, was seated on a stool by the counter, reading yesterday's Times; but when he looked up, the thought glanced through Deronda that such a face might have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the mediaeval time. It was a fine Jewish face, given an intensity of expression by strenuous eager experience, and perhaps by bodily suffering also. The features were clear-cut, not large; the brow not high but broad, and fully defined by the crisp black hair. It might never have been a handsome face, but it must always have been forcible; and now with its dark, far-off gaze, and yellow pallor, one might have imagined coming upon it in some past prison of the Inquisition; while the look fixed on a customer seemed questioning enough to have been turned on a messenger of salvation or of death. To Deronda's mind this figure was so unusual, that there was a perceptible interval of mutual observation before he asked, "What is the price of this book?" After examining the book, the supposed bookseller said, "There is no mark, and Mr. Ram is not in now. I am keeping the shop while he is gone to dinner. What are you disposed to give for it?" He looked examiningly at Deronda, who had the disagreeable idea that this striking personage might want to see how much could be got. He said, "Don't you know how much it is worth?" "Not its market-price. May I ask have you read it?" "No. I have read an account of it, which makes me want to buy it." "You are a man of learning - you are interested in Jewish history?" This was said in a deepened tone of eager inquiry. "I am certainly interested in Jewish history," said Deronda, quietly, curiosity overcoming his dislike to the inspection he was under. But immediately the strange Jew rose from his seat, and Deronda felt a thin hand pressing his arm tightly, while an excited voice said in a hoarse whisper- "You are perhaps of our race?" Deronda coloured deeply, and answered, "No." The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes had sunk back again. Moving away, the stranger said with distant civility, "I believe Mr. Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir." The effect of this change on Deronda was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient. He paid his half-crown and carried off his book with a mere "good-morning." He felt vexed at the sudden end of the interview, so that he should not know more of this man, who was certainly uncommon - as different as a Jew could be from Ezra Cohen, through whose door Deronda now entered, and whose flourishing face was negotiating with some one on the other side of the partition. Seeing Deronda enter, he called out "Mother!" and then with a familiar smile, said, "Coming, sir - coming directly." Deronda felt some anxiety, which was not soothed when he saw a vigorous woman of over fifty enter the shop. Not that there was anything very repulsive about her: the worst that could be said was that she had that look of having washed with little water, which is common to older people of her class, and of having presumably slept in her large earrings, if not in her necklace. In fact, what caused Deronda's heart to sink was her not being so coarse and ugly as to exclude the idea of her being Mirah's mother. Anyone who has looked at a face for signs of kinship in it will understand his process - how he tried to think away the fat which had gradually disguised the outlines of youth, and to discern the underlying expressions of the face. He was sorry to see no absolute negative to his fears. It was not impossible that this mother might have had a lovely, refined daughter like Mirah. The eyebrows had a vexatious similarity of line; and who knows how far a face may be masked by age? Her good-humoured glance shone out in a motherly way at Deronda, as she said, in a mild guttural tone- "How can I serve you, sir?" "I should like to look at the silver clasps in the window, please," said Deronda. They were not easy to get at. The son called out, "I'll reach 'em, mother," with alacrity; and handed the clasps to Deronda with the smiling remark- "Mother's too proud: she wants to do everything herself. That's why I called her to wait on you, sir. But I can't let her do herself mischief with stretching." Here Mr. Cohen made way for his parent, who gave an amiable laugh, as much as to say, "The boy will joke, but he's the best son in the world." Deronda began to examine the clasps. "They are only three guineas, sir," said the mother, encouragingly. "First-rate workmanship, sir - worth twice the money," said the son from a distance. Meanwhile two new customers entered, and the repeated call, "Addy!" brought from the back of the shop a group that Deronda turned frankly to stare at, feeling sure that the stare would be held complimentary. The group consisted of a black-eyed young woman who carried a little one, its head already covered with black curls, and deposited it on the counter, where it looked round with even more than the usual intelligence of babies: also a robust boy of six and a younger girl, both with black eyes and black-ringed hair, looking more Semitic than their parents. The young woman answering to "Addy", a sort of parakeet in a bright blue dress, with coral necklace and earrings, and her hair in a huge bush, looked as complacently lively and unrefined as her husband. Her difference from the mother deepened in Deronda the unwelcome impression that the latter was not so utterly common a Jewess as to exclude her being Mirah's mother. Meanwhile, the boy ran forward energetically, and standing about four feet from Deronda, with his hands in the pockets of his miniature knickerbockers, looked at him with a precocious air of survey. With diplomatic intentions, Deronda patted the boy's head, saying- "What is your name, sirrah?" "Jacob Alexander Cohen," said the boy distinctly. "You are not named after your father, then?" "No, after my grandfather; he sells knives and scissors," said Jacob, wishing to impress the stranger with that high connection. "He gave me this knife." Here a pocket-knife was drawn forth, and the small fingers opened two blades and a cork-screw with much quickness. "Is not that a dangerous plaything?" said Deronda, turning to the grandmother. "He'll never hurt himself, bless you!" said she, contemplating her grandson with placid rapture. "Have you got a knife?" says Jacob, coming closer. His small voice was hoarse in its glibness, as if it belonged to an aged commercial soul, fatigued with bargaining through many generations. "Yes. Do you want to see it?" said Deronda, taking a small penknife from his waistcoat-pocket. Jacob seized it immediately, holding the two knives to compare them. By now the other clients were gone, and the whole family centred their attention on the marvellous Jacob. "Mine's the best," said Jacob at last, returning Deronda's knife as if he had considered the idea of exchange and had rejected it. Father and mother laughed aloud with delight. "You won't find Jacob choosing the worst," said Mr. Cohen, winking. Deronda, looking at the grandmother, who had only an inward silent laugh, said- "Are these your only grandchildren?" "Yes. This is my only son," she answered. It seemed natural enough that Deronda should say next- "And you have no daughter?" There was an instant change in the mother's face. Her lips closed, she looked down, and finally turned her back on Deronda to examine some Indian handkerchiefs that hung behind her. Her son gave a significant glance, and put his fingers to his lips - then said quickly, "I think you're a first-rate gentleman in the city, sir, if I may be allowed to guess." "No," said Deronda. "I have nothing to do with the city." "I thought you might be the young principal of a first-rate firm," said Mr. Cohen, wishing to make amends for his mother's silence. "But you understand silver-work, I see." "A little," said Deronda, taking up the clasps and laying them down again. That unwelcome bit of evidence had made his mind busy with a plan which was certainly more like acting than anything he had done before. But he no longer wished to be left in uncertainty, when more knowledge might nullify that evidence. "To tell you the truth," he went on, "my errand is not so much to buy as to borrow. I dare say you do such transactions?" "Well, sir, I've accommodated gentlemen of distinction - I'm proud to say it. There's no business more honourable, nor more charitable, nor more necessary for all classes, from the good lady who wants a little of the ready for the baker, to a gentleman like yourself, sir, who may want it for amusement. I like my business, and I like my shop - I wouldn't be without it to become the Lord Mayor. It puts you in connection with the world at large. Now, what can I do for you, sir?" Mr. Cohen was in excellent spirits about himself. While speaking with lively rapidity, he took the baby from his wife and presented his face to be explored by its small fists. Deronda, not in a cheerful mood, was rashly thinking this Ezra Cohen to be the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: no shadow of a suffering race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous, pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage. However, this was no reason for not persevering in his project, and he answered- "I have a diamond ring to offer as security - not with me at this moment, unfortunately. But I will bring it this evening. Fifty pounds at once would be a convenience to me." "Well, you know, this evening is the Sabbath, young gentleman," said Cohen, "and I go to the Shool. The shop will be closed. But if you can't get here before, and are any ways pressed - why, I'll look at your diamond. You're perhaps from the West End - a longish drive?" "Yes; and your Sabbath begins early at this season. I could be here by five: will that do?" Deronda had hoped that by asking to come on a Friday evening he might get a better opportunity of observing the family character, and perhaps could ask some decisive question. Cohen assented; but here the marvellous Jacob put in, "You are coming again. Have you got any more knives at home?" "I think I have one," said Deronda, smiling at him. "Has it two blades and a hook, and a white handle like that?" said Jacob, pointing to the waistcoat-pocket. "I dare say it has." "Do you like a cork-screw?" said Jacob, with serious inquiry. "Yes," said Deronda, experimentally. "Bring your knife, then, and we'll shwop," said Jacob, stamping about with the sense that he had concluded a good transaction. The grandmother had now recovered her usual manners, and the whole family watched Deronda radiantly when he caressingly lifted the little girl, and seating her on the counter, asked for her name also. She looked at him in silence, and put her fingers to her gold earrings, which he did not seem to have noticed. "Adelaide Rebekah is her name," said her mother, proudly. "Speak to the gentleman, lovey." "Shlav'm Shabbes fyock on," said Adelaide Rebekah. "Her Sabbath frock, she means," explained the father. "She'll have her Sabbath frock on this evening." "And will you let me see you in it, Adelaide?" said Deronda gently. "Say yes, lovey," said her mother, enchanted with this handsome young gentleman, who appreciated remarkable children. "And will you give me a kiss this evening?" said Deronda. Adelaide Rebekah immediately put up her lips to offer a kiss, whereupon her father, in glowing satisfaction with himself and the admiring stranger, said cordially- "Somebody will be disappointed if you don't come this evening, sir. You won't mind sitting down in our family place and waiting a bit for me, if I'm not in when you come, sir? Bring the diamond, and I'll see what I can do." Deronda thus left the most favourable impression behind him. But for his own part he was in the heaviest spirits. If these were really Mirah's relatives, he could not imagine that she could find any sweetness in the reunion with them beyond her filial duty. What did this vaunting brother need? And Deronda shrank from imagining a first meeting between the mother and Mirah, and still more from the idea of Mirah's domestication with this family. He took refuge in disbelief. To find an Ezra Cohen was no more extraordinary than to find a John Smith; and as to the coincidence about the daughter, it would probably turn out to be a difference. If, however, further knowledge confirmed the undesirable conclusion, what would be wise expediency?- to conceal it, or to brave the consequences for the sake of that openness which is the sweet fresh air of our moral life?

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 33

"The unripe grape, the ripe, and the dried. All things are changes, not into nothing, but into that which is not at present."--MARCUS AURELIUS. Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in darkness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more. In the evening she sent for him again. It was already near the hour at which she had been brought in from the sea the evening before, and the light was subdued enough with blinds drawn up and windows open. She was seated gazing fixedly on the sea, resting her cheek on her hand, looking less shattered than when he had left her, but with a deep melancholy in her expression which as Deronda approached her passed into an anxious timidity. She did not put out her hand, but said, "How long ago it is!" Then, "Will you sit near me again a little while?" He placed himself by her side as he had done before, and seeing that she turned to him with that indefinable expression which implies a wish to say something, he waited for her to speak. But again she looked toward the window silently, and again turned with the same expression, which yet did not issue in speech. There was some fear hindering her, and Deronda, wishing to relieve her timidity, averted his face. Presently he heard her cry imploringly, "You will not say that any one else should know?" "Most decidedly not," said Deronda. "There is no action that ought to be taken in consequence. There is no injury that could be righted in that way. There is no retribution that any mortal could apportion justly." She was so still during a pause that she seemed to be holding her breath before she said, "But if I had not had that murderous will--that moment--if I had thrown the rope on the instant--perhaps it would have hindered death?" "No--I think not," said Deronda, slowly. "If it were true that he could swim, he must have been seized with cramp. With your quickest, utmost effort, it seems impossible that you could have done anything to save him. That momentary murderous will cannot, I think, have altered the course of events. Its effect is confined to the motives in your own breast. Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or later it works its way outside us--it may be in the vitiation that breeds evil acts, but also it may be in the self-abhorrence that stings us into better striving." "I am saved from robbing others--there are others--they will have everything--they will have what they ought to have. I knew that some time before I left town. You do not suspect me of wrong desires about those things?" She spoke hesitatingly. "I had not thought of them," said Deronda; "I was thinking too much of the other things." "Perhaps you don't quite know the beginning of it all," said Gwendolen, slowly, as if she were overcoming her reluctance. "There was some one else he ought to have married. And I knew it, and I told her I would not hinder it. And I went away--that was when you first saw me. But then we became poor all at once, and I was very miserable, and I was tempted. I thought, 'I shall do as I like and make everything right.' I persuaded myself. And it was all different. It was all dreadful. Then came hatred and wicked thoughts. That was how it all came. I told you I was afraid of myself. And I did what you told me--I did try to make my fear a safeguard. I thought of what would be if I--I felt what would come--how I should dread the morning--wishing it would be always night--and yet in the darkness always seeing something--seeing death. If you did not know how miserable I was, you might--but now it has all been no use. I can care for nothing but saving the rest from knowing--poor mamma, who has never been happy." There was silence again before she said with a repressed sob--"You cannot bear to look at me any more. You think I am too wicked. You do not believe that I can become any better--worth anything--worthy enough--I shall always be too wicked to--" The voice broke off helpless. Deronda's heart was pierced. He turned his eyes on her poor beseeching face and said, "I believe that you may become worthier than you have ever yet been--worthy to lead a life that may be a blessing. No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. You _have_ made efforts--you will go on making them." "But you were the beginning of them. You must not forsake me," said Gwendolen, leaning with her clasped hands on the arm of her chair and looking at him, while her face bore piteous traces of the life-experience concentrated in the twenty-four hours--that new terrible life lying on the other side of the deed which fulfills a criminal desire. "I will bear any penance. I will lead any life you tell me. But you must not forsake me. You must be near. If you had been near me--if I could have said everything to you, I should have been different. You will not forsake me?" "It could never be my impulse to forsake you," said Deronda promptly, with that voice which, like his eyes, had the unintentional effect of making his ready sympathy seem more personal and special than it really was. And in that moment he was not himself quite free from a foreboding of some such self-committing effect. His strong feeling for this stricken creature could not hinder rushing images of future difficulty. He continued to meet her appealing eyes as he spoke, but it was with the painful consciousness that to her ear his words might carry a promise which one day would seem unfulfilled: he was making an indefinite promise to an indefinite hope. Anxieties, both immediate and distant, crowded on his thought, and it was under their influence that, after a moment's silence, he said, "I expect Sir Hugo Mallinger to arrive by to-morrow night at least; and I am not without hope that Mrs. Davilow may shortly follow him. Her presence will be the greatest comfort to you--it will give you a motive to save her from unnecessary pain?" "Yes, yes--I will try. And you will not go away?" "Not till after Sir Hugo has come." "But we shall all go to England?" "As soon as possible," said Deronda, not wishing to enter into particulars. Gwendolen looked toward the window again with an expression which seemed like a gradual awakening to new thoughts. The twilight was perceptibly deepening, but Deronda could see a movement in her eyes and hands such as accompanies a return of perception in one who has been stunned. "You will always be with Sir Hugo now!" she said presently, looking at him. "You will always live at the Abbey--or else at Diplow?" "I am quite uncertain where I shall live," said Deronda, coloring. She was warned by his changed color that she had spoken too rashly, and fell silent. After a little while she began, again looking away, "It is impossible to think how my life will go on. I think now it would be better for me to be poor and obliged to work." "New promptings will come as the days pass. When you are among your friends again, you will discern new duties," said Deronda. "Make it a task now to get as well and calm--as much like yourself as you can, before--" He hesitated. "Before my mother comes," said Gwendolen. "Ah! I must be changed. I have not looked at myself. Should you have known me," she added, turning toward him, "if you had met me now?--should you have known me for the one you saw at Leubronn?" "Yes, I should have known you," said Deronda, mournfully. "The outside change is not great. I should have seen at once that it was you, and that you had gone through some great sorrow." "Don't wish now that you had never seen me; don't wish that," said Gwendolen, imploringly, while the tears gathered. "I should despise myself for wishing it," said Deronda. "How could I know what I was wishing? We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been. If I took to foolish wishing of that sort, I should wish--not that I had never seen you, but that I had been able to save you from this." "You have saved me from worse," said Gwendolen, in a sobbing voice. "I should have been worse if it had not been for you. If you had not been good, I should have been more wicked than I am." "It will be better for me to go now," said Deronda, worn in spirit by the perpetual strain of this scene. "Remember what we said of your task--to get well and calm before other friends come." He rose as he spoke, and she gave him her hand submissively. But when he had left her she sank on her knees, in hysterical crying. The distance between them was too great. She was a banished soul--beholding a possible life which she had sinned herself away from. She was found in this way, crushed on the floor. Such grief seemed natural in a poor lady whose husband had been drowned in her presence.

In the evening she sent for him again. It was near the hour at which she had been brought in from the sea the evening before. She was seated by the open window gazing fixedly on the sea, looking less shattered than before, though with a deep melancholy in her expression. She did not put out her hand, but said, "How long ago it is! Will you sit near me again a little while?" He placed himself by her side and waited for her to speak. But she looked toward the window in silence, before crying out imploringly- "You will not say that anyone else should know?" "Decidedly not," said Deronda. "There is no action that ought to be taken in consequence. There is no injury that could be righted in that way." She was so still that she seemed to be holding her breath before she said- "But if I had not had that murderous will - if I had thrown the rope at once - perhaps it would have hindered death?" "No - I think not," said Deronda, slowly. "If it were true that he could swim, he must have been seized with cramp. With your quickest effort, it seems impossible that you could have saved him. That momentary hesitation cannot, I think, have altered the course of events. Its effect is confined to you. Our evil wish may breed evil acts, but it may also bring the self-abhorrence that stings us into better striving." "I am saved from robbing others - they will have everything - they will have what they ought to have." Gwendolen spoke as if overcoming reluctance. "There was some one else he ought to have married. And I knew it, and I told her I would not hinder it. And I went away - that was when you first saw me. But then we became poor, and I was tempted. I thought, 'I shall do as I like and make everything right.' I persuaded myself. And it was all different and dreadful. Then came hatred and wicked thoughts. I told you I was afraid of myself. I did what you told me - I tried to make my fear a safeguard. I thought of what would be if I - I felt how I should dread the morning - and yet in the darkness always seeing death. If you did not know how miserable I was, you might - but now it has all been no use. I can care for nothing but saving the rest from knowing - poor mamma, who has never been happy." There was silence again before she said with a repressed sob- "You think I am wicked. You do not believe that I can become any better - I shall always be wicked-" She broke off, helpless. Deronda's heart was pierced. He said, "I believe that you may become worthy to lead a life that may be a blessing. No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and make no effort to escape from. You have made efforts - you will go on making them." "But you must not forsake me," said Gwendolen, looking at him piteously. "I will bear any penance. I will lead any life you tell me. But you must not forsake me. You must be near. If I could have said everything to you, I should have been different. You will not forsake me?" "It could never be my impulse to forsake you," said Deronda promptly, with that voice which, like his eyes, had the unintentional effect of making his ready sympathy seem more personal and special than it really was. And he was not free from a foreboding of some such self-committing effect, and of future difficulty. He continued to meet her appealing gaze as he spoke, but it was with the painful consciousness that his words might seem to carry a promise which would be unfulfilled: he was making an indefinite promise to an indefinite hope. His anxiety made him say- "I expect Sir Hugo Mallinger to arrive tomorrow night; and I hope that Mrs. Davilow may shortly follow him. Her presence will be a comfort - you will try to save her from unnecessary pain?" "Yes, I will try. You will not go away?" "Not till after Sir Hugo has come." "But we shall all go to England?" "As soon as possible," said Deronda, not wishing to enter into particulars. Gwendolen looked toward the window again with an expression which seemed like a gradual awakening to new thoughts. "You will always be with Sir Hugo now?" she said presently, looking at him. "You will always live at the Abbey - or at Diplow?" "I am uncertain where I shall live," said Deronda, colouring. She was made aware that she had spoken too rashly, and fell silent. After a little while she began- "It is impossible to think how my life will go on. I think it would be better for me to be poor and obliged to work." "New promptings will come as the days pass. When you are among your friends again, you will discern new duties," said Deronda. "Make it a task now to get as well and calm as you can, before your mother comes." "Ah! I must be changed. I have not looked at myself. If you had met me now, should you have known me for the one you saw at Leubronn?" "Yes," said Deronda, mournfully. "I should have seen at once that it was you, and that you had gone through some great sorrow." "Don't wish that you had never seen me; don't wish that," said Gwendolen, imploringly, while the tears gathered. "I should despise myself for wishing it," said Deronda. "If I took to foolish wishing of that sort, I should wish - not that I had never seen you, but that I had been able to save you from this." "You have saved me from worse," she said. "I should have been worse if it had not been for you." "I had better go now," said Deronda, worn out by the strain of this scene. "Remember to get well and calm before your friends come." He rose, and she gave him her hand submissively. But when he had left, she sank on her knees in hysterical crying. The distance between them was too great. She was a banished soul - beholding a possible life which she had sinned herself away from. She was found in this way, crushed on the floor. Such grief seemed natural in a poor lady whose husband had been drowned in her presence.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 57

_1st Gent._ What woman should be? Sir, consult the taste Of marriageable men. This planet's store In iron, cotton, wool, or chemicals-- All matter rendered to our plastic skill, Is wrought in shapes responsive to demand; The market's pulse makes index high or low, By rule sublime. Our daughters must be wives, And to the wives must be what men will choose; Men's taste is woman's test. You mark the phrase? 'Tis good, I think?--the sense well-winged and poised With t's and s's. _2nd Gent._ Nay, but turn it round; Give us the test of taste. A fine _menu_-- Is it to-day what Roman epicures Insisted that a gentleman must eat To earn the dignity of dining well? Brackenshaw Park, where the archery meeting was held, looked out from its gentle heights far over the neighboring valley to the outlying eastern downs and the broad, slow rise of cultivated country, hanging like a vast curtain toward the west. The castle which stood on the highest platform of the clustered hills, was built of rough-hewn limestone, full of lights and shadows made by the dark dust of lichens and the washings of the rain. Masses of beech and fir sheltered it on the north, and spread down here and there along the green slopes like flocks seeking the water which gleamed below. The archery-ground was a carefully-kept enclosure on a bit of table-land at the farthest end of the park, protected toward the southwest by tall elms and a thick screen of hollies, which kept the gravel walk and the bit of newly-mown turf where the targets were placed in agreeable afternoon shade. The Archery Hall with an arcade in front showed like a white temple against the greenery on the north side. What could make a better background for the flower-groups of ladies, moving and bowing and turning their necks as it would become the leisurely lilies to do if they took to locomotion. The sounds too were very pleasant to hear, even when the military band from Wanchester ceased to play: musical laughs in all the registers and a harmony of happy, friendly speeches, now rising toward mild excitement, now sinking to an agreeable murmur. No open-air amusement could be much freer from those noisy, crowding conditions which spoil most modern pleasures; no Archery Meeting could be more select, the number of friends accompanying the members being restricted by an award of tickets, so as to keep the maximum within the limits of convenience for the dinner and ball to be held in the castle. Within the enclosure no plebeian spectators were admitted except Lord Brackenshaw's tenants and their families, and of these it was chiefly the feminine members who used the privilege, bringing their little boys and girls or younger brothers and sisters. The males among them relieved the insipidity of the entertainment by imaginative betting, in which the stake was "anything you like," on their favorite archers; but the young maidens, having a different principle of discrimination, were considering which of those sweetly-dressed ladies they would choose to be, if the choice were allowed them. Probably the form these rural souls would most have striven for as a tabernacle, was some other than Gwendolen's--one with more pink in her cheeks and hair of the most fashionable yellow; but among the male judges in the ranks immediately surrounding her there was unusual unanimity in pronouncing her the finest girl present. No wonder she enjoyed her existence on that July day. Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances. Perhaps it was not quite mythical that a slave has been proud to be bought first; and probably a barn-door fowl on sale, though he may not have understood himself to be called the best of a bad lot, may have a self-informed consciousness of his relative importance, and strut consoled. But for complete enjoyment the outward and the inward must concur. And that concurrence was happening to Gwendolen. Who can deny that bows and arrows are among the prettiest weapons in the world for feminine forms to play with? They prompt attitudes full of grace and power, where that fine concentration of energy seen in all markmanship, is freed from associations of bloodshed. The time-honored British resource of "killing something" is no longer carried on with bow and quiver; bands defending their passes against an invading nation fight under another sort of shade than a cloud of arrows; and poisoned darts are harmless survivals either in rhetoric or in regions comfortably remote. Archery has no ugly smell of brimstone; breaks nobody's shins, breeds no athletic monsters; its only danger is that of failing, which for generous blood is enough to mould skilful action. And among the Brackenshaw archers the prizes were all of the nobler symbolic kind; not properly to be carried off in a parcel, degrading honor into gain; but the gold arrow and the silver, the gold star and the silver, to be worn for a long time in sign of achievement and then transferred to the next who did excellently. These signs of pre-eminence had the virtue of wreaths without their inconveniences, which might have produced a melancholy effect in the heat of the ball-room. Altogether the Brackenshaw Archery Club was an institution framed with good taste, so as not to have by necessity any ridiculous incidents. And to-day all incalculable elements were in its favor. There was mild warmth, and no wind to disturb either hair or drapery or the course of the arrow; all skillful preparation had fair play, and when there was a general march to extract the arrows, the promenade of joyous young creatures in light speech and laughter, the graceful movement in common toward a common object, was a show worth looking at. Here Gwendolen seemed a Calypso among her nymphs. It was in her attitudes and movements that every one was obliged to admit her surpassing charm. "That girl is like a high-mettled racer," said Lord Brackenshaw to young Clintock, one of the invited spectators. "First chop! tremendously pretty too," said the elegant Grecian, who had been paying her assiduous attention; "I never saw her look better." Perhaps she had never looked so well. Her face was beaming with young pleasure in which there was no malign rays of discontent; for being satisfied with her own chances, she felt kindly toward everybody and was satisfied with the universe. Not to have the highest distinction in rank, not to be marked out as an heiress, like Miss Arrowpoint, gave an added triumph in eclipsing those advantages. For personal recommendation she would not have cared to change the family group accompanying her for any other: her mamma's appearance would have suited an amiable duchess; her uncle and aunt Gascoigne with Anna made equally gratifying figures in their way; and Gwendolen was too full of joyous belief in herself to feel in the least jealous though Miss Arrowpoint was one of the best archeresses. Even the reappearance of the formidable Herr Klesmer, which caused some surprise in the rest of the company, seemed only to fall in with Gwendolen's inclination to be amused. Short of Apollo himself, what great musical _maestro_ could make a good figure at an archery meeting? There was a very satirical light in Gwendolen's eyes as she looked toward the Arrowpoint party on their first entrance, when the contrast between Klesmer and the average group of English country people seemed at its utmost intensity in the close neighborhood of his hosts--or patrons, as Mrs. Arrowpoint would have liked to hear them called, that she might deny the possibility of any longer patronizing genius, its royalty being universally acknowledged. The contrast might have amused a graver personage than Gwendolen. We English are a miscellaneous people, and any chance fifty of us will present many varieties of animal architecture or facial ornament; but it must be admitted that our prevailing expression is not that of a lively, impassioned race, preoccupied with the ideal and carrying the real as a mere make-weight. The strong point of the English gentleman pure is the easy style of his figure and clothing; he objects to marked ins and outs in his costume, and he also objects to looking inspired. Fancy an assemblage where the men had all that ordinary stamp of the well-bred Englishman, watching the entrance of Herr Klesmer--his mane of hair floating backward in massive inconsistency with the chimney-pot hat, which had the look of having been put on for a joke above his pronounced but well-modeled features and powerful clear-shaven mouth and chin; his tall, thin figure clad in a way which, not being strictly English, was all the worse for its apparent emphasis of intention. Draped in a loose garment with a Florentine _berretta_ on his head, he would have been fit to stand by the side of Leonardo de Vinci; but how when he presented himself in trousers which were not what English feeling demanded about the knees?--and when the fire that showed itself in his glances and the movements of his head, as he looked round him with curiosity, was turned into comedy by a hat which ruled that mankind should have well-cropped hair and a staid demeanor, such, for example, as Mr. Arrowsmith's, whose nullity of face and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule? One feels why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to have got rid of the outward man. Many present knew Klesmer, or knew of him; but they had only seen him on candle-light occasions when he appeared simply as a musician, and he had not yet that supreme, world-wide celebrity which makes an artist great to the most ordinary people by their knowledge of his great expensiveness. It was literally a new light for them to see him in--presented unexpectedly on this July afternoon in an exclusive society: some were inclined to laugh, others felt a little disgust at the want of judgment shown by the Arrowpoints in this use of an introductory card. "What extreme guys those artistic fellows usually are!" said young Clintock to Gwendolen. "Do look at the figure he cuts, bowing with his hand on his heart to Lady Brackenshaw--and Mrs. Arrowpoint's feather just reaching his shoulder." "You are one of the profane," said Gwendolen. "You are blind to the majesty of genius. Herr Klesmer smites me with awe; I feel crushed in his presence; my courage all oozes from me." "Ah, you understand all about his music." "No, indeed," said Gwendolen, with a light laugh; "it is he who understands all about mine and thinks it pitiable." Klesmer's verdict on her singing had been an easier joke to her since he had been struck by her _plastik_. "It is not addressed to the ears of the future, I suppose. I'm glad of that: it suits mine." "Oh, you are very kind. But how remarkably well Miss Arrowpoint looks to-day! She would make quite a fine picture in that gold-colored dress." "Too splendid, don't you think?" "Well, perhaps a little too symbolical--too much like the figure of Wealth in an allegory." This speech of Gwendolen's had rather a malicious sound, but it was not really more than a bubble of fun. She did not wish Miss Arrowpoint or any one else to be out of the way, believing in her own good fortune even more than in her skill. The belief in both naturally grew stronger as the shooting went on, for she promised to achieve one of the best scores--a success which astonished every one in a new member; and to Gwendolen's temperament one success determined another. She trod on air, and all things pleasant seemed possible. The hour was enough for her, and she was not obliged to think what she should do next to keep her life at the due pitch. "How does the scoring stand, I wonder?" said Lady Brackenshaw, a gracious personage who, adorned with two little girls and a boy of stout make, sat as lady paramount. Her lord had come up to her in one of the intervals of shooting. "It seems to me that Miss Harleth is likely to win the gold arrow." "Gad, I think she will, if she carries it on! she is running Juliet Fenn hard. It is wonderful for one in her first year. Catherine is not up to her usual mark," continued his lordship, turning to the heiress's mother who sat near. "But she got the gold arrow last time. And there's a luck even in these games of skill. That's better. It gives the hinder ones a chance." "Catherine will be very glad for others to win," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, "she is so magnanimous. It was entirely her considerateness that made us bring Herr Klesmer instead of Canon Stopley, who had expressed a wish to come. For her own pleasure, I am sure she would rather have brought the Canon; but she is always thinking of others. I told her it was not quite _en rgle_ to bring one so far out of our own set; but she said, 'Genius itself is not _en rgle_; it comes into the world to make new rules.' And one must admit that." "Ay, to be sure," said Lord Brackenshaw, in a tone of careless dismissal, adding quickly, "For my part, I am not magnanimous; I should like to win. But, confound it! I never have the chance now. I'm getting old and idle. The young ones beat me. As old Nestor says--the gods don't give us everything at one time: I was a young fellow once, and now I am getting an old and wise one. Old, at any rate; which is a gift that comes to everybody if they live long enough, so it raises no jealousy." The Earl smiled comfortably at his wife. "Oh, my lord, people who have been neighbors twenty years must not talk to each other about age," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Years, as the Tuscans say, are made for the letting of houses. But where is our new neighbor? I thought Mr. Grandcourt was to be here to-day." "Ah, by the way, so he was. The time's getting on too," said his lordship, looking at his watch. "But he only got to Diplow the other day. He came to us on Tuesday and said he had been a little bothered. He may have been pulled in another direction. Why, Gascoigne!"--the rector was just then crossing at a little distance with Gwendolen on his arm, and turned in compliance with the call--"this is a little too bad; you not only beat us yourself, but you bring up your niece to beat all the archeresses." "It _is_ rather scandalous in her to get the better of elder members," said Mr. Gascoigne, with much inward satisfaction curling his short upper lip. "But it is not my doing, my lord. I only meant her to make a tolerable figure, without surpassing any one." "It is not my fault, either," said Gwendolen, with pretty archness. "If I am to aim, I can't help hitting." "Ay, ay, that may be a fatal business for some people," said Lord Brackenshaw, good-humoredly; then taking out his watch and looking at Mrs. Arrowpoint again--"The time's getting on, as you say. But Grandcourt is always late. I notice in town he's always late, and he's no bowman--understands nothing about it. But I told him he must come; he would see the flower of the neighborhood here. He asked about you--had seen Arrowpoint's card. I think you had not made his acquaintance in town. He has been a good deal abroad. People don't know him much." "No; we are strangers," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "But that is not what might have been expected. For his uncle Sir Hugo Mallinger and I are great friends when we meet." "I don't know; uncles and nephews are not so likely to be seen together as uncles and nieces," said his lordship, smiling toward the rector. "But just come with me one instant, Gascoigne, will you? I want to speak a word about the clout-shooting." Gwendolen chose to go too and be deposited in the same group with her mamma and aunt until she had to shoot again. That Mr. Grandcourt might after all not appear on the archery-ground, had begun to enter into Gwendolen's thought as a possible deduction from the completeness of her pleasure. Under all her saucy satire, provoked chiefly by her divination that her friends thought of him as a desirable match for her, she felt something very far from indifference as to the impression she would make on him. True, he was not to have the slightest power over her (for Gwendolen had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection); she had made up her mind that he was to be one of those complimentary and assiduously admiring men of whom even her narrow experience had shown her several with various-colored beards and various styles of bearing; and the sense that her friends would want her to think him delightful, gave her a resistant inclination to presuppose him ridiculous. But that was no reason why she could spare his presence: and even a passing prevision of trouble in case she despised and refused him, raised not the shadow of a wish that he should save her that trouble by showing no disposition to make her an offer. Mr. Grandcourt taking hardly any notice of her, and becoming shortly engaged to Miss Arrowpoint, was not a picture which flattered her imagination. Hence Gwendolen had been all ear to Lord Brackenshaw's mode of accounting for Grandcourt's non-appearance; and when he did arrive, no consciousness--not even Mrs. Arrowpoint's or Mr. Gascoigne's--was more awake to the fact than hers, although she steadily avoided looking toward any point where he was likely to be. There should be no slightest shifting of angles to betray that it was of any consequence to her whether the much-talked-of Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt presented himself or not. She became again absorbed in the shooting, and so resolutely abstained from looking round observantly that, even supposing him to have taken a conspicuous place among the spectators, it might be clear she was not aware of him. And all the while the certainty that he was there made a distinct thread in her consciousness. Perhaps her shooting was the better for it: at any rate, it gained in precision, and she at last raised a delightful storm of clapping and applause by three hits running in the gold--a feat which among the Brackenshaw archers had not the vulgar reward of a shilling poll-tax, but that of a special gold star to be worn on the breast. That moment was not only a happy one to herself--it was just what her mamma and her uncle would have chosen for her. There was a general falling into ranks to give her space that she might advance conspicuously to receive the gold star from the hands of Lady Brackenshaw; and the perfect movement of her fine form was certainly a pleasant thing to behold in the clear afternoon light when the shadows were long and still. She was the central object of that pretty picture, and every one present must gaze at her. That was enough: she herself was determined to see nobody in particular, or to turn her eyes any way except toward Lady Brackenshaw, but her thoughts undeniably turned in other ways. It entered a little into her pleasure that Herr Klesmer must be observing her at a moment when music was out of the question, and his superiority very far in the back-ground; for vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return; and the unconquered Klesmer threw a trace of his malign power even across her pleasant consciousness that Mr. Grandcourt was seeing her to the utmost advantage, and was probably giving her an admiration unmixed with criticism. She did not expect to admire _him_, but that was not necessary to her peace of mind. Gwendolen met Lady Brackenshaw's gracious smile without blushing (which only came to her when she was taken by surprise), but with a charming gladness of expression, and then bent with easy grace to have the star fixed near her shoulder. That little ceremony had been over long enough for her to have exchanged playful speeches and received congratulations as she moved among the groups who were now interesting themselves in the results of the scoring; but it happened that she stood outside examining the point of an arrow with rather an absent air when Lord Brackenshaw came up to her and said, "Miss Harleth, here is a gentleman who is not willing to wait any longer for an introduction. He has been getting Mrs. Davilow to send me with him. Will you allow me to introduce Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt?"

Brackenshaw Park, where the Archery Meeting was held, looked out from gentle heights over the valley to the eastern downs and the broad, slow rise of country hanging like a vast curtain toward the west. The castle was built of rough-hewn limestone, full of lights and shadows made by dark lichens and the washings of the rain. Beech and fir sheltered it, and spread down the green slopes to the water below. The archery-ground was a carefully-kept enclosure at the farthest end of the park, protected by tall elms and a shading screen of hollies. The Archery Hall, with an arcade in front, showed like a white temple against the greenery. What could make a better background for the flower-groups of ladies, moving and bowing like leisurely lilies? There was a pleasant sound of musical laughter and a harmony of happy speech, now rising to mild excitement, now sinking to an agreeable murmur. No Archery Meeting could be more select. Within the enclosure no plebeian spectators were admitted except Lord Brackenshaw's tenants and their families, chiefly the feminine members, who liked to consider which of those sweetly-dressed ladies they would choose to be. Probably they would not have chosen Gwendolen, but some lady with more pink in her cheeks and hair of fashionable yellow; but among the males, she was unanimously pronounced the finest girl present. No wonder she enjoyed her existence on that July day. Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances. And who can deny that bows and arrows are the prettiest weapons in the world for feminine forms to play with? They prompt attitudes full of grace and power, where fine marksmanship is freed from associations of bloodshed. All the prizes were of the nobler symbolic kind; the gold arrow and the silver, the gold star and the silver, to be worn in sign of achievement. Altogether the Brackenshaw Archery Club was an institution framed with good taste. And today all the elements were in its favour. There was mild warmth, and no wind to disturb either hair or the course of the arrow; and when there was a general march to extract the arrows, the joyous promenade of graceful movement was a show worth looking at. Everyone was obliged to admit Gwendolen's surpassing charm. "That girl is like a high-mettled racer," said Lord Brackenshaw to young Clintock. "Tremendously pretty too." Perhaps she had never looked so well. Her face beamed with pleasure; for, being satisfied with her own chances, she felt kindly toward everybody. Not to be marked out as an heiress, like Miss Arrowpoint, gave an added triumph in eclipsing those advantages. Gwendolen was too full of joyous belief in herself to feel the least jealousy, although Miss Arrowpoint was one of the best archeresses. Even the reappearance of the formidable Herr Klesmer seemed only to fall in with Gwendolen's amusement. What great musical maestro could make a good figure at an archery meeting? There was a satirical light in Gwendolen's eyes as she looked toward the Arrowpoint party, with its intense contrast between Klesmer and the group of English country people. Fancy a gathering of men all with that ordinary stamp of the well-bred Englishman, watching the entrance of Herr Klesmer - his mane of hair floating backward under the absurd chimney-pot hat; his tall, thin figure clad in noticeably un-English style. When the fire that showed itself in his glances was turned into comedy by his hat, one felt why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to have got rid of the outward man. Many present knew Klesmer, or knew of him; but they had only seen him on candle-light occasions when he appeared as a musician. Seeing him presented unexpectedly on this July afternoon, some were inclined to laugh; others felt a little disgust at the want of judgment shown by the Arrowpoints. "What extreme guys those artistic fellows usually are!" said young Clintock to Gwendolen. "Do look at the figure he cuts." "You are blind to the majesty of genius," said Gwendolen. "Herr Klesmer smites me with awe; I feel crushed in his presence; my courage oozes from me." "Ah, you understand about his music." "No, indeed," she said with a light laugh; "it is he who understands mine and thinks it pitiable. But how remarkably well Miss Arrowpoint looks! She would make quite a fine picture in that gold-coloured dress." "Too splendid, don't you think?" "Well, perhaps a little too much like the figure of Wealth in an allegory." This speech of Gwendolen's had rather a malicious sound, but it was not really more than a bubble of fun. She did not wish Miss Arrowpoint or anyone else to be out of the way, believing in her own good fortune even more than in her skill. The belief in both naturally grew stronger as the shooting went on, for she promised to achieve one of the best scores. She trod on air, and all things pleasant seemed possible. "How does the scoring stand, I wonder?" said Lady Brackenshaw to her lord in an interval of shooting. "It seems to me that Miss Harleth is likely to win the gold arrow." "Gad, I think she will, if she carries it on! she is running Juliet Fenn hard. It is wonderful for one in her first year. Catherine is not up to her usual mark," continued his lordship, turning to the heiress's mother nearby. "But she got the gold arrow last time." "Catherine will be very glad for others to win," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, "she is so magnanimous. It was entirely her kindness that made us bring Herr Klesmer instead of Canon Stople. I am sure she would rather have brought the Canon; but she is always thinking of others. But where is our new neighbour? I thought Mr. Grandcourt was to be here to-day." "So he was. The time's getting on too," said his lordship, looking at his watch. "But he only got to Diplow the other day. Why, Gascoigne!" - the rector was just then close by with Gwendolen - "this is too bad; you bring your niece to beat all the archeresses." "It is rather scandalous in her," said Mr. Gascoigne, with much inward satisfaction. "But it is not my doing, my lord." "It is not my fault, either," said Gwendolen, with pretty archness. "If I am to aim, I can't help hitting." "Ay, ay, that may be fatal for some people," said Lord Brackenshaw, good-humouredly; then taking out his watch again- "The time's getting on. Grandcourt is always late, and he's no bowman - understands nothing about it. But I told him he must come and see the flower of the neighbourhood." Gwendolen, who joined her mamma and aunt until it was time to shoot again, felt that Mr. Grandcourt's absence might compromise her pleasure. Under all her saucy satire, she was far from indifferent as to the impression she would make on him. True, he was not to have the slightest power over her (for Gwendolen had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection); she had made up her mind that he was to be one of those complimentary and admiring men of whom she had some experience, and she imagined he would be ridiculous. But that was no reason why she could spare his presence: she did not wish him to save her the trouble of a refusal, by showing no desire to make her an offer. Mr. Grandcourt taking hardly any notice of her, and becoming shortly engaged to Miss Arrowpoint, was not a picture which flattered her imagination. Hence Gwendolen had been all ears to Lord Brackenshaw's words about Grandcourt; and when he did arrive, no-one was more awake to the fact than her, although she steadily avoided looking where he was likely to be. She would not betray the slightest interest in Mr. Grandcourt. She became again absorbed in the shooting, and resolutely abstained from looking round, so that even if he were watching, it might be clear she was not aware of him. And all the while the certainty that he was there made a distinct thread in her consciousness. Perhaps her shooting was the better for it: at any rate, she raised a storm of clapping and applause by three hits in the gold - a feat which was rewarded by a special gold star. That moment was a happy one. There was a general falling into ranks to give her space to advance and receive the gold star from Lady Brackenshaw; she was the central object of that pretty picture, and everyone must gaze at her. She herself was determined not to turn her eyes any way except toward Lady Brackenshaw, but her thoughts undeniably turned in other ways. It pleased her that Herr Klesmer must be observing her at a moment when music and his superiority were far in the background; for the unconquered Klesmer threw a trace of his malign power even across her pleasant consciousness that Mr. Grandcourt was probably admiring her. She did not expect to admire him, but that was not necessary to her peace of mind. Gwendolen met Lady Brackenshaw's smile charmingly, and bent with easy grace to have the star fixed near her shoulder. After an exchange of congratulations, she was standing aside examining an arrow with rather an absent air when Lord Brackenshaw came up and said: "Miss Harleth, here is a gentleman who is not willing to wait any longer for an introduction. Will you allow me to introduce Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt?"

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 10

Fairy folk a-listening Hear the seed sprout in the spring. And for music to their dance Hear the hedgerows wake from trance, Sap that trembles into buds Sending little rhythmic floods Of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears Has birth as sound to finer sense And lighter-clad intelligence. And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of her--often wondering what were his ideas "about things," and how his life was occupied. But a lap-dog would be necessarily at a loss in framing to itself the motives and adventures of doghood at large; and it was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star. With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about themselves reflected in other minds; and Gwendolen, with her youth and inward solitude, may be excused for dwelling on signs of special interest in her shown by the one person who had impressed her with the feeling of submission, and for mistaking the color and proportion of those signs in the mind of Deronda. Meanwhile, what would he tell her that she ought to do? "He said, I must get more interest in others, and more knowledge, and that I must care about the best things--but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous selection--Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Butler, Burke, Guizot--knowing, as a clever young lady of education, that these authors were ornaments of mankind, feeling sure that Deronda had read them, and hoping that by dipping into them all in succession, with her rapid understanding she might get a point of view nearer to his level. But it was astonishing how little time she found for these vast mental excursions. Constantly she had to be on the scene as Mrs. Grandcourt, and to feel herself watched in that part by the exacting eyes of a husband who had found a motive to exercise his tenacity--that of making his marriage answer all the ends he chose, and with the more completeness the more he discerned any opposing will in her. And she herself, whatever rebellion might be going on within her, could not have made up her mind to failure in her representation. No feeling had yet reconciled her for a moment to any act, word, or look that would be a confession to the world: and what she most dreaded in herself was any violent impulse that would make an involuntary confession: it was the will to be silent in every other direction that had thrown the more impetuosity into her confidences toward Deronda, to whom her thought continually turned as a help against herself. Her riding, her hunting, her visiting and receiving of visits, were all performed in a spirit of achievement which served instead of zest and young gladness, so that all around Diplow, in those weeks of the new year, Mrs. Grandcourt was regarded as wearing her honors with triumph. "She disguises it under an air of taking everything as a matter of course," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "A stranger might suppose that she had condescended rather than risen. I always noticed that doubleness in her." To her mother most of all Gwendolen was bent on acting complete satisfaction, and poor Mrs. Davilow was so far deceived that she took the unexpected distance at which she was kept, in spite of what she felt to be Grandcourt's handsome behavior in providing for her, as a comparative indifference in her daughter, now that marriage had created new interests. To be fetched to lunch and then to dinner along with the Gascoignes, to be driven back soon after breakfast the next morning, and to have brief calls from Gwendolen in which her husband waited for her outside either on horseback or sitting in the carriage, was all the intercourse allowed to her mother. The truth was, that the second time Gwendolen proposed to invite her mother with Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne, Grandcourt had at first been silent, and then drawled, "We can't be having _those people_ always. Gascoigne talks too much. Country clergy are always bores--with their confounded fuss about everything." That speech was full of foreboding for Gwendolen. To have her mother classed under "those people" was enough to confirm the previous dread of bringing her too near. Still, she could not give the true reasons--she could not say to her mother, "Mr. Grandcourt wants to recognize you as little as possible; and besides it is better you should not see much of my married life, else you might find out that I am miserable." So she waived as lightly as she could every allusion to the subject; and when Mrs. Davilow again hinted the possibility of her having a house close to Ryelands, Gwendolen said, "It would not be so nice for you as being near the rectory here, mamma. We shall perhaps be very little at Ryelands. You would miss my aunt and uncle." And all the while this contemptuous veto of her husband's on any intimacy with her family, making her proudly shrink from giving them the aspect of troublesome pensioners, was rousing more inward inclination toward them. She had never felt so kindly toward her uncle, so much disposed to look back on his cheerful, complacent activity and spirit of kind management, even when mistaken, as more of a comfort than the neutral loftiness which was every day chilling her. And here perhaps she was unconsciously finding some of that mental enlargement which it was hard to get from her occasional dashes into difficult authors, who instead of blending themselves with her daily agitations required her to dismiss them. It was a delightful surprise one day when Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne were at Offendene to see Gwendolen ride up without her husband--with the groom only. All, including the four girls and Miss Merry, seated in the dining-room at lunch, could see the welcome approach; and even the elder ones were not without something of Isabel's romantic sense that the beautiful sister on the splendid chestnut, which held its head as if proud to bear her, was a sort of Harriet Byron or Miss Wardour reappearing out of her "happiness ever after." Her uncle went to the door to give her his hand, and she sprang from her horse with an air of alacrity which might well encourage that notion of guaranteed happiness; for Gwendolen was particularly bent to-day on setting her mother's heart at rest, and her unusual sense of freedom in being able to make this visit alone enabled her to bear up under the pressure of painful facts which were urging themselves anew. The seven family kisses were not so tiresome as they used to be. "Mr. Grandcourt is gone out, so I determined to fill up the time by coming to you, mamma," said Gwendolen, as she laid down her hat and seated herself next to her mother; and then looking at her with a playfully monitory air, "That is a punishment to you for not wearing better lace on your head. You didn't think I should come and detect you--you dreadfully careless-about-yourself mamma!" She gave a caressing touch to the dear head. "Scold me, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, her delicate worn face flushing with delight. "But I wish there was something you could eat after your ride--instead of these scraps. Let Jocosa make you a cup of chocolate in your old way. You used to like that." Miss Merry immediately rose and went out, though Gwendolen said, "Oh, no, a piece of bread, or one of those hard biscuits. I can't think about eating. I am come to say good-bye." "What! going to Ryelands again?" said Mr. Gascoigne. "No, we are going to town," said Gwendolen, beginning to break up a piece of bread, but putting no morsel into her mouth. "It is rather early to go to town," said Mrs. Gascoigne, "and Mr. Grandcourt not in Parliament." "Oh, there is only one more day's hunting to be had, and Henleigh has some business in town with lawyers, I think," said Gwendolen. "I am very glad. I shall like to go to town." "You will see your house in Grosvenor Square," said Mrs. Davilow. She and the girls were devouring with their eyes every movement of their goddess, soon to vanish. "Yes," said Gwendolen, in a tone of assent to the interest of that expectation. "And there is so much to be seen and done in town." "I wish, my dear Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne, in a kind of cordial advice, "that you would use your influence with Mr. Grandcourt to induce him to enter Parliament. A man of his position should make his weight felt in politics. The best judges are confident that the ministry will have to appeal to the country on this question of further Reform, and Mr. Grandcourt should be ready for the opportunity. I am not quite sure that his opinions and mine accord entirely; I have not heard him express himself very fully. But I don't look at the matter from that point of view. I am thinking of your husband's standing in the country. And he has now come to that stage of life when a man like him should enter into public affairs. A wife has great influence with her husband. Use yours in that direction, my dear." The rector felt that he was acquitting himself of a duty here, and giving something like the aspect of a public benefit to his niece's match. To Gwendolen the whole speech had the flavor of bitter comedy. If she had been merry, she must have laughed at her uncle's explanation to her that he had not heard Grandcourt express himself very fully on politics. And the wife's great influence! General maxims about husbands and wives seemed now of a precarious usefulness. Gwendolen herself had once believed in her future influence as an omnipotence in managing--she did not know exactly what. But her chief concern at present was to give an answer that would be felt appropriate. "I should be very glad, uncle. But I think Mr. Grandcourt would not like the trouble of an election--at least, unless it could be without his making speeches. I thought candidates always made speeches." "Not necessarily--to any great extent," said Mr. Gascoigne. "A man of position and weight can get on without much of it. A county member need have very little trouble in that way, and both out of the House and in it is liked the better for not being a speechifier. Tell Mr. Grandcourt that I say so." "Here comes Jocosa with my chocolate after all," said Gwendolen, escaping from a promise to give information that would certainly have been received in a way inconceivable to the good rector, who, pushing his chair a little aside from the table and crossing his leg, looked as well as if he felt like a worthy specimen of a clergyman and magistrate giving experienced advice. Mr. Gascoigne had come to the conclusion that Grandcourt was a proud man, but his own self-love, calmed through life by the consciousness of his general value and personal advantages, was not irritable enough to prevent him from hoping the best about his niece's husband because her uncle was kept rather haughtily at a distance. A certain aloofness must be allowed to the representative of an old family; you would not expect him to be on intimate terms even with abstractions. But Mrs. Gascoigne was less dispassionate on her husband's account, and felt Grandcourt's haughtiness as something a little blameable in Gwendolen. "Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in town about Easter," she said, with a vague sense of expressing a slight discontent. "Dear Rex hopes to come out with honors and a fellowship, and he wants his father and Anna to meet him in London, that they may be jolly together, as he says. I shouldn't wonder if Lord Brackenshaw invited them, he has been so very kind since he came back to the Castle." "I hope my uncle will bring Ann to stay in Grosvenor Square," said Gwendolen, risking herself so far, for the sake of the present moment, but in reality wishing that she might never be obliged to bring any of her family near Grandcourt again. "I am very glad of Rex's good fortune." "We must not be premature, and rejoice too much beforehand," said the rector, to whom this topic was the happiest in the world, and altogether allowable, now that the issue of that little affair about Gwendolen had been so satisfactory. "Not but that I am in correspondence with impartial judges, who have the highest hopes about my son, as a singularly clear-headed young man. And of his excellent disposition and principle I have had the best evidence." "We shall have him a great lawyer some time," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "How very nice!" said Gwendolen, with a concealed scepticism as to niceness in general, which made the word quite applicable to lawyers. "Talking of Lord Brackenshaw's kindness," said Mrs. Davilow, "you don't know how delightful he has been, Gwendolen. He has begged me to consider myself his guest in this house till I can get another that I like--he did it in the most graceful way. But now a house has turned up. Old Mr. Jodson is dead, and we can have his house. It is just what I want; small, but with nothing hideous to make you miserable thinking about it. And it is only a mile from the Rectory. You remember the low white house nearly hidden by the trees, as we turn up the lane to the church?" "Yes, but you have no furniture, poor mamma," said Gwendolen, in a melancholy tone. "Oh, I am saving money for that. You know who has made me rather rich, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, laying her hand on Gwendolen's. "And Jocosa really makes so little do for housekeeping--it is quite wonderful." "Oh, please let me go up-stairs with you and arrange my hat, mamma," said Gwendolen, suddenly putting up her hand to her hair and perhaps creating a desired disarrangement. Her heart was swelling, and she was ready to cry. Her mother _must_ have been worse off, if it had not been for Grandcourt. "I suppose I shall never see all this again," said Gwendolen, looking round her, as they entered the black and yellow bedroom, and then throwing herself into a chair in front of the glass with a little groan as of bodily fatigue. In the resolve not to cry she had become very pale. "You are not well, dear?" said Mrs. Davilow. "No; that chocolate has made me sick," said Gwendolen, putting up her hand to be taken. "I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, rather timidly, as she pressed the hand to her bosom. Something had made her sure today that her child loved her--needed her as much as ever. "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, leaning her head against her mother, though speaking as lightly as she could. "But you know I never am ill. I am as strong as possible; and you must not take to fretting about me, but make yourself as happy as you can with the girls. They are better children to you than I have been, you know." She turned up her face with a smile. "You have always been good, my darling. I remember nothing else." "Why, what did I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr. Grandcourt?" said Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve to be playful, and keep no more on the perilous edge of agitation. "And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself." She tossed up her chin, and reached her hat. "God forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your happiness by itself is half mine." "Very well," said Gwendolen, arranging her hat fastidiously, "then you will please to consider that you are half happy, which is more than I am used to seeing you." With the last words she again turned with her old playful smile to her mother. "Now I am ready; but oh, mamma, Mr. Grandcourt gives me a quantity of money, and expects me to spend it, and I can't spend it; and you know I can't bear charity children and all that; and here are thirty pounds. I wish the girls would spend it for me on little things for themselves when you go to the new house. Tell them so." Gwendolen put the notes into her mother's hands and looked away hastily, moving toward the door. "God bless you, dear," said Mrs. Davilow. "It will please them so that you should have thought of them in particular." "Oh, they are troublesome things; but they don't trouble me now," said Gwendolen, turning and nodding playfully. She hardly understood her own feeling in this act toward her sisters, but at any rate she did not wish it to be taken as anything serious. She was glad to have got out of the bedroom without showing more signs of emotion, and she went through the rest of her visit and all the good-byes with a quiet propriety that made her say to herself sarcastically as she rode away, "I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt." She believed that her husband had gone to Gadsmere that day--had inferred this, as she had long ago inferred who were the inmates of what he had described as "a dog-hutch of a place in a black country;" and the strange conflict of feeling within her had had the characteristic effect of sending her to Offendene with a tightened resolve--a form of excitement which was native to her. She wondered at her own contradictions. Why should she feel it bitter to her that Grandcourt showed concern for the beings on whose account she herself was undergoing remorse? Had she not before her marriage inwardly determined to speak and act on their behalf?--and since he had lately implied that he wanted to be in town because he was making arrangements about his will, she ought to have been glad of any sign that he kept a conscience awake toward those at Gadsmere; and yet, now that she was a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to Gadsmere was like red heat near a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity in her own eyes--this humiliation of being doomed to a terrified silence lest her husband should discover with what sort of consciousness she had married him; and as she had said to Deronda, she "must go on." After the intense moments of secret hatred toward this husband who from the very first had cowed her, there always came back the spiritual pressure which made submission inevitable. There was no effort at freedoms that would not bring fresh and worse humiliation. Gwendolen could dare nothing except an impulsive action--least of all could she dare premeditatedly a vague future in which the only certain condition was indignity. In spite of remorse, it still seemed the worst result of her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself; and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs. Glasher was aware of the fact which caused it. For Gwendolen had never referred the interview at the Whispering Stones to Lush's agency; her disposition to vague terror investing with shadowy omnipresence any threat of fatal power over her, and so hindering her from imagining plans and channels by which news had been conveyed to the woman who had the poisoning skill of a sorceress. To Gwendolen's mind the secret lay with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in the horrible letter which implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband, as much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt. Something else, too, she thought of as more of a secret from her husband than it really was--namely that suppressed struggle of desperate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grandcourt could not indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers, to him nonexistent. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.

And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of her - often wondering about his ideas, and how his life was occupied. But a lap-dog would be at a loss to understand the adventures of doghood at large; and Gwendolen had no conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews. She imagined a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually held; but with her youth and solitude, she may be excused for dwelling on any signs of special interest in her shown by the one person who had impressed her into feeling submission. What would he tell her to do? "He said, I must get more interest in others, and more knowledge - but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to read, recalling the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable; and carried a selection to her room - Descartes, Bacon, Locke. Knowing from her education that these authors were ornaments of mankind, she felt sure that Deronda had read them, and hoped that by dipping into them, with her rapid understanding she might get a point of view nearer to his level. But it was astonishing how little time she found for these vast mental excursions. Constantly she had to be on the scene as Mrs. Grandcourt, and to feel herself watched in that part by the exacting eyes of a husband who chose to rule her the more completely the more he discerned any opposing will in her. And she herself, whatever rebellion might be going on within her, did not wish to fail in playing this part. She dreaded betraying her true feelings to the world: her determination to be silent in every other direction had thrown the more impetuosity into her confidences toward Deronda, to whom her thought continually turned as a help against herself. Her riding, her hunting, her visits, were all performed in a spirit of achievement which served instead of zest and young gladness, so that all around Diplow Mrs. Grandcourt was regarded as wearing her honours with triumph. To her mother most of all Gwendolen was bent on acting complete satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Davilow was so well deceived that she took the unexpected distance at which she was kept as indifference in her daughter, now that marriage had created new interests. To be fetched to lunch and dinner along with the Gascoignes, to be driven back the next morning, and to have brief calls from Gwendolen while her husband waited for her outside, was all the intercourse allowed to her mother. The truth was, that the second time Gwendolen proposed to invite her mother with Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne, Grandcourt had drawled, "We can't be having those people always. Gascoigne talks too much. Country clergy are always bores." That speech was full of foreboding for Gwendolen. Still, she could not say to her mother, "Mr. Grandcourt wants to recognize you as little as possible; and it is better you should not see much of my married life, in case you find out that I am miserable." So she waived as lightly as she could every allusion to the subject; and when Mrs. Davilow again hinted the possibility of moving closer to Ryelands, Gwendolen said,- "It would not be so nice for you as being near the rectory here, mamma. We shall perhaps be very little at Ryelands. You would miss my aunt and uncle." Meanwhile this contemptuous veto of her husband's on any intimacy with her family was rousing her attachment to them. She had never felt so kindly toward her uncle, so much disposed to look on his cheerful, complacent activity as a greater comfort than the neutral loftiness which was every day chilling her. And here perhaps she was unconsciously finding some of that mental enlargement which it was hard to get from her occasional dashes into difficult authors. It was a delightful surprise one day, when Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne were at Offendene, for the family to see Gwendolen ride up without her husband. Even the elder ones were not without something of Isabel's sense that the beautiful sister on the splendid chestnut was a romantic heroine appearing out of her "happiness ever after." Gwendolen sprang from her horse with an alacrity which might well signify happiness; for she was particularly bent today on setting her mother's heart at rest, and her freedom in being able to make this visit alone enabled her to bear up under the pressure of painful facts. The seven family kisses were not so tiresome as they used to be. "Mr. Grandcourt is gone out, so I decided to fill the time by coming to you, mamma," said Gwendolen. Sitting next to her mother, she said with a playfully admonitory air, "That is a punishment to you for not wearing better lace. You didn't think I should detect you - you dreadfully careless-about-yourself mamma!" She gave a caressing touch to the dear head. "Scold me, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, her delicate worn face flushing with delight. "But I wish you would eat after your ride. Let Jocosa make you a cup of chocolate. You used to like that." Miss Merry immediately rose and went out, though Gwendolen said, "Oh, no, a piece of bread. I can't think about eating. I am come to say good-bye." "What! going to Ryelands again?" said Mr. Gascoigne. "No, we are going to town," said Gwendolen, beginning to break up a piece of bread, but putting none into her mouth. "It is rather early to go to town," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "Oh, there is only one more day's hunting, and Henleigh has some business in town with lawyers, I think," said Gwendolen. "I am very glad. I shall like to go to town." "You will see your house in Grosvenor Square," said Mrs. Davilow, devouring Gwendolen's every movement with her eyes. "Yes. And there is so much to be done in town." "I wish, my dear Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne cordially, "that you would use your influence with Mr. Grandcourt to induce him to enter Parliament. A man of his position should make his weight felt in politics. And he has now come to that stage of life when a man like him should enter into public affairs. A wife has great influence with her husband. Use yours in that direction, my dear." To Gwendolen this speech had the flavour of bitter comedy. The wife's great influence! She had once believed in her future influence as all-powerful in managing - she did not know exactly what. But her chief concern was to give an appropriate answer. "I should be very glad, uncle. But I think Mr. Grandcourt would not like the trouble of an election - at least, unless it could be without his making speeches. I thought candidates always made speeches." "Not necessarily," said Mr. Gascoigne. "A man of position can get on without much of it. A county member need have very little trouble in that way, and is liked the better for not being a speechifier. Tell Mr. Grandcourt that I say so." "Here comes Jocosa with my chocolate," said Gwendolen, escaping from a promise that would certainly have been received in a way inconceivable to the good rector. Mr. Gascoigne had concluded that Grandcourt was a proud man, but he was not so selfish as to resent his niece's husband for keeping him haughtily at a distance. A certain aloofness must be allowed to the representative of an old family. But Mrs. Gascoigne felt Grandcourt's haughtiness as something a little blameable in Gwendolen. "Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in town about Easter," she said. "Dear Rex hopes to come out with honours and a fellowship, and wants his father and Anna to meet him in London, that they may be jolly together, as he says. I shouldn't wonder if Lord Brackenshaw invited them; he is so very kind." "I hope my uncle will bring Anna to stay in Grosvenor Square," said Gwendolen, in reality wishing that she need never bring any of her family near Grandcourt again. "I am very glad of Rex's good fortune." "We must not be premature, and rejoice too much beforehand," said the rector, to whom this topic was the happiest in the world, and altogether allowable, now that the result of that little affair about Gwendolen had been so satisfactory. "However, impartial judges have the highest hopes about my son, as a singularly clear-headed young man of excellent disposition and principle." "We shall have him a great lawyer some time," said Mrs. Gascoigne. "How very nice!" said Gwendolen. "Talking of Lord Brackenshaw's kindness," said Mrs. Davilow, "he has begged me to consider myself his guest in this house till I can get another. But now a house has turned up. Old Mr. Jodson is dead, and we can have his. It is just what I want; small, but with nothing hideous to make you miserable thinking about it. And it is only a mile from the Rectory." "But you have no furniture, poor mamma," said Gwendolen. "Oh, I am saving money for that. You know who has made me rather rich, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, laying her hand on Gwendolen's. "And Jocosa really makes so little do for housekeeping - it is quite wonderful." "Oh, please let me go upstairs with you and arrange my hat, mamma," said Gwendolen, suddenly putting her hand to her hair. Her heart was swelling, and she was ready to cry. Her mother must have been worse off, if it had not been for Grandcourt. As they entered the bedroom, she looked around, saying, "I suppose I shall never see all this again," and then throwing herself into a chair in front of the glass with a little groan. In the resolve not to cry she had become very pale. "You are not well, dear?" said Mrs. Davilow. "No; that chocolate has made me sick," said Gwendolen, putting up her hand to be taken. "I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, rather timidly, as she pressed the hand. Something had made her sure today that her child loved and needed her as much as ever. "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, leaning her head against her mother, though speaking lightly. "But I never am ill. I am as strong as possible; and you must not fret about me, but make yourself happy with the girls. They are better children to you than I have been, you know." She turned up her face with a smile. "You have always been good, my darling." "Why, what did I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr. Grandcourt?" said Gwendolen, with a desperate resolve to be playful. "And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself." "God forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your happiness by itself is half mine." "Very well," said Gwendolen, arranging her hat, "then please consider yourself half happy, which is more than I am used to seeing you." She turned with her old playful smile to her mother. "Oh, mamma, Mr. Grandcourt gives me a quantity of money, and expects me to spend it, and I can't; so here are thirty pounds. I wish the girls would spend it on little things for themselves when you go to the new house. Tell them so." Gwendolen put the notes into her mother's hands and moved hastily toward the door. "God bless you, dear," said Mrs. Davilow. "It will please them so that you should have thought of them." "Oh, they are troublesome things; but they don't trouble me now," said Gwendolen. She hardly understood her own feeling in this act toward her sisters, but did not wish it to be taken as anything serious. She was glad to get out of the bedroom without showing more emotion, and she went through the rest of her visit with a quiet propriety that made her say to herself sarcastically as she rode away, "I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt." She believed that her husband had gone to Gadsmere that day; and the strange conflict of feeling within her had sent her to Offendene with a tightened resolve. She wondered at her own contradictions. Why should she be bitter that Grandcourt showed concern for the beings on whose account she herself was undergoing remorse? Had she not before her marriage inwardly determined to speak on their behalf? - and since he had lately implied that he wanted to be in town to make arrangements about his will, she ought to have been glad of any sign that he kept a conscience awake toward those at Gadsmere. Yet the sense that he was gone to Gadsmere was like a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity - this humiliating terror lest her husband should discover with what knowledge she had married him; and as she had said to Deronda, she "must go on." After the intense moments of secret hatred toward this husband who cowed her, there always came back the spiritual pressure which made submission inevitable. Any effort at freedom would bring worse humiliation. It still seemed that the worst result would be that she should make a spectacle of herself; and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs. Glasher was aware of the cause. For Gwendolen did not know about Lush's involvement; she had never considered how news had been conveyed to Mrs. Glasher. To her mind the secret lay with Mrs. Glasher only, and she thought the horrible letter implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to Grandcourt. Something else, too, she thought of as more secret from her husband than it really was - namely, that suppressed struggle of desperate rebellion within her. Grandcourt could not fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions; and Grandcourt was not infallible in his judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers unknown to him. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 44

She held the spindle as she sat, Errina with the thick-coiled mat Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes, Gazing with a sad surprise At surging visions of her destiny-- To spin the byssus drearily In insect-labor, while the throng Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song. When Deronda presented himself at the door of his mother's apartment in the _Italia_ he felt some revival of his boyhood with its premature agitations. The two servants in the antechamber looked at him markedly, a little surprised that the doctor their lady had come to consult was this striking young gentleman whose appearance gave even the severe lines of an evening dress the credit of adornment. But Deronda could notice nothing until, the second door being opened, he found himself in the presence of a figure which at the other end of the large room stood awaiting his approach. She was covered, except as to her face and part of her arms, with black lace hanging loosely from the summit of her whitening hair to the long train stretching from her tall figure. Her arms, naked to the elbow, except for some rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine poise of her head made it look handsomer than it really was. But Deronda felt no interval of observation before he was close in front of her, holding the hand she had put out and then raising it to his lips. She still kept her hand in his and looked at him examiningly; while his chief consciousness was that her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person. For even while she was examining him there was a play of the brow and nostril which made a tacit language. Deronda dared no movement, not able to conceive what sort of manifestation her feeling demanded; but he felt himself changing color like a girl, and yet wondering at his own lack of emotion; he had lived through so many ideal meetings with his mother, and they had seemed more real than this! He could not even conjecture in what language she would speak to him. He imagined it would not be English. Suddenly, she let fall his hand, and placed both hers on his shoulders, while her face gave out a flash of admiration in which every worn line disappeared and seemed to leave a restored youth. "You are a beautiful creature!" she said, in a low melodious voice, with syllables which had what might be called a foreign but agreeable outline. "I knew you would be." Then she kissed him on each cheek, and he returned the kisses. But it was something like a greeting between royalties. She paused a moment while the lines were coming back into her face, and then said in a colder tone, "I am your mother. But you can have no love for me." "I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world," said Deronda, his voice trembling nervously. "I am not like what you thought I was," said the mother decisively, withdrawing her hands from his shoulders, and folding her arms as before, looking at him as if she invited him to observe her. He had often pictured her face in his imagination as one which had a likeness to his own: he saw some of the likeness now, but amidst more striking differences. She was a remarkable looking being. What was it that gave her son a painful sense of aloofness?--Her worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with some world which is independent of ours. "I used to think that you might be suffering," said Deronda, anxious above all not to wound her. "I used to wish that I could be a comfort to you." "I _am_ suffering. But with a suffering that you can't comfort," said the Princess, in a harder voice than before, moving to a sofa where cushions had been carefully arranged for her. "Sit down." She pointed to a seat near her; and then discerning some distress in Deronda's face, she added, more gently, "I am not suffering at this moment. I am at ease now. I am able to talk." Deronda seated himself and waited for her to speak again. It seemed as if he were in the presence of a mysterious Fate rather than of the longed-for mother. He was beginning to watch her with wonder, from the spiritual distance to which she had thrown him. "No," she began: "I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not know beforehand--I don't know now--what you will feel toward me. I have not the foolish notion that you can love me merely because I am your mother, when you have never seen or heard of me in all your life. But I thought I chose something better for you than being with me. I did not think I deprived you of anything worth having." "You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been worth having," said Deronda, finding that she paused as if she expected him to make some answer. "I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the princess, with proud impetuosity, "But I had not much affection to give you. I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder what I was. I was no princess then." She rose with a sudden movement, and stood as she had done before. Deronda immediately rose too; he felt breathless. "No princess in this tame life that I live in now. I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad lives in one. I did not want a child." There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She had cast all precedent out of her mind. Precedent had no excuse for her and she could only seek a justification in the intensest words she could find for her experience. She seemed to fling out the last words against some possible reproach in the mind of her son, who had to stand and hear them--clutching his coat-collar as if he were keeping himself above water by it, and feeling his blood in the sort of commotion that might have been excited if he had seen her going through some strange rite of a religion which gave a sacredness to crime. What else had she to tell him? She went on with the same intensity and a sort of pale illumination in her face. "I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your father--forced, I mean, by my father's wishes and commands; and besides, it was my best way of getting some freedom. I could rule my husband, but not my father. I had a right to be free. I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated." She seated herself again, while there was that subtle movement in her eyes and closed lips which is like the suppressed continuation of speech. Deronda continued standing, and after a moment or two she looked up at him with a less defiant pleading as she said, "And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of having been born a Jew." "Then I _am_ a Jew?" Deronda burst out with a deep-voiced energy that made his mother shrink a little backward against her cushions. "My father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?" "Yes, your father was my cousin," said the mother, watching him with a change in her look, as if she saw something that she might have to be afraid of. "I am glad of it," said Deronda, impetuously, in the veiled voice of passion. He could not have imagined beforehand how he would have come to say that which he had never hitherto admitted. He could not have dreamed that it would be in impulsive opposition to his mother. He was shaken by a mixed anger which no reflection could come soon enough to check, against this mother who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had willingly made herself a stranger to him, and--perhaps--was now making herself known unwillingly. This last suspicion seemed to flash some explanation over her speech. But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and her frame was less equal to any repression. The shaking with her was visibly physical, and her eyes looked the larger for her pallid excitement as she said violently, "Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured you that." "You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my birthright for me?" said Deronda, throwing himself sideways into his chair again, almost unconsciously, and leaning his arm over the back, while he looked away from his mother. He was fired with an intolerance that seemed foreign to him. But he was now trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept in upon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this moment which made an epoch never to be recalled. There was a pause before his mother spoke again, and when she spoke her voice had become more firmly resistant in its finely varied tones: "I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I know that you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know that you would love what I hated?--if you really love to be a Jew." The last words had such bitterness in them that any one overhearing might have supposed some hatred had arisen between the mother and son. But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling his sensibilities to what life had been and actually was for her whose best years were gone, and who with the signs of suffering in her frame was now exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but also hers. His habitual shame at the acceptance of events as if they were his only, helped him even here. As he looked at his mother silently after her last words, his face regained some of its penetrative calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitating influence over her: her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of fascination, but not with any repose of maternal delight. "Forgive me, if I speak hastily," he said, with diffident gravity. "Why have you resolved now on disclosing to me what you took care to have me brought up in ignorance of? Why--since you seem angry that I should be glad?" "Oh--the reasons of our actions!" said the Princess, with a ring of something like sarcastic scorn. "When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question--'Why did you do this?' People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel--or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did _not_ feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. But I did well for you, and I gave you your father's fortune. Do I seem now to be revoking everything?--Well, there are reasons. I feel many things that I cannot understand. A fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I shall very likely not live another year. I will not deny anything I have done. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are rising round me. Sickness makes them. If I have wronged the dead--I have but little time to do what I left undone." The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them. The speech was in fact a piece of what may be called sincere acting; this woman's nature was one in which all feeling--and all the more when it was tragic as well as real--immediately became matter of conscious representation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions. In a minor degree this is nothing uncommon, but in the Princess the acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice, and gesture. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of this double consciousness: she felt--that is, her mind went through--all the more, but with a difference; each nucleus of pain or pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the excitement or spiritual intoxication which at once exalts and deadens. But Deronda made no reflection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on the purport of what his mother was saying; her tones and her wonderful face entered into his agitation without being noted. What he longed for with an awed desire was to know as much as she would tell him of the strange mental conflict under which it seemed he had been brought into the world; what his compassionate nature made the controlling idea within him were the suffering and the confession that breathed through her later words, and these forbade any further question, when she paused and remained silent, with her brow knit, her head turned a little away from him, and her large eyes fixed as if on something incorporeal. He must wait for her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning her eyes upon him suddenly, and saying more quickly, "Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful mind--you comprehend everything--you are wiser than he is with all his sixty years. You say you are glad to know that you were born a Jew. I am not going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Your feelings are against mine. You don't thank me for what I did. Shall you comprehend your mother, or only blame her?" "There is not a fibre within me but makes me wish to comprehend her," said Deronda, meeting her sharp gaze solemnly. "It is a bitter reversal of my longing to think of blaming her. What I have been most trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself." "Then you have become unlike your grandfather in that." said the mother, "though you are a young copy of him in your face. He never comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called 'the Jewish woman' under pain of his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the _mezuza_ over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the _tephillin_ on them, and women not,--to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father's strictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting--'this you must be,' 'that you must not be'--pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what every one else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care. Ah!"--here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness--"you are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it." "When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my origin?" said Deronda, impulsively. "You have at least changed in your feeling on that point." "Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of me. I am still the same Leonora"--she pointed with her forefinger to her breast--"here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same choice, _but_"--she spread out her hands, palm upward, on each side of her, as she paused with a bitter compression of her lip, then let her voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance--"events come upon us like evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness are events--are they not? I don't consent. We only consent to what we love. I obey something tyrannic"--she spread out her hands again--"I am forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver." "I beseech you to tell me what moved you--when you were young, I mean--to take the course you did," said Deronda, trying by this reference to the past to escape from what to him was the heart-rending piteousness of this mingled suffering and defiance. "I gather that my grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. Though my own experience has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation." "No," said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms with an air of decision. "You are not a woman. You may try--but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out--'this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage." "Was my grandfather a learned man?" said Deronda, eager to know particulars that he feared his mother might not think of. She answered impatiently, putting up her hand, "Oh, yes,--and a clever physician--and good: I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play--grand, with an iron will. Like the old Foscari before he pardons. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself." She had folded her arms again, and looked as if she were ready to face some impending attempt at mastery. "Your father was different. Unlike me--all lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that he would put no hindrance in the way of my being an artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my father--always I had had an awe of him: it was impossible to help it. I hated to feel awed--I wished I could have defied him openly; but I never could. It was what I could not imagine: I could not act it to myself that I should begin to defy my father openly and succeed. And I never would risk failure." This last sentence was uttered with an abrupt emphasis, and she paused after it as if the words had raised a crowd of remembrances which obstructed speech. Her son was listening to her with feelings more and more highly mixed; the first sense of being repelled by the frank coldness which had replaced all his preconceptions of a mother's tender joy in the sight of him; the first impulses of indignation at what shocked his most cherished emotions and principles--all these busy elements of collision between them were subsiding for a time, and making more and more room for that effort at just allowance and that admiration of a forcible nature whose errors lay along high pathways, which he would have felt if, instead of being his mother, she had been a stranger who had appealed to his sympathy. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lest the next thing she had to say would be more repugnant to him than what had gone before: he was afraid of the strange corcion she seemed to be under to lay her mind bare: he almost wished he could say, "Tell me only what is necessary," and then again he felt the fascination which made him watch her and listen to her eagerly. He tried to recall her to particulars by asking, "Where was my grandfather's home?" "Here in Genoa, where I was married; and his family had lived here generations ago. But my father had been in various countries." "You must surely have lived in England?" "My mother was English--a Jewess of Portuguese descent. My father married her in England. Certain circumstances of that marriage made all the difference in my life: through that marriage my father thwarted his own plans. My mother's sister was a singer, and afterward she married the English partner of a merchant's house here in Genoa, and they came and lived here eleven years. My mother died when I was eight years old, and my father allowed me to be continually with my Aunt Leonora and be taught under her eyes, as if he had not minded the danger of her encouraging my wish to be a singer, as she had been. But this was it--I saw it again and again in my father:--he did not guard against consequences, because he felt sure he could hinder them if he liked. Before my aunt left Genoa, I had had enough teaching to bring out the born singer and actress within me: my father did not know everything that was done; but he knew that I was taught music and singing--he knew my inclination. That was nothing to him: he meant that I should obey his will. And he was resolved that I should marry my cousin Ephraim, the only one left of my father's family that he knew. I wanted not to marry. I thought of all plans to resist it, but at last I found that I could rule my cousin, and I consented. My father died three weeks after we were married, and then I had my way!" She uttered these words almost exultantly; but after a little pause her face changed, and she said in a biting tone, "It has not lasted, though. My father is getting his way now." She began to look more contemplatively again at her son, and presently said, "You are like him--but milder--there is something of your own father in you; and he made it the labor of his life to devote himself to me: wound up his money-changing and banking, and lived to wait upon me--he went against his conscience for me. As I loved the life of my art, so he loved me. Let me look at your hand again: the hand with the ring on. It was your father's ring." He drew his chair nearer to her and gave her his hand. We know what kind of a hand it was: her own, very much smaller, was of the same type. As he felt the smaller hand holding his, as he saw nearer to him the face that held the likeness of his own, aged not by time but by intensity, the strong bent of his nature toward a reverential tenderness asserted itself above every other impression and in his most fervent tone he said, "Mother! take us all into your heart--the living and the dead. Forgive every thing that hurts you in the past. Take my affection." She looked at him admiringly rather than lovingly, then kissed him on the brow, and saying sadly, "I reject nothing, but I have nothing to give," she released his hand and sank back on her cushions. Deronda turned pale with what seems always more of a sensation than an emotion--the pain of repulsed tenderness. She noticed the expression of pain, and said, still with melodious melancholy in her tones, "It is better so. We must part again soon and you owe me no duties. I did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. When your father died I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I could free myself from. I was the Alcharisi you have heard of: the name had magic wherever it was carried. Men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger was one who wished to marry me. He was madly in love with me. One day I asked him, 'Is there a man capable of doing something for love of me, and expecting nothing in return?' He said: 'What is it you want done?' I said, 'Take my boy and bring him up as an Englishman, and never let him know anything about his parents.' You were little more than two years old, and were sitting on his foot. He declared that he would pay money to have such a boy. I had not meditated much on the plan beforehand, but as soon as I had spoken about it, it took possession of me as something I could not rest without doing. At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him, and he was never surprised at anything. He agreed that it would be for your good, and the finest thing for you. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son. All that happened at Naples. And afterward I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; and I had a joy in doing it. My father had tyrannized over me--he cared more about a grandson to come than he did about me: I counted as nothing. You were to be such a Jew as he; you were to be what he wanted. But you were my son, and it was my turn to say what you should be. I said you should not know you were a Jew." "And for months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew," said Deronda, his opposition roused again. The point touched the quick of his experience. "It would always have been better that I should have known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents--the shame is to disown it." "You say it was a shame to me, then, that I used that secrecy," said his mother, with a flash of new anger. "There is no shame attaching to me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for you." "Then why have you now undone the secrecy?--no, not undone it--the effects will never be undone. But why have you now sent for me to tell me that I am a Jew?" said Deronda, with an intensity of opposition in feeling that was almost bitter. It seemed as if her words had called out a latent obstinacy of race in him. "Why?--ah, why?" said the Princess, rising quickly and walking to the other side of the room, where she turned round and slowly approached him, as he, too, stood up. Then she began to speak again in a more veiled voice. "I can't explain; I can only say what is. I don't love my father's religion now any more than I did then. Before I married the second time I was baptized; I made myself like the people I lived among. I had a right to do it; I was not like a brute, obliged to go with my own herd. I have not repented; I will not say that I have repented. But yet"--here she had come near to her son, and paused; then again retreated a little and stood still, as if resolute not to give way utterly to an imperious influence; but, as she went on speaking, she became more and more unconscious of anything but the awe that subdued her voice. "It is illness, I don't doubt that it has been gathering illness--my mind has gone back: more than a year ago it began. You see my gray hair, my worn look: it has all come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain--I dare say I shall be to-night. Then it is as if all the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can't get away: my pain seems to keep me there. My childhood--my girlhood--the day of my marriage--the day of my father's death--there seems to be nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me: what do I know of life or death? and what my father called 'right' may be a power that is laying hold of me--that is clutching me now. Well, I will satisfy him. I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying him. I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I thank God I have not burned it!" She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda, moved too strongly by her suffering for other impulses to act within him, drew near her, and said, entreatingly, "Will you not spare yourself this evening? Let us leave the rest till to-morrow." "No," she said decisively. "I will confess it all, now that I have come up to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self comes quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other will come--the poor, solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can resist nothing. It was my nature to resist, and say, 'I have a right to resist.' Well, I say so still when I have any strength in me. You have heard me say it, and I don't withdraw it. But when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand; and even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. And now you have made it worse for me," she said, with a sudden return of impetuosity; "but I shall have told you everything. And what reproach is there against me," she added bitterly, "since I have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched by a Jew. I wish you had!" she ended, with a new marvelous alternation. It was as if her mind were breaking into several, one jarring the other into impulsive action. "Who is Joseph Kalonymos?" said Deronda, with a darting recollection of that Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue. "Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you and come to reproach me. He was my father's friend. He knew of your birth: he knew of my husband's death, and once, twenty years ago, after he had been away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the world of my childhood. If I had said that you were living, he would have interfered with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent my father, and have tried to make me recall what I had done. What could I do but say you were dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it there would have been trouble and scandal--and all to conquer me, who would not have been conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had my will, though there might have been a hard fight against me. I took the way to have it without any fight. I felt then that I was not really deceiving: it would have come to the same in the end; or if not to the same, to something worse. He believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest--things that had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding--things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life--my life that was growing like a tree. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. I have committed no shameful act--except what Jews would call shameful. I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, and said, 'If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.' I bowed in silence. I meant not to marry again--no more than I meant to be the shattered woman that I am now." She ceased speaking, and her head sank back while she looked vaguely before her. Her thought was traveling through the years, and when she began to speak again her voice had lost its argumentative spirit, and had fallen into a veiled tone of distress. "But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort. He saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was nobody else in the world to whom the name would have told anything about me." "Then it is not my real name?" said Deronda, with a dislike even to this trifling part of the disguise which had been thrown round him. "Oh, as real as another," said his mother, indifferently. "The Jews have always been changing their names. My father's family had kept the name of Charisi: my husband was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer, we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family my father had lost sight of who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you, and Sir Hugo said, 'Let it be a foreign name,' I thought of Deronda. But Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion. He began to suspect what had been done. It was as if everything had been whispered to him in the air. He found out where I was. He took a journey into Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He had come back again, with his white hair, and with rage in his soul against me. He said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood and robbery--falsehood to my father and robbery of my own child. He accused me of having kept the knowledge of your birth from you, and having brought you up as if you had been the son of an English gentleman. Well, it was true; and twenty years before I would have maintained that I had a right to do it. But I can maintain nothing now. No faith is strong within me. My father may have God on his side. This man's words were like lion's teeth upon me. My father's threats eat into me with my pain. If I tell everything--if I deliver up everything--what else can be demanded of me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never loved--is it not enough that I lost the life I did love?" She had leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed like a smothered cry: her arms and hands were stretched out at full length, as if strained in beseeching, Deronda's soul was absorbed in the anguish of compassion. He could not mind now that he had been repulsed before. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. His single impulse was to kneel by her and take her hand gently, between his palms, while he said in that exquisite voice of soothing which expresses oneness with the sufferer, "Mother, take comfort!" She did not seem inclined to repulse him now, but looked down at him and let him take both her hands to fold between his. Gradually tears gathered, but she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and then leaned her cheek against his brow, as if she wished that they should not look at each other. "Is it not possible that I could be near you often and comfort you?" said Deronda. He was under that stress of pity that propels us on sacrifices. "No, not possible," she answered, lifting up her head again and withdrawing her hand as if she wished him to move away. "I have a husband and five children. None of them know of your existence." Deronda felt painfully silenced. He rose and stood at a little distance. "You wonder why I married," she went on presently, under the influence of a newly-recurring thought. "I meant never to marry again. I meant to be free and to live for my art. I had parted with you. I had no bonds. For nine years I was a queen. I enjoyed the life I had longed for. But something befell me. It was like a fit of forgetfulness. I began to sing out of tune. They told me of it. Another woman was thrusting herself in my place. I could not endure the prospect of failure and decline. It was horrible to me." She started up again, with a shudder, and lifted screening hands like one who dreads missiles. "It drove me to marry. I made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian noble to being the greatest lyric actress of Europe; I made believe--I acted that part. It was because I felt my greatness sinking away from me, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, 'She had better go.'" She sank into her seat again, and looked at the evening sky as she went on: "I repented. It was a resolve taken in desperation. That singing out of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went away. I repented; but it was too late. I could not go back. All things hindered, me--all things." A new haggardness had come in her face, but her son refrained from again urging her to leave further speech till the morrow: there was evidently some mental relief for her in an outpouring such as she could never have allowed herself before. He stood still while she maintained silence longer than she knew, and the light was perceptibly fading. At last she turned to him and said, "I can bear no more now." She put out her hand, but then quickly withdrew it saying, "Stay. How do I know that I can see you again? I cannot bear to be seen when I am in pain." She drew forth a pocket-book, and taking out a letter said, "This is addressed to the banking-house in Mainz, where you are to go for your grandfather's chest. It is a letter written by Joseph Kalonymos: if he is not there himself, this order of his will be obeyed." When Deronda had taken the letter, she said, with effort but more gently than before, "Kneel again, and let me kiss you." He obeyed, and holding his head between her hands, she kissed him solemnly on the brow. "You see, I had no life left to love you with," she said, in a low murmur. "But there is more fortune for you. Sir Hugo was to keep it in reserve. I gave you all your father's fortune. They can never accuse me of robbery there." "If you had needed anything I would have worked for you," said Deronda, conscious of disappointed yearning--a shutting out forever from long early vistas of affectionate imagination. "I need nothing that the skill of man can give me," said his mother, still holding his head, and perusing his features. "But perhaps now I have satisfied my father's will, your face will come instead of his--your young, loving face." "But you will see me again?" said Deronda, anxiously. "Yes--perhaps. Wait, wait. Leave me now."

When Deronda presented himself at the door of his mother's apartment he felt some revival of his boyhood agitations. The two servants looked a little surprised that the doctor their lady had come to consult was this striking young gentleman in evening dress. But Deronda could notice nothing until he found himself in the presence of a figure who stood awaiting his approach. She was covered, except her face and fore-arms, with black lace. Her arms, adorned with rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine poise of her head made it look handsomer than it really was. Deronda held the hand she had put out and raised it to his lips. She looked at him examiningly; he was conscious that her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person. Deronda felt himself changing colour, and yet wondering at his own lack of emotion; he had lived through so many ideal meetings with his mother, and they had seemed more real than this! He could not even conjecture in what language she would speak to him. Suddenly, she let fall his hand, and placed both hers on his shoulders, while a flash of admiration in her face seemed to restore its youth. "You are a beautiful creature!" she said, in a low melodious voice, with a foreign but agreeable pronunciation. "I knew you would be." Then she kissed him on each cheek, and he returned the kisses. But it was something like a greeting between royalties. She paused a moment and then said in a colder tone, "I am your mother. But you can have no love for me." "I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world," said Deronda, his voice trembling nervously. "I am not like what you thought I was," said the mother decisively, withdrawing her hands, and folding her arms again, looking at him as if she invited him to observe her. He saw her likeness to himself, but with striking differences. She was a remarkable looking being, but she gave him a painful sense of aloofness; her worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a Melusina of some other world. "I used to think that you might be suffering," he said, anxious not to wound her. "I used to wish that I could comfort you." "I am suffering. But with a suffering that you can't comfort," said the Princess, in a harder voice, moving to a sofa. "Sit down." She pointed to a seat near her; and then added, more gently, "I am not suffering at this moment. I am at ease now, and able to talk." Deronda seated himself and waited for her to speak again. It seemed as if he were in the presence of a mysterious Fate rather than the longed-for mother. He was beginning to watch her with wonder, from the spiritual distance to which she had thrown him. "I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not know what you will feel toward me. I have not the foolish notion that you can love me merely because I am your mother, when you have never seen me. But I did not think I deprived you of anything worth having." "You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been worth having," said Deronda. "I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the princess proudly, "But I had not much affection to give you. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. I was no princess then." She rose with a sudden movement, and Deronda rose too; he felt breathless. "I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad lives. I did not want a child." There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She seemed to fling out the last words against some possible reproach in the mind of her son, who had to stand and hear them - clutching his coat-collar as if he were keeping himself above water by it. She went on with the same intensity. "I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying by my father's commands; and besides, it was my best way of getting some freedom. I could rule my husband, but not my father. I had a right to seek freedom from a bondage that I hated." She seated herself again, and after a moment looked up at him with a less defiant pleading as she said- "I wanted to keep you from that bondage that I hated. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of being born a Jew." "Then I am a Jew?" Deronda burst out. "My father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?" "Yes, your father was my cousin," said the mother, watching him as if she saw something that she might have to be afraid of. "I am glad of it," he said impetuously. He could not have dreamed beforehand that he would say that in opposition to his mother. He was shaken by a mixed anger against this woman, who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had willingly made herself a stranger to him, and perhaps was now making herself known unwillingly. But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and with her the shaking was visible. She said violently- "Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured you that." "You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my birthright for me?" said Deronda, throwing himself into his chair again, while he looked away. He was now trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept in upon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this unique moment. There was a pause before his mother spoke again, in firmly resistant tones: "I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I know that you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know that you would love what I hated?- if you really love to be a Jew." The last words held such bitterness that any listener might have supposed some hatred had arisen between mother and son. But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling what life was like for her whose best years were gone, and who with a suffering frame was now exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but also hers. His face regained some of its penetrative calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitating influence over her: her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of fascination. "Forgive me, if I speak hastily," he said. "Why have you resolved now on disclosing the facts to me? Why - since you seem angry that I should be glad?" "Oh - reasons!" said the Princess, with sarcastic scorn. "When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel - or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me for sending you away, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. But I did well for you, and I gave you your father's fortune. As for reasons, a fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are rising round me. If I have wronged the dead - I have but little time to do what I left undone." The speech was in fact a piece of sincere acting; this woman's nature was one in which all feeling and experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own emotions. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of this: she felt all the more, but with a difference; each pain or pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the spiritual intoxication which at once exalts and deadens. But Deronda made no reflection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on his mother's meaning. He longed for her to tell him of the strange mental conflict under which it seemed he had been brought into the world; but his compassionate nature forbade any further question. She paused, with her brow knit, her head turned away. He must wait for her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning her eyes upon him suddenly, and saying- "Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful mind - you are wiser than he is with all his sixty years. You say you are glad that you were born a Jew. I am not going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Your feelings are against mine. You don't thank me for what I did. Shall you comprehend your mother, or only blame her?" "I wish only to comprehend her," said Deronda, meeting her sharp gaze solemnly. "It is a bitter reversal of my longing to think of blaming her. What I have been trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself." "Then you are unlike your grandfather," she said, "though you look like him. He never comprehended me; he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called 'the Jewish woman': to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat;- to adore the wisdom of such silly laws. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I did not care about Israel: I cared for the wide world. I hated living under the shadow of my father's strictness. 'You must be this,' 'you must not be that' pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted freedom. Ah!" - her tone changed to bitter incisiveness - "you are glad to have been born a Jew, because you were not brought up as a Jew. It seems sweet to you because I saved you from it." "Did you mean that I should never know my origin?" said Deronda. "You have changed your mind on that point." "I did mean that. And it is not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of me. I am still the same Leonora" - she pointed with her forefinger to her breast - "here within me is the same will, but events come upon us like evil enchantments. I obey something tyrannic: I am forced to feel pain, to be dying slowly. I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver." "Please tell me what moved you to take the course you did," said Deronda, trying to escape the heart-rending piteousness of this suffering and defiance. "I gather that my grandfather opposed your wish to be an artist. I can imagine the hardship of your struggle." "No," said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms. "You are not a woman. You may try - but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out - 'this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.' That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be singers and actresses for the Christian world. As if we were not the more enviable for that chance of escaping from bondage!" "Was my grandfather a learned man?" said Deronda eagerly. She answered impatiently, "Oh, yes, a clever physician - and good: I don't deny that. A man to be admired in a play - grand, with an iron will. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but since they cannot, they throw all the weight of their will onto women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child, and I was like himself. "Your father was different. Unlike me - all lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that he would not hinder my being an artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I was in awe of my father - I wished I could defy him openly; but I knew I could not succeed in that. And I never would risk failure." This last sentence was uttered with abrupt emphasis. Her son was listening to her with feelings more and more highly mixed; the first sense of being repelled by her frank coldness; the indignation at what shocked his most cherished principles - these feelings were subsiding, and making room for that effort at just allowance and admiration of a forcible nature which he would have felt if she had been a stranger. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lest her next words should be still more repugnant to him. He almost wished he could say, "Tell me only what is necessary," and yet he felt a fascination which made him listen eagerly. "Where was my grandfather's home?" "Here in Genoa; and his family lived here generations ago. But my father had been in various countries." "You must surely have lived in England?" "My mother was English - a Jewess of Portuguese descent. My father married her in England. Through that marriage he thwarted his own plans. My mother's sister was a singer who married a merchant of Genoa, and they lived here. My mother died when I was eight, and my father allowed me to be with my Aunt Leonora and be taught here, as if he had not minded her encouraging my wish to be a singer. But I saw it again and again in my father:- he did not guard against consequences, because he felt sure he could hinder them if he liked. My father knew my inclination. That was nothing to him: he meant that I should obey his will. And he was resolved that I should marry my cousin Ephraim. I wanted not to marry, but I found that I could rule my cousin, and I consented. My father died three weeks after we were married, and then I had my way!" She uttered these words almost exultantly; but after a little pause her face changed, and she said bitingly, "It has not lasted, though. My father is getting his way now." She looked more contemplatively at her son, and said- "You are like him - but milder - there is something of your own father in you; and he devoted himself to me. He wound up his money-changing and banking, and lived to wait upon me. As I loved my art, so he loved me. Let me look at your hand again, with the ring on. It was your father's ring." He gave her his hand. As he felt the smaller hand holding his, as he saw nearer to him the face so like his own, his tender nature made him say fervently- "Mother! take us all into your heart - the living and the dead. Forgive everything that hurts you. Take my affection." She looked at him admiringly rather than lovingly, then kissed him on the brow, and saying sadly, "I reject nothing, but I have nothing to give," she released his hand and sank back on her cushions. Deronda turned pale; and noticing this, she said- "It is better so. We must part again soon, and you owe me no duties. I parted with you willingly. When your father died I resolved that I would have no more ties. I was the singer Alcharisi you have heard of: men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger was one who wished to marry me. "One day I asked him, 'Is there a man capable of doing something for love of me, and expecting nothing in return?' He said: 'What is it you want done?' I said, 'Take my boy and bring him up as an Englishman, and never let him know anything about his parents.' You were little more than two years old, and were sitting on his foot. At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him. He agreed that it would be for your good. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son. "I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. I had a joy in doing it. My father had tyrannized over me - he cared more about a grandson to come than he did about me: I counted as nothing. You were to be such a Jew as he; you were to be what he wanted. But you were my son, and it was my turn to say what you should be. I said you should not know you were a Jew." "And for months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew," said Deronda, his opposition roused again. "It would have been better if I had known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents - the shame is to disown it." "I have no reason to be ashamed," said his mother, with a flash of new anger. "I rid myself of the Jewish gibberish that makes people nudge each other at sight of us. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for you." "Then why have you now undone it? Why have you now sent for me to tell me that I am a Jew?" said Deronda, feeling almost bitter. "Why?" said the Princess, rising quickly and walking across the room. "I can't explain. I don't love my father's religion now any more than I did then. I have not repented. But yet" - here she stood still, her voice subdued - "It is illness, I don't doubt - my mind has gone back. It has come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain - I dare say I shall be to-night. Then it is as if my will forsakes me and leaves me alone in memories, and I can't get away: my pain keeps me there. My childhood - my wedding day - the day of my father's death - there seems to be nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me. I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying my father. I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it, but I have not burned it, I thank God!" She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda, moved strongly by her suffering, entreated- "Let us leave the rest till tomorrow." "No," she said decisively. "I will confess it all. Often when I am at ease it fades away; my whole self comes back; but when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand. Even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. And what reproach is there against me," she added bitterly, "since I have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched by a Jew. I wish you had!" "Who is Joseph Kalonymos?" said Deronda, recalling the Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue. "He was my father's friend. He knew of your birth: he knew of my husband's death, and twenty years ago, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him that you were dead. If I had said that you were living, he would have interfered with my plans, and caused trouble. He believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest - things that had been dinned in my ears since I had any understanding. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn it. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. So I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, saying, 'If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.' I bowed in silence. I meant not to marry again." She ceased speaking, and looked vaguely before her: her thought was travelling through the years. When she spoke again, it was in a tone of distress. "But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort. He saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was nobody else in the world to whom the name meant anything." "Then it is not my real name?" said Deronda. "Oh, as real as another," said his mother, indifferently. "The Jews have always been changing their names. My husband was a Charisi; when I came out as a singer, we made it Alcharisi. But there had been an obscure branch of the family who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you, I thought of Deronda. Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion. "He found out where I was. He journeyed into Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He raged against me, and said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood. His words were like lion's teeth upon me. My father's threats eat into me with my pain. If I tell everything - what else can be demanded of me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never loved - is it not enough that I lost the life I did love?" She had leaned forward in pleading, her arms and hands stretched out beseechingly. Deronda's soul was absorbed in the anguish of compassion. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. He knelt by her and took her hand gently, saying, "Mother, take comfort!" She did not repulse him now, but let him fold her hands in his. Gradually tears gathered: she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and then leaned her cheek against his brow, as if she wished that they should not look at each other. "Is it not possible that I could be near you often and comfort you?" said Deronda. "No," she answered, withdrawing her hand. "I have a husband and five children. None of them know of your existence." Deronda felt painfully silenced. He rose and stood at a little distance. "You wonder why I married," she went on presently. "I meant never to marry again. I meant to be free and to live for my art. I was a queen. But something befell me. I began to sing out of tune. They told me of it. I could not endure the prospect of failure and decline. It was horrible to me." She shuddered. "It drove me to marry. I made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian noble to being the greatest lyric actress of Europe. I acted that part because I felt my greatness sinking away, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, 'She had better go.'" Looking at the evening sky, she went on: "I repented. That singing out of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went, and I repented; but it was too late. I could not go back." A new haggardness had come in her face. The light was perceptibly fading as she turned to him and said- "I can bear no more now. I cannot bear to be seen when I am in pain." She drew forth a pocket-book, and took out a letter. "This is addressed to the banking-house in Mainz, where you are to go for your grandfather's chest. It is a letter written by Joseph Kalonymos." Then she said, with effort but more gently than before, "Kneel again, and let me kiss you." He obeyed, and she kissed him solemnly on the brow. "You see, I had no life left to love you with," she said, in a low murmur. "But there is more fortune for you. Sir Hugo kept it in reserve." "If you had needed anything I would have worked for you," said Deronda, conscious of a shutting out forever from long vistas of affectionate imagination. "I need nothing that man can give me," said his mother, perusing his features. "But perhaps now I have satisfied my father's will, your face will come instead of his - your young, loving face." "But you will see me again?" said Deronda, anxiously. "Yes - perhaps. Leave me now."

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 51

Ever in his soul That larger justice which makes gratitude Triumphed above resentment. 'Tis the mark Of regal natures, with the wider life. And fuller capability of joy:-- Not wits exultant in the strongest lens To show you goodness vanished into pulp Never worth "thank you"--they're the devil's friars, Vowed to be poor as he in love and trust, Yet must go begging of a world that keeps Some human property. Deronda, in parting from Gwendolen, had abstained from saying, "I shall not see you again for a long while: I am going away," lest Grandcourt should understand him to imply that the fact was of importance to her. He was actually going away under circumstances so momentous to himself that when he set out to fulfill his promise of calling on her, he was already under the shadow of a solemn emotion which revived the deepest experience of his life. Sir Hugo had sent for him to his chambers with the note--"Come immediately. Something has happened:" a preparation that caused him some relief when, on entering the baronet's study, he was received with grave affection instead of the distress which he had apprehended. "It is nothing to grieve you, sir?" said Deronda, in a tone rather of restored confidence than question, as he took the hand held out to him. There was an unusual meaning in Sir Hugo's look, and a subdued emotion in his voice, as he said, "No, Dan, no. Sit down. I have something to say." Deronda obeyed, not without presentiment. It was extremely rare for Sir Hugo to show so much serious feeling. "Not to grieve me, my boy, no. At least, if there is nothing in it that will grieve you too much. But I hardly expected that this--just this--would ever happen. There have been reasons why I have never prepared you for it. There have been reasons why I have never told you anything about your parentage. But I have striven in every way not to make that an injury to you." Sir Hugo paused, but Deronda could not speak. He could not say, "I have never felt it an injury." Even if that had been true, he could not have trusted his voice to say anything. Far more than any one but himself could know of was hanging on this moment when the secrecy was to be broken. Sir Hugo had never seen the grand face he delighted in so pale--the lips pressed together with such a look of pain. He went on with a more anxious tenderness, as if he had a new fear of wounding. "I have acted in obedience to your mother's wishes. The secrecy was her wish. But now she desires to remove it. She desires to see you. I will put this letter into your hands, which you can look at by-and-by. It will merely tell you what she wishes you to do, and where you will find her." Sir Hugo held out a letter written on foreign paper, which Deronda thrust into his breast-pocket, with a sense of relief that he was not called on to read anything immediately. The emotion on Daniel's face had gained on the baronet, and was visibly shaking his composure. Sir Hugo found it difficult to say more. And Deronda's whole soul was possessed by a question which was the hardest in the world to utter. Yet he could not bear to delay it. This was a sacramental moment. If he let it pass, he could not recover the influences under which it was possible to utter the words and meet the answer. For some moments his eyes were cast down, and it seemed to both as if thoughts were in the air between them. But at last Deronda looked at Sir Hugo, and said, with a tremulous reverence in his voice--dreading to convey indirectly the reproach that affection had for years been stifling, "Is my father also living?" The answer came immediately in a low emphatic tone--"No." In the mingled emotions which followed that answer it was impossible to distinguish joy from pain. Some new light had fallen on the past for Sir Hugo too in this interview. After a silence in which Deronda felt like one whose creed is gone before he has religiously embraced another, the baronet said, in a tone of confession, "Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake what I did. And perhaps I liked it a little too well--having you all to myself. But if you have had any pain which I might have helped, I ask you to forgive me." "The forgiveness has long been there," said Deronda "The chief pain has always been on account of some one else--whom I never knew--whom I am now to know. It has not hindered me from feeling an affection for you which has made a large part of all the life I remember." It seemed one impulse that made the two men clasp each other's hand for a moment.

Deronda, in parting from Gwendolen, did not tell her he was going away, lest Grandcourt should infer that the fact was important to her. He was actually going abroad under circumstances so momentous that when he called on her, he was already affected by solemn emotion. Sir Hugo had sent a note to his chambers- "Come immediately. Something has happened." Expecting bad news on entering the baronet's study, he was relieved to be received with affection. However, there was a subdued emotion in Sir Hugo's voice, as he said- "Sit down, Dan. I have something to say." Deronda obeyed, not without presentiment. It was extremely rare for Sir Hugo to show so much serious feeling. "I hardly expected that this would ever happen. There have been reasons why I have never prepared you for it, and never told you anything about your parentage." Sir Hugo paused, but Deronda could not trust his voice to speak, with so much hanging on this moment when the secrecy was to be broken. Sir Hugo went on with anxious tenderness. "I have acted in obedience to your mother's wishes. The secrecy was her wish. But now she desires to see you. This letter, which you can read later, will tell you what she wishes you to do, and where you will find her." Sir Hugo held out a letter written on foreign paper, which Deronda thrust into his breast-pocket, relieved that he was not called on to read it immediately. His composure shaken, Sir Hugo found it difficult to say more. And Deronda's whole soul was possessed by a question which was the hardest in the world to utter. Yet he could not bear to delay it. At last he looked at Sir Hugo, and said, with a tremulous reverence in his voice, dreading to convey any reproach- "Is my father also living?" The answer came: a low emphatic "No." Some light had fallen on the past for Sir Hugo too in this interview. The baronet said, in a tone of confession- "Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake what I did. I liked having you all to myself. But if you have had any pain, I ask you to forgive me." "The forgiveness has long been there," said Deronda. "The chief pain has always been on account of my mother. But my affection for you has made a large part of my life." And with one impulse the two men clasped each other's hands.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 49

This man contrives a secret 'twixt us two, That he may quell me with his meeting eyes Like one who quells a lioness at bay. This was the letter Gwendolen found on her table:, DEAREST CHILD.--I have been expecting to hear from you for a week. In your last you said the Langens thought of leaving Leubronn and going to Baden. How could you be so thoughtless as to leave me in uncertainty about your address? I am in the greatest anxiety lest this should not reach you. In any case, you were to come home at the end of September, and I must now entreat you to return as quickly as possible, for if you spent all your money it would be out of my power to send you any more, and you must not borrow of the Langens, for I could not repay them. This is the sad truth, my child--I wish I could prepare you for it better--but a dreadful calamity has befallen us all. You know nothing about business and will not understand it; but Grapnell & Co. have failed for a million, and we are totally ruined--your aunt Gascoigne as well as I, only that your uncle has his benefice, so that by putting down their carriage and getting interest for the boys, the family can go on. All the property our poor father saved for us goes to pay the liabilities. There is nothing I can call my own. It is better you should know this at once, though it rends my heart to have to tell it you. Of course we cannot help thinking what a pity it was that you went away just when you did. But I shall never reproach you, my dear child; I would save you from all trouble if I could. On your way home you will have time to prepare yourself for the change you will find. We shall perhaps leave Offendene at once, for we hope that Mr. Haynes, who wanted it before, may be ready to take it off my hands. Of course we cannot go to the rectory--there is not a corner there to spare. We must get some hut or other to shelter us, and we must live on your uncle Gascoigne's charity, until I see what else can be done. I shall not be able to pay the debts to the tradesmen besides the servants' wages. Summon up your fortitude, my dear child; we must resign ourselves to God's will. But it is hard to resign one's self to Mr. Lassman's wicked recklessness, which they say was the cause of the failure. Your poor sisters can only cry with me and give me no help. If you were once here, there might be a break in the cloud--I always feel it impossible that you can have been meant for poverty. If the Langens wish to remain abroad, perhaps you can put yourself under some one else's care for the journey. But come as soon as you can to your afflicted and loving mamma, FANNY DAVILOW. The first effect of this letter on Gwendolen was half-stupefying. The implicit confidence that her destiny must be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble that occurred would be well clad and provided for, had been stronger in her own mind than in her mamma's, being fed there by her youthful blood and that sense of superior claims which made a large part of her consciousness. It was almost as difficult for her to believe suddenly that her position had become one of poverty and of humiliating dependence, as it would have been to get into the strong current of her blooming life the chill sense that her death would really come. She stood motionless for a few minutes, then tossed off her hat and automatically looked in the glass. The coils of her smooth light-brown hair were still in order perfect enough for a ball-room; and as on other nights, Gwendolen might have looked lingeringly at herself for pleasure (surely an allowable indulgence); but now she took no conscious note of her reflected beauty, and simply stared right before her as if she had been jarred by a hateful sound and was waiting for any sign of its cause. By-and-by she threw herself in the corner of the red velvet sofa, took up the letter again and read it twice deliberately, letting it at last fall on the ground, while she rested her clasped hands on her lap and sat perfectly still, shedding no tears. Her impulse was to survey and resist the situation rather than to wail over it. There was no inward exclamation of "Poor mamma!" Her mamma had never seemed to get much enjoyment out of life, and if Gwendolen had been at this moment disposed to feel pity she would have bestowed it on herself--for was she not naturally and rightfully the chief object of her mamma's anxiety too? But it was anger, it was resistance that possessed her; it was bitter vexation that she had lost her gains at roulette, whereas if her luck had continued through this one day she would have had a handsome sum to carry home, or she might have gone on playing and won enough to support them all. Even now was it not possible? She had only four napoleons left in her purse, but she possessed some ornaments which she could sell: a practice so common in stylish society at German baths that there was no need to be ashamed of it; and even if she had not received her mamma's letter, she would probably have decided to get money for an Etruscan necklace which she happened not to have been wearing since her arrival; nay, she might have done so with an agreeable sense that she was living with some intensity and escaping humdrum. With ten louis at her disposal and a return of her former luck, which seemed probable, what could she do better than go on playing for a few days? If her friends at home disapproved of the way in which she got the money, as they certainly would, still the money would be there. Gwendolen's imagination dwelt on this course and created agreeable consequences, but not with unbroken confidence and rising certainty as it would have done if she had been touched with the gambler's mania. She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from which her pride sank sensitively. For she was resolved not to tell the Langens that any misfortune had befallen her family, or to make herself in any way indebted to their compassion; and if she were to part with her jewelry to any observable extent, they would interfere by inquiries and remonstrances. The course that held the least risk of intolerable annoyance was to raise money on her necklace early in the morning, tell the Langens that her mother desired her immediate return without giving a reason, and take the train for Brussels that evening. She had no maid with her, and the Langens might make difficulties about her returning home, but her will was peremptory. Instead of going to bed she made as brilliant a light as she could and began to pack, working diligently, though all the while visited by the scenes that might take place on the coming day--now by the tiresome explanations and farewells, and the whirling journey toward a changed home, now by the alternative of staying just another day and standing again at the roulette-table. But always in this latter scene there was the presence of that Deronda, watching her with exasperating irony, and--the two keen experiences were inevitably revived together--beholding her again forsaken by luck. This importunate image certainly helped to sway her resolve on the side of immediate departure, and to urge her packing to the point which would make a change of mind inconvenient. It had struck twelve when she came into her room, and by the time she was assuring herself that she had left out only what was necessary, the faint dawn was stealing through the white blinds and dulling her candles. What was the use of going to bed? Her cold bath was refreshment enough, and she saw that a slight trace of fatigue about the eyes only made her look the more interesting. Before six o'clock she was completely equipped in her gray traveling dress even to her felt hat, for she meant to walk out as soon as she could count on seeing other ladies on their way to the springs. And happening to be seated sideways before the long strip of mirror between her two windows she turned to look at herself, leaning her elbow on the back of the chair in an attitude that might have been chosen for her portrait. It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care; but Gwendolen knew nothing of such inward strife. She had a _nave_ delight in her fortunate self, which any but the harshest saintliness will have some indulgence for in a girl who had every day seen a pleasant reflection of that self in her friends' flattery as well as in the looking-glass. And even in this beginning of troubles, while for lack of anything else to do she sat gazing at her image in the growing light, her face gathered a complacency gradual as the cheerfulness of the morning. Her beautiful lips curled into a more and more decided smile, till at last she took off her hat, leaned forward and kissed the cold glass which had looked so warm. How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already. Anything seemed more possible than that she could go on bearing miseries, great or small. Madame von Langen never went out before breakfast, so that Gwendolen could safely end her early walk by taking her way homeward through the Obere Strasse in which was the needed shop, sure to be open after seven. At that hour any observers whom she minded would be either on their walks in the region of the springs, or would be still in their bedrooms; but certainly there was one grand hotel, the _Czarina_ from which eyes might follow her up to Mr. Wiener's door. This was a chance to be risked: might she not be going in to buy something which had struck her fancy? This implicit falsehood passed through her mind as she remembered that the _Czarina_ was Deronda's hotel; but she was then already far up the Obere Strasse, and she walked on with her usual floating movement, every line in her figure and drapery falling in gentle curves attractive to all eyes except those which discerned in them too close a resemblance to the serpent, and objected to the revival of serpent-worship. She looked neither to the right hand nor to the left, and transacted her business in the shop with a coolness which gave little Mr. Wiener nothing to remark except her proud grace of manner, and the superior size and quality of the three central turquoises in the necklace she offered him. They had belonged to a chain once her father's: but she had never known her father; and the necklace was in all respects the ornament she could most conveniently part with. Who supposes that it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalizing at the same time? Roulette encourages a romantic superstition as to the chances of the game, and the most prosaic rationalism as to human sentiments which stand in the way of raising needful money. Gwendolen's dominant regret was that after all she had only nine louis to add to the four in her purse: these Jew dealers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play! But she was the Langens' guest in their hired apartment, and had nothing to pay there: thirteen louis would do more than take her home; even if she determined on risking three, the remaining ten would more than suffice, since she meant to travel right on, day and night. As she turned homeward, nay, entered and seated herself in the _salon_ to await her friends and breakfast, she still wavered as to her immediate departure, or rather she had concluded to tell the Langens simply that she had had a letter from her mamma desiring her return, and to leave it still undecided when she should start. It was already the usual breakfast-time, and hearing some one enter as she was leaning back rather tired and hungry with her eyes shut, she rose expecting to see one or other of the Langens--the words which might determine her lingering at least another day, ready-formed to pass her lips. But it was the servant bringing in a small packet for Miss Harleth, which had at that moment been left at the door. Gwendolen took it in her hand and immediately hurried into her own room. She looked paler and more agitated than when she had first read her mamma's letter. Something--she never quite knew what--revealed to her before she opened the packet that it contained the necklace she had just parted with. Underneath the paper it was wrapped in a cambric handkerchief, and within this was a scrap of torn-off note-paper, on which was written with a pencil, in clear but rapid handwriting--"_A stranger who has found Miss Harleth's necklace returns it to her with the hope that she will not again risk the loss of it._" Gwendolen reddened with the vexation of wounded pride. A large corner of the handkerchief seemed to have been recklessly torn off to get rid of a mark; but she at once believed in the first image of "the stranger" that presented itself to her mind. It was Deronda; he must have seen her go into the shop; he must have gone in immediately after and repurchased the necklace. He had taken an unpardonable liberty, and had dared to place her in a thoroughly hateful position. What could she do?--Not, assuredly, act on her conviction that it was he who had sent her the necklace and straightway send it back to him: that would be to face the possibility that she had been mistaken; nay, even if the "stranger" were he and no other, it would be something too gross for her to let him know that she had divined this, and to meet him again with that recognition in their minds. He knew very well that he was entangling her in helpless humiliation: it was another way of smiling at her ironically, and taking the air of a supercilious mentor. Gwendolen felt the bitter tears of mortification rising and rolling down her cheeks. No one had ever before dared to treat her with irony and contempt. One thing was clear: she must carry out her resolution to quit this place at once; it was impossible for her to reappear in the public _salon_, still less stand at the gaming-table with the risk of seeing Deronda. Now came an importunate knock at the door: breakfast was ready. Gwendolen with a passionate movement thrust necklace, cambric, scrap of paper, and all into her _ncessaire_, pressed her handkerchief against her face, and after pausing a minute or two to summon back her proud self-control, went to join her friends. Such signs of tears and fatigue as were left seemed accordant enough with the account she at once gave of her having sat up to do her packing, instead of waiting for help from her friend's maid. There was much protestation, as she had expected, against her traveling alone, but she persisted in refusing any arrangements for companionship. She would be put into the ladies' compartment and go right on. She could rest exceedingly well in the train, and was afraid of nothing. In this way it happened that Gwendolen never reappeared at the roulette-table, but that Thursday evening left Leubronn for Brussels, and on Saturday morning arrived at Offendene, the home to which she and her family were soon to say a last good-bye.

This was the letter Gwendolen found on her table: 'DEAREST CHILD. - I have been expecting to hear from you. In your last letter you said the Langens thought of leaving Leubronn for Baden. How could you be so thoughtless as to leave me in uncertainty about your address? I am in the greatest anxiety lest this should not reach you. I must entreat you to return as quickly as possible, for if you spent all your money I would be powerless to send you any more, and you must not borrow of the Langens, for I could not repay them. 'This is the sad truth, my child - a dreadful calamity has befallen us all. You know nothing about business and will not understand it; but Grapnell & Co. have failed for a million, and we are totally ruined - your aunt Gascoigne as well as I, except that your uncle's benefice means that they can manage. All the property our poor father saved for us is gone. There is nothing I can call my own. It is better you should know this at once, though it rends my heart to have to tell it you. We cannot help thinking what a pity it was that you went away just when you did; but I shall never reproach you, my dear child; I would save you from all trouble if I could. 'On your way home you will have time to prepare yourself for changes. We shall leave Offendene. Of course we cannot go to the rectory - there is not a corner there to spare. We must get some hut or other to shelter us, and live on your uncle Gascoigne's charity, until I see what else can be done. Summon your fortitude, my dear child; we must resign ourselves to God's will. But it is hard to resign one's self to the wicked recklessness which was the cause of the failure. Your poor sisters can only cry and give me no help. If you were here, there might be a break in the cloud - I always feel it impossible that you can have been meant for poverty. Come as soon as you can to your afflicted and loving mamma, 'FANNY DAVILOW.' The first effect of this letter on Gwendolen was half-stupefying. Her confidence that her destiny must be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble would be well provided for, had been stronger in her own mind than in her mamma's, fed by her youth and her sense of superior claims. It was almost as difficult for her to believe suddenly in her poverty and humiliating dependence, as it would have been for her to take into her strong blooming life the chill sense that her death would really come. She stood motionless for a few minutes, then tossed off her hat and automatically looked in the glass. The coils of her smooth light-brown hair were still in perfect order. On other nights, Gwendolen might have looked lingeringly at herself for pleasure; but now she took no note of her beauty, and simply stared before her. By-and-by she threw herself onto the sofa and read the letter again twice, letting it at last fall on the ground, while she sat still, shedding no tears. Her impulse was to survey and resist the situation rather than to wail over it. There was no pity for "Poor mamma!" Her mamma had never seemed to get much enjoyment out of life, and Gwendolen would rather have bestowed any pity on herself. But it was anger, it was resistance that possessed her; it was bitter vexation that she had lost her gains at roulette, whereas if her luck had continued through this one day she would have had a handsome sum to carry home, or she might have gone on playing and won enough to support them all. Even now was it not possible? She had little money left in her purse, but she had some ornaments which she could sell: a practice so common in stylish society here that there was no need to be ashamed of it. Even if she had not received her mamma's letter, she would probably have decided to get money for an Etruscan necklace which she had not worn since her arrival. With money and a return of her former luck, which seemed probable, what could she do better than go on playing for a few days? If her friends at home disapproved, as they certainly would, still the money would be there. Gwendolen imagined following this course and its agreeable consequences, but not with the unbroken confidence of a committed gambler. She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing made a vision from which her pride shrank. For she was resolved not to tell the Langens that any misfortune had befallen her family, or to make herself in any way indebted to their compassion; and if they were to see her part with her jewellery, they would interfere. The least risky course was to sell her necklace early in the morning, tell the Langens that her mother desired her immediate return without giving a reason, and take the train for Brussels that evening. Instead of going to bed she began to pack, all the while foreseeing the events of the coming day - the tiresome explanations and farewells, and the whirling journey toward a changed home; or the alternative of staying just another day and standing again at the roulette-table. But always in this latter scene there was the presence of Deronda, watching her with exasperating irony, and seeing her again forsaken by luck. She resolved on departing immediately. By the time she finishing packing, the faint dawn was stealing through the blinds. What was the use of going to bed? A slight trace of fatigue about the eyes only made her look more interesting. Before six o'clock she was equipped in her grey travelling dress, for she meant to walk out as soon as other ladies would be on their way to the springs. Seated before the mirror, she turned to look at herself, leaning on the back of the chair in an attitude that might have been chosen for her portrait. She had a nave delight in herself, which may be forgiven in a girl who had every day seen a pleasant reflection of that self in her friends' flattery as well as in the looking-glass. And even in this beginning of troubles, while she sat gazing at her image in the growing light, her face gathered a gradual complacency. Her beautiful lips curled into a more and more decided smile, till at last she took off her hat, leaned forward and kissed the cold glass. How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already. Anything seemed more possible than that she could go on bearing miseries. Madame von Langen never went out before breakfast, so Gwendolen could safely walk up to the shop she needed, which was sure to be open after seven. At that hour any observers would be either on their walks towards the springs, or still in their bedrooms; but certainly there was one grand hotel, the Czarina, from which eyes might follow her up to Mr. Wiener's shop. This was a risk: she remembered that the Czarina was Deronda's hotel; but she was already far up the road, and walked on with her usual floating movement, every line in her figure and drapery falling in gentle curves attractive to all eyes except those which saw in them too close a resemblance to the serpent. She looked neither to right nor left on the way, and transacted her business in the shop with a coolness which gave little Mr. Weiner nothing to remark except her proud grace of manner, and the superior quality of the three central turquoises in the necklace she offered him. They had belonged to a chain once her father's: but she had never known her father; and the necklace was the ornament she could most conveniently part with. Gwendolen's chief regret was that she added only nine louis to the four in her purse: these Jew dealers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play! But she was the Langens' guest in their apartment, and had nothing to pay there. Thirteen louis would do more than take her home; even if she decided to risk three, the remaining ten would suffice. As she turned homeward and seated herself in the salon to await her friends and breakfast, she still wavered as to her immediate departure. She had resolved to tell the Langens simply that she had had a letter from her mamma desiring her return, and to leave it undecided when she should start. By now rather tired and hungry, she was leaning back when she heard some one enter. She rose expecting to see one of the Langens; but it was the servant bringing in a small packet for Miss Harleth, which had just been left at the door. Gwendolen took it and immediately hurried to her room, paler and more agitated than when she had first read her mamma's letter. Something - she never quite knew what - revealed to her before she opened the packet that it contained the necklace she had just parted with. It was wrapped in a handkerchief, and with it was a scrap of note-paper, on which was written, in clear but rapid handwriting- "A stranger who has found Miss Harleth's necklace returns it to her with the hope that she will not again risk the loss of it." Gwendolen reddened with the vexation of wounded pride. A large corner of the handkerchief seemed to have been torn off to get rid of an owner's mark; but she at once believed in the first image of "the stranger" that presented itself to her mind. It was Deronda; he must have seen her go into the shop; he must have gone in immediately after and repurchased the necklace. He had taken an unpardonable liberty, and had placed her in a hateful position. What could she do? - Not, certainly, straightway send the necklace back to him: for she might be mistaken. But even if the "stranger" were he, it would be too gross to let him know that she had realised this, and to meet him again with that recognition in their minds. He knew very well that he was causing her helpless humiliation: it was another way of smiling at her ironically. Gwendolen felt bitter tears of mortification rolling down her cheeks. No one had ever before dared to treat her with irony and contempt. One thing was clear: she must leave at once; it was impossible for her to reappear in the salon, still less stand at the gaming-table with the risk of seeing Deronda. There came a knock at the door: breakfast was ready. Gwendolen passionately thrust necklace, cambric, paper and all into her bag, pressed her handkerchief against her face, and after pausing a minute to summon her proud self-control, went to join her friends. Her signs of tears and fatigue seemed accordant enough with the account she gave of her having sat up to do her packing. Her friends protested against her travelling alone, but she refused any companion. She would be put into the ladies' compartment and go right on. She could rest exceedingly well in the train, and was afraid of nothing. In this way it happened that Gwendolen never reappeared at the roulette-table, but that Thursday evening left Leubronn for Brussels, and on Saturday morning arrived at Offendene, the home to which she and her family were soon to say a last good-bye.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 2

I'll tell thee, Berthold, what men's hopes are like: A silly child that, quivering with joy, Would cast its little mimic fishing-line Baited with loadstone for a bowl of toys In the salt ocean. Eight months after the arrival of the family at Offendene, that is to say in the end of the following June, a rumor was spread in the neighborhood which to many persons was matter of exciting interest. It had no reference to the results of the American war, but it was one which touched all classes within a certain circuit round Wanchester: the corn-factors, the brewers, the horse-dealers, and saddlers, all held it a laudable thing, and one which was to be rejoiced in on abstract grounds, as showing the value of an aristocracy in a free country like England; the blacksmith in the hamlet of Diplow felt that a good time had come round; the wives of laboring men hoped their nimble boys of ten or twelve would be taken into employ by the gentlemen in livery; and the farmers about Diplow admitted, with a tincture of bitterness and reserve, that a man might now again perhaps have an easier market or exchange for a rick of old hay or a wagon-load of straw. If such were the hopes of low persons not in society, it may be easily inferred that their betters had better reasons for satisfaction, probably connected with the pleasures of life rather than its business. Marriage, however, must be considered as coming under both heads; and just as when a visit of majesty is announced, the dream of knighthood or a baronetcy is to be found under various municipal nightcaps, so the news in question raised a floating indeterminate vision of marriage in several well-bred imaginations. The news was that Diplow Hall, Sir Hugo Mallinger's place, which had for a couple of years turned its white window-shutters in a painfully wall-eyed manner on its fine elms and beeches, its lilied pool and grassy acres specked with deer, was being prepared for a tenant, and was for the rest of the summer and through the hunting season to be inhabited in a fitting style both as to house and stable. But not by Sir Hugo himself: by his nephew, Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt, who was presumptive heir to the baronetcy, his uncle's marriage having produced nothing but girls. Nor was this the only contingency with which fortune flattered young Grandcourt, as he was pleasantly called; for while the chance of the baronetcy came through his father, his mother had given a baronial streak to his blood, so that if certain intervening persons slightly painted in the middle distance died, he would become a baron and peer of this realm. It is the uneven allotment of nature that the male bird alone has the tuft, but we have not yet followed the advice of hasty philosophers who would have us copy nature entirely in these matters; and if Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt became a baronet or a peer, his wife would share the title--which in addition to his actual fortune was certainly a reason why that wife, being at present unchosen, should be thought of by more than one person with a sympathetic interest as a woman sure to be well provided for. Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall: they will aver that neither they nor their first cousins have minds so unbridled; and that in fact this is not human nature, which would know that such speculations might turn out to be fallacious, and would therefore not entertain them. But, let it be observed, nothing is here narrated of human nature generally: the history in its present stage concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex--whose reputation, however, was unimpeached, and who, I am in the proud position of being able to state, were all on visiting terms with persons of rank. There were the Arrowpoints, for example, in their beautiful place at Quetcham: no one could attribute sordid views in relation to their daughter's marriage to parents who could leave her at least half a million; but having affectionate anxieties about their Catherine's position (she having resolutely refused Lord Slogan, an unexceptionable Irish peer, whose estate wanted nothing but drainage and population), they wondered, perhaps from something more than a charitable impulse, whether Mr. Grandcourt was good-looking, of sound constitution, virtuous, or at least reformed, and if liberal-conservative, not too liberal-conservative; and without wishing anybody to die, thought his succession to the title an event to be desired. If the Arrowpoints had such ruminations, it is the less surprising that they were stimulated in Mr. Gascoigne, who for being a clergyman was not the less subject to the anxieties of a parent and guardian; and we have seen how both he and Mrs. Gascoigne might by this time have come to feel that he was overcharged with the management of young creatures who were hardly to be held in with bit or bridle, or any sort of metaphor that would stand for judicious advice. Naturally, people did not tell each other all they felt and thought about young Grandcourt's advent: on no subject is this openness found prudently practicable--not even on the generation of acids, or the destination of the fixed stars: for either your contemporary with a mind turned toward the same subjects may find your ideas ingenious and forestall you in applying them, or he may have other views on acids and fixed stars, and think ill of you in consequence. Mr. Gascoigne did not ask Mr. Arrowpoint if he had any trustworthy source of information about Grandcourt considered as a husband for a charming girl; nor did Mrs. Arrowpoint observe to Mrs. Davilow that if the possible peer sought a wife in the neighborhood of Diplow, the only reasonable expectation was that he would offer his hand to Catherine, who, however, would not accept him unless he were in all respects fitted to secure her happiness. Indeed, even to his wife the rector was silent as to the contemplation of any matrimonial result, from the probability that Mr. Grandcourt would see Gwendolen at the next Archery Meeting; though Mrs. Gascoigne's mind was very likely still more active in the same direction. She had said interjectionally to her sister, "It would be a mercy, Fanny, if that girl were well married!" to which Mrs. Davilow discerning some criticism of her darling in the fervor of that wish, had not chosen to make any audible reply, though she had said inwardly, "You will not get her to marry for your pleasure"; the mild mother becoming rather saucy when she identified herself with her daughter. To her husband Mrs. Gascoigne said, "I hear Mr. Grandcourt has got two places of his own, but he comes to Diplow for the hunting. It is to be hoped he will set a good example in the neighborhood. Have you heard what sort of a young man he is, Henry?" Mr. Gascoigne had not heard; at least, if his male acquaintances had gossiped in his hearing, he was not disposed to repeat their gossip, or to give it any emphasis in his own mind. He held it futile, even if it had been becoming, to show any curiosity as to the past of a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable. Whatever Grandcourt had done, he had not ruined himself; and it is well-known that in gambling, for example, whether of the business or holiday sort, a man who has the strength of mind to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character. This is an illustration merely: Mr. Gascoigne had not heard that Grandcourt had been a gambler; and we can hardly pronounce him singular in feeling that a landed proprietor with a mixture of noble blood in his veins was not to be an object of suspicious inquiry like a reformed character who offers himself as your butler or footman. Reformation, where a man can afford to do without it, can hardly be other than genuine. Moreover, it was not certain on any other showing hitherto, that Mr. Grandcourt had needed reformation more than other young men in the ripe youth of five-and-thirty; and, at any rate, the significance of what he had been must be determined by what he actually was. Mrs. Davilow, too, although she would not respond to her sister's pregnant remark, could not be inwardly indifferent to an advent that might promise a brilliant lot for Gwendolen. A little speculation on "what may be" comes naturally, without encouragement--comes inevitably in the form of images, when unknown persons are mentioned; and Mr. Grandcourt's name raised in Mrs. Davilow's mind first of all the picture of a handsome, accomplished, excellent young man whom she would be satisfied with as a husband for her daughter; but then came the further speculation--would Gwendolen be satisfied with him? There was no knowing what would meet that girl's taste or touch her affections--it might be something else than excellence; and thus the image of the perfect suitor gave way before a fluctuating combination of qualities that might be imagined to win Gwendolen's heart. In the difficulty of arriving at the particular combination which would insure that result, the mother even said to herself, "It would not signify about her being in love, if she would only accept the right person." For whatever marriage had been for herself, how could she the less desire it for her daughter? The difference her own misfortunes made was, that she never dared to dwell much to Gwendolen on the desirableness of marriage, dreading an answer something like that of the future Madame Roland, when her gentle mother urging the acceptance of a suitor, said, "Tu seras heureuse, ma chre." "Oui, maman, comme toi." In relation to the problematic Mr. Grandcourt least of all would Mrs. Davilow have willingly let fall a hint of the aerial castle-building which she had the good taste to be ashamed of; for such a hint was likely enough to give an adverse poise to Gwendolen's own thought, and make her detest the desirable husband beforehand. Since that scene after poor Rex's farewell visit, the mother had felt a new sense of peril in touching the mystery of her child's feeling, and in rashly determining what was her welfare: only she could think of welfare in no other shape than marriage. The discussion of the dress that Gwendolen was to wear at the Archery Meeting was a relevant topic, however; and when it had been decided that as a touch of color on her white cashmere, nothing, for her complexion, was comparable to pale green--a feather which she was trying in her hat before the looking-glass having settled the question--Mrs. Davilow felt her ears tingle when Gwendolen, suddenly throwing herself into the attitude of drawing her bow, said with a look of comic enjoyment, "How I pity all the other girls at the Archery Meeting--all thinking of Mr. Grandcourt! And they have not a shadow of a chance." Mrs. Davilow had not the presence of mind to answer immediately, and Gwendolen turned round quickly toward her, saying, wickedly, "Now you know they have not, mamma. You and my uncle and aunt--you all intend him to fall in love with me." Mrs. Davilow, piqued into a little stratagem, said, "Oh, my, dear, that is not so certain. Miss Arrowpoint has charms which you have not." "I know, but they demand thought. My arrow will pierce him before he has time for thought. He will declare himself my slave--I shall send him round the world to bring me back the wedding ring of a happy woman--in the meantime all the men who are between him and the title will die of different diseases--he will come back Lord Grandcourt--but without the ring--and fall at my feet. I shall laugh at him--he will rise in resentment--I shall laugh more--he will call for his steed and ride to Quetcham, where he will find Miss Arrowpoint just married to a needy musician, Mrs. Arrowpoint tearing her cap off, and Mr. Arrowpoint standing by. Exit Lord Grandcourt, who returns to Diplow, and, like M. Jabot, _change de linge_." Was ever any young witch like this? You thought of hiding things from her--sat upon your secret and looked innocent, and all the while she knew by the corner of your eye that it was exactly five pounds ten you were sitting on! As well turn the key to keep out the damp! It was probable that by dint of divination she already knew more than any one else did of Mr. Grandcourt. That idea in Mrs. Davilow's mind prompted the sort of question which often comes without any other apparent reason than the faculty of speech and the not knowing what to do with it. "Why, what kind of a man do you imagine him to be, Gwendolen?" "Let me see!" said the witch, putting her forefinger to her lips, with a little frown, and then stretching out the finger with decision. "Short--just above my shoulder--trying to make himself tall by turning up his mustache and keeping his beard long--a glass in his right eye to give him an air of distinction--a strong opinion about his waistcoat, but uncertain and trimming about the weather, on which he will try to draw me out. He will stare at me all the while, and the glass in his eye will cause him to make horrible faces, especially when he smiles in a flattering way. I shall cast down my eyes in consequence, and he will perceive that I am not indifferent to his attentions. I shall dream that night that I am looking at the extraordinary face of a magnified insect--and the next morning he will make an offer of his hand; the sequel as before." "That is a portrait of some one you have seen already, Gwen. Mr. Grandcourt may be a delightful young man for what you know." "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, with a high note of careless admission, taking off her best hat and turning it round on her hand contemplatively. "I wonder what sort of behavior a delightful young man would have? I know he would have hunters and racers, and a London house and two country-houses--one with battlements and another with a veranda. And I feel sure that with a little murdering he might get a title." The irony of this speech was of the doubtful sort that has some genuine belief mixed up with it. Poor Mrs. Davilow felt uncomfortable under it. Her own meanings being usually literal and in intention innocent; and she said with a distressed brow: "Don't talk in that way, child, for heaven's sake! you do read such books--they give you such ideas of everything. I declare when your aunt and I were your age we knew nothing about wickedness. I think it was better so." "Why did you not bring me up in that way, mamma?" said Gwendolen. But immediately perceiving in the crushed look and rising sob that she had given a deep wound, she tossed down her hat and knelt at her mother's feet crying, "Mamma, mamma! I was only speaking in fun. I meant nothing." "How could I, Gwendolen?" said poor Mrs. Davilow, unable to hear the retraction, and sobbing violently while she made the effort to speak. "Your will was always too strong for me--if everything else had been different." This disjoined logic was intelligible enough to the daughter. "Dear mamma, I don't find fault with you--I love you," said Gwendolen, really compunctious. "How can you help what I am? Besides, I am very charming. Come, now." Here Gwendolen with her handkerchief gently rubbed away her mother's tears. "Really--I am contented with myself. I like myself better than I should have liked my aunt and you. How dreadfully dull you must have been!" Such tender cajolery served to quiet the mother, as it had often done before after like collisions. Not that the collisions had often been repeated at the same point; for in the memory of both they left an association of dread with the particular topics which had occasioned them: Gwendolen dreaded the unpleasant sense of compunction toward her mother, which was the nearest approach to self-condemnation and self-distrust that she had known; and Mrs. Davilow's timid maternal conscience dreaded whatever had brought on the slightest hint of reproach. Hence, after this little scene, the two concurred in excluding Mr. Grandcourt from their conversation. When Mr. Gascoigne once or twice referred to him, Mrs. Davilow feared least Gwendolen should betray some of her alarming keen-sightedness about what was probably in her uncle's mind; but the fear was not justified. Gwendolen knew certain differences in the characters with which she was concerned as birds know climate and weather; and for the very reason that she was determined to evade her uncle's control, she was determined not to clash with him. The good understanding between them was much fostered by their enjoyment of archery together: Mr. Gascoigne, as one of the best bowmen in Wessex, was gratified to find the elements of like skill in his niece; and Gwendolen was the more careful not to lose the shelter of his fatherly indulgence, because since the trouble with Rex both Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna had been unable to hide what she felt to be a very unreasonable alienation from her. Toward Anna she took some pains to behave with a regretful affectionateness; but neither of them dared to mention Rex's name, and Anna, to whom the thought of him was part of the air she breathed, was ill at ease with the lively cousin who had ruined his happiness. She tried dutifully to repress any sign of her changed feeling; but who in pain can imitate the glance and hand-touch of pleasure. This unfair resentment had rather a hardening effect on Gwendolen, and threw her into a more defiant temper. Her uncle too might be offended if she refused the next person who fell in love with her; and one day when that idea was in her mind she said, "Mamma, I see now why girls are glad to be married--to escape being expected to please everybody but themselves." Happily, Mr. Middleton was gone without having made any avowal; and notwithstanding the admiration for the handsome Miss Harleth, extending perhaps over thirty square miles in a part of Wessex well studded with families whose numbers included several disengaged young men, each glad to seat himself by the lively girl with whom it was so easy to get on in conversation,--notwithstanding these grounds for arguing that Gwendolen was likely to have other suitors more explicit than the cautious curate, the fact was not so. Care has been taken not only that the trees should not sweep the stars down, but also that every man who admires a fair girl should not be enamored of her, and even that every man who is enamored should not necessarily declare himself. There are various refined shapes in which the price of corn, known to be potent cause in their relation, might, if inquired into, show why a young lady, perfect in person, accomplishments, and costume, has not the trouble of rejecting many offers; and nature's order is certainly benignant in not obliging us one and all to be desperately in love with the most admirable mortal we have ever seen. Gwendolen, we know, was far from holding that supremacy in the minds of all observers. Besides, it was but a poor eight months since she had come to Offendene, and some inclinations become manifest slowly, like the sunward creeping of plants. In face of this fact that not one of the eligible young men already in the neighborhood had made Gwendolen an offer, why should Mr. Grandcourt be thought of as likely to do what they had left undone? Perhaps because he was thought of as still more eligible; since a great deal of what passes for likelihood in the world is simply the reflex of a wish. Mr. and Mrs. Arrowpoint, for example, having no anxiety that Miss Harleth should make a brilliant marriage, had quite a different likelihood in their minds.

Some months later, a rumour spread which excited interest in many persons. Just as when a visit of majesty is announced, the dream of knighthood is to be found under various nightcaps, so the news in question raised a vision of marriage in several well-bred imaginations. The news was that Diplow Hall, Sir Hugo Mallinger's place, which had for a couple of years been shut up, was to be inhabited in a fitting style. But not by Sir Hugo: by his nephew, Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt, who was presumptive heir to the baronetcy, his uncle's marriage having produced nothing but girls. Moreover, young Grandcourt's mother had given a baronial streak to his blood, so that if certain intervening persons died, he would become a baron and peer of the realm. Some readers will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune was coming within reach, and will aver that this is not human nature. But nothing is here narrated of human nature generally: this history concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex. There were the Arrowpoints, for example: no one could attribute sordid views about their daughter's marriage to parents who could leave her at least half a million; but since Catherine had already refused Lord Slogan, an unexceptionable Irish peer, they wondered whether Mr. Grandcourt was good-looking and virtuous, or at least reformed; and without wishing anybody to die, thought his succession to the title an event to be desired. If the Arrowpoints had such thoughts, it is the less surprising that they were present in Mr. Gascoigne, who despite being a clergyman was not the less subject to the anxieties of a parent and guardian. Naturally, the two families did not discuss these hopes with each other. To her husband Mrs. Gascoigne said, "I hear Mr. Grandcourt has got two places, but comes to Diplow for the hunting. Have you heard what sort of a young man he is, Henry?" Mr. Gascoigne had not heard; or if his male acquaintances had gossiped, he was not disposed to repeat their gossip. Whatever Grandcourt had done, he had not ruined himself; and it is well-known that in gambling, for example, a man who has the strength of mind to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character. This is an illustration merely: Mr. Gascoigne had not heard that Grandcourt had been a gambler; and it was not certain on any other showing that Mr. Grandcourt had needed reformation more than other young men of five-and-thirty. Mrs. Davilow, too, could not be indifferent to an arrival that might promise a brilliant lot for Gwendolen. Mr. Grandcourt's name raised in her mind the picture of a handsome, accomplished, excellent young man whom she would be satisfied with as a husband for her daughter; but would Gwendolen be satisfied with him? There was no knowing what would meet that girl's taste or touch her affections. The mother even said to herself, "It would not signify about her being in love, if she would only accept the right person." Whatever her own marriage had been, how could she the less desire it for her daughter? Mrs. Davilow did not let fall a hint of this aerial castle-building which she had the good taste to be ashamed of; for such a hint was likely to make Gwendolen detest the desirable husband beforehand. The discussion of the dress that Gwendolen was to wear at the Archery Meeting was a relevant topic, however; and when it had been decided that as a touch of colour on her white cashmere, nothing suited her better than pale green, Gwendolen, throwing herself into the attitude of drawing her bow, said with a look of comic enjoyment- "How I pity all the other girls at the Archery Meeting - all thinking of Mr. Grandcourt! And they have not a shadow of a chance. You know they have not, mamma. You and my uncle and aunt all intend him to fall in love with me." Mrs. Davilow, piqued, said, "Oh, my dear, that is not so certain. Miss Arrowpoint has charms which you have not." "I know, but they demand thought. My arrow will pierce him before he has time for thought. He will declare himself my slave - I shall send him round the world to bring me back the wedding ring of a happy woman - in the meantime all the men between him and the title will die - he will come back Lord Grandcourt and fall at my feet. I shall laugh at him - he will call for his steed and ride to Quetcham, where he will find Miss Arrowpoint just married to a needy musician." Was ever any young witch like this? You sat upon your secret, and all the while she knew exactly what you were sitting on! As well turn the key to keep out the damp! "Why, what kind of a man do you imagine him to be, Gwendolen?" "Let me see!" said the witch, with a little frown. "Short - just above my shoulder - trying to make himself tall by turning up his moustache - a glass in his right eye, which will cause him to make horrible faces, especially when he smiles. I shall cast down my eyes, and he will perceive that I am not indifferent to his attentions. I shall dream that night that I am looking at the face of a magnified insect - and the next morning he will make an offer of his hand; the sequel as before." "Mr. Grandcourt may be a delightful young man." "Oh, yes," said Gwendolen carelessly. "A delightful young man would have hunters, and a London house and two country-houses - one with battlements and another with a veranda. And I feel sure that with a little murdering he might get a title." Poor Mrs. Davilow said, distressed: "Don't talk in that way, child, for heaven's sake! you do read such books. I declare when I was your age I knew nothing about wickedness." "Why did you not bring me up in that way, mamma?" said Gwendolen. But immediately perceiving her mother's crushed look, she knelt at her feet crying- "Mamma! I was only speaking in fun. I meant nothing. Dear mamma, I don't find fault with you - I love you. How can you help what I am? Besides, I am very charming. Come, now." Here Gwendolen gently rubbed away her mother's tears. "Really, how dreadfully dull you must have been!" Such tender cajolery quieted the mother, as it had often done before. However, Gwendolen dreaded the unpleasant sense of compunction which was the nearest to self-condemnation that she had known; and Mrs. Davilow's timid maternal conscience dreaded any reproach. Hence, after this, the two excluded Mr. Grandcourt from their conversation. When Mr. Gascoigne referred to him, Mrs. Davilow feared lest Gwendolen should betray some of her alarming keen-sightedness about what was probably in her uncle's mind; but Gwendolen was determined not to clash with her uncle. The good understanding between them was much fostered by their enjoyment of archery together. Mr. Gascoigne was gratified to discover his niece's skill; and Gwendolen was the more careful not to lose the shelter of his fatherly indulgence, because since the trouble with Rex both Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna had been unreasonably alienated from her. Toward Anna she behaved with regretful affection; but neither of them dared to mention Rex's name, and Anna was ill at ease with her. This unfair resentment had rather a hardening effect on Gwendolen, and made her defiant. Her uncle too might be offended if she refused the next person who fell in love with her. But happily, Mr. Middleton was gone without having made any avowal; and Gwendolen had no other suitors. For not every man who admires a fair girl will be enamoured of her, and not every man who is enamoured will necessarily declare himself. Gwendolen was far from holding supremacy in the minds of all observers. Since not one of the eligible young men in the neighbourhood had made Gwendolen an offer, why should Mr. Grandcourt be thought likely to do it? Perhaps because a great deal of what passes for likelihood in the world is simply the reflex of a wish. Mr. and Mrs. Arrowpoint, for example, having no anxiety that Miss Harleth should make a brilliant marriage, had quite a different likelihood in their minds.

Daniel Deronda

Book 1 - THE SPOILED CHILD | Chapter 9

"If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, 'Because it was he, because it was I.' There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable power that brought on this union."--MONTAIGNE: _On Friendship_. The time had come to prepare Mordecai for the revelation of the restored sister and for the change of abode which was desirable before Mirah's meeting with her brother. Mrs. Meyrick, to whom Deronda had confided everything except Mordecai's peculiar relation to himself, had been active in helping him to find a suitable lodging in Brompton, not many minutes' walk from her own house, so that the brother and sister would be within reach of her motherly care. Her happy mixture of Scottish fervor and Gaelic liveliness had enabled her to keep the secret close from the girls as well as from Hans, any betrayal to them being likely to reach Mirah in some way that would raise an agitating suspicion, and spoil the important opening of that work which was to secure her independence, as we rather arbitrarily call one of the more arduous and dignified forms of our dependence. And both Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda had more reasons than they could have expressed for desiring that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. Perhaps "the little mother" was rather helped in her secrecy by some dubiousness in her sentiment about the remarkable brother described to her; and certainly if she felt any joy and anticipatory admiration, it was due to her faith in Deronda's judgment. The consumption was a sorrowful fact that appealed to her tenderness; but how was she to be very glad of an enthusiasm which, to tell the truth, she could only contemplate as Jewish pertinacity, and as rather an undesirable introduction among them all of a man whose conversation would not be more modern and encouraging than that of Scott's Covenanters? Her mind was anything but prosaic, and had her soberer share of Mab's delight in the romance of Mirah's story and of her abode with them; but the romantic or unusual in real life requires some adaptation. We sit up at night to read about Sakya-Mouni, St. Francis, or Oliver Cromwell; but whether we should be glad for any one at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more, to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another affair. Besides, Mrs. Meyrick had hoped, as her children did, that the intensity of Mirah's feeling about Judaism would slowly subside, and be merged in the gradually deepening current of loving interchange with her new friends. In fact, her secret favorite continuation of the romance had been no discovery of Jewish relations, but something much more favorable to the hopes she discerned in Hans. And now--here was a brother who would dip Mirah's mind over again in the deepest dye of Jewish sentiment. She could not help saying to Deronda, "I am as glad as you are that the pawnbroker is not her brother: there are Ezras and Ezras in the world; and really it is a comfort to think that all Jews are not like those shopkeepers who _will not_ let you get out of their shops: and besides, what he said to you about his mother and sister makes me bless him. I am sure he's good. But I never did like anything fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much preaching in my youth and lost my palate for it." "I don't think you will find that Mordecai obtrudes any preaching," said Deronda. "He is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of proportions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track. Mordecai is an enthusiast; I should like to keep that word for the highest order of minds--those who care supremely for grand and general benefits to mankind. He is not a strictly orthodox Jew, and is full of allowances for others; his conformity in many things is an allowance for the condition of other Jews. The people he lives with are as fond of him as possible, and they can't in the least understand his ideas." "Oh, well, I can live up to the level of the pawnbroker's mother, and like him for what I see to be good in him; and for what I don't see the merits of I will take your word. According to your definition, I suppose one might be fanatical in worshipping common-sense; for my poor husband used to say the world would be a poor place if there were nothing but common-sense in it. However, Mirah's brother will have good bedding--that I have taken care of; and I shall have this extra window pasted up with paper to prevent draughts." (The conversation was taking place in the destined lodging.) "It is a comfort to think that the people of the house are no strangers to me--no hypocritical harpies. And when the children know, we shall be able to make the rooms much prettier." "The next stage of the affair is to tell all to Mordecai, and get him to move--which may be a more difficult business," said Deronda. "And will you tell Mirah before I say anything to the children?" said Mrs. Meyrick. But Deronda hesitated, and she went on in a tone of persuasive deliberation--"No, I think not. Let me tell Hans and the girls the evening before, and they will be away the next morning?" "Yes, that will be best. But do justice to my account of Mordecai--or Ezra, as I suppose Mirah will wish to call him: don't assist their imagination by referring to Habakkuk Mucklewrath," said Deronda, smiling--Mrs. Meyrick herself having used the comparison of the Covenanters. "Trust me, trust me," said the little mother. "I shall have to persuade them so hard to be glad, that I shall convert myself. When I am frightened I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for not being brave: it warms the blood." Deronda might have been more argumentative or persuasive about the view to be taken of Mirah's brother, if he had been less anxiously preoccupied with the more important task immediately before him, which he desired to acquit himself of without wounding the Cohens. Mordecai, by a memorable answer, had made it evident that he would be keenly alive to any inadvertance in relation to their feelings. In the interval, he had been meeting Mordecai at the _Hand and Banner_, but now after due reflection he wrote to him saying that he had particular reasons for wishing to see him in his own home the next evening, and would beg to sit with him in his workroom for an hour, if the Cohens would not regard it as an intrusion. He would call with the understanding that if there were any objection, Mordecai would accompany him elsewhere. Deronda hoped in this way to create a little expectation that would have a preparatory effect. He was received with the usual friendliness, some additional costume in the women and children, and in all the elders a slight air of wondering which even in Cohen was not allowed to pass the bounds of silence--the guest's transactions with Mordecai being a sort of mystery which he was rather proud to think lay outside the sphere of light which enclosed his own understanding. But when Deronda said, "I suppose Mordecai is at home and expecting me," Jacob, who had profited by the family remarks, went up to his knee and said, "What do you want to talk to Mordecai about?" "Something that is very interesting to him," said Deronda, pinching the lad's ear, "but that you can't understand." "Can you say this?" said Jacob, immediately giving forth a string of his rote-learned Hebrew verses with a wonderful mixture of the throaty and the nasal, and nodding his small head at his hearer, with a sense of giving formidable evidence which might rather alter their mutual position. "No, really," said Deronda, keeping grave; "I can't say anything like it." "I thought not," said Jacob, performing a dance of triumph with his small scarlet legs, while he took various objects out of the deep pockets of his knickerbockers and returned them thither, as a slight hint of his resources; after which, running to the door of the workroom, he opened it wide, set his back against it, and said, "Mordecai, here's the young swell"--a copying of his father's phrase, which seemed to him well fitted to cap the recitation of Hebrew. He was called back with hushes by mother and grandmother, and Deronda, entering and closing the door behind him, saw that a bit of carpet had been laid down, a chair placed, and the fire and lights attended to, in sign of the Cohens' respect. As Mordecai rose to greet him, Deronda was struck with the air of solemn expectation in his face, such as would have seemed perfectly natural if his letter had declared that some revelation was to be made about the lost sister. Neither of them spoke, till Deronda, with his usual tenderness of manner, had drawn the vacant chair from the opposite side of the hearth and had seated himself near to Mordecai, who then said, in a tone of fervid certainty, "You are coming to tell me something that my soul longs for." "It is true I have something very weighty to tell you--something I trust that you will rejoice in," said Deronda, on his guard against the probability that Mordecai had been preparing himself for something quite different from the fact. "It is all revealed--it is made clear to you," said Mordecai, more eagerly, leaning forward with clasped hands. "You are even as my brother that sucked the breasts of my mother--the heritage is yours--there is no doubt to divide us." "I have learned nothing new about myself," said Deronda. The disappointment was inevitable: it was better not to let the feeling be strained longer in a mistaken hope. Mordecai sank back in his chair, unable for the moment to care what was really coming. The whole day his mind had been in a state of tension toward one fulfillment. The reaction was sickening and he closed his eyes. "Except," Deronda went on gently, after a pause,--"except that I had really some time ago come into another sort of hidden connection with you, besides what you have spoken of as existing in your own feeling." The eyes were not opened, but there was a fluttering in the lids. "I had made the acquaintance of one in whom you are interested." "One who is closely related to your departed mother," Deronda went on wishing to make the disclosure gradual; but noticing a shrinking movement in Mordecai, he added--"whom she and you held dear above all others." Mordecai, with a sudden start, laid a spasmodic grasp on Deronda's wrist; there was a great terror in him. And Deronda divined it. A tremor was perceptible in his clear tones as he said, "What was prayed for has come to pass: Mirah has been delivered from evil." Mordecai's grasp relaxed a little, but he was panting with a tearless sob. Deronda went on: "Your sister is worthy of the mother you honored." He waited there, and Mordecai, throwing himself backward in his chair, again closed his eyes, uttering himself almost inaudibly for some minutes in Hebrew, and then subsiding into a happy-looking silence. Deronda, watching the expression in his uplifted face, could have imagined that he was speaking with some beloved object: there was a new suffused sweetness, something like that on the faces of the beautiful dead. For the first time Deronda thought he discerned a family resemblance to Mirah. Presently when Mordecai was ready to listen, the rest was told. But in accounting for Mirah's flight he made the statement about the father's conduct as vague as he could, and threw the emphasis on her yearning to come to England as the place where she might find her mother. Also he kept back the fact of Mirah's intention to drown herself, and his own part in rescuing her; merely describing the home she had found with friends of his, whose interest in her and efforts for her he had shared. What he dwelt on finally was Mirah's feeling about her mother and brother; and in relation to this he tried to give every detail. "It was in search of them," said Deronda, smiling, "that I turned into this house: the name Ezra Cohen was just then the most interesting name in the world to me. I confess I had fear for a long while. Perhaps you will forgive me now for having asked you that question about the elder Mrs. Cohen's daughter. I cared very much what I should find Mirah's friends to be. But I had found a brother worthy of her when I knew that her Ezra was disguised under the name of Mordecai." "Mordecai is really my name--Ezra Mordecai Cohen." "Is there any kinship between this family and yours?" said Deronda. "Only the kinship of Israel. My soul clings to these people, who have sheltered me and given me succor out of the affection that abides in Jewish hearts, as sweet odor in things long crushed and hidden from the outer air. It is good for me to bear with their ignorance and be bound to them in gratitude, that I may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish million, and not put impatient knowledge in the stead of loving wisdom." "But you don't feel bound to continue with them now there is a closer tie to draw you?" said Deronda, not without fear that he might find an obstacle to overcome. "It seems to me right now--is it not?--that you should live with your sister; and I have prepared a home to take you to in the neighborhood of her friends, that she may join you there. Pray grant me this wish. It will enable me to be with you often in the hours when Mirah is obliged to leave you. That is my selfish reason. But the chief reason is, that Mirah will desire to watch over you, and that you ought to give her the guardianship of a brother's presence. You shall have books about you. I shall want to learn of you, and to take you out to see the river and trees. And you will have the rest and comfort that you will be more and more in need of--nay, that I need for you. This is the claim I make on you, now that we have found each other." Deronda spoke in a tone of earnest, affectionate pleading, such as he might have used to a venerated elder brother. Mordecai's eyes were fixed on him with a listening contemplation, and he was silent for a little while after Deronda had ceased to speak. Then he said, with an almost reproachful emphasis, "And you would have me hold it doubtful whether you were born a Jew! Have we not from the first touched each other with invisible fibres--have we not quivered together like the leaves from a common stem with stirring from a common root? I know what I am outwardly, I am one among the crowd of poor--I am stricken, I am dying. But our souls know each other. They gazed in silence as those who have long been parted and meet again, but when they found voice they were assured, and all their speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in your veins." Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face tingling. It was impossible either to deny or assent. He waited, hoping that Mordecai would presently give him a more direct answer. And after a pause of meditation he did say, firmly, "What you wish of me I will do. And our mother--may the blessing of the Eternal be with her in our souls!--would have wished it too. I will accept what your loving kindness has prepared, and Mirah's home shall be mine." He paused a moment, and then added in a more melancholy tone, "But I shall grieve to part from these parents and the little ones. You must tell them, for my heart would fail me." "I felt that you would want me to tell them. Shall we go now at once?" said Deronda, much relieved by this unwavering compliance. "Yes; let us not defer it. It must be done," said Mordecai, rising with the air of a man who has to perform a painful duty. Then came, as an afterthought, "But do not dwell on my sister more than is needful." When they entered the parlor he said to the alert Jacob, "Ask your father to come, and tell Sarah to mind the shop. My friend has something to say," he continued, turning to the elder Mrs. Cohen. It seemed part of Mordecai's eccentricity that he should call this gentleman his friend; and the two women tried to show their better manners by warm politeness in begging Deronda to seat himself in the best place. When Cohen entered with a pen behind his ear, he rubbed his hands and said with loud satisfaction, "Well, sir! I'm glad you're doing us the honor to join our family party again. We are pretty comfortable, I think." He looked round with shiny gladness. And when all were seated on the hearth the scene was worth peeping in upon: on one side Baby under her scarlet quilt in the corner being rocked by the young mother, and Adelaide Rebekah seated on the grandmother's knee; on the other, Jacob between his father's legs; while the two markedly different figures of Deronda and Mordecai were in the middle--Mordecai a little backward in the shade, anxious to conceal his agitated susceptibility to what was going on around him. The chief light came from the fire, which brought out the rich color on a depth of shadow, and seemed to turn into speech the dark gems of eyes that looked at each other kindly. "I have just been telling Mordecai of an event that makes a great change in his life," Deronda began, "but I hope you will agree with me that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you as his best friends, he wishes me to tell you for him at once." "Relations with money, sir?" burst in Cohen, feeling a power of divination which it was a pity to nullify by waiting for the fact. "No; not exactly," said Deronda, smiling. "But a very precious relation wishes to be reunited to him--a very good and lovely young sister, who will care for his comfort in every way." "Married, sir?" "No, not married." "But with a maintenance?" "With talents which will secure her a maintenance. A home is already provided for Mordecai." There was silence for a moment or two before the grandmother said in a wailing tone, "Well, well! and so you're going away from us, Mordecai." "And where there's no children as there is here," said the mother, catching the wail. "No Jacob, and no Adelaide, and no Eugenie!" wailed the grandmother again. "Ay, ay, Jacob's learning 'ill all wear out of him. He must go to school. It'll be hard times for Jacob," said Cohen, in a tone of decision. In the wide-open ears of Jacob his father's words sounded like a doom, giving an awful finish to the dirge-like effect of the whole announcement. His face had been gathering a wondering incredulous sorrow at the notion of Mordecai's going away: he was unable to imagine the change as anything lasting; but at the mention of "hard times for Jacob" there was no further suspense of feeling, and he broke forth in loud lamentation. Adelaide Rebekah always cried when her brother cried, and now began to howl with astonishing suddenness, whereupon baby awaking contributed angry screams, and required to be taken out of the cradle. A great deal of hushing was necessary, and Mordecai feeling the cries pierce him, put out his arms to Jacob, who in the midst of his tears and sobs was turning his head right and left for general observation. His father, who had been saying, "Never mind, old man; you shall go to the riders," now released him, and he went to Mordecai, who clasped him, and laid his cheek on the little black head without speaking. But Cohen, sensible that the master of the family must make some apology for all this weakness, and that the occasion called for a speech, addressed Deronda with some elevation of pitch, squaring his elbows and resting a hand on each knee: "It's not as we're the people to grudge anybody's good luck, sir, or the portion of their cup being made fuller, as I may say. I'm not an envious man, and if anybody offered to set up Mordecai in a shop of my sort two doors lower down, _I_ shouldn't make wry faces about it. I'm not one of them that had need have a poor opinion of themselves, and be frightened at anybody else getting a chance. If I'm offal, let a wise man come and tell me, for I've never heard it yet. And in point of business, I'm not a class of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpillar, and find my feet when I'm let alone. And though, as I may say, you're taking some of our good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I'm not saying but we can afford that, though my mother and my wife had the good will to wish and do for Mordecai to the last; and a Jew must not be like a servant who works for reward--though I see nothing against a reward if I can get it. And as to the extra outlay in schooling, I'm neither poor nor greedy--I wouldn't hang myself for sixpence, nor half a crown neither. But the truth of it is, the women and children are fond of Mordecai. You may partly see how it is, sir, by your own sense. A Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, that he was not made a woman; but a woman has to thank God that He has made her according to His will. And we all know what He has made her--a child-bearing, tender-hearted thing is the woman of our people. Her children are mostly stout, as I think you'll say Addy's are, and she's not mushy, but her heart is tender. So you must excuse present company, sir, for not being glad all at once. And as to this young lady--for by what you say 'young lady' is the proper term"--Cohen here threw some additional emphasis into his look and tone--"we shall all be glad for Mordecai's sake by-and-by, when we cast up our accounts and see where we are." Before Deronda could summon any answer to this oddly mixed speech, Mordecai exclaimed, "Friends, friends! For food and raiment and shelter I would not have sought better than you have given me. You have sweetened the morsel with love; and what I thought of as a joy that would be left to me even in the last months of my waning strength was to go on teaching the lad. But now I am as one who had clad himself beforehand in his shroud, and used himself to making the grave his bed, when the divine command sounded in his ears, 'Arise, and go forth; the night is not yet come.' For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness to take another's. But it has been taught us, as you know, that _the reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another_--so said Ben Azai. You have made your duty to one of the poor among your brethren a joy to you and me; and your reward shall be that you will not rest without the joy of like deeds in the time to come. And may not Jacob come and visit me?" Mordecai had turned with this question to Deronda, who said, "Surely that can be managed. It is no further than Brompton." Jacob, who had been gradually calmed by the need to hear what was going forward, began now to see some daylight on the future, the word "visit" having the lively charm of cakes and general relaxation at his grandfather's, the dealer in knives. He danced away from Mordecai, and took up a station of survey in the middle of the hearth with his hands in his knickerbockers. "Well," said the grandmother, with a sigh of resignation, "I hope there'll be nothing in the way of your getting _kosher_ meat, Mordecai. For you'll have to trust to those you live with." "That's all right, that's all right, you may be sure, mother," said Cohen, as if anxious to cut off inquiry on matters in which he was uncertain of the guest's position. "So, sir," he added, turning with a look of amused enlightenment to Deronda, "it was better than learning you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered to myself at the time. I thought somehow there was a something." "Mordecai will perhaps explain to you how it was that I was seeking him," said Deronda, feeling that he had better go, and rising as he spoke. It was agreed that he should come again and the final move be made on the next day but one; but when he was going Mordecai begged to walk with him to the end of the street, and wrapped himself in coat and comforter. It was a March evening, and Deronda did not mean to let him go far, but he understood the wish to be outside the house with him in communicative silence, after the exciting speech that had been filling the last hour. No word was spoken until Deronda had proposed parting, when he said, "Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. You would wish her to do so--to come and see them, would you not?" Mordecai did not answer immediately, but at length said, "I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of my sister might be to them as the fresh bleeding of wounds. There is a daughter and sister who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers--and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain. In my ears I have the prayers of generations past and to come. My life is as nothing to me but the beginning of fulfilment. And yet I am only another prayer--which you will fulfil." Deronda pressed his hand, and they parted.

The time had come to prepare Mordecai for the revelation of the restored sister and for the change of abode which was desirable before Mirah's meeting with her brother. Mrs. Meyrick had helped Deronda to find a suitable lodging in Brompton, not far from her own house, so that the brother and sister would be within reach of her motherly care. She had kept the secret from the girls as well as from Hans, as any betrayal to them might reach Mirah and cause her agitation that would spoil the important opening of the work which was to secure her independence. And both Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda had private reasons for desiring that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. "The little mother" felt some dubiousness about the remarkable brother described to her; and certainly if she felt any joy, it was due to her faith in Deronda's judgment. Mordecai's consumption was a sorrowful fact that appealed to her tenderness; but how was she to be glad of his antique brand of Jewish zeal? She was anything but prosaic, and had her share of Mab's delight in the romance of Mirah's story; but the romantic in real life requires some adaptation. We sit up at night to read about St. Francis, or Oliver Cromwell; but whether we should be glad for them to call on us the next morning, is quite another matter. Besides, Mrs. Meyrick had hoped, as her children did, that the intensity of Mirah's feeling about Judaism would slowly subside in the loving interchange with her new friends. In fact, her secret hope had been no discovery of Jewish relations, but concerned the feelings she perceived in Hans. And now, here was a brother who would dip Mirah's mind again in the deepest dye of Jewish sentiment. She could not help saying to Deronda- "I am glad that the pawnbroker is not her brother: it is a comfort to think that all Jews are not like those shopkeepers who will not let you get out of their shops: and besides, what the brother said to you about his mother and sister makes me bless him. I am sure he's good. But I never did like anything fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much preaching in my youth and lost my taste for it." "I don't think you will find that Mordecai preaches," said Deronda. "He is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of proportion, and becomes unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track. Mordecai is an enthusiast; one of those who care supremely for general benefits to mankind. He is not a strictly orthodox Jew, and is full of allowances for others. The people he lives with are as fond of him as possible, though they can't in the least understand his ideas." "Well, I will take your word for it. At least Mirah's brother will have good bedding - that I have taken care of; and I shall have this extra window pasted up to prevent draughts." (The conversation was taking place in the destined lodging.) "When the children know, we shall be able to make the rooms much prettier." "The next stage is to tell all to Mordecai, and get him to move - which may be difficult," said Deronda. "Let me tell Hans and the girls the evening before, and they will be away the next morning. I shall persuade them so hard to be glad, that I shall convert myself." Deronda was anxiously preoccupied with the question of how to move Mordecai without wounding the Cohens. Mordecai had made it evident that he would be keenly alive to any injury to their feelings. After due reflection, Deronda wrote to him asking to see him in his own home the next evening for a particular purpose, if the Cohens would not regard it as an intrusion. He would call with the understanding that if there were any objection, Mordecai would accompany him elsewhere. Deronda hoped in this way to create a little preparatory expectation. He was received with the usual friendliness, and a slight air of wondering which the Cohens did not allow to pass the bounds of silence. But when Deronda said, "I suppose Mordecai is expecting me," Jacob said, "What do you want to talk to him about?" "Something that is very interesting to him," said Deronda, pinching the lad's ear, "but that you can't understand." "Can you say this?" said Jacob, immediately reciting a string of his rote-learned Hebrew verses, with a sense of giving formidable evidence which might alter their mutual position. "No," said Deronda, keeping grave; "I can't say anything like it." "I thought not," said Jacob, performing a dance of triumph, while he took various objects out of his pockets as a hint of his resources; after which, running to the door of the workroom, he opened it wide, and said, "Mordecai, here's the young swell" - copying his father's phrase. He was called back with hushes, and Deronda, entering and closing the door behind him, saw that a bit of carpet had been laid down, a chair placed, and the fire and lights attended to, in sign of the Cohens' respect. As Mordecai rose to greet him, Deronda was struck with the air of solemn expectation in his face. Neither of them spoke, till Deronda had drawn the vacant chair to seat himself near to Mordecai, who then said, in a tone of fervid certainty- "You are coming to tell me something that my soul longs for." "It is true I have something very weighty to tell you - something I trust that you will rejoice in," said Deronda, on his guard against the probability that Mordecai expected something quite different from the fact. "It is all revealed - it is made clear to you," said Mordecai eagerly, clasping his hands. "You are as my brother - the heritage is yours - there is no doubt to divide us." "I have learned nothing new about myself," said Deronda. The disappointment was inevitable: better not to delay it. Mordecai sank back in his chair, unable for the moment to care what was really coming. All day his mind had been in a state of tension toward one fulfilment. The reaction was sickening and he closed his eyes. "Except," Deronda went on gently,- "except that I had some time ago come into another hidden connection with you, besides the one in your own feeling." The eyes were not opened, but there was a fluttering in the lids. "I met one in whom you are interested." Mordecai opened his eyes and fixed them quietly on Deronda. "One who is closely related to your departed mother," Deronda went on, wishing to make the disclosure gradual; but noticing a shrinking movement in Mordecai, he added - "whom she and you held dear above all others." Mordecai, with a sudden start, laid a spasmodic grasp on Deronda's wrist; there was a great terror in him. And Deronda divined it. With a tremor in his clear tones he said- "What was prayed for has come to pass: Mirah has been delivered from evil." Mordecai's grasp relaxed, but he was panting with a tearless sob. Deronda went on: "Your sister is worthy of the mother you honoured." He waited, and Mordecai again closed his eyes, murmuring for some minutes in Hebrew, and then subsiding into a happy-looking silence. Deronda could have imagined that he was speaking with some beloved object: his face held a new sweetness, and for the first time Deronda thought he discerned a family resemblance to Mirah. When Mordecai was ready to listen, the rest was told. But in describing Mirah's flight he made the statement about the father's conduct as vague as he could, and emphasised her yearning to come to England to find her mother. Also he kept back Mirah's intention to drown herself, and his rescue of her, merely describing the home she had found with friends of his. What he dwelt on was Mirah's feeling about her mother and brother; and about this he tried to give every detail. "It was in search of them," said Deronda, smiling, "that I turned into this house: the name Ezra Cohen was just then the most interesting in the world to me. Perhaps you will forgive me now for having asked you that question about the elder Mrs. Cohen's daughter. I cared very much what I should find Mirah's friends to be. But I found a brother worthy of her disguised under the name of Mordecai." "Mordecai is really my name - Ezra Mordecai Cohen." "Is there any kinship between this family and yours?" said Deronda. "Only the kinship of Israel. My soul clings to these people, who have sheltered me out of the affection that abides in Jewish hearts. It is good for me to bear with their ignorance and be bound to them in gratitude, that I may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish millions, and not put impatient knowledge in the stead of loving wisdom." "But you don't feel bound to continue with them now there is a closer tie to draw you?" said Deronda, fearing he might find an obstacle to overcome. "It seems to me right that you should live with your sister; and I have prepared a home for you near her friends, that she may join you there. Pray grant me this wish. It will enable me to be with you often in the hours when Mirah is obliged to leave you. That is my selfish reason. But the chief reason is, that Mirah will desire to watch over you, and you ought to give her the guardianship of a brother's presence. You shall have books, and I shall want to learn from you, and take you out to see the river and trees. And you will have the rest and comfort that you will be more and more in need of. This is the claim I make on you, now that we have found each other." Deronda spoke in a tone of earnest, affectionate pleading, such as he might have used to a venerated elder brother. Mordecai's eyes were fixed on him, and he was silent for a little while. Then he said, almost reproachfully- "And you would have me doubt whether you were born a Jew! Have we not from the first touched each other like the leaves from a common stem? I am stricken, I am dying. But our souls know each other. They gazed in silence as those who have long been parted and meet again, but when they found voice they were assured, and all their speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in your veins." Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face tingling. He waited, hoping for a more direct answer; and eventually Mordecai said- "What you wish of me I will do. Our blessed mother would have wished it. I will accept what your loving kindness has prepared, and Mirah's home shall be mine." He added in a more melancholy tone, "But I shall grieve to part from this family. You must tell them, for my heart would fail me." "I felt that you would want me to tell them. Shall we go now?" said Deronda, much relieved. "Yes; let us not defer it," said Mordecai, rising with the air of a man who must perform a painful duty. "But do not dwell on my sister more than is needful." When they entered the parlour he said to the alert Jacob, "Ask your father to come. My friend has something to say," he continued, turning to the elder Mrs. Cohen. The two women politely begged Deronda to seat himself in the best place, while Cohen said with satisfaction, "Well, sir! I'm glad you're doing us the honour to join our family party again." And when all were seated on the hearth the scene was worth peeping in upon: on one side Baby being rocked by the young mother, and Adelaide Rebekah seated on the grandmother's knee; on the other, Jacob between his father's legs; while the two markedly different figures of Deronda and Mordecai were in the middle - Mordecai shaded from the firelight, anxious to conceal his agitation. "I have just been telling Mordecai of an event that makes a great change in his life," Deronda began, "but I hope you will agree with me that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you as his best friends, he wishes me to tell you at once." "Relations with money, sir?" burst in Cohen. "No; not exactly," said Deronda, smiling. "But a very precious relation wishes to be reunited to him - a good and lovely young sister, who will care for his comfort in every way." "Married, sir?" "No, not married." "But with an income?" "With talents which will secure her an income. A home is already provided for Mordecai." There was silence for a moment before the grandmother wailed- "Well! so you're going away from us, Mordecai." "To where there's no children," said the mother, catching the wail. "No Jacob, no Adelaide, and no Eugenie!" "Ay, Jacob's learning will wear out of him. He must go to school. It'll be hard times for Jacob," said Cohen decisively. To Jacob these words sounded like a doom. His face had shown a wondering sorrow at the notion of Mordecai's going away: but at the mention of "hard times for Jacob" he broke forth in loud lamentation. Adelaide Rebekah always cried when her brother cried, and now began to howl with astonishing suddenness, whereupon baby awaking contributed angry screams, and required to be taken out of the cradle. A great deal of hushing was necessary, and Mordecai, feeling the cries pierce him, put out his arms to Jacob. His father, who had been comforting him, released him, and he went to Mordecai, who laid his cheek on the little black head without speaking. But Cohen, wishing to make some apology for all this weakness, addressed Deronda:- "We're not people to grudge anybody's good luck, sir. I'm not an envious man, and if anybody offered to set up Mordecai in a shop of my sort two doors lower down, I shouldn't make wry faces about it. I'm not one of them that is frightened at anybody else getting a chance. And though, as I may say, you're taking some of our good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I'm not saying but we can afford that, though my mother and my wife had the good will to do for Mordecai to the last. And as to the extra outlay in schooling, I'm neither poor nor greedy. But the truth is, the women and children are fond of Mordecai. A Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, that he was not made a woman; but a woman has to thank God that He has made her according to His will. And we all know what He has made her - a child-bearing, tender-hearted thing is the woman of our people. So you must excuse present company, sir, for not being glad all at once. We shall be glad for Mordecai's sake by-and-by." Before Deronda could answer, Mordecai exclaimed- "Friends, friends! For food and shelter I would not have sought better than you have given me; and it would be a joy to me even in my last months to go on teaching the lad. For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness. But the reward of one duty is the power to fulfil another - so said Ben Azai. You have made your duty a joy to you and me; and your reward shall be that you will have the joy of like deeds in time to come. And may Jacob come and visit me?" Jacob, who had been gradually calmed, now began to see some daylight on the future, the word "visit" having the lively charm of cakes. He danced away from Mordecai, and stood in the hearth with his hands in his knickerbockers. "Well," said the grandmother, with a sigh of resignation, "I hope there'll be nothing in the way of your getting kosher meat, Mordecai." "That's all right, you may be sure, mother," said Cohen. "So, sir," he added, turning a look of amused enlightenment to Deronda, "it was more than learning that you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered at the time." "Mordecai will perhaps explain to you why I was seeking him," said Deronda, rising to go. Mordecai begged to walk with him to the end of the street, and wrapped himself in his coat. It was a March evening, and Deronda did not mean to let him go far, but he understood the wish to be outside with him in communicative silence, after the excitement of the last hour. No word was spoken until Deronda said- "Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. Should she come and see them?" Mordecai paused before saying- "I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of my sister might re-open those wounds. There is a daughter who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers. In my ears I have the prayers of generations past and to come. And I am only another prayer - which you will fulfil." Deronda pressed his hand, and they parted.

Daniel Deronda

Book 6 - REVELATIONS | Chapter 46

No penitence and no confessional, No priest ordains it, yet they're forced to sit Amid deep ashes of their vanished years. Imagine a rambling, patchy house, the best part built of gray stone, and red-tiled, a round tower jutting at one of the corners, the mellow darkness of its conical roof surmounted by a weather-cock making an agreeable object either amidst the gleams and greenth of summer or the low-hanging clouds and snowy branches of winter: the ground shady with spreading trees: a great tree flourishing on one side, backward some Scotch firs on a broken bank where the roots hung naked, and beyond, a rookery: on the other side a pool overhung with bushes, where the water-fowl fluttered and screamed: all around, a vast meadow which might be called a park, bordered by an old plantation and guarded by stone lodges which looked like little prisons. Outside the gate the country, once entirely rural and lovely, now black with coal mines, was chiefly peopled by men and brethren with candles stuck in their hats, and with a diabolic complexion which laid them peculiarly open to suspicion in the eyes of the children at Gadsmere--Mrs. Glasher's four beautiful children, who had dwelt there for about three years. Now, in November, when the flower-beds were empty, the trees leafless, and the pool blackly shivering, one might have said that the place was sombrely in keeping with the black roads and black mounds which seemed to put the district in mourning;--except when the children were playing on the gravel with the dogs for their companions. But Mrs. Glasher, under her present circumstances, liked Gadsmere as well as she would have liked any other abode. The complete seclusion of the place, which the unattractiveness of the country secured, was exactly to her taste. When she drove her two ponies with a waggonet full of children, there were no gentry in carriages to be met, only men of business in gigs; at church there were no eyes she cared to avoid, for the curate's wife and the curate himself were either ignorant of anything to her disadvantage, or ignored it: to them she was simply a widow lady, the tenant of Gadsmere; and the name of Grandcourt was of little interest in that district compared with the names of Fletcher and Gawcome, the lessees of the collieries. It was full ten years since the elopement of an Irish officer's beautiful wife with young Grandcourt, and a consequent duel where the bullets wounded the air only, had made some little noise. Most of those who remembered the affair now wondered what had become of that Mrs. Glasher, whose beauty and brilliancy had made her rather conspicuous to them in foreign places, where she was known to be living with young Grandcourt. That he should have disentangled himself from that connection seemed only natural and desirable. As to her, it was thought that a woman who was understood to have forsaken her child along with her husband had probably sunk lower. Grandcourt had of course got weary of her. He was much given to the pursuit of women: but a man in his position would by this time desire to make a suitable marriage with the fair young daughter of a noble house. No one talked of Mrs. Glasher now, any more than they talked of the victim in a trial for manslaughter ten years before: she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out an expedition of search; but Grandcourt was seen in harbor with his colors flying, registered as seaworthy as ever. Yet, in fact, Grandcourt had never disentangled himself from Mrs. Glasher. His passion for her had been the strongest and most lasting he had ever known; and though it was now as dead as the music of a cracked flute, it had left a certain dull disposedness, which, on the death of her husband three years before, had prompted in him a vacillating notion of marrying her, in accordance with the understanding often expressed between them during the days of his first ardor. At that early time Grandcourt would willingly have paid for the freedom to be won by a divorce; but the husband would not oblige him, not wanting to be married again himself, and not wishing to have his domestic habits printed in evidence. The altered poise which the years had brought in Mrs. Glasher was just the reverse. At first she was comparatively careless about the possibility of marriage. It was enough that she had escaped from a disagreeable husband and found a sort of bliss with a lover who had completely fascinated her--young, handsome, amorous, and living in the best style, with equipage and conversation of the kind to be expected in young men of fortune who have seen everything. She was an impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of adoration, exasperated by five years of marital rudeness; and the sense of release was so strong upon her that it stilled anxiety for more than she actually enjoyed. An equivocal position was of no importance to her then; she had no envy for the honors of a dull, disregarded wife: the one spot which spoiled her vision of her new pleasant world, was the sense that she left her three-year-old boy, who died two years afterward, and whose first tones saying "mamma" retained a difference from those of the children that came after. But now the years had brought many changes besides those in the contour of her cheek and throat; and that Grandcourt should marry her had become her dominant desire. The equivocal position which she had not minded about for herself was now telling upon her through her children, whom she loved with a devotion charged with the added passion of atonement. She had no repentance except in this direction. If Grandcourt married her, the children would be none the worse off for what had passed: they would see their mother in a dignified position, and they would be at no disadvantage with the world: her son could be made his father's heir. It was the yearning for this result which gave the supreme importance to Grandcourt's feeling for her; her love for him had long resolved itself into anxiety that he should give her the unique, permanent claim of a wife, and she expected no other happiness in marriage than the satisfaction of her maternal love and pride--including her pride for herself in the presence of her children. For the sake of that result she was prepared even with a tragic firmness to endure anything quietly in marriage; and she had acuteness enough to cherish Grandcourt's flickering purpose negatively, by not molesting him with passionate appeals and with scene-making. In her, as in every one else who wanted anything of him, his incalculable turns, and his tendency to harden under beseeching, had created a reasonable dread:--a slow discovery, of which no presentiment had been given in the bearing of a youthful lover with a fine line of face and the softest manners. But reticence had necessarily cost something to this impassioned woman, and she was the bitterer for it. There is no quailing--even that forced on the helpless and injured--which has not an ugly obverse: the withheld sting was gathering venom. She was absolutely dependent on Grandcourt; for though he had been always liberal in expenses for her, he had kept everything voluntary on his part; and with the goal of marriage before her, she would ask for nothing less. He had said that he would never settle anything except by will; and when she was thinking of alternatives for the future it often occurred to her that, even if she did not become Grandcourt's wife, he might never have a son who would have a legitimate claim on him, and the end might be that her son would be made heir to the best part of his estates. No son at that early age could promise to have more of his father's physique. But her becoming Grandcourt's wife was so far from being an extravagant notion of possibility, that even Lush had entertained it, and had said that he would as soon bet on it as on any other likelihood with regard to his familiar companion. Lush, indeed, on inferring that Grandcourt had a preconception of using his residence at Diplow in order to win Miss Arrowpoint, had thought it well to fan that project, taking it as a tacit renunciation of the marriage with Mrs. Glasher, which had long been a mark for the hovering and wheeling of Grandcourt's caprice. But both prospects had been negatived by Gwendolen's appearance on the scene; and it was natural enough for Mrs. Glasher to enter with eagerness into Lush's plan of hindering that new danger by setting up a barrier in the mind of the girl who was being sought as a bride. She entered into it with an eagerness which had passion in it as well as purpose, some of the stored-up venom delivering itself in that way. After that, she had heard from Lush of Gwendolen's departure, and the probability that all danger from her was got rid of; but there had been no letter to tell her that the danger had returned and had become a certainty. She had since then written to Grandcourt, as she did habitually, and he had been longer than usual in answering. She was inferring that he might intend coming to Gadsmere at the time when he was actually on the way; and she was not without hope--what construction of another's mind is not strong wishing equal to?--that a certain sickening from that frustrated courtship might dispose him to slip the more easily into the old track of intention. Grandcourt had two grave purposes in coming to Gadsmere: to convey the news of his approaching marriage in person, in order to make this first difficulty final; and to get from Lydia his mother's diamonds, which long ago he had confided to her and wished her to wear. Her person suited diamonds, and made them look as if they were worth some of the money given for them. These particular diamonds were not mountains of light--they were mere peas and haricots for the ears, neck and hair; but they were worth some thousands, and Grandcourt necessarily wished to have them for his wife. Formerly when he had asked Lydia to put them into his keeping again, simply on the ground that they would be safer and ought to be deposited at the bank, she had quietly but absolutely refused, declaring that they were quite safe; and at last had said, "If you ever marry another woman I will give them up to her: are you going to marry another woman?" At that time Grandcourt had no motive which urged him to persist, and he had this grace in him, that the disposition to exercise power either by cowing or disappointing others or exciting in them a rage which they dared not express--a disposition which was active in him as other propensities became languid--had always been in abeyance before Lydia. A severe interpreter might say that the mere facts of their relation to each other, the melancholy position of this woman who depended on his will, made a standing banquet for his delight in dominating. But there was something else than this in his forbearance toward her: there was the surviving though metamorphosed effect of the power she had had over him; and it was this effect, the fitful dull lapse toward solicitations that once had the zest now missing from life, which had again and again inclined him to espouse a familiar past rather than rouse himself to the expectation of novelty. But now novelty had taken hold of him and urged him to make the most of it. Mrs. Glasher was seated in the pleasant room where she habitually passed her mornings with her children round her. It had a square projecting window and looked on broad gravel and grass, sloping toward a little brook that entered the pool. The top of a low, black cabinet, the old oak table, the chairs in tawny leather, were littered with the children's toys, books and garden garments, at which a maternal lady in pastel looked down from the walls with smiling indulgence. The children were all there. The three girls, seated round their mother near the widow, were miniature portraits of her--dark-eyed, delicate-featured brunettes with a rich bloom on their cheeks, their little nostrils and eyebrows singularly finished as if they were tiny women, the eldest being barely nine. The boy was seated on the carpet at some distance, bending his blonde head over the animals from a Noah's ark, admonishing them separately in a voice of threatening command, and occasionally licking the spotted ones to see if the colors would hold. Josephine, the eldest, was having her French lesson; and the others, with their dolls on their laps, sat demurely enough for images of the Madonna. Mrs. Glasher's toilet had been made very carefully--each day now she said to herself that Grandcourt might come in. Her head, which, spite of emaciation, had an ineffaceable beauty in the fine profile, crisp curves of hair, and clearly-marked eyebrows, rose impressively above her bronze-colored silk and velvet, and the gold necklace which Grandcourt had first clasped round her neck years ago. Not that she had any pleasure in her toilet; her chief thought of herself seen in the glass was, "How changed!"--but such good in life as remained to her she would keep. If her chief wish were fulfilled, she could imagine herself getting the comeliness of a matron fit for the highest rank. The little faces beside her, almost exact reductions of her own, seemed to tell of the blooming curves which had once been where now was sunken pallor. But the children kissed the pale cheeks and never found them deficient. That love was now the one end of her life. Suddenly Mrs. Glasher turned away her head from Josephine's book and listened. "Hush, dear! I think some one is coming." Henleigh the boy jumped up and said, "Mamma, is it the miller with my donkey?" He got no answer, and going up to his mamma's knee repeated his question in an insistent tone. But the door opened, and the servant announced Mr. Grandcourt. Mrs. Glasher rose in some agitation. Henleigh frowned at him in disgust at his not being the miller, and the three little girls lifted up their dark eyes to him timidly. They had none of them any particular liking for this friend of mamma's--in fact, when he had taken Mrs. Glasher's hand and then turned to put his other hand on Henleigh's head, that energetic scion began to beat the friend's arm away with his fists. The little girls submitted bashfully to be patted under the chin and kissed, but on the whole it seemed better to send them into the garden, where they were presently dancing and chatting with the dogs on the gravel. "How far are you come?" said Mrs. Glasher, as Grandcourt put away his hat and overcoat. "From Diplow," he answered slowly, seating himself opposite her and looking at her with an unnoting gaze which she noted. "You are tired, then." "No, I rested at the Junction--a hideous hole. These railway journeys are always a confounded bore. But I had coffee and smoked." Grandcourt drew out his handkerchief, rubbed his face, and in returning the handkerchief to his pocket looked at his crossed knee and blameless boot, as if any stranger were opposite to him, instead of a woman quivering with a suspense which every word and look of his was to incline toward hope or dread. But he was really occupied with their interview and what it was likely to include. Imagine the difference in rate of emotion between this woman whom the years had worn to a more conscious dependence and sharper eagerness, and this man whom they were dulling into a more neutral obstinacy. "I expected to see you--it was so long since I had heard from you. I suppose the weeks seem longer at Gadsmere than they do at Diplow," said Mrs. Glasher. She had a quick, incisive way of speaking that seemed to go with her features, as the tone and _timbre_ of a violin go with its form. "Yes," drawled Grandcourt. "But you found the money paid into the bank." "Oh, yes," said Mrs. Glasher, curtly, tingling with impatience. Always before--at least she fancied so--Grandcourt had taken more notice of her and the children than he did to-day. "Yes," he resumed, playing with his whisker, and at first not looking at her, "the time has gone on at rather a rattling pace with me; generally it is slow enough. But there has been a good deal happening, as you know"--here he turned his eyes upon her. "What do I know?" said she, sharply. He left a pause before he said, without change of manner, "That I was thinking of marrying. You saw Miss Harleth?" "_She_ told you that?" The pale cheeks looked even paler, perhaps from the fierce brightness in the eyes above them. "No. Lush told me," was the slow answer. It was as if the thumb-screw and the iron boot were being placed by creeping hands within sight of the expectant victim. "Good God! say at once that you are going to marry her," she burst out, passionately, her knees shaking and her hands tightly clasped. "Of course, this kind of thing must happen some time or other, Lydia," said he; really, now the thumb-screw was on, not wishing to make the pain worse. "You didn't always see the necessity." "Perhaps not. I see it now." In those few under-toned words of Grandcourt's she felt as absolute a resistance as if her thin fingers had been pushing at a fast shut iron door. She knew her helplessness, and shrank from testing it by any appeal--shrank from crying in a dead ear and clinging to dead knees, only to see the immovable face and feel the rigid limbs. She did not weep nor speak; she was too hard pressed by the sudden certainty which had as much of chill sickness in it as of thought and emotion. The defeated clutch of struggling hope gave her in these first moments a horrible sensation. At last she rose, with a spasmodic effort, and, unconscious of every thing but her wretchedness, pressed her forehead against the hard, cold glass of the window. The children, playing on the gravel, took this as a sign that she wanted them, and, running forward, stood in front of her with their sweet faces upturned expectantly. This roused her: she shook her head at them, waved them off, and overcome with this painful exertion, sank back in the nearest chair. Grandcourt had risen too. He was doubly annoyed--at the scene itself, and at the sense that no imperiousness of his could save him from it; but the task had to be gone through, and there was the administrative necessity of arranging things so that there should be as little annoyance as possible in the future. He was leaning against the corner of the fire-place. She looked up at him and said, bitterly, "All this is of no consequence to you. I and the children are importunate creatures. You wish to get away again and be with Miss Harleth." "Don't make the affair more disagreeable than it need be. Lydia. It is of no use to harp on things that can't be altered. Of course, its deucedly disagreeable to me to see you making yourself miserable. I've taken this journey to tell you what you must make up your mind to--you and the children will be provided for as usual--and there's an end of it." Silence. She dared not answer. This woman with the intense, eager look had had the iron of the mother's anguish in her soul, and it had made her sometimes capable of a repression harder than shrieking and struggle. But underneath the silence there was an outlash of hatred and vindictiveness: she wished that the marriage might make two others wretched, besides herself. Presently he went on, "It will be better for you. You may go on living here. But I think of by-and-by settling a good sum on you and the children, and you can live where you like. There will be nothing for you to complain of then. Whatever happens, you will feel secure. Nothing could be done beforehand. Every thing has gone on in a hurry." Grandcourt ceased his slow delivery of sentences. He did not expect her to thank him, but he considered that she might reasonably be contented; if it were possible for Lydia to be contented. She showed no change, and after a minute he said, "You have never had any reason to fear that I should be illiberal. I don't care a curse about the money." "If you did care about it, I suppose you would not give it us," said Lydia. The sarcasm was irrepressible. "That's a devilishly unfair thing to say," Grandcourt replied, in a lower tone; "and I advise you not to say that sort of thing again." "Should you punish me by leaving the children in beggary?" In spite of herself, the one outlet of venom had brought the other. "There is no question about leaving the children in beggary," said Grandcourt, still in his low voice. "I advise you not to say things that you will repent of." "I am used to repenting," said she, bitterly. "Perhaps you will repent. You have already repented of loving me." "All this will only make it uncommonly difficult for us to meet again. What friend have you besides me?" "Quite true." The words came like a low moan. At the same moment there flashed through her the wish that after promising himself a better happiness than that he had had with her, he might feel a misery and loneliness which would drive him back to her to find some memory of a time when he was young, glad, and hopeful. But no! he would go scathless; it was she that had to suffer. With this the scorching words were ended. Grandcourt had meant to stay till evening; he wished to curtail his visit, but there was no suitable train earlier than the one he had arranged to go by, and he had still to speak to Lydia on the second object of his visit, which like a second surgical operation seemed to require an interval. The hours had to go by; there was eating to be done; the children came in--all this mechanism of life had to be gone through with the dreary sense of constraint which is often felt in domestic quarrels of a commoner kind. To Lydia it was some slight relief for her stifled fury to have the children present: she felt a savage glory in their loveliness, as if it would taunt Grandcourt with his indifference to her and them--a secret darting of venom which was strongly imaginative. He acquitted himself with all the advantage of a man whose grace of bearing has long been moulded on an experience of boredom--nursed the little Antonia, who sat with her hands crossed and eyes upturned to his bald head, which struck her as worthy of observation--and propitiated Henleigh by promising him a beautiful saddle and bridle. It was only the two eldest girls who had known him as a continual presence; and the intervening years had overlaid their infantine memories with a bashfulness which Grandcourt's bearing was not likely to dissipate. He and Lydia occasionally, in the presence of the servants, made a conventional remark; otherwise they never spoke; and the stagnant thought in Grandcourt's mind all the while was of his own infatuation in having given her those diamonds, which obliged him to incur the nuisance of speaking about them. He had an ingrained care for what he held to belong to his caste, and about property he liked to be lordly; also he had a consciousness of indignity to himself in having to ask for anything in the world. But however he might assert his independence of Mrs. Glasher's past, he had made a past for himself which was a stronger yoke than any he could impose. He must ask for the diamonds which he had promised to Gwendolen. At last they were alone again, with the candles above them, face to face with each other. Grandcourt looked at his watch, and then said, in an apparently indifferent drawl, "There is one thing I had to mention, Lydia. My diamonds--you have them." "Yes, I have them," she answered promptly, rising and standing with her arms thrust down and her fingers threaded, while Grandcourt sat still. She had expected the topic, and made her resolve about it. But she meant to carry out her resolve, if possible, without exasperating him. During the hours of silence she had longed to recall the words which had only widened the breach between them. "They are in this house, I suppose?" "No; not in this house." "I thought you said you kept them by you." "When I said so it was true. They are in the bank at Dudley." "Get them away, will you? I must make an arrangement for your delivering them to some one." "Make no arrangement. They shall be delivered to the person you intended them for. _I_ will make the arrangement." "What do you mean?" "What I say. I have always told you that I would give them up to your wife. I shall keep my word. She is not your wife yet." "This is foolery," said Grandcourt, with undertoned disgust. It was too irritating that this indulgence of Lydia had given her a sort of mastery over him in spite of dependent condition. She did not speak. He also rose now, but stood leaning against the mantle-piece with his side-face toward her. "The diamonds must be delivered to me before my marriage," he began again. "What is your wedding-day?" "The tenth. There is no time to be lost." "And where do you go after the marriage?" He did not reply except by looking more sullen. Presently he said, "You must appoint a day before then, to get them from the bank and meet me--or somebody else I will commission;--it's a great nuisance. Mention a day." "No; I shall not do that. They shall be delivered to her safely. I shall keep my word." "Do you mean to say," said Grandcourt, just audibly, turning to face her, "that you will not do as I tell you?" "Yes, I mean that," was the answer that leaped out, while her eyes flashed close to him. The poor creature was immediately conscious that if her words had any effect on her own lot, the effect must be mischievous, and might nullify all the remaining advantage of her long patience. But the word had been spoken. He was in a position the most irritating to him. He could not shake her nor touch her hostilely; and if he could, the process would not bring his mother's diamonds. He shrank from the only sort of threat that would frighten her--if she believed it. And in general, there was nothing he hated more than to be forced into anything like violence even in words: his will must impose itself without trouble. After looking at her for a moment, he turned his side-face toward her again, leaning as before, and said, "Infernal idiots that women are!" "Why will you not tell me where you are going after the marriage? I could be at the wedding if I liked, and learn in that way," said Lydia, not shrinking from the one suicidal form of threat within her power. "Of course, if you like, you can play the mad woman," said Grandcourt, with _sotto voce_ scorn. "It is not to be supposed that you will wait to think what good will come of it--or what you owe to me." He was in a state of disgust and embitterment quite new in the history of their relation to each other. It was undeniable that this woman, whose life he had allowed to send such deep suckers into his, had a terrible power of annoyance in her; and the rash hurry of his proceedings had left her opportunities open. His pride saw very ugly possibilities threatening it, and he stood for several minutes in silence reviewing the situation--considering how he could act upon her. Unlike himself she was of a direct nature, with certain simple strongly-colored tendencies, and there was one often-experienced effect which he thought he could count upon now. As Sir Hugo had said of him, Grandcourt knew how to play his cards upon occasion. He did not speak again, but looked at his watch, rang the bell, and ordered the vehicle to be brought round immediately. Then he removed farther from her, walked as if in expectation of a summons, and remained silent without turning his eyes upon her. She was suffering the horrible conflict of self-reproach and tenacity. She saw beforehand Grandcourt leaving her without even looking at her again--herself left behind in lonely uncertainty--hearing nothing from him--not knowing whether she had done her children harm--feeling that she had perhaps made him hate her;--all the wretchedness of a creature who had defeated her own motives. And yet she could not bear to give up a purpose which was a sweet morsel to her vindictiveness. If she had not been a mother she would willingly have sacrificed herself to her revenge--to what she felt to be the justice of hindering another from getting happiness by willingly giving her over to misery. The two dominant passions were at struggle. She must satisfy them both. "Don't let us part in anger, Henleigh," she began, without changing her voice or attitude: "it is a very little thing I ask. If I were refusing to give anything up that you call yours it would be different: that would be a reason for treating me as if you hated me. But I ask such a little thing. If you will tell me where you are going on the wedding-day I will take care that the diamonds shall be delivered to her without scandal. Without scandal," she repeated entreatingly. "Such preposterous whims make a woman odious," said Grandcourt, not giving way in look or movement. "What is the use of talking to mad people?" "Yes, I am foolish--loneliness has made me foolish--indulge me." Sobs rose as she spoke. "If you will indulge me in this one folly I will be very meek--I will never trouble you." She burst into hysterical crying, and said again almost with a scream--"I will be very meek after that." There was a strange mixture of acting and reality in this passion. She kept hold of her purpose as a child might tighten its hand over a small stolen thing, crying and denying all the while. Even Grandcourt was wrought upon by surprise: this capricious wish, this childish violence, was as unlike Lydia's bearing as it was incongruous with her person. Both had always had a stamp of dignity on them. Yet she seemed more manageable in this state than in her former attitude of defiance. He came close up to her again, and said, in his low imperious tone, "Be quiet, and hear what I tell you, I will never forgive you if you present yourself again and make a scene." She pressed her handkerchief against her face, and when she could speak firmly said, in the muffled voice that follows sobbing, "I will not--if you will let me have my way--I promise you not to thrust myself forward again. I have never broken my word to you--how many have you broken to me? When you gave me the diamonds to wear you were not thinking of having another wife. And I now give them up--I don't reproach you--I only ask you to let me give them up in my own way. Have I not borne it well? Everything is to be taken away from me, and when I ask for a straw, a chip--you deny it me." She had spoken rapidly, but after a little pause she said more slowly, her voice freed from its muffled tone: "I will not bear to have it denied me." Grandcourt had a baffling sense that he had to deal with something like madness; he could only govern by giving way. The servant came to say the fly was ready. When the door was shut again Grandcourt said sullenly, "We are going to Ryelands then." "They shall be delivered to her there," said Lydia, with decision. "Very well, I am going." He felt no inclination even to take her hand: she had annoyed him too sorely. But now that she had gained her point, she was prepared to humble herself that she might propitiate him. "Forgive me; I will never vex you again," she said, with beseeching looks. Her inward voice said distinctly--"It is only I who have to forgive." Yet she was obliged to ask forgiveness. "You had better keep that promise. You have made me feel uncommonly ill with your folly," said Grandcourt, apparently choosing this statement as the strongest possible use of language. "Poor thing!" cried Lydia, with a faint smile;--was he aware of the minor fact that he made her feel ill this morning? But with the quick transition natural to her, she was now ready to coax him if he would let her, that they might part in some degree reconciled. She ventured to lay her hand on his shoulder, and he did not move away from her: she had so far succeeded in alarming him, that he was not sorry for these proofs of returned subjection. "Light a cigar," she said, soothingly, taking the case from his breast-pocket and opening it. Amidst such caressing signs of mutual fear they parted. The effect that clung and gnawed within Grandcourt was a sense of imperfect mastery.

Imagine a rambling house, built of grey stone and red-tiled, a round tower jutting at its corner: a great tree flourishing on one side, with a rookery behind it; on the other side a pool overhung with bushes, where the water-fowl fluttered and screamed: all around, a vast park, bordered by an old plantation. Outside the gate the country, once entirely rural and lovely, now black with coal mines, was chiefly peopled by men with candles stuck in their hats, whose dark faces frightened the children at Gadsmere - Mrs. Glasher's four beautiful children, who had dwelt there for three years. Now, in November, when the trees were leafless and the pool blackly shivering, the place was sombrely in keeping with the black roads and black mounds which seemed to put the district in mourning. But Mrs. Glasher liked Gadsmere as well as she would have liked any other abode. Its complete seclusion was to her taste. When she drove her two ponies with a waggonet full of children, there were no gentry in carriages to be met, only men of business in gigs; at church there were no eyes she needed to avoid, for to the curate she was simply a widow, the tenant of Gadsmere. It was full ten years since the elopement of an Irish officer's beautiful wife with young Grandcourt, and a consequent duel where the bullets wounded the air only. Most of those who remembered the affair now wondered what had become of the beautiful and brilliant Lydia Glasher after she had gone to live with young Grandcourt abroad. That he should have disentangled himself from her seemed natural and desirable. As to her, it was thought that a woman who had forsaken her child along with her husband had probably sunk lower still. Grandcourt had of course got weary of her. He was much given to the pursuit of women: but a man in his position would in time desire to make a suitable marriage. No one talked of Mrs. Glasher now: she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out a search expedition; but Grandcourt was seen in harbour with his colours flying, as seaworthy as ever. Yet, in fact, Grandcourt had never disentangled himself from Mrs. Glasher. His passion for her had been the strongest and most lasting he had ever known; and though it was now as dead as the music of a cracked flute, it had left a certain dull disposedness, which, on the death of her husband three years before, had made him consider marrying her, as he had wished to in the days of his first ardour. At that early time the husband would not oblige him by divorcing Mrs Glasher. In contrast, Mrs. Glasher herself was at first careless about the possibility of marriage. It was enough that she had escaped from a disagreeable husband and found bliss with a lover who had completely fascinated her - young, handsome, amorous, and living in the best style. She was an impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of adoration, exasperated by five years of marital rudeness as a disregarded wife. The one blot on her vision of her new pleasant world, was the knowledge that she left her three-year-old boy, who died two years afterward, and whose first tones saying "mamma" retained a difference from those of the children that came after. But now, over the changes of the years, the desire that Grandcourt should marry her had become dominant. This was on behalf of her children, whom she loved with a devotion charged with the added passion of atonement. She had no repentance except in this direction. If Grandcourt married her, the children would be none the worse off for what had passed: they would be at no disadvantage with the world if her son was made his father's heir. Her love for Grandcourt had long resolved itself into anxiety that he should marry her, and for her children's sake she was prepared to endure anything quietly in marriage. She was acute enough to cherish Grandcourt's flickering purpose by not molesting him with passionate appeals and scene-making. His incalculable turns, and his tendency to harden under beseeching, had created dread in her. But her reticence made her bitter: the withheld sting was gathering venom. She was absolutely dependent on Grandcourt. Though he had always been liberal in expenses for her, he had said that he would never settle anything except by will; and it often occurred to her that, even if she did not become Grandcourt's wife, he might never have a legitimate son; so in the end her boy might be made heir to his estates. No son could promise to have more of his father's physique. But her becoming Grandcourt's wife was so far from being impossible, that even Lush had thought Grandcourt was as likely to marry Mrs. Glasher as anyone else. Indeed, when Lush thought that Grandcourt had an idea of attempting to win Miss Arrowpoint, he had supported that project instead. But both prospects had been eclipsed by Gwendolen's appearance on the scene; and Mrs. Glasher entered with eagerness into Lush's plan of hindering that new danger by setting up a barrier in Gwendolen's mind. After that, she had heard from Lush of Gwendolen's departure, and that the danger was gone; but there had been no letter to tell her that the danger had returned and had become a certainty. She had since then written to Grandcourt, as she did habitually, and he had been longer than usual in answering. She thought that he might intend coming to see her, and she hoped that a frustrated courtship might dispose him to slip the more easily into his old track. Grandcourt had two purposes in coming to Gadsmere: to convey the news of his approaching marriage in person; and to get from Lydia his mother's diamonds, which long ago he had handed to her. These particular diamonds were not mountains of light - they were mere peas and haricots for the ears, neck and hair; but they were worth some thousands, and Grandcourt wished to have them for his wife. Formerly when he had asked Lydia to put them into his keeping again, simply on the ground that they would be safer, she had quietly but absolutely refused, declaring that they were quite safe; and had said, "If you ever marry another woman I will give them up to her." At that time Grandcourt had no motive which urged him to persist, and he had this grace in him, that he did not like to exercise his power of cowing or disappointing her as he did with others. A severe interpreter might say that the mere facts of their relation to each other, the melancholy position of this woman who depended on his will, made a standing banquet for his delight in dominating. But there was something more: there was the memory of the power she once had over him, which inclined him to espouse a familiar past rather than rouse himself to the expectation of novelty. But now novelty had taken hold of him. Mrs. Glasher was seated in the pleasant room where she habitually passed her mornings with her children. The window looked out on broad gravel and grass; the old oak table was littered with the children's toys and books. The three girls, seated round their mother, were miniature portraits of her - dark-eyed, delicate-featured brunettes, the eldest being barely nine. The boy was seated on the carpet, bending his blonde head over the animals from a Noah's ark, admonishing them in a voice of threatening command, and occasionally licking them to see if the colours would hold. Mrs. Glasher had dressed carefully, for each day now she said to herself that Grandcourt might come. Her head, which though emaciated, had an ineffaceable beauty, rose impressively above her bronze-coloured silk and velvet, and the gold necklace which Grandcourt had first clasped round her neck years ago. Not that she had any pleasure in her looks; her chief thought when she looked in the glass was, "How changed!" But the children kissed the pale cheeks and never found them deficient. That love was now the one end of her life. Suddenly Mrs. Glasher turned her head and listened. "Hush, dear! I think some one is coming." Henleigh the boy jumped up and said, "Mamma, is it the miller with my donkey?" He got no answer, and going up to his mamma's knee repeated his question insistently. But the door opened, and the servant announced Mr. Grandcourt. Mrs. Glasher rose in some agitation. Henleigh frowned at him in disgust at his not being the miller, and the three little girls lifted up their dark eyes to him timidly. They had none of them any particular liking for this friend of mamma's - in fact, when he put his hand on Henleigh's head, the boy began to beat the arm away with his fists. The little girls submitted bashfully to be patted under the chin, but on the whole it seemed better to send them into the garden, where they were presently dancing and chatting with the dogs on the gravel. "How far have you come?" said Mrs. Glasher. "From Diplow," he answered slowly, seating himself opposite her. She noted his unseeing gaze. "You are tired, then." "No, I rested at the Junction - a hideous hole. These railway journeys are always a confounded bore." Grandcourt rubbed his face, and looked at his crossed knee and blameless boot, as if a stranger sat opposite him, instead of a woman quivering with suspense. Imagine the difference in emotion between this woman whom the years had worn to sharper eagerness, and this man whom they were dulling into obstinacy. "I expected to see you - it was so long since I had heard from you," said Mrs. Glasher. She had a quick, incisive way of speaking. "Yes," drawled Grandcourt. "But you found the money paid into the bank." "Oh, yes," said Mrs. Glasher, curtly, tingling with impatience. Always before, Grandcourt had taken more notice of her and the children than he did to-day. "Yes," he resumed, playing with his whisker, "the time has gone on at rather a rattling pace. But there has been a good deal happening, as you know." Here he turned his eyes upon her. "What do I know?" said she, sharply. He left a pause before he said, without change of manner, "That I was thinking of marrying. You saw Miss Harleth?" "She told you that?" The pale cheeks looked even paler. "No. Lush told me," was the slow answer. It was as if the thumb-screw was being placed by creeping hands within sight of the expectant victim. "Good God! say at once that you are going to marry her," she burst out passionately, her hands tightly clasped. "Of course, it must happen some time or other, Lydia," said he; really, now the thumb-screw was on, not wishing to make the pain worse. "You didn't always see the necessity." "Perhaps not. I see it now." In those few words she felt as absolute a resistance as if her thin fingers had been pushing at an iron door. She knew her helplessness, and shrank from testing it by any appeal - shrank from crying in a dead ear and clinging to dead knees, only to see the immovable face and feel the rigid limbs. She did not weep nor speak. At last she rose, with a spasmodic effort, and, unconscious of everything but her wretchedness, pressed her forehead against the hard, cold glass of the window. The children, playing on the gravel, took this as a sign that she wanted them, and, running forward, stood in front of her with their sweet faces upturned expectantly. This roused her: she shook her head at them, waved them off, and overcome, sank back in the nearest chair. Grandcourt had risen too. He was doubly annoyed - at the scene itself, and at the sense that no imperiousness of his could save him from it; but the task had to be gone through. She looked up at him and said bitterly- "The children and I are of no consequence to you. You wish to get away again and be with Miss Harleth." "Don't make the affair more disagreeable than it need be, Lydia. It's deucedly disagreeable to me to see you making yourself miserable. You must make your mind up to it - you and the children will be provided for as usual - and there's an end of it." She dared not answer. This intense woman had the iron of a mother's anguish in her soul, and it had made her capable of a repression harder than shrieking and struggle. But underneath the silence there was vindictive hatred: she wished that the marriage might make them wretched. He went on- "You may go on living here. But I think of by-and-by settling a good sum on you and the children, and you can live where you like. You will have nothing to complain of. I don't care a curse about the money." "If you did care about it, I suppose you would not give it us," said Lydia. "That's a devilishly unfair thing to say," Grandcourt replied, in a lower tone; "and I advise you not to say that sort of thing again." "Should you punish me by leaving the children in beggary?" she said in spite of herself. "There is no question about leaving the children in beggary," said Grandcourt, still in his low voice. "Do not say things that you will repent of." "I am used to repenting," said she, bitterly. "Perhaps you will repent. You have already repented of loving me." "All this will only make it uncommonly difficult for us to meet again. What friend have you besides me?" "Quite true." The words came like a low moan. Through her mind flashed the wish that he might feel a misery and loneliness which would drive him back to her. But no! he would go unscathed; it was she that had to suffer. With this the scorching words were ended. Although Grandcourt still had to speak to Lydia on the second object of his visit, like a second surgical operation it seemed to require an interval. The hours had to go by; there was eating to be done; the children came in - all this mechanism of life had to be gone through with the dreary constraint which is often felt in domestic quarrels. Lydia felt a savage glory in her children's loveliness, as if it would taunt Grandcourt with his indifference. He acquitted himself with bored grace - nursed the little Antonia, who sat with her eyes upturned to his bald head - and propitiated Henleigh by promising him a beautiful saddle and bridle. It was only the two eldest girls who had known him as a continual presence; and the intervening years had overlaid their memories with bashfulness. He and Lydia occasionally, in the presence of the servants, made a conventional remark; otherwise they never spoke; and the thought in Grandcourt's mind all the while was of his own infatuation in having given her those diamonds, which obliged him to incur the nuisance of speaking about them. He did not like to ask for anything; but he must ask for the diamonds which he had promised to Gwendolen. At last they were alone again. Grandcourt looked at his watch, and said, in an apparently indifferent drawl, "There is one thing I had to mention, Lydia. My diamonds - you have them." "Yes, I have them," she answered promptly, rising and standing with her fingers threaded. She had expected the topic, and made her resolve; but she meant to carry it out, if possible, without exasperating him. "They are in this house, I suppose?" "No; they are in the bank at Dudley." "Get them away, will you? I must make an arrangement for your delivering them to some one." "Make no arrangement. They shall be delivered to the person you intended them for." "What do you mean?" "What I say. I have always told you that I would give them up to your wife. I shall keep my word. She is not your wife yet." "This is foolery," said Grandcourt, with undertoned disgust. It was too irritating that Lydia had any sort of mastery over him in spite of her dependence. "The diamonds must be delivered to me before my marriage." "What is your wedding-day?" "The tenth. There is no time to be lost." "And where do you go after the marriage?" He did not reply except by looking more sullen. Presently he said, "You must get them from the bank before then and meet me; it's a great nuisance." "No; I shall not do that. They shall be delivered to her safely. I shall keep my word." "Do you mean to say," said Grandcourt, just audibly, turning to face her, "that you will not do as I tell you?" "Yes, I mean that." The poor creature was immediately conscious that the effect of her words on her own position must be mischievous. But the words had been spoken. He was highly irritated, but he shrank from the only sort of threat that would frighten her - if she believed it. And there was nothing he hated more than to be forced into anything like violence even in words: his will must impose itself without trouble. After a moment, he said- "Infernal idiots that women are!" "Why will you not tell me where you are going after the marriage? I could be at the wedding if I liked, and learn in that way," said Lydia, using the one suicidal form of threat within her power. "Of course, if you like, you can play the mad woman," said Grandcourt, with sotto voce scorn. He was in a state of disgust and embitterment quite new in their relationship. This woman had a terrible power of annoyance; and the rash hurry of his proceedings had left opportunities open. He stood for several minutes in silence reviewing the situation - considering how he could act upon her. Unlike himself, she was of a direct nature, and there was one often-experienced effect which he thought he could count upon now. He did not speak again, but looked at his watch, rang the bell, and ordered the vehicle to be brought round. Then he walked away silently without turning his eyes upon her. She was suffering the horrible conflict of self-reproach and tenacity. She imagined Grandcourt leaving her without even looking at her again - herself left behind in lonely uncertainty - hearing nothing - not knowing whether she had done her children harm - feeling that she had perhaps made him hate her, and defeated her own motives. And yet she could not bear to give up a sweet revenge. "Don't let us part in anger, Henleigh," she began: "it is a very little thing I ask. If you tell me where you are going on the wedding-day I will take care that the diamonds shall be delivered to her without scandal. Without scandal," she repeated entreatingly. "Such preposterous whims make a woman odious," said Grandcourt, not giving way in look or movement. "What is the use of talking to mad people?" "Yes, I am foolish - loneliness has made me foolish - indulge me." Sobs rose as she spoke. "If you will indulge me in this one folly I will never trouble you." She burst into hysterical crying, and said almost with a scream- "I will be very meek." There was a strange mixture of acting and reality in this passion. She kept hold of her purpose as a child might tighten its hand over a small stolen thing, crying and denying all the while. Even Grandcourt was surprised: this childish caprice was unlike the normally dignified Lydia. He came close up to her, and said, in his low imperious tone, "Be quiet. I will never forgive you if you present yourself and make a scene." She pressed her handkerchief against her face, and said, in a muffled voice, "If you let me have my way, I promise not to thrust myself forward again. I have never broken my word to you - how many have you broken to me? I don't reproach you - I only ask you to let me give up the diamonds in my own way. Have I not borne it well? Everything is to be taken away from me, and when I ask for a straw, you deny it me. I will not bear to have it denied me." Grandcourt had a baffling sense that he had to deal with something like madness; he could only govern by giving way. He said sullenly, "We are going to Ryelands." "They shall be delivered to her there," said Lydia. Now that she had gained her point, she was prepared to humble herself. "Forgive me; I will never vex you again," she said beseechingly. "You had better keep that promise. You have made me feel uncommonly ill with your folly," said Grandcourt, apparently choosing this statement as the strongest possible use of language. "Poor thing!" cried Lydia, with a faint smile. She was now ready to coax him if he would let her, so that they might part in some degree reconciled. She ventured to lay her hand on his shoulder, and he did not move away. She had so far succeeded in alarming him, that he was not sorry for these proofs of returned subjection. "Light a cigar," she said, soothingly, taking the case from his breast-pocket. Amidst such caressing signs of mutual fear they parted. The effect that clung and gnawed within Grandcourt was a sense of his imperfect mastery.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 30

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline for our ignorance. Mr. Grandcourt's wish to be introduced had no suddenness for Gwendolen; but when Lord Brackenshaw moved aside a little for the prefigured stranger to come forward and she felt herself face to face with the real man, there was a little shock which flushed her cheeks and vexatiously deepened with her consciousness of it. The shock came from the reversal of her expectations: Grandcourt could hardly have been more unlike all her imaginary portraits of him. He was slightly taller than herself, and their eyes seemed to be on a level; there was not the faintest smile on his face as he looked at her, not a trace of self-consciousness or anxiety in his bearing: when he raised his hat he showed an extensive baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish-blonde hair, but he also showed a perfect hand; the line of feature from brow to chin undisguised by beard was decidedly handsome, with only moderate departures from the perpendicular, and the slight whisker too was perpendicular. It was not possible for a human aspect to be freer from grimace or solicitous wrigglings: also it was perhaps not possible for a breathing man wide awake to look less animated. The correct Englishman, drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity, assenting severely, and seemed to be in a state of internal drill, suggests a suppressed vivacity, and may be suspected of letting go with some violence when he is released from parade; but Grandcourt's bearing had no rigidity, it inclined rather to the flaccid. His complexion had a faded fairness resembling that of an actress when bare of the artificial white and red; his long narrow gray eyes expressed nothing but indifference. Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. I am only mentioning the point that Gwendolen saw by the light of a prepared contrast in the first minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt: they were summed up in the words, "He is not ridiculous." But forthwith Lord Brackenshaw was gone, and what is called conversation had begun, the first and constant element in it being that Grandcourt looked at Gwendolen persistently with a slightly exploring gaze, but without change of expression, while she only occasionally looked at him with a flash of observation a little softened by coquetry. Also, after her answers there was a longer or shorter pause before he spoke again. "I used to think archery was a great bore," Grandcourt began. He spoke with a fine accent, but with a certain broken drawl, as of a distinguished personage with a distinguished cold on his chest. "Are you converted to-day?" said Gwendolen. (Pause, during which she imagined various degrees and modes of opinion about herself that might be entertained by Grandcourt.) "Yes, since I saw you shooting. In things of this sort one generally sees people missing and simpering." "I suppose you are a first-rate shot with a rifle." (Pause, during which Gwendolen, having taken a rapid observation of Grandcourt, made a brief graphic description of him to an indefinite hearer.) "I have left off shooting." "Oh, then, you are a formidable person. People who have done things once and left them off make one feel very contemptible, as if one were using cast-off fashions. I hope you have not left off all follies, because I practice a great many." (Pause, during which Gwendolen made several interpretations of her own speech.) "What do you call follies?" "Well, in general, I think, whatever is agreeable is called a folly. But you have not left off hunting, I hear." (Pause, wherein Gwendolen recalled what she had heard about Grandcourt's position, and decided that he was the most aristocratic-looking man she had ever seen.) "One must do something." "And do you care about the turf?--or is that among the things you have left off?" (Pause, during which Gwendolen thought that a man of extremely calm, cold manners might be less disagreeable as a husband than other men, and not likely to interfere with his wife's preferences.) "I run a horse now and then; but I don't go in for the thing as some men do. Are you fond of horses?" "Yes, indeed; I never like my life so well as when I am on horseback, having a great gallop. I think of nothing. I only feel myself strong and happy." (Pause, wherein Gwendolen wondered whether Grandcourt would like what she said, but assured herself that she was not going to disguise her tastes.) "Do you like danger?" "I don't know. When I am on horseback I never think of danger. It seems to me that if I broke my bones I should not feel it. I should go at anything that came in my way." (Pause during which Gwendolen had run through a whole hunting season with two chosen hunters to ride at will.) "You would perhaps like tiger-hunting or pig-sticking. I saw some of that for a season or two in the East. Everything here is poor stuff after that." "_You_ are fond of danger, then?" (Pause, wherein Gwendolen speculated on the probability that the men of coldest manners were the most adventurous, and felt the strength of her own insight, supposing the question had to be decided.) "One must have something or other. But one gets used to it." "I begin to think I am very fortunate, because everything is new to me: it is only that I can't get enough of it. I am not used to anything except being dull, which I should like to leave off as you have left off shooting." (Pause, during which it occurred to Gwendolen that a man of cold and distinguished manners might possibly be a dull companion; but on the other hand she thought that most persons were dull, that she had not observed husbands to be companions--and that after all she was not going to accept Grandcourt.) "Why are you dull?" "This is a dreadful neighborhood. There is nothing to be done in it. That is why I practiced my archery." (Pause, during which Gwendolen reflected that the life of an unmarried woman who could not go about and had no command of anything must necessarily be dull through all degrees of comparison as time went on.) "You have made yourself queen of it. I imagine you will carry the first prize." "I don't know that. I have great rivals. Did you not observe how well Miss Arrowpoint shot?" (Pause, wherein Gwendolen was thinking that men had been known to choose some one else than the woman they most admired, and recalled several experiences of that kind in novels.) "Miss Arrowpoint. No--that is, yes." "Shall we go now and hear what the scoring says? Every one is going to the other end now--shall we join them? I think my uncle is looking toward me. He perhaps wants me." Gwendolen found a relief for herself by thus changing the situation: not that the _tete--tete_ was quite disagreeable to her; but while it lasted she apparently could not get rid of the unwonted flush in her cheeks and the sense of surprise which made her feel less mistress of herself than usual. And this Mr. Grandcourt, who seemed to feel his own importance more than he did hers--a sort of unreasonableness few of us can tolerate--must not take for granted that he was of great moment to her, or that because others speculated on him as a desirable match she held herself altogether at his beck. How Grandcourt had filled up the pauses will be more evident hereafter. "You have just missed the gold arrow, Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne. "Miss Juliet Fenn scores eight above you." "I am very glad to hear it. I should have felt that I was making myself too disagreeable--taking the best of everything," said Gwendolen, quite easily. It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as mid-day market in everything but her archery and plainness, in which last she was noticeable like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes. (Surely, considering the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls "intending bridegrooms," should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the effect of their own ugliness.) There was now a lively movement in the mingling groups, which carried the talk along with it. Every one spoke to every one else by turns, and Gwendolen, who chose to see what was going on around her now, observed that Grandcourt was having Klesmer presented to him by some one unknown to her--a middle-aged man, with dark, full face and fat hands, who seemed to be on the easiest terms with both, and presently led the way in joining the Arrowpoints, whose acquaintance had already been made by both him and Grandcourt. Who this stranger was she did not care much to know; but she wished to observe what was Grandcourt's manner toward others than herself. Precisely the same: except that he did not look much at Miss Arrowpoint, but rather at Klesmer, who was speaking with animation--now stretching out his long fingers horizontally, now pointing downward with his fore-finger, now folding his arms and tossing his mane, while he addressed himself first to one and then to the other, including Grandcourt, who listened with an impassive face and narrow eyes, his left fore-finger in his waistcoat-pocket, and his right slightly touching his thin whisker. "I wonder which style Miss Arrowpoint admires most," was a thought that glanced through Gwendolen's mind, while her eyes and lips gathered rather a mocking expression. But she would not indulge her sense of amusement by watching, as if she were curious, and she gave all her animation to those immediately around her, determined not to care whether Mr. Grandcourt came near her again or not. He did come, however, and at a moment when he could propose to conduct Mrs. Davilow to her carriage, "Shall we meet again in the ball-room?" she said as he raised his hat at parting. The "yes" in reply had the usual slight drawl and perfect gravity. "You were wrong for once, Gwendolen," said Mrs. Davilow, during their few minutes' drive to the castle. "In what, mamma?" "About Mr. Grandcourt's appearance and manners. You can't find anything ridiculous in him." "I suppose I could if I tried, but I don't want to do it," said Gwendolen, rather pettishly; and her mother was afraid to say more. It was the rule on these occasions for the ladies and gentlemen to dine apart, so that the dinner might make a time of comparative ease and rest for both. Indeed, the gentlemen had a set of archery stories about the epicurism of the ladies, who had somehow been reported to show a revolting masculine judgment in venison, even asking for the fat--a proof of the frightful rate at which corruption might go on in women, but for severe social restraint, and every year the amiable Lord Brackenshaw, who was something of a _gourmet_, mentioned Byron's opinion that a woman should never be seen eating,--introducing it with a confidential--"The fact is" as if he were for the first time admitting his concurrence in that sentiment of the refined poet. In the ladies' dining-room it was evident that Gwendolen was not a general favorite with her own sex: there were no beginnings of intimacy between her and other girls, and in conversation they rather noticed what she said than spoke to her in free exchange. Perhaps it was that she was not much interested in them, and when left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them--she was only fond of their homage--and women did not give her homage. The exception to this willing aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who often managed unostentatiously to be by her side, and talked to her with quiet friendliness. "She knows, as I do, that our friends are ready to quarrel over a husband for us," thought Gwendolen, "and she is determined not to enter into the quarrel." "I think Miss Arrowpoint has the best manners I ever saw," said Mrs. Davilow, when she and Gwendolen were in a dressing-room with Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna, but at a distance where they could have their talk apart. "I wish I were like her," said Gwendolen. "Why? Are you getting discontented with yourself, Gwen?" "No; but I am discontented with things. She seems contented." "I am sure you ought to be satisfied to-day. You must have enjoyed the shooting. I saw you did." "Oh, that is over now, and I don't know what will come next," said Gwendolen, stretching herself with a sort of moan and throwing up her arms. They were bare now; it was the fashion to dance in the archery dress, throwing off the jacket; and the simplicity of her white cashmere with its border of pale green set off her form to the utmost. A thin line of gold round her neck, and the gold star on her breast, were her only ornaments. Her smooth soft hair piled up into a grand crown made a clear line about her brow. Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change--only to give stability to one beautiful moment. "The dancing will come next," said Mrs. Davilow "You are sure to enjoy that." "I shall only dance in the quadrille. I told Mr. Clintock so. I shall not waltz or polk with any one." "Why in the world do you say that all on a sudden?" "I can't bear having ugly people so near me." "Whom do you mean by ugly people?" "Oh, plenty." "Mr. Clintock, for example, is not ugly." Mrs. Davilow dared not mention Grandcourt. "Well, I hate woolen cloth touching me." "Fancy!" said Mrs. Davilow to her sister who now came up from the other end of the room. "Gwendolen says she will not waltz or polk." "She is rather given to whims, I think," said Mrs. Gascoigne, gravely. "It would be more becoming in her to behave as other young ladies do on such an occasion as this; especially when she has had the advantage of first-rate dancing lessons." "Why should I dance if I don't like it, aunt? It is not in the catechism." "My _dear_!" said Mrs. Gascoigne, in a tone of severe check, and Anna looked frightened at Gwendolen's daring. But they all passed on without saying any more. Apparently something had changed Gwendolen's mood since the hour of exulting enjoyment in the archery-ground. But she did not look the worse under the chandeliers in the ball-room, where the soft splendor of the scene and the pleasant odors from the conservatory could not but be soothing to the temper, when accompanied with the consciousness of being preeminently sought for. Hardly a dancing man but was anxious to have her for a partner, and each whom she accepted was in a state of melancholy remonstrance that she would not waltz or polk. "Are you under a vow, Miss Harleth?"--"Why are you so cruel to us all?"--"You waltzed with me in February."--"And you who waltz so perfectly!" were exclamations not without piquancy for her. The ladies who waltzed naturally thought that Miss Harleth only wanted to make herself particular; but her uncle when he overheard her refusal, supported her by saying, "Gwendolen has usually good reasons." He thought she was certainly more distinguished in not waltzing, and he wished her to be distinguished. The archery ball was intended to be kept at the subdued pitch that suited all dignities clerical and secular; it was not an escapement for youthful high spirits, and he himself was of opinion that the fashionable dances were too much of a romp. Among the remonstrant dancing men, however, Mr. Grandcourt was not numbered. After standing up for a quadrille with Miss Arrowpoint, it seemed that he meant to ask for no other partner. Gwendolen observed him frequently with the Arrowpoints, but he never took an opportunity of approaching her. Mr. Gascoigne was sometimes speaking to him; but Mr. Gascoigne was everywhere. It was in her mind now that she would probably after all not have the least trouble about him: perhaps he had looked at her without any particular admiration, and was too much used to everything in the world to think of her as more than one of the girls who were invited in that part of the country. Of course! It was ridiculous of elders to entertain notions about what a man would do, without having seen him even through a telescope. Probably he meant to marry Miss Arrowpoint. Whatever might come, she, Gwendolen, was not going to be disappointed: the affair was a joke whichever way it turned, for she had never committed herself even by a silent confidence in anything Mr. Grandcourt would do. Still, she noticed that he did sometimes quietly and gradually change his position according to hers, so that he could see her whenever she was dancing, and if he did not admire her--so much the worse for him. This movement for the sake of being in sight of her was more direct than usual rather late in the evening, when Gwendolen had accepted Klesmer as a partner; and that wide-glancing personage, who saw everything and nothing by turns, said to her when they were walking, "Mr. Grandcourt is a man of taste. He likes to see you dancing." "Perhaps he likes to look at what is against his taste," said Gwendolen, with a light laugh; she was quite courageous with Klesmer now. "He may be so tired of admiring that he likes disgust for variety." "Those words are not suitable to your lips," said Klesmer, quickly, with one of his grand frowns, while he shook his hand as if to banish the discordant sounds. "Are you as critical of words as of music?" "Certainly I am. I should require your words to be what your face and form are--always among the meanings of a noble music." "That is a compliment as well as a correction. I am obliged for both. But do you know I am bold enough to wish to correct _you_, and require you to understand a joke?" "One may understand jokes without liking them," said the terrible Klesmer. "I have had opera books sent me full of jokes; it was just because I understood them that I did not like them. The comic people are ready to challenge a man because he looks grave. 'You don't see the witticism, sir?' 'No, sir, but I see what you meant.' Then I am what we call ticketed as a fellow without _esprit_. But, in fact," said Klesmer, suddenly dropping from his quick narrative to a reflective tone, with an impressive frown, "I am very sensible to wit and humor." "I am glad you tell me that," said Gwendolen, not without some wickedness of intention. But Klesmer's thoughts had flown off on the wings of his own statement, as their habit was, and she had the wickedness all to herself. "Pray, who is that standing near the card-room door?" she went on, seeing there the same stranger with whom Klesmer had been in animated talk on the archery ground. "He is a friend of yours, I think." "No, no; an amateur I have seen in town; Lush, a Mr. Lush--too fond of Meyerbeer and Scribe--too fond of the mechanical-dramatic." "Thanks. I wanted to know whether you thought his face and form required that his words should be among the meanings of noble music?" Klesmer was conquered, and flashed at her a delightful smile which made them quite friendly until she begged to be deposited by the side of her mamma. Three minutes afterward her preparations for Grandcourt's indifference were all canceled. Turning her head after some remark to her mother, she found that he had made his way up to her. "May I ask if you are tired of dancing, Miss Harleth?" he began, looking down with his former unperturbed expression. "Not in the least." "Will you do me the honor--the next--or another quadrille?" "I should have been very happy," said Gwendolen looking at her card, "but I am engaged for the next to Mr. Clintock--and indeed I perceive that I am doomed for every quadrille; I have not one to dispose of." She was not sorry to punish Mr. Grandcourt's tardiness, yet at the same time she would have liked to dance with him. She gave him a charming smile as she looked up to deliver her answer, and he stood still looking down at her with no smile at all. "I am unfortunate in being too late," he said, after a moment's pause. "It seemed to me that you did not care for dancing," said Gwendolen. "I thought it might be one of the things you had left off." "Yes, but I have not begun to dance with you," said Grandcourt. Always there was the same pause before he took up his cue. "You make dancing a new thing, as you make archery." "Is novelty always agreeable?" "No, no--not always." "Then I don't know whether to feel flattered or not. When you had once danced with me there would be no more novelty in it." "On the contrary, there would probably be much more." "That is deep. I don't understand." "It is difficult to make Miss Harleth understand her power?" Here Grandcourt had turned to Mrs. Davilow, who, smiling gently at her daughter, said, "I think she does not generally strike people as slow to understand." "Mamma," said Gwendolen, in a deprecating tone, "I am adorably stupid, and want everything explained to me--when the meaning is pleasant." "If you are stupid, I admit that stupidity is adorable," returned Grandcourt, after the usual pause, and without change of tone. But clearly he knew what to say. "I begin to think that my cavalier has forgotten me," Gwendolen observed after a little while. "I see the quadrille is being formed." "He deserves to be renounced," said Grandcourt. "I think he is very pardonable," said Gwendolen. "There must have been some misunderstanding," said Mrs. Davilow. "Mr. Clintock was too anxious about the engagement to have forgotten it." But now Lady Brackenshaw came up and said, "Miss Harleth, Mr. Clintock has charged me to express to you his deep regret that he was obliged to leave without having the pleasure of dancing with you again. An express came from his father, the archdeacon; something important; he was to go. He was _au dsespoir_." "Oh, he was very good to remember the engagement under the circumstances," said Gwendolen. "I am sorry he was called away." It was easy to be politely sorrowful on so felicitous an occasion. "Then I can profit by Mr. Clintock's misfortune?" said Grandcourt. "May I hope that you will let me take his place?" "I shall be very happy to dance the next quadrille with you." The appropriateness of the event seemed an augury, and as Gwendolen stood up for the quadrille with Grandcourt, there was a revival in her of the exultation--the sense of carrying everything before her, which she had felt earlier in the day. No man could have walked through the quadrille with more irreproachable ease than Grandcourt; and the absence of all eagerness in his attention to her suited his partner's taste. She was now convinced that he meant to distinguish her, to mark his admiration of her in a noticeable way; and it began to appear probable that she would have it in her power to reject him, whence there was a pleasure in reckoning up the advantages which would make her rejection splendid, and in giving Mr. Grandcourt his utmost value. It was also agreeable to divine that this exclusive selection of her to dance with, from among all the unmarried ladies present, would attract observation; though she studiously avoided seeing this, and at the end of the quadrille walked away on Grandcourt's arm as if she had been one of the shortest sighted instead of the longest and widest sighted of mortals. They encountered Miss Arrowpoint, who was standing with Lady Brackenshaw and a group of gentlemen. The heiress looked at Gwendolen invitingly and said, "I hope you will vote with us, Miss Harleth, and Mr. Grandcourt too, though he is not an archer." Gwendolen and Grandcourt paused to join the group, and found that the voting turned on the project of a picnic archery meeting to be held in Cardell Chase, where the evening entertainment would be more poetic than a ball under chandeliers--a feast of sunset lights along the glades and through the branches and over the solemn tree-tops. Gwendolen thought the scheme delightful--equal to playing Robin Hood and Maid Marian: and Mr. Grandcourt, when appealed to a second time, said it was a thing to be done; whereupon Mr. Lush, who stood behind Lady Brackenshaw's elbow, drew Gwendolen's notice by saying with a familiar look and tone to Grandcourt, "Diplow would be a good place for the meeting, and more convenient: there's a fine bit between the oaks toward the north gate." Impossible to look more unconscious of being addressed than Grandcourt; but Gwendolen took a new survey of the speaker, deciding, first, that he must be on terms of intimacy with the tenant of Diplow, and, secondly, that she would never, if she could help it, let him come within a yard of her. She was subject to physical antipathies, and Mr. Lush's prominent eyes, fat though not clumsy figure, and strong black gray-besprinkled hair of frizzy thickness, which, with the rest of his prosperous person, was enviable to many, created one of the strongest of her antipathies. To be safe from his looking at her, she murmured to Grandcourt, "I should like to continue walking." He obeyed immediately; but when they were thus away from any audience, he spoke no word for several minutes, and she, out of a half-amused, half-serious inclination for experiment, would not speak first. They turned into the large conservatory, beautifully lit up with Chinese lamps. The other couples there were at a distance which would not have interfered with any dialogue, but still they walked in silence until they had reached the farther end where there was a flush of pink light, and the second wide opening into the ball-room. Grandcourt, when they had half turned round, paused and said languidly, "Do you like this kind of thing?" If the situation had been described to Gwendolen half an hour before, she would have laughed heartily at it, and could only have imagined herself returning a playful, satirical answer. But for some mysterious reason--it was a mystery of which she had a faint wondering consciousness--she dared not be satirical: she had begun to feel a wand over her that made her afraid of offending Grandcourt. "Yes," she said, quietly, without considering what "kind of thing" was meant--whether the flowers, the scents, the ball in general, or this episode of walking with Mr. Grandcourt in particular. And they returned along the conservatory without farther interpretation. She then proposed to go and sit down in her old place, and they walked among scattered couples preparing for the waltz to the spot where Mrs. Davilow had been seated all the evening. As they approached it her seat was vacant, but she was coming toward it again, and, to Gwendolen's shuddering annoyance, with Mr. Lush at her elbow. There was no avoiding the confrontation: her mamma came close to her before they had reached the seats, and, after a quiet greeting smile, said innocently, "Gwendolen, dear, let me present Mr. Lush to you." Having just made the acquaintance of this personage, as an intimate and constant companion of Mr. Grandcourt's, Mrs. Davilow imagined it altogether desirable that her daughter also should make the acquaintance. It was hardly a bow that Gwendolen gave--rather, it was the slightest forward sweep of the head away from the physiognomy that inclined itself toward her, and she immediately moved toward her seat, saying, "I want to put on my burnous." No sooner had she reached it, than Mr. Lush was there, and had the burnous in his hand: to annoy this supercilious young lady, he would incur the offense of forestalling Grandcourt; and, holding up the garment close to Gwendolen, he said, "Pray, permit me?" But she, wheeling away from him as if he had been a muddy hound, glided on to the ottoman, saying, "No, thank you." A man who forgave this would have much Christian feeling, supposing he had intended to be agreeable to the young lady; but before he seized the burnous Mr. Lush had ceased to have that intention. Grandcourt quietly took the drapery from him, and Mr. Lush, with a slight bow, moved away. "You had perhaps better put it on," said Mr. Grandcourt, looking down on her without change of expression. "Thanks; perhaps it would be wise," said Gwendolen, rising, and submitting very gracefully to take the burnous on her shoulders. After that, Mr. Grandcourt exchanged a few polite speeches with Mrs. Davilow, and, in taking leave, asked permission to call at Offendene the next day. He was evidently not offended by the insult directed toward his friend. Certainly Gwendolen's refusal of the burnous from Mr. Lush was open to the interpretation that she wished to receive it from Mr. Grandcourt. But she, poor child, had no design in this action, and was simply following her antipathy and inclination, confiding in them as she did in the more reflective judgments into which they entered as sap into leafage. Gwendolen had no sense that these men were dark enigmas to her, or that she needed any help in drawing conclusions about them--Mr. Grandcourt at least. The chief question was, how far his character and ways might answer her wishes; and unless she were satisfied about that, she had said to herself that she would not accept his offer. Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?--in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely; when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul of man was walking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy. What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.

Mr. Grandcourt's wish to be introduced was not unexpected; but when Gwendolen came face to face with the real man, there was a little shock which flushed her cheeks. The shock came from the reversal of her expectations: Grandcourt could hardly have been more unlike her imaginary portraits of him. He was slightly taller than herself, and their eyes seemed to be on a level; there was not the faintest smile on his face as he looked at her, not a trace of self-consciousness or anxiety in his bearing: when he raised his hat he showed an extensive baldness surrounded with a fringe of reddish-blonde hair, but he also showed a perfect hand; and his features were decidedly handsome. It was not possible for a face to be freer from grimace: also it was perhaps not possible for a breathing man to look less animated. His bearing was relaxed; his long narrow grey eyes expressed nothing but indifference. Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? Our knowledge of his appearance must be completed by innumerable impressions. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. Gwendolen's first impressions were summed up in the words, "He is not ridiculous." As Lord Brackenshaw left, conversation began, while Grandcourt looked at Gwendolen persistently with a slightly exploring gaze, but without change of expression. She only occasionally glanced at him with a flash of observation a little softened by coquetry. After her answers there was a pause before he spoke again. "I used to think archery was a great bore," Grandcourt began. He spoke with a fine accent, but with a broken and distinguished drawl. "Are you converted to-day?" said Gwendolen. (Pause, during which she imagined various opinions about herself that Grandcourt might hold.) "Yes, since I saw you shooting. In things of this sort one generally sees people missing and simpering." "I suppose you are a first-rate shot with a rifle." (Pause, during which Gwendolen made a brief graphic description of Grandcourt to an unknown hearer.) "I have left off shooting." "Oh, then you are a formidable person. People who have done things once and left them off make one feel very contemptible. I hope you have not left off all follies, because I practice a great many." (Pause, during which Gwendolen made several interpretations of her own speech.) "What do you call follies?" "Well, in general, I think whatever is agreeable is called a folly. But you have not left off hunting, I hear." (Pause, wherein Gwendolen recalled Grandcourt's position, and decided that he was the most aristocratic-looking man she had ever seen.) "One must do something." "And do you care about the turf? - or is that among the things you have left off?" (Pause, during which Gwendolen thought that a man of extremely calm, cold manners might be less disagreeable as a husband than other men, and not likely to interfere with his wife's preferences.) "I run a horse now and then. Are you fond of horses?" "Yes, indeed: I never like my life so well as when I am on horseback, having a great gallop. I think of nothing. I only feel myself strong and happy." (Pause, wherein Gwendolen wondered whether Grandcourt would like what she said, but assured herself that she was not going to disguise her tastes.) "Do you like danger?" "I don't know. When I am on horseback I never think of danger. It seems to me that if I broke my bones I should not feel it. I should go at anything that came in my way." (Pause, during which Gwendolen had run through a whole hunting season with two chosen hunters to ride at will.) "You would perhaps like tiger-hunting or pig-sticking. I saw some of that for a season or two in the East. Everything here is poor stuff after that." "You are fond of danger, then?" (Pause, wherein Gwendolen speculated that men of coldest manners were probably the most adventurous, and felt the strength of her own insight.) "One must have something or other. But one gets used to it." "I begin to think I am very fortunate, because everything is new to me: I am not used to anything except being dull, which I should like to leave off as you have left off shooting." (Pause, during which it occurred to Gwendolen that a man of cold and distinguished manners might possibly be a dull companion; but then most persons were dull - and after all she was not going to accept Grandcourt.) "Why are you dull?" "This is a dreadful neighbourhood. There is nothing to be done in it. That is why I practised my archery." (Pause, during which Gwendolen reflected that the life of an unmarried woman who could not go about must be dull indeed.) "You have made yourself queen of it. I imagine you will carry the first prize." "But I have great rivals. Did you not observe how well Miss Arrowpoint shot?" (Pause, wherein Gwendolen was thinking that men had been known to choose some one else than the woman they most admired, and recalled several experiences of that kind in novels.) "Miss Arrowpoint. No - that is, yes." "Shall we go and hear the scoring? Everyone is going to the other end now - shall we join them? I think my uncle is looking toward me. He perhaps wants me." Gwendolen found it a relief to thus change the situation: not that the tte--tte was quite disagreeable; but while it lasted she could not get rid of the unwonted flush in her cheeks and the sense of surprise which made her feel less mistress of herself than usual. And this Mr. Grandcourt must not take for granted that he was of great moment to her, or that because others speculated on him as a desirable match she held herself at his beck and call. "You have just missed the gold arrow, Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne. "Miss Juliet Fenn scores eight above you." "I am very glad to hear it. I should have felt that I was taking the best of everything," said Gwendolen easily. It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl middling in everything but her archery and her plainness, in which she resembled one of the more intelligent fishes. There was now a lively movement of mingling groups. Gwendolen observed that Grandcourt was having Klesmer presented to him by a middle-aged man, with a dark, full face and fat hands, who seemed to be friendly with both. Who this stranger was she did not care to know; but she wished to observe Grandcourt's manner toward others than herself. Precisely the same: except that he did not look much at Miss Arrowpoint, but rather at Klesmer, who was speaking with animation and tossing his mane. Grandcourt listened with an impassive face and narrow eyes, his left fore-finger in his waistcoat-pocket, and his right slightly touching his thin whisker. "I wonder which style Miss Arrowpoint admires most," thought Gwendolen, rather mockingly. Then she gave all her animation to those immediately around her, determined not to care whether Mr. Grandcourt came near her again or not. He did not come, however, until it was time to conduct Mrs. Davilow to her carriage. "Shall we meet again in the ball-room tonight?" she said. His "yes" in reply had the usual slight drawl and perfect gravity. "You were wrong about Mr. Grandcourt, Gwendolen," said Mrs. Davilow, during their drive to the castle. "You can't find anything ridiculous in him." "I could if I tried, but I don't want to," said Gwendolen, rather pettishly; and her mother was afraid to say more. It was the rule on these occasions for the ladies and gentlemen to dine apart. In the ladies' dining-room it was evident that Gwendolen was not a favourite with her own sex: there was no intimacy between her and other girls, perhaps because she was not much interested in them. The exception to this aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who talked to her with quiet friendliness. "She knows, as I do, that our friends are ready to quarrel over a husband for us," thought Gwendolen, "and she is determined not to enter into the quarrel." "I think Miss Arrowpoint has the best manners I ever saw," said Mrs. Davilow, when she and Gwendolen had retired to a dressing-room. "I wish I were like her," said Gwendolen. "I am discontented with things. She seems contented." "I am sure you ought to be satisfied to-day. You must have enjoyed the shooting." "Oh, that is over now, and I don't know what will come next," said Gwendolen, stretching and throwing up her arms. They were bare now; it was the fashion to dance in the archery dress, without the jacket; and her simple white cashmere with its border of pale green set off her form. A thin line of gold round her neck, and the gold star on her breast, were her only ornaments. "The dancing will come next," said Mrs. Davilow. "You are sure to enjoy that." "I shall only dance in the quadrille. I told Mr. Clintock so. I shall not waltz or polk with anyone. I can't bear having ugly people so near me." "Whom do you mean by ugly people?" "Oh, plenty." "Mr. Clintock is not ugly." Mrs. Davilow dared not mention Grandcourt. "I hate woollen cloth touching me." Apparently something had changed Gwendolen's mood since the hour of exulting enjoyment in the archery-ground. But she did not look the worse for it under the chandeliers in the ball-room, where the soft splendour of the scene and the pleasant odours from the conservatory soothed her temper, as did the consciousness of being sought after. Almost every man was anxious to have her for a partner, and was in a state of melancholy remonstrance that she would not waltz or polk. Among the remonstrant dancing men, however, Mr. Grandcourt was not numbered. After standing up for a quadrille with Miss Arrowpoint, it seemed that he meant to ask for no other partner. Gwendolen saw him frequently with the Arrowpoints, but he never approached her. She thought that she would probably not have the least trouble about him after all: probably he meant to marry Miss Arrowpoint. Whatever might come, she, Gwendolen, was not going to be disappointed: for she had never committed herself even by a silent confidence in anything Mr. Grandcourt would do. Still, she noticed that he did sometimes quietly and gradually change his position according to hers, so that he could see her whenever she was dancing. This movement for the sake of watching her was more direct than usual late in the evening, when Gwendolen had Klesmer as a partner; and that wide-glancing personage said to her, "Mr. Grandcourt is a man of taste. He likes to see you dancing." "Perhaps he likes to look at what is against his taste," said Gwendolen, with a light laugh; she was quite courageous with Klesmer now. "He may be so tired of admiring that he likes disgust for variety." "Those words are not suitable to your lips," said Klesmer, quickly, with one of his grand frowns. "Are you as critical of words as of music?" "Certainly. I should require your words to be as noble as your face and form." "That is a compliment as well as a correction. I am obliged for both. Pray, who is that standing near the card-room door?" she went on, seeing there the same stranger with whom Klesmer had been in animated talk on the archery ground. "A friend of yours?" "No, an amateur I have seen in town - too fond of popular operas - a Mr. Lush." Three minutes afterward, when she was back with her mamma, Grandcourt made his way up to her. "May I ask if you are tired of dancing, Miss Harleth?" he began. "Not in the least." "Will you do me the honour - the next - or another quadrille?" "I should have been very happy," said Gwendolen looking at her card, "but I am engaged for the next to Mr. Clintock - and indeed I have not one quadrille left to dispose of." She was not sorry to punish Mr. Grandcourt's tardiness, yet at the same time she would have liked to dance with him. She gave him a charming smile, and he stood looking down at her with no smile at all. "I am unfortunate in being too late," he said, after a moment's pause. "It seemed to me that you did not care for dancing," said Gwendolen. "I thought it might be one of the things you had left off." "Yes, but I have not begun to dance with you," said Grandcourt. Always there was the same pause before he took up his cue. "You make dancing a new thing, as you make archery." "But once you had danced with me there would be no more novelty in it." "On the contrary, there would probably be much more." "That is deep. I don't understand." "It is difficult to make Miss Harleth understand her power?" Here Grandcourt had turned to Mrs. Davilow, who, smiling gently at her daughter, said- "I think she does not generally strike people as slow to understand." "Mamma," said Gwendolen, in a deprecating tone, "I am adorably stupid, and want everything explained to me - when the meaning is pleasant." "If you are stupid, I admit that stupidity is adorable," returned Grandcourt, after the usual pause, and without change of tone. But clearly he knew what to say. "I begin to think that Mr Clintock has forgotten me," Gwendolen observed, looking round for her partner. "I see the quadrille is being formed." But just then Lady Brackenshaw came up and said, "Miss Harleth, Mr. Clintock has charged me to express to you his deep regret that he was obliged to leave without having the pleasure of dancing with you again." "I am sorry he was called away," said Gwendolen, politely. "May I hope that you will let me take his place?" said Grandcourt. "I shall be very happy." It seemed an augury, and as Gwendolen stood up for the quadrille with Grandcourt, her earlier exultation revived. No man could have walked through the dance with more irreproachable ease; and the absence of all eagerness in his attention suited her taste. She was now convinced that he meant to distinguish her; and it began to appear probable that she would have it in her power to reject him. It was agreeable to know that his selecting her to dance with, from all the ladies present, attracted observation; though she studiously avoided seeing this, and at the end of the quadrille walked away on Grandcourt's arm as if she had been the shortest sighted of mortals. They joined Miss Arrowpoint and Lady Brackenshaw amongst a group who were discussing a project: a picnic archery meeting to be held in Cardell Chase. Gwendolen thought the scheme delightful, and Mr. Grandcourt said it was a thing to be done. Mr. Lush, who stood behind Lady Brackenshaw, said with a familiar tone to Grandcourt, "Diplow would be a good place for the meeting, and more convenient." Although Grandcourt looked totally unconscious of being addressed, Gwendolen took a new survey of the speaker, deciding, first, that he must be on intimate terms with Grandcourt, and, secondly, that she would never let him come within a yard of her. Mr. Lush's prominent eyes, fat though not clumsy figure, and strong black grey-besprinkled frizzy hair, created in her a strong antipathy. She murmured to Grandcourt, "I should like to continue walking." He obeyed immediately; but spoke no word for several minutes, and she, out of a half-amused inclination for experiment, would not speak first. They turned into the large conservatory, beautifully lit up with Chinese lamps. The other couples were at a distance, but still they walked in silence until they had reached the farther end where there was a second wide opening into the ball-room. Grandcourt paused and said languidly- "Do you like this kind of thing?" Half an hour before, Gwendolen could only have imagined herself returning a playful, satirical answer. But for some mysterious reason she dared not be satirical: she had begun to feel a wand over her that made her afraid of offending Grandcourt. "Yes," she said, quietly, without considering what "kind of thing" was meant - whether the flowers, the scents, the ball in general, or walking with Mr. Grandcourt in particular. And they returned along the conservatory without farther interpretation. She proposed to go and sit down in her old place by Mrs. Davilow; but as they approached, she saw, to her shuddering annoyance, that Mr. Lush stood at her mother's elbow. There was no avoiding the confrontation: her mamma said innocently, "Gwendolen, dear, let me present Mr. Lush to you." Having just made the acquaintance of this intimate companion of Mr. Grandcourt's, Mrs. Davilow imagined it altogether desirable that her daughter also should meet him. It was hardly a bow that Gwendolen gave - rather, it was the slightest sweep of the head away from him. She immediately moved toward her seat, saying, "I want to put on my cloak." No sooner had she reached it, than Mr. Lush was there with the cloak in his hand, willing to risk forestalling Grandcourt for the sake of annoying this supercilious young lady. Holding up the garment, he said, "Pray, permit me?" But she wheeled away, saying, "No, thank you." A man who forgave this would have much Christian feeling, supposing he had intended to be agreeable to the young lady; but Mr. Lush had no such intention. Grandcourt quietly took the cloak from him, and Mr. Lush, with a slight bow, moved away. "You had perhaps better put it on," said Mr. Grandcourt, looking down on her without change of expression. "Thanks; perhaps it would be wise," said Gwendolen, rising, and submitting very gracefully. In taking leave, Mr. Grandcourt asked permission to call at Offendene the next day, evidently not offended by the insult to his friend. Certainly Gwendolen's refusal of the cloak from Mr. Lush was open to the interpretation that she wished to receive it from Mr. Grandcourt. But she, poor child, was simply following her antipathy, without any such design. Gwendolen had no sense that these men were dark enigmas to her - Mr. Grandcourt at least. The chief question was, how far he might answer her wishes; and unless she were satisfied about that, she would not accept his offer.

Daniel Deronda

Book 2 - MEETING STREAMS | Chapter 11

"Das Gluck ist eine leichte Dirne, Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort; Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne Und kusst dich rasch und flattert fort Frau Ungluck hat im Gegentheile Dich liebefest an's Herz gedruckt; 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.

Something which Mirah had lately been watching for now came about. Turning out of Knightsbridge after singing at a charitable morning concert, she began to feel herself dogged by footsteps that kept pace with her own. She immediately thought of her father, and could no more look round than if she had felt herself tracked by a ghost. She walked on, not quickening her pace - of what use was that? - but certain that the man behind her was her father. Hoping to prevent any unnecessary shock for her brother, she resolved to turn to meet her father before she reached her door. She came to the entrance of the small square where her home lay, but before she could turn she felt him grasping her wrist, and saying, with a persuasive curl of accent, "Mirah!" She paused without any start; it was the voice she expected. Her face was as grave as if she were looking at her executioner, while his had a propitiating expression. Once a handsome face, it was now sallow and deep-lined, with an impudent suavity. He was lightly made and active, with something youthful about him which made the signs of age seem a disguise. His dress was shabby, and Mirah felt mingled shame and grief, repulsion and pity. 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. "What were you afraid of? I never made you do anything against your will. I broke up your engagement in the Vorstadt because I saw it didn't suit you, and you repaid me by leaving me. I had made an easier engagement for you: I didn't tell you, because I wanted to surprise you. And you left me planted there, after I had given up everything for the sake of getting you an education. What father devoted himself to his daughter more than I did? You know how I bore that disappointment in your voice, and made the best of it: and when I had nobody besides you, you chose to leave me. Who else did you owe 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, taking out an old yellow silk handkerchief. He really felt that his daughter had treated him ill - a sort of feeling which is strong in unscrupulous persons. Mirah, despite that sob, answered 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." "I never meant to deceive your mother, Mirah," said Lapidoth, with a voice that struggled against further sobs. "I meant to take you back to her, but then I had word of her death from a particular friend, and I sent him money to pay necessary expenses. 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 money out of me." Mirah made no answer; she could not bear to utter the only true one - "I don't believe one word you say" - and she simply walked on. They might well have caused passers-by to turn 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, eagerly gesticulating man, with his light, jaunty walk. "You seem to have done well for yourself, Mirah? You are in no want, I see," he said. "Good friends who found me in distress have helped me to get work," said Mirah, "I give lessons. 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. I might have done very well, staying abroad: 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. Talents like mine are no use in this country. I've been obliged to get pretty low for a shilling already." Mirah anxiously imagined her father's sinking into further degradation, which she was bound to prevent if she could. Before she could answer, he said, "Where do you live, Mirah?" "Here, in this square." "In lodgings?" "Yes." "Anyone to take care of you?" "Yes," said Mirah again, looking full at the keen face - "my brother." The father's eyelids fluttered, and there was a slight movement of the shoulders. But he said, after a brief pause: "Ezra? 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's heart had begun to beat faster with the prospect of what was coming in the presence of Ezra; and she had a pang of the sympathetic humiliation and shame - the stabbed heart of reverence - which belongs to a nature intensely filial. "Stay a minute, Liebchen," said Lapidoth; "what sort of man has Ezra turned out?" "A good man - a wonderful man," said Mirah, with slow emphasis, trying to master her agitation. She felt urged to prepare her father for the penetration of himself which awaited him. "But he was very poor when my friends found him. Once - twelve years ago - he was strong and happy, going to the East; and my mother called him back because she had lost me. And he went to her, and took care of her, and worked for her till she died in grief. And Ezra, too, had lost his health and strength. For years he has been getting weaker - always poor, always working - but full of knowledge, and great-minded. All who come near him honour 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 while she spoke, unable to bear the ignoble look of frustration in his face. But he was quick in invention. "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 money, I could fit myself out decently with a good coat, and find work. 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, I could fit myself out by the day after tomorrow." Mirah answered- "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 we can pay for new clothes." Her practical sense made her now see Mrs. Meyrick's wisdom in exacting a promise from her. Lapidoth's good humour gave way a little. He said, with a sneer, "You are a hard and fast young lady - you have been learning useful virtues - promising not to help your father with a pound or two when you dress yourself in silk - your father who gave up the best part of his life to providing for you." "I know it seems cruel," said Mirah, pale, and feeling this a worse moment than when she meant to drown herself. "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 this bitterness. Bear it. Come in and be cared for as you are." "Tomorrow, then," said Lapidoth, almost turning away from this trembling daughter, who seemed now to have got the inconvenient world to back her; but he quickly turned again, and said in his appealing tone, "I'm a little cut up with all this, Mirah. 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 do anything else than put her cold trembling hands in her pocket for her purse and hold it out. Lapidoth grasped it, pressing her fingers, said, "Good-bye, my little girl - tomorrow then!" and left her. He had not taken many steps before he looked carefully into the purse, found two half-sovereigns and odd silver, and, pasted against the 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." Mirah liked 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; very fond of his beautiful bride Sara - crying when she expected him to cry, and reflecting every phase of her feeling with perfect mimicry. Lapidoth had travelled a long way from that young self, and remembered this without emotion, like a morsel of food which had no taste to him. Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy selfish life is the capacity for pity, compunction, or unselfish regret - which we may come to long for as one in slow death longs to feel pain, rather than a widening space where consciousness once was. Mirah's purse was a handsome one, and Lapidoth found himself considering what it 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 penance under the eyes of that formidable son. Meanwhile Mirah was overcome by her pain. She found her brother quietly sifting old manuscripts which he meant to give to Deronda, and fell down and clasped his knees, sobbing, and crying, "Ezra, Ezra!" He did not speak, though he was stricken with alarm. But presently she raised her head, and said brokenly- "Ezra, my father! our father! He followed me. I wanted him to come in. And he said No, he would not now, but tomorrow. And he begged for money. And I gave him my purse, and he went away." Although Mirah's words expressed all her misery, her brother found them less grievous than his preconceptions, and said gently, "Wait for calm, Mirah, and then tell me all," laying his hands tenderly on her head. Under this soothing influence, she told him what had happened. "He will not come tomorrow," said Mordecai. Neither of them said to the other what they both thought, namely, that he might watch for Mirah 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. It is said, "God is occupied in making marriages": whereby are meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 62

"If some mortal, born too soon, Were laid away in some great trance--the ages Coming and going all the while--till dawned His true time's advent; and could then record The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed, Then I might tell more of the breath so light Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never So dull was I but, when that spirit passed, I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep." --BROWNING: _Paracelsus_. This was the letter which Sir Hugo put into Deronda's hands:, TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA. My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire there should be no time lost before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let nothing hinder you from being at the _Albergo dell' Italia_ in Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for me--the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again.--Your unknown mother, LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN. This letter with its colorless wording gave Deronda no clue to what was in reserve for him; but he could not do otherwise than accept Sir Hugo's reticence, which seemed to imply some pledge not to anticipate the mother's disclosures; and the discovery that his life-long conjectures had been mistaken checked further surmise. Deronda could not hinder his imagination from taking a quick flight over what seemed possibilities, but he refused to contemplate any of them as more likely than another, lest he should be nursing it into a dominant desire or repugnance, instead of simply preparing himself with resolve to meet the fact bravely, whatever it might turn out to be. In this state of mind he could not have communicated to any one the reason for the absence which in some quarters he was obliged to mention beforehand, least of all to Mordecai, whom it would affect as powerfully as it did himself, only in rather a different way. If he were to say, "I am going to learn the truth about my birth," Mordecai's hope would gather what might prove a painful, dangerous excitement. To exclude suppositions, he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by Sir Hugo's wish, and threw as much indifference as he could into his manner of announcing it, saying he was uncertain of its duration, but it would perhaps be very short. "I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me," said Mordecai, comforting himself in this way, after the first mournful glances. "I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come," said Mirah. "The grandmother will deny you nothing," said Deronda. "I'm glad you were a little wrong as well as I," he added, smiling at Mordecai. "You thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah." "I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. "She is capable of rejoicing that another's plant blooms though her own be withered." "Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each other," said Mirah, with a tinge of merriment in her smile. "What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?" said Deronda, mischievously--a little provoked that she had taken kindly at once to people who had caused him so much prospective annoyance on her account. Mirah looked at him with a slight surprise for a moment, and then said, "He is not a bad man--I think he would never forsake any one." But when she uttered the words she blushed deeply, and glancing timidly at Mordecai, turned away to some occupation. Her father was in her mind, and this was a subject on which she and her brother had a painful mutual consciousness. "If he should come and find us!" was a thought which to Mirah sometimes made the street daylight as shadowy as a haunted forest where each turn screened for her an imaginary apparition. Deronda felt what was her involuntary allusion, and understood the blush. How could he be slow to understand feelings which now seemed nearer than ever to his own? for the words of his mother's letter implied that his filial relation was not to be freed from painful conditions; indeed, singularly enough that letter which had brought his mother nearer as a living reality had thrown her into more remoteness for his affections. The tender yearning after a being whose life might have been the worse for not having his care and love, the image of a mother who had not had all her dues, whether of reverence or compassion, had long been secretly present with him in his observation of all the women he had come near. But it seemed now that this picturing of his mother might fit the facts no better than his former conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered to find that when this mother's very hand-writing had come to him with words holding her actual feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into a state of comparative neutrality toward her. A veiled figure with enigmatic speech had thrust away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging thought had gradually modeled and made the possessor of his tenderness and duteous longing. When he set off to Genoa, the interest really uppermost in his mind had hardly so much relation to his mother as to Mordecai and Mirah. "God bless you, Dan!" Sir Hugo had said, when they shook hands. "Whatever else changes for you, it can't change my being the oldest friend you have known, and the one who has all along felt the most for you. I couldn't have loved you better if you'd been my own--only I should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; and then you would have seen it necessary for you to take a political line. However--things must be as they may." It was a defensive movement of the baronet's to mingle purposeless remarks with the expression of serious feeling. When Deronda arrived at the _Italia_ in Genoa, no Princess Halm-Eberstein was there; but on the second day there was a letter for him, saying that her arrival might happen within a week, or might be deferred a fortnight and more; she was under circumstances which made it impossible for her to fix her journey more precisely, and she entreated him to wait as patiently as he could. With this indefinite prospect of suspense on matters of supreme moment to him, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement on philosophic grounds, as a means of quieting excited feeling and giving patience a lift over a weary road. His former visit to the superb city had been only cursory, and left him much to learn beyond the prescribed round of sight-seeing, by spending the cooler hours in observant wandering about the streets, the quay, and the environs; and he often took a boat that he might enjoy the magnificent view of the city and harbor from the sea. All sights, all subjects, even the expected meeting with his mother, found a central union in Mordecai and Mirah, and the ideas immediately associated with them; and among the thoughts that most filled his mind while his boat was pushing about within view of the grand harbor was that of the multitudinous Spanish Jews centuries ago driven destitute from their Spanish homes, suffered to land from the crowded ships only for a brief rest on this grand quay of Genoa, overspreading it with a pall of famine and plague--dying mothers and dying children at their breasts--fathers and sons a-gaze at each other's haggardness, like groups from a hundred Hunger-towers turned out beneath the midday sun. Inevitably dreamy constructions of a possible ancestry for himself would weave themselves with historic memories which had begun to have a new interest for him on his discovery of Mirah, and now, under the influence of Mordecai, had become irresistibly dominant. He would have sealed his mind against such constructions if it had been possible, and he had never yet fully admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter, and that wishing was folly--nay, on the question of parentage, wishing seemed part of that meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning by anticipation. What he had to do was simply to accept the fact; and he had really no strong presumption to go upon, now that he was assured of his mistake about Sir Hugo. There had been a resolved concealment which made all inference untrustworthy, and the very name he bore might be a false one. If Mordecai was wrong--if he, the so-called Daniel Deronda, were held by ties entirely aloof from any such course as his friend's pathetic hope had marked out?--he would not say "I wish"; but he could not help feeling on which side the sacrifice lay. Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one can resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to suspense, there came continually an anxiety which he made no effort to banish--dwelling on it rather with a mournfulness, which often seems to us the best atonement we can make to one whose need we have been unable to meet. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful mixtures of our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say--for it is a man who is here concerned--hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling toward a woman more nearly than in words, "I should have loved her, if----": the "if" covering some prior growth in the inclinations, or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. The "if" in Deronda's case carried reasons of both kinds; yet he had never throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous consciousness that there was something to guard against not only on her account but on his own--some precipitancy in the manifestations of impulsive feeling--some ruinous inroad of what is but momentary on the permanent chosen treasure of the heart--some spoiling of her trust, which wrought upon him now as if it had been the retreating cry of a creature snatched and carried out of his reach by swift horsemen or swifter waves, while his own strength was only a stronger sense of weakness. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his feelings for other women, even when there was one by whose side he desired to stand apart from them? Strangely the figure entered into the pictures of his present and future; strangely (and now it seemed sadly) their two lots had come in contact, hers narrowly personal, his charged with far-reaching sensibilities, perhaps with durable purposes, which were hardly more present to her than the reasons why men migrate are present to the birds that come as usual for the crumbs and find them no more. Not that Deronda was too ready to imagine himself of supreme importance to a woman; but her words of insistence that he must "remain near her--must not forsake her"--continually recurred to him with the clearness and importunity of imagined sounds, such as Dante has said pierce us like arrows whose points carry the sharpness of pity, "Lamenti saettaron me diversi Che di pieta ferrati avean gli strali". Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day was a hurrying march of crowded Time toward the world-changing battle of Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office--scattering abroad those whom the midday had sent under shelter, and sowing all paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of thrumbed strings, light footsteps and voices, if not leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fullness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong color melted in the stream of moonlight which made the Streets a new spectacle with shadows, both still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the faades of massive palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of the days as he might have watched a wonderful clock where the striking of the hours was made solemn with antique figures advancing and retreating in monitory procession, while he still kept his ear open for another kind of signal which would have its solemnity too: He was beginning to sicken of occupation, and found himself contemplating all activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his letters to Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but he was really getting into that state of mind to which all subjects become personal; and the few books he had brought to make him a refuge in study were becoming unreadable, because the point of view that life would make for him was in that agitating moment of uncertainty which is close upon decision. Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the heavens; often in struggling under the oppressive skepticism which represented his particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing Mordecai to give it, as of no more lasting effect than a dream--a set of changes which made passion to him, but beyond his consciousness were no more than an imperceptible difference of mass and shadow; sometimes with a reaction of emotive force which gave even to sustained disappointment, even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities might befall him--the blending of a complete personal love in one current with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion (what human creature escapes it?) against things in general because they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her equivocal fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own life, and which were acting in him now under the form of an afflicting doubtfulness about the mother who had announced herself coldly and still kept away. But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting there was a new kind of knock at the door. A servant in Chasseurs livery entered and delivered in French the verbal message that, the Princess Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during the day, but would be obliged if Monsieur would dine early, so as to be at liberty at seven, when she would be able to receive him.

This was the letter which Sir Hugo gave to Deronda:- 'TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA. 'My good friend, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire to lose no time before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Be at the Albergo dell' Italia in Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for me: the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again. Your unknown mother, 'LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN.' This letter with its colourless wording gave Deronda no clue to what awaited him. He could not help imagining possibilities, but he refused to regard any of them as likely. He simply attempted to prepare himself to meet the fact bravely, whatever it might turn out to be. He could not tell anyone the reason for his absence, least of all Mordecai, whom it would affect as powerfully as it did himself, only in a different way. If he were to say, "I am going to learn the truth about my birth," Mordecai's hopes might be dangerously excited. So he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by Sir Hugo's wish, with as much indifference and vagueness as he could. "I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me," said Mordecai. "I will ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come," said Mirah. "The grandmother will deny you nothing," said Deronda. "I'm glad you were wrong," he added, smiling at Mordecai. "You thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah." "I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. "She is capable of rejoicing that another's plant blooms though her own be withered." "Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each other," said Mirah, with merriment. "What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?" said Deronda mischievously. Mirah looked at him with slight surprise, and said, "He is not a bad man - I think he would never forsake anyone." Then she blushed deeply, glancing timidly at Mordecai: her father was in her mind. "If he should find us!" was a thought which sometimes haunted Mirah. Deronda understood the blush, for her feelings about her parent seemed near to his own. That letter which had brought his mother nearer in reality had made her more remote in his affections. The tender yearning after an imagined mother had long been secretly present within him in his observation of all women. But it seemed now that this picture of his mother might not fit the facts: her enigmatic letter had thrust away that image created by his longing. When Deronda arrived at the Italia in Genoa, no Princess Halm-Eberstein was there; but there was a letter for him, saying that she might arrive within a week or two, and entreating him to wait patiently. Under this suspense, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement as a means of quieting his excitement and giving patience a lift over a weary road. He spent the cooler hours in wandering about to observe the streets and the quay; and he often took a boat to enjoy the magnificent view of the city from the sea. Mordecai and Mirah were ever-present in his thoughts; and while his boat was pushing about within view of the grand harbour, he imagined the multitudinous Spanish Jews centuries ago, driven destitute and starving from their homes into crowded ships, and allowed only a brief rest on this grand quay of Genoa. Inevitably, dreamy constructions of his possible ancestry would weave themselves with this history, which had acquired a new interest for him since meeting Mirah and Mordecai. He had never yet fully admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter, and that wishing was folly. He had simply to accept the fact. Across these thoughts, there came continually another anxiety which he made no effort to banish. Rather, he dwelt on it with a mournfulness which often seems to us the best atonement we can make to one whom we have been unable to help. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. His feeling for her was not passionate love, yet was not the same as friendship, or a merely benevolent regard. A man may express this feeling in the words, "I should have loved her, if": the "if" covering some circumstance set against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. Deronda had never throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous consciousness that there was something to guard against, not only on her account but on his own - that any impulsive action on his part would ruin her trust in him, which worked upon him now like the retreating cry of a creature snatched and carried out of his reach. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his feelings for other women, even when there was one by whose side he desired to stand? Although Deronda did not imagine himself to be of supreme importance to any woman, Gwendolen's insistence that he must "remain near her - must not forsake her" continually recurred to him with piercing clearness. Day after day passed, and in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening sowing the paths with happy tinklings of mule-bells and thrumming of strings, light footsteps and voices; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with gardens, seemed to come forth in fullness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour melted in the moonlight. Then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of the days as he might have watched a wonderful antique clock, and found himself contemplating all activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his letters to Mordecai and Hans, he avoided writing about himself, but he was really in that state of mind in which all subjects become personal; and the few books he had brought with him were unreadable in his agitating uncertainty. On many nights, he gazed from the open window of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the heavens; often struggling under the oppressive scepticism which made him think of his lot as of no more lasting effect than a dream; sometimes with an emotional reaction which gave even to disappointment the nature of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities might befall him - the blending of a complete personal love with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion against things in general because they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world along with the concealments in his own life, which now afflicted him with doubt about the mother who had announced herself coldly and still kept away. But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting there was a knock at the door. A liveried servant entered and delivered the message that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during the day, but would be obliged if Monsieur would be at liberty at seven, when she would be able to receive him.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 50

We please our fancy with ideal webs Of innovation, but our life meanwhile Is in the loom, where busy passion plies The shuttle to and fro, and gives our deeds The accustomed pattern. Gwendolen's note, coming "pat betwixt too early and too late," was put into Klesmer's hands just when he was leaving Quetcham, and in order to meet her appeal to his kindness he, with some inconvenience to himself spent the night at Wanchester. There were reasons why he would not remain at Quetcham. That magnificent mansion, fitted with regard to the greatest expense, had in fact became too hot for him, its owners having, like some great politicians, been astonished at an insurrection against the established order of things, which we plain people after the event can perceive to have been prepared under their very noses. There were as usual many guests in the house, and among them one in whom Miss Arrowpoint foresaw a new pretender to her hand: a political man of good family who confidently expected a peerage, and felt on public grounds that he required a larger fortune to support the title properly. Heiresses vary, and persons interested in one of them beforehand are prepared to find that she is too yellow or too red, tall and toppling or short and square, violent and capricious or moony and insipid; but in every case it is taken for granted that she will consider herself an appendage to her fortune, and marry where others think her fortunes ought to go. Nature, however, not only accommodates herself ill to our favorite practices by making "only children" daughters, but also now and then endows the misplaced daughter with a clear head and a strong will. The Arrowpoints had already felt some anxiety owing to these endowments of their Catherine. She would not accept the view of her social duty which required her to marry a needy nobleman or a commoner on the ladder toward nobility; and they were not without uneasiness concerning her persistence in declining suitable offers. As to the possibility of her being in love with Klesmer they were not at all uneasy--a very common sort of blindness. For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect toward which they had done nothing but desire it. Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honored and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us. In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable. The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes. The Arrowpoints' hour of astonishment was come. When there is a passion between an heiress and a proud independent-spirited man, it is difficult for them to come to an understanding; but the difficulties are likely to be overcome unless the proud man secures himself by a constant _alibi_. Brief meetings after studied absence are potent in disclosure: but more potent still is frequent companionship, with full sympathy in taste and admirable qualities on both sides; especially where the one is in the position of teacher and the other is delightedly conscious of receptive ability which also gives the teacher delight. The situation is famous in history, and has no less charm now than it had in the days of Abelard. But this kind of comparison had not occurred to the Arrowpoints when they first engaged Klesmer to come down to Quetcham. To have a first-rate musician in your house is a privilege of wealth; Catherine's musical talent demanded every advantage; and she particularly desired to use her quieter time in the country for more thorough study. Klesmer was not yet a Liszt, understood to be adored by ladies of all European countries with the exception of Lapland: and even with that understanding it did not follow that he would make proposals to an heiress. No musician of honor would do so. Still less was it conceivable that Catherine would give him the slightest pretext for such daring. The large check that Mr. Arrowpoint was to draw in Klesmer's name seemed to make him as safe an inmate as a footman. Where marriage is inconceivable, a girl's sentiments are safe. Klesmer was eminently a man of honor, but marriages rarely begin with formal proposals, and moreover, Catherine's limit of the conceivable did not exactly correspond with her mother's. Outsiders might have been more apt to think that Klesmer's position was dangerous for himself if Miss Arrowpoint had been an acknowledged beauty; not taking into account that the most powerful of all beauty is that which reveals itself after sympathy and not before it. There is a charm of eye and lip which comes with every little phrase that certifies delicate perception or fine judgment, with every unostentatious word or smile that shows a heart awake to others; and no sweep of garment or turn of figure is more satisfying than that which enters as a restoration of confidence that one person is present on whom no intention will be lost. What dignity of meaning goes on gathering in frowns and laughs which are never observed in the wrong place; what suffused adorableness in a human frame where there is a mind that can flash out comprehension and hands that can execute finely! The more obvious beauty, also adorable sometimes--one may say it without blasphemy--begins by being an apology for folly, and ends like other apologies in becoming tiresome by iteration; and that Klesmer, though very susceptible to it, should have a passionate attachment to Miss Arrowpoint, was no more a paradox than any other triumph of a manifold sympathy over a monotonous attraction. We object less to be taxed with the enslaving excess of our passions than with our deficiency in wider passion; but if the truth were known, our reputed intensity is often the dullness of not knowing what else to do with ourselves. Tannhuser, one suspects, was a knight of ill-furnished imagination, hardly of larger discourse than a heavy Guardsman; Merlin had certainly seen his best days, and was merely repeating himself, when he fell into that hopeless captivity; and we know that Ulysses felt so manifest an _ennui_ under similar circumstances that Calypso herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he afterward left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifogging disposition, always anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this already dubious scandal as to the relation between companionship and constancy. Klesmer was as versatile and fascinating as a young Ulysses on a sufficient acquaintance--one whom nature seemed to have first made generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervor of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces the whole future of a life with the delight of congruous devoted purpose. His foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found in the best English families; and Catherine Arrowpoint had no corresponding restlessness to clash with his: notwithstanding her native kindliness she was perhaps too coolly firm and self-sustained. But she was one of those satisfactory creatures whose intercourse has the charm of discovery; whose integrity of faculty and expression begets a wish to know what they will say on all subjects or how they will perform whatever they undertake; so that they end by raising not only a continual expectation but a continual sense of fulfillment--the systole and diastole of blissful companionship. In such cases the outward presentment easily becomes what the image is to the worshipper. It was not long before the two became aware that each was interesting to the other; but the "how far" remained a matter of doubt. Klesmer did not conceive that Miss Arrowpoint was likely to think of him as a possible lover, and she was not accustomed to think of herself as likely to stir more than a friendly regard, or to fear the expression of more from any man who was not enamored of her fortune. Each was content to suffer some unshared sense of denial for the sake of loving the other's society a little too well; and under these conditions no need had been felt to restrict Klesmer's visits for the last year either in country or in town. He knew very well that if Miss Arrowpoint had been poor he would have made ardent love to her instead of sending a storm through the piano, or folding his arms and pouring out a hyperbolical tirade about something as impersonal as the north pole; and she was not less aware that if it had been possible for Klesmer to wish for her hand she would have found overmastering reasons for giving it to him. Here was the safety of full cups, which are as secure from overflow as the half-empty, always supposing no disturbance. Naturally, silent feeling had not remained at the same point any more than the stealthly dial-hand, and in the present visit to Quetcham, Klesmer had begun to think that he would not come again; while Catherine was more sensitive to his frequent _brusquerie_, which she rather resented as a needless effort to assert his footing of superior in every sense except the conventional. Meanwhile enters the expectant peer, Mr. Bult, an esteemed party man who, rather neutral in private life, had strong opinions concerning the districts of the Niger, was much at home also in Brazils, spoke with decision of affairs in the South Seas, was studious of his Parliamentary and itinerant speeches, and had the general solidity and suffusive pinkness of a healthy Briton on the central table-land of life. Catherine, aware of a tacit understanding that he was an undeniable husband for an heiress, had nothing to say against him but that he was thoroughly tiresome to her. Mr. Bult was amiably confident, and had no idea that his insensibility to counterpoint could ever be reckoned against him. Klesmer he hardly regarded in the light of a serious human being who ought to have a vote; and he did not mind Miss Arrowpoint's addiction to music any more than her probable expenses in antique lace. He was consequently a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst of Klesmer's on the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market; the crusades, to his mind, had at least this excuse, that they had a banner of sentiment round which generous feelings could rally: of course, the scoundrels rallied too, but what then? they rally in equal force round your advertisement van of "Buy cheap, sell dear." On this theme Klesmer's eloquence, gesticulatory and other, went on for a little while like stray fireworks accidentally ignited, and then sank into immovable silence. Mr. Bult was not surprised that Klesmer's opinions should be flighty, but was astonished at his command of English idiom and his ability to put a point in a way that would have told at a constituents' dinner--to be accounted for probably by his being a Pole, or a Czech, or something of that fermenting sort, in a state of political refugeeism which had obliged him to make a profession of his music; and that evening in the drawing-room he for the first time went up to Klesmer at the piano, Miss Arrowpoint being near, and said, "I had no idea before that you were a political man." Klesmer's only answer was to fold his arms, put out his nether lip, and stare at Mr. Bult. "You must have been used to public speaking. You speak uncommonly well, though I don't agree with you. From what you said about sentiment, I fancy you are a Panslavist." "No; my name is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew," said Klesmer, flashing a smile at Miss Arrowpoint, and suddenly making a mysterious, wind-like rush backward and forward on the piano. Mr. Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive and Polish, but--Miss Arrowpoint being there--did not like to move away. "Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas," said Miss Arrowpoint, trying to make the best of the situation. "He looks forward to a fusion of races." "With all my heart," said Mr. Bult, willing to be gracious. "I was sure he had too much talent to be a mere musician." "Ah, sir, you are under some mistake there," said Klesmer, firing up. "No man has too much talent to be a musician. Most men have too little. A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician. We are not ingenious puppets, sir, who live in a box and look out on the world only when it is gaping for amusement. We help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators. And a man who speaks effectively through music is compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence." With the last word Klesmer wheeled from the piano and walked away. Miss Arrowpoint colored, and Mr. Bult observed, with his usual phlegmatic stolidity, "Your pianist does not think small beer of himself." "Herr Klesmer is something more than a pianist," said Miss Arrowpoint, apologetically. "He is a great musician in the fullest sense of the word. He will rank with Schubert and Mendelssohn." "Ah, you ladies understand these things," said Mr. Bult, none the less convinced that these things were frivolous because Klesmer had shown himself a coxcomb. Catherine, always sorry when Klesmer gave himself airs, found an opportunity the next day in the music-room to say, "Why were you so heated last night with Mr. Bult? He meant no harm." "You wish me to be complaisant to him?" said Klesmer, rather fiercely. "I think it is hardly worth your while to be other than civil." "You find no difficulty in tolerating him, then?--you have a respect for a political platitudinarian as insensible as an ox to everything he can't turn into political capital. You think his monumental obtuseness suited to the dignity of the English gentleman." "I did not say that." "You mean that I acted without dignity, and you are offended with me." "Now you are slightly nearer the truth," said Catherine, smiling. "Then I had better put my burial-clothes in my portmanteau and set off at once." "I don't see that. If I have to bear your criticism of my operetta, you should not mind my criticism of your impatience." "But I do mind it. You would have wished me to take his ignorant impertinence about a 'mere musician' without letting him know his place. I am to hear my gods blasphemed as well as myself insulted. But I beg pardon. It is impossible you should see the matter as I do. Even you can't understand the wrath of the artist: he is of another caste for you." "That is true," said Catherine, with some betrayal of feeling. "He is of a caste to which I look up--a caste above mine." Klesmer, who had been seated at a table looking over scores, started up and walked to a little distance, from which he said, "That is finely felt--I am grateful. But I had better go, all the same. I have made up my mind to go, for good and all. You can get on exceedingly well without me: your operetta is on wheels--it will go of itself. And your Mr. Bull's company fits me 'wie die Faust ins Auge.' I am neglecting my engagements. I must go off to St. Petersburg." There was no answer. "You agree with me that I had better go?" said Klesmer, with some irritation. "Certainly; if that is what your business and feeling prompt. I have only to wonder that you have consented to give us so much of your time in the last year. There must be treble the interest to you anywhere else. I have never thought of you consenting to come here as anything else than a sacrifice." "Why should I make the sacrifice?" said Klesmer, going to seat himself at the piano, and touching the keys so as to give with the delicacy of an echo in the far distance a melody which he had set to Heine's "Ich hab' dich geliebet und liebe dich noch." "That is the mystery," said Catherine, not wanting to affect anything, but from mere agitation. From the same cause she was tearing a piece of paper into minute morsels, as if at a task of utmost multiplication imposed by a cruel fairy. "You can conceive no motive?" said Klesmer, folding his arms. "None that seems in the least probable." "Then I shall tell you. It is because you are to me the chief woman in the world--the throned lady whose colors I carry between my heart and my armor." Catherine's hands trembled so much that she could no longer tear the paper: still less could her lips utter a word. Klesmer went on, "This would be the last impertinence in me, if I meant to found anything upon it. That is out of the question. I meant no such thing. But you once said it was your doom to suspect every man who courted you of being an adventurer, and what made you angriest was men's imputing to you the folly of believing that they courted you for your own sake. Did you not say so?" "Very likely," was the answer, in a low murmur. "It was a bitter word. Well, at least one man who has seen women as plenty as flowers in May has lingered about you for your own sake. And since he is one whom you can never marry, you will believe him. There is an argument in favor of some other man. But don't give yourself for a meal to a minotaur like Bult. I shall go now and pack. I shall make my excuses to Mrs. Arrowpoint." Klesmer rose as he ended, and walked quickly toward the door. "You must take this heap of manuscript," then said Catherine, suddenly making a desperate effort. She had risen to fetch the heap from another table. Klesmer came back, and they had the length of the folio sheets between them. "Why should I not marry the man who loves me, if I love him?" said Catherine. To her the effort was something like the leap of a woman from the deck into the lifeboat. "It would be too hard--impossible--you could not carry it through. I am not worth what you would have to encounter. I will not accept the sacrifice. It would be thought a _msalliance_ for you and I should be liable to the worst accusations." "Is it the accusations you are afraid of? I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together." The decisive word had been spoken: there was no doubt concerning the end willed by each: there only remained the way of arriving at it, and Catherine determined to take the straightest possible. She went to her father and mother in the library, and told them that she had promised to marry Klesmer. Mrs. Arrowpoint's state of mind was pitiable. Imagine Jean Jacques, after his essay on the corrupting influence of the arts, waking up among children of nature who had no idea of grilling the raw bone they offered him for breakfast with the primitive couvert of a flint knife; or Saint Just, after fervidly denouncing all recognition of pre-eminence, receiving a vote of thanks for the unbroken mediocrity of his speech, which warranted the dullest patriots in delivering themselves at equal length. Something of the same sort befell the authoress of "Tasso," when what she had safely demanded of the dead Leonora was enacted by her own Catherine. It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining. Besides, it has long been understood that the proprieties of literature are not those of practical life. Mrs. Arrowpoint naturally wished for the best of everything. She not only liked to feel herself at a higher level of literary sentiment than the ladies with whom she associated; she wished not to be behind them in any point of social consideration. While Klesmer was seen in the light of a patronized musician, his peculiarities were picturesque and acceptable: but to see him by a sudden flash in the light of her son-in-law gave her a burning sense of what the world would say. And the poor lady had been used to represent her Catherine as a model of excellence. Under the first shock she forgot everything but her anger, and snatched at any phrase that would serve as a weapon. "If Klesmer has presumed to offer himself to you, your father shall horsewhip him off the premises. Pray, speak, Mr. Arrowpoint." The father took his cigar from his mouth, and rose to the occasion by saying, "This will never do, Cath." "Do!" cried Mrs. Arrowpoint; "who in their senses ever thought it would do? You might as well say poisoning and strangling will not do. It is a comedy you have got up, Catherine. Else you are mad." "I am quite sane and serious, mamma, and Herr Klesmer is not to blame. He never thought of my marrying him. I found out that he loved me, and loving him, I told him I would marry him." "Leave that unsaid, Catherine," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, bitterly. "Every one else will say that for you. You will be a public fable. Every one will say that you must have made an offer to a man who has been paid to come to the house--who is nobody knows what--a gypsy, a Jew, a mere bubble of the earth." "Never mind, mamma," said Catherine, indignant in her turn. "We all know he is a genius--as Tasso was." "Those times were not these, nor is Klesmer Tasso," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, getting more heated. "There is no sting in _that_ sarcasm, except the sting of undutifulness." "I am sorry to hurt you, mamma. But I will not give up the happiness of my life to ideas that I don't believe in and customs I have no respect for." "You have lost all sense of duty, then? You have forgotten that you are our only child--that it lies with you to place a great property in the right hands?" "What are the right hands? My grandfather gained the property in trade." "Mr. Arrowpoint, _will_ you sit by and hear this without speaking?" "I am a gentleman, Cath. We expect you to marry a gentleman," said the father, exerting himself. "And a man connected with the institutions of this country," said the mother. "A woman in your position has serious duties. Where duty and inclination clash, she must follow duty." "I don't deny that," said Catherine, getting colder in proportion to her mother's heat. "But one may say very true things and apply them falsely. People can easily take the sacred word duty as a name for what they desire any one else to do." "Your parent's desire makes no duty for you, then?" "Yes, within reason. But before I give up the happiness of my life--" "Catherine, Catherine, it will not be your happiness," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, in her most raven-like tones. "Well, what seems to me my happiness--before I give it up, I must see some better reason than the wish that I should marry a nobleman, or a man who votes with a party that he may be turned into a nobleman. I feel at liberty to marry the man I love and think worthy, unless some higher duty forbids." "And so it does, Catherine, though you are blinded and cannot see it. It is a woman's duty not to lower herself. You are lowering yourself. Mr. Arrowpoint, will you tell your daughter what is her duty?" "You must see, Catherine, that Klesmer is not the man for you," said Mr. Arrowpoint. "He won't do at the head of estates. He has a deuced foreign look--is an unpractical man." "I really can't see what that has to do with it, papa. The land of England has often passed into the hands of foreigners--Dutch soldiers, sons of foreign women of bad character:--if our land were sold to-morrow it would very likely pass into the hands of some foreign merchant on 'Change. It is in everybody's mouth that successful swindlers may buy up half the land in the country. How can I stem that tide?" "It will never do to argue about marriage, Cath," said Mr. Arrowpoint. "It's no use getting up the subject like a parliamentary question. We must do as other people do. We must think of the nation and the public good." "I can't see any public good concerned here, papa," said Catherine. "Why is it to be expected of any heiress that she should carry the property gained in trade into the hands of a certain class? That seems to be a ridiculous mishmash of superannuated customs and false ambition. I should call it a public evil. People had better make a new sort of public good by changing their ambitions." "That is mere sophistry, Catherine," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Because you don't wish to marry a nobleman, you are not obliged to marry a mountebank or a charlatan." "I cannot understand the application of such words, mamma." "No, I dare say not," rejoined Mrs. Arrowpoint, with significant scorn. "You have got to a pitch at which we are not likely to understand each other." "It can't be done, Cath," said Mr. Arrowpoint, wishing to substitute a better-humored reasoning for his wife's impetuosity. "A man like Klesmer can't marry such a property as yours. It can't be done." "It certainly will not be done," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, imperiously. "Where is the man? Let him be fetched." "I cannot fetch him to be insulted," said Catherine. "Nothing will be achieved by that." "I suppose you would wish him to know that in marrying you he will not marry your fortune," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Certainly; if it were so, I should wish him to know it." "Then you had better fetch him." Catherine only went into the music-room and said, "Come." She felt no need to prepare Klesmer. "Herr Klesmer," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, with a rather contemptuous stateliness, "it is unnecessary to repeat what has passed between us and our daughter. Mr. Arrowpoint will tell you our resolution." "Your marrying is out of the question," said Mr. Arrowpoint, rather too heavily weighted with his task, and standing in an embarrassment unrelieved by a cigar. "It is a wild scheme altogether. A man has been called out for less." "You have taken a base advantage of our confidence," burst in Mrs. Arrowpoint, unable to carry out her purpose and leave the burden of speech to her husband. Klesmer made a low bow in silent irony. "The pretension is ridiculous. You had better give it up and leave the house at once," continued Mr. Arrowpoint. He wished to do without mentioning the money. "I can give up nothing without reference to your daughter's wish," said Klesmer. "My engagement is to her." "It is useless to discuss the question," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "We shall never consent to the marriage. If Catherine disobeys us we shall disinherit her. You will not marry her fortune. It is right you should know that." "Madam, her fortune has been the only thing I have had to regret about her. But I must ask her if she will not think the sacrifice greater than I am worthy of." "It is no sacrifice to me," said Catherine, "except that I am sorry to hurt my father and mother. I have always felt my fortune to be a wretched fatality of my life." "You mean to defy us, then?" said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "I mean to marry Herr Klesmer," said Catherine, firmly. "He had better not count on our relenting," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, whose manners suffered from that impunity in insult which has been reckoned among the privileges of women. "Madam," said Klesmer, "certain reasons forbid me to retort. But understand that I consider it out of the power of either of you, or of your fortune, to confer on me anything that I value. My rank as an artist is of my own winning, and I would not exchange it for any other. I am able to maintain your daughter, and I ask for no change in my life but her companionship." "You will leave the house, however," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "I go at once," said Klesmer, bowing and quitting the room. "Let there be no misunderstanding, mamma," said Catherine; "I consider myself engaged to Herr Klesmer, and I intend to marry him." The mother turned her head away and waved her hand in sign of dismissal. "It's all very fine," said Mr. Arrowpoint, when Catherine was gone; "but what the deuce are we to do with the property?" "There is Harry Brendall. He can take the name." "Harry Brendall will get through it all in no time," said Mr. Arrowpoint, relighting his cigar. And thus, with nothing settled but the determination of the lovers, Klesmer had left Quetcham.

Gwendolen's note was put into Klesmer's hands just when he was leaving Quetcham. With some inconvenience to himself, he arranged to spend the night at Wanchester. There were reasons why he would not remain at Quetcham. That magnificent mansion had in fact became too hot for him, its owners having been astonished at an insurrection against the established order of things, which had been prepared under their very noses. There were many guests in the house, including one in whom Miss Arrowpoint foresaw a new pretender to her hand: a political man of good family who confidently expected a peerage, and felt that he required a larger fortune to support the title properly. It is taken for granted that an heiress will consider herself an appendage to her fortune, and marry where others think her fortunes ought to go; however, Nature now and then endows her with a clear head and a strong will. The Arrowpoints had already felt some anxiety about their Catherine, and were uneasy at her persistence in declining suitable offers. As to the possibility of her being in love with Klesmer they were not at all uneasy: for the habitual lazy assumptions begotten by our wishes often blind us to the truth. When there is a passion between an heiress and a proud independent-spirited man, it is difficult for them to come to an understanding; but frequent companionship, with sympathy in taste, has the power to bring them together; especially where the one is a teacher and the other is delightedly conscious of receptive ability which also gives the teacher delight. But this did not occur to the Arrowpoints when they first engaged Klesmer. Catherine's musical talent demanded every advantage; and she desired to use her time in the country for study. Klesmer was not yet a Liszt, and seemed as safe an inmate as a footman. That Catherine might fall in love with him was as inconceivable as that they could marry. She was not an acknowledged beauty; but the most powerful beauty is that which reveals itself in sympathy; the word or smile that shows a heart awake to others. What adorableness is there in a mind that can flash out comprehension and hands that can execute finely! Catherine Arrowpoint had no restlessness to clash with Klesmer's: for all her native kindliness, she was coolly firm and self-sustained. The two soon became aware that each was interesting to the other; but the "how far" remained a matter of doubt. Klesmer did not conceive that Miss Arrowpoint was likely to think of him as a possible lover, and she thought herself unlikely to stir more than a friendly regard in any man who was not enamoured of her fortune. Klesmer knew that if Miss Arrowpoint had been poor he would have made ardent love to her instead of sending a storm through the piano. He began to think that he would not visit Quetcham again. Meanwhile Catherine was aware that if it were possible for Klesmer to wish for her hand, she would give it to him. Enter the expectant peer, Mr. Bult, an esteemed party man of solidity and healthy pinkness. Catherine had nothing to say against him except that he was thoroughly tiresome. Mr. Bult was amiably confident, and had no idea that his insensibility to music could be reckoned against him. Klesmer he hardly regarded in the light of a serious human being; and he was consequently a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst of Klesmer's on the lack of idealism in English politics. Mr. Bult was not surprised that Klesmer's opinions should be flighty, but was astonished at his command of English idiom, and assumed Klesmer must be a Pole or Czech refugee, or something of that sort. That evening he went up to Klesmer at the piano, and said- "I had no idea that you were a political man." Klesmer folded his arms and stared at Mr. Bult. "You speak uncommonly well," continued Mr Bult, "though I don't agree with you. From what you said, I fancy you are a Panslavist." "No; my name is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew," said Klesmer, flashing a smile at Miss Arrowpoint, and suddenly making a mysterious rush backward and forward on the piano. Mr. Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive and Polish. "Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas," said Miss Arrowpoint. "He looks forward to a fusion of races." "Indeed," said Mr. Bult graciously. "I was sure he had too much talent to be a mere musician." "Sir, you are under some mistake," said Klesmer, firing up. "No man has too much talent to be a musician. Most men have too little. A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician. To speak effectively through music is more difficult than parliamentary eloquence." With that Klesmer wheeled from the piano and walked away. Miss Arrowpoint coloured, and Mr. Bult observed, "Your pianist thinks highly of himself." "Herr Klesmer is something more than a pianist," said Miss Arrowpoint apologetically. "He is a great musician, who will rank with Schubert and Mendelssohn." "Ah, you ladies understand these things." Catherine, always sorry when Klesmer gave himself airs, said to him next day, "Why were you so heated last night with Mr. Bult? He meant no harm." "You find no difficulty in tolerating him, then? - you respect a man full of platitudes and as insensible as an ox?" "I did not say that." "You mean that I acted without dignity, and you are offended with me." "Now you are slightly nearer the truth," said Catherine, smiling. "Then I had better pack my burial-clothes and set off at once." "If I have to bear your criticism of my operetta, you should not mind my criticism of your impatience." "But I do mind it. You would have wished me to take his ignorant impertinence about a 'mere musician' without letting him know his place. I am to hear my gods blasphemed as well as myself insulted. Even you can't understand the wrath of the artist: he is of another caste for you." "That is true," said Catherine, with some betrayal of feeling. "He is of a caste to which I look up - a caste above mine." Klesmer started up and walked a little distance, before saying- "That is finely felt. I am grateful. But I have made up my mind to go, all the same. You can get on exceedingly well without me. I am neglecting my engagements. I must go to St. Petersburg." "Certainly. I only wonder that you have given us so much of your time. I have never thought of your consenting to come here as anything other than a sacrifice." "Why should I make the sacrifice?" said Klesmer, seating himself at the piano and delicately touching the keys. "That is the mystery," said Catherine, in agitation. She was tearing a piece of paper into minute morsels, as if at a task imposed by a cruel fairy. "You can conceive no motive?" "None that seems in the least probable." "Then I shall tell you. It is because you are to me the chief woman in the world - the throned lady whose colours I carry between my heart and my armour." Catherine's hands trembled so much that she could no longer tear the paper: still less could she speak. Klesmer went on- "You once said it was your doom to suspect every man who courted you of being an adventurer, and that what made you angriest was men's assuming you would believe that they courted you for your own sake. Well, at least one man has lingered for your own sake. And since he is one whom you can never marry, you may believe him. I shall go now and pack." Klesmer rose and walked quickly toward the door. "You must take this heap of manuscript," said Catherine, in sudden desperation, rising to fetch the folio sheets. Klesmer turned back, and they stood with the sheets between them. "Why should I not marry the man who loves me, if I love him?" said Catherine, with an effort something like the leap from the deck into the lifeboat. "It would be too hard - impossible - you could not carry it through. I am not worth what you would have to encounter. We should be liable to the worst accusations." "Is it the accusations you are afraid of? I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together." The decisive word had been spoken: there was no doubt concerning the end willed by each: there only remained the way of arriving at it, and Catherine determined to take the straightest possible. She went to her father and mother in the library, and told them that she had promised to marry Klesmer. Mrs. Arrowpoint's state of mind was pitiable. While Klesmer was seen in the light of a patronized musician, his peculiarities were picturesque: but to see him in the light of her son-in-law gave her a burning sense of what the world would say. Under the first shock she snatched angrily at any phrase that would serve as a weapon. "If Klesmer has presumed to offer himself to you, your father shall horsewhip him off the premises. Speak, Mr. Arrowpoint." The father took his cigar from his mouth, and rose to the occasion by saying, "This will never do, Cath." "Do!" cried Mrs. Arrowpoint; "who in their senses ever thought it would do? You might as well say poisoning and strangling will not do. You are mad, Catherine." "I am quite sane, mamma, and Herr Klesmer is not to blame. He never thought of marrying me. I found out that he loved me, and told him I would marry him." "Leave that unsaid, Catherine," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, bitterly. "Everyone will say that you have made an offer to a man who has been paid to come to the house - who is nobody knows what - a gypsy, a Jew." "No, mamma," said Catherine, indignant in her turn. "We all know he is a genius, as Tasso was. I am sorry to hurt you; but I will not give up the happiness of my life." "You have lost all sense of duty, then? You have forgotten that as our only child, it lies with you to place a great property in the right hands?" "What are the right hands? My grandfather gained the property in trade." "Mr. Arrowpoint, will you sit by and hear this?" "We expect you to marry a gentleman, Cath," said the father, exerting himself. "A woman in your position has serious duties," said the mother. "Where duty and inclination clash, she must follow duty." "I don't deny that," said Catherine, getting colder in proportion to her mother's heat. "But people can easily use the word duty as a name for what they desire anyone else to do. Before I give up my happiness-" "It will not be your happiness," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, in her most raven-like tones. "Before I give it up, I must see some better reason than the wish that I should marry a nobleman. I feel at liberty to marry the man I love, unless some higher duty forbids." "And so it does, Catherine, though you are blinded and cannot see it. It is a woman's duty not to lower herself. Mr. Arrowpoint, will you tell your daughter what is her duty?" "You must see, Catherine, that Klesmer is not the man for you," said Mr. Arrowpoint. "He has a deuced foreign look." "I really can't see what that has to do with it, papa." "We must do as other people do. We must think of the nation and the public good." "I can't see any public good concerned here, papa," said Catherine. "Because you don't wish to marry a nobleman," said Mrs Arrowpoint, "you are not obliged to marry a mountebank." "I cannot understand the application of such words, mamma." "No, I dare say not," rejoined Mrs. Arrowpoint, with significant scorn. "You have got to a pitch at which we are not likely to understand each other." "It can't be done, Cath," said Mr. Arrowpoint, more good-humouredly. "A man like Klesmer can't marry such a property as yours. It can't be done." "It certainly will not be done," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, imperiously. "Where is the man? Let him be fetched." "I cannot fetch him to be insulted," said Catherine. "Nothing will be achieved by that." "I suppose you would wish him to know that in marrying you he will not marry your fortune," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Certainly; if it were so, I should wish him to know it." "Then you had better fetch him." Catherine only went into the music-room and said, "Come." She felt no need to prepare Klesmer. "Herr Klesmer," said Mrs. Arrowpoint, with a rather contemptuous stateliness, "it is unnecessary to repeat what has passed between us and our daughter. Mr. Arrowpoint will tell you our resolution." "Your marrying is out of the question," said Mr. Arrowpoint, rather too heavily weighted with his task. "It is a wild scheme altogether." "You have taken a base advantage of our confidence," burst in Mrs. Arrowpoint. Klesmer made a low bow in silent irony. "The pretension is ridiculous. You had better give it up and leave the house at once," continued Mr. Arrowpoint. He wished to do without mentioning the money. "I can give up nothing without reference to your daughter's wish," said Klesmer. "My engagement is to her." "We shall never consent to the marriage," said Mrs Arrowpoint. "If Catherine disobeys us we shall disinherit her." "Madam, her fortune has been the only thing I have had to regret about her. But I must ask her if she will not think the sacrifice greater than I am worthy of." "It is no sacrifice to me," said Catherine, "except that I am sorry to hurt my father and mother." "You mean to defy us, then?" said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "I mean to marry Herr Klesmer," said Catherine firmly. "He had better not count on our relenting," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "Madam," said Klesmer, "I consider it out of your power to confer on me anything that I value. My rank as an artist is of my own winning, and I would not exchange it for any other. I am able to maintain your daughter, and I ask for no change in my life but her companionship." "You will leave the house," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "I go at once," said Klesmer, bowing and quitting the room. "Let there be no misunderstanding, mamma," said Catherine; "I consider myself engaged to Herr Klesmer, and I intend to marry him." The mother turned away and waved her hand in sign of dismissal. And thus, with nothing settled but the determination of the lovers, Klesmer had left Quetcham.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 22

_Aspern._ Pardon, my lord--I speak for Sigismund. _Fronsberg._ For him? Oh, ay--for him I always hold A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw Sooner or later on me. What his need? Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings That would not fly? durance, assault on watch, Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat? _Aspern._ Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped From Circe's herd, and seeks to win the love Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win First your consent. You frown. _Fronsberg._ Distinguish words. I said I held a pardon, not consent. In spite of Deronda's reasons for wishing to be in town again--reasons in which his anxiety for Mirah was blent with curiosity to know more of the enigmatic Mordecai--he did not manage to go up before Sir Hugo, who preceded his family that he might be ready for the opening of Parliament on the sixth of February. Deronda took up his quarters in Park Lane, aware that his chambers were sufficiently tenanted by Hans Meyrick. This was what he expected; but he found other things not altogether according to his expectations. Most of us remember Retzsch's drawing of destiny in the shape of Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away from the true point of attack. The fiend makes preparation his favorite object of mockery, that he may fatally persuade us against our taking out waterproofs when he is well aware the sky is going to clear, foreseeing that the imbecile will turn this delusion into a prejudice against waterproofs instead of giving a closer study to the weather-signs. It is a peculiar test of a man's mettle when, after he has painfully adjusted himself to what seems a wise provision, he finds all his mental precaution a little beside the mark, and his excellent intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, accurately cut from a wrong starting-point. His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet misbehavior, and finds quite a different call upon it. Something of this kind happened to Deronda. His first impression was one of pure pleasure and amusement at finding his sitting-room transformed into an _atelier_ strewed with miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome, the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place--his hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk. The friendship of the two had been kept up warmly since the memorable Cambridge time, not only by correspondence but by little episodes of companionship abroad and in England, and the original relation of confidence on one side and indulgence on the other had been developed in practice, as is wont to be the case where such spiritual borrowing and lending has been well begun. "I knew you would like to see my casts and antiquities," said Hans, after the first hearty greetings and inquiries, "so I didn't scruple to unlade my chests here. But I've found two rooms at Chelsea not many hundred yards from my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready to hang out there--when they've scraped the walls and put in some new lights. That's all I'm waiting for. But you see I don't wait to begin work: you can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me." "Only a fungoid growth, I dare say--a growing disease in the lungs," said Deronda, accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fashion. He was walking toward some drawings propped on the ledge of his bookcases; five rapidly-sketched heads--different aspects of the same face. He stood at a convenient distance from them, without making any remark. Hans, too, was silent for a minute, took up his palette and began touching the picture on his easel. "What do you think of them?" he said at last. "The full face looks too massive; otherwise the likenesses are good," said Deronda, more coldly than was usual with him. "No, it is not too massive," said Hans, decisively. "I have noted that. There is always a little surprise when one passes from the profile to the full face. But I shall enlarge her scale for Berenice. I am making a Berenice series--look at the sketches along there--and now I think of it, you are just the model I want for the Agrippa." Hans, still with pencil and palette in hand, had moved to Deronda's side while he said this, but he added hastily, as if conscious of a mistake, "No, no, I forgot; you don't like sitting for your portrait, confound you! However, I've picked up a capital Titus. There are to be five in the series. The first is Berenice clasping the knees of Gessius Florus and beseeching him to spare her people; I've got that on the easel. Then, this, where she is standing on the Xystus with Agrippa, entreating the people not to injure themselves by resistance." "Agrippa's legs will never do," said Deronda. "The legs are good realistically," said Hans, his face creasing drolly; "public men are often shaky about the legs--' Their legs, the emblem of their various thought,' as somebody says in the _Rehearsal._" "But these are as impossible as the legs of Raphael's Alcibiades," said Deronda. "Then they are good ideally," said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius, must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover Titus his successor." "You must put a scroll in her mouth, else people will not understand that. You can't tell that in a picture." "It will make them feel their ignorance then--an excellent sthetic effect. The fourth is, Titus sending Berenice away from Rome after she has shared his palace for ten years--both reluctant, both sad--_invitus invitam_, as Suetonius hath it. I've found a model for the Roman brute." "Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She must have been that." "No, no; a few mature touches to show the lapse of time. Dark-eyed beauty wears well, hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth: Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure imagination. That is what ought to have been--perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her--that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing--_le nant_; can anything be more sublime, especially in French? The vulgar would desire to see her corpse and burial--perhaps her will read and her linen distributed. But now come and look at this on the easel. I have made some way there." "That beseeching attitude is really good," said Deronda, after a moment's contemplation. "You have been very industrious in the Christmas holidays; for I suppose you have taken up the subject since you came to London." Neither of them had yet mentioned Mirah. "No," said Hans, putting touches to his picture, "I made up my mind to the subject before. I take that lucky chance for an augury that I am going to burst on the world as a great painter. I saw a splendid woman in the Trastevere--the grandest women there are half Jewesses--and she set me hunting for a fine situation of a Jewess at Rome. Like other men of vast learning, I ended by taking what lay on the surface. I'll show you a sketch of the Trasteverina's head when I can lay my hands on it." "I should think she would be a more suitable model for Berenice," said Deronda, not knowing exactly how to express his discontent. "Not a bit of it. The model ought to be the most beautiful Jewess in the world, and I have found her." "Have you made yourself sure that she would like to figure in that character? I should think no woman would be more abhorrent to her. Does she quite know what you are doing?" "Certainly. I got her to throw herself precisely into this attitude. Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees." Here Hans went a little way off and looked at the effect of his touches. "I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda, feeling more indignation than he would have been able to justify. "Oh, yes, she does--ladies' edition. Berenice was a fervid patriot, but was beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the arch-enemy of her people. Whence the Nemesis. Mirah takes it as a tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation. That was her own phrase. I couldn't find it in my heart to tell her I invented that part of the story." "Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, chiefly in order to hinder himself from saying something else. "Shall you mind turning over that folio?" said Hans. "My studies of heads are all there. But they are in confusion. You will perhaps find her next to a crop-eared undergraduate." After Deronda had been turning over the drawings a minute or two, he said, "These seem to be all Cambridge heads and bits of country. Perhaps I had better begin at the other end." "No; you'll find her about the middle. I emptied one folio into another." "Is this one of your undergraduates?" said Deronda, holding up a drawing. "It's an unusually agreeable face." "That! Oh, that's a man named Gascoigne--Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly good fellow; his upper lip, too, is good. I coached him before he got his scholarship. He ought to have taken honors last Easter. But he was ill, and has had to stay up another year. I must look him up. I want to know how he's going on." "Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, holding up a sketch of the Trasteverina. "Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather contemptuously, "too coarse. I was unregenerate then." Deronda was silent while he closed the folio, leaving the Trasteverina outside. Then clasping his coat-collar, and turning toward Hans, he said, "I dare say my scruples are excessive, Meyrick, but I must ask you to oblige me by giving up this notion." Hans threw himself into a tragic attitude, and screamed, "What! my series--my immortal Berenice series? Think of what you are saying, man--destroying, as Milton says, not a life but an immortality. Wait before you answer, that I may deposit the implements of my art and be ready to uproot my hair." Here Hans laid down his pencil and palette, threw himself backward into a great chair, and hanging limply over the side, shook his long hair over his face, lifted his hooked fingers on each side his head, and looked up with comic terror at Deronda, who was obliged to smile, as he said, "Paint as many Berenices as you like, but I wish you could feel with me--perhaps you will, on reflection--that you should choose another model." "Why?" said Hans, standing up, and looking serious again. "Because she may get into such a position that her face is likely to be recognized. Mrs. Meyrick and I are anxious for her that she should be known as an admirable singer. It is right, and she wishes it, that she should make herself independent. And she has excellent chances. One good introduction is secured already, and I am going to speak to Klesmer. Her face may come to be very well known, and--well, it is useless to attempt to explain, unless you feel as I do. I believe that if Mirah saw the circumstances clearly, she would strongly object to being exhibited in this way--to allowing herself to be used as a model for a heroine of this sort." As Hans stood with his thumbs in the belt of his blouse, listening to this speech, his face showed a growing surprise melting into amusement, that at last would have its way in an explosive laugh: but seeing that Deronda looked gravely offended, he checked himself to say, "Excuse my laughing, Deronda. You never gave me an advantage over you before. If it had been about anything but my own pictures, I should have swallowed every word because you said it. And so you actually believe that I should get my five pictures hung on the line in a conspicuous position, and carefully studied by the public? Zounds, man! cider-cup and conceit never gave me half such a beautiful dream. My pictures are likely to remain as private as the utmost hypersensitiveness could desire." Hans turned to paint again as a way of filling up awkward pauses. Deronda stood perfectly still, recognizing his mistake as to publicity, but also conscious that his repugnance was not much diminished. He was the reverse of satisfied either with himself or with Hans; but the power of being quiet carries a man well through moments of embarrassment. Hans had a reverence for his friend which made him feel a sort of shyness at Deronda's being in the wrong; but it was not in his nature to give up anything readily, though it were only a whim--or rather, especially if it were a whim, and he presently went on, painting the while, "But even supposing I had a public rushing after my pictures as if they were a railway series including nurses, babies and bonnet-boxes, I can't see any justice in your objection. Every painter worth remembering has painted the face he admired most, as often as he could. It is a part of his soul that goes out into his pictures. He diffuses its influence in that way. He puts what he hates into a caricature. He puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the _Stella Maris_ to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by a worshipful name?" "Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way," said Deronda, with a touch of peremptoriness. "I might admit all your generalities, and yet be right in saying you ought not to publish Mirah's face as a model for Berenice. But I give up the question of publicity. I was unreasonable there." Deronda hesitated a moment. "Still, even as a private affair, there might be good reasons for your not indulging yourself too much in painting her from the point of view you mention. You must feel that her situation at present is a very delicate one; and until she is in more independence, she should be kept as carefully as a bit of Venetian glass, for fear of shaking her out of the safe place she is lodged in. Are you quite sure of your own discretion? Excuse me, Hans. My having found her binds me to watch over her. Do you understand me?" "Perfectly," said Hans, turning his face into a good-humored smile. "You have the very justifiable opinion of me that I am likely to shatter all the glass in my way, and break my own skull into the bargain. Quite fair. Since I got into the scrape of being born, everything I have liked best has been a scrape either for myself or somebody else. Everything I have taken to heartily has somehow turned into a scrape. My painting is the last scrape; and I shall be all my life getting out of it. You think now I shall get into a scrape at home. No; I am regenerate. You think I must be over head and ears in love with Mirah. Quite right; so I am. But you think I shall scream and plunge and spoil everything. There you are mistaken--excusably, but transcendently mistaken. I have undergone baptism by immersion. Awe takes care of me. Ask the little mother." "You don't reckon a hopeless love among your scrapes, then," said Deronda, whose voice seemed to get deeper as Hans's went higher. "I don't mean to call mine hopeless," said Hans, with provoking coolness, laying down his tools, thrusting his thumbs into his belt, and moving away a little, as if to contemplate his picture more deliberately. "My dear fellow, you are only preparing misery for yourself," said Deronda, decisively. "She would not marry a Christian, even if she loved him. Have you heard her--of course you have--heard her speak of her people and her religion?" "That can't last," said Hans. "She will see no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that race is insupportable--'insupportably advancing'--his nose." "She may rejoin her family. That is what she longs for. Her mother and brother are probably strict Jews." "I'll turn proselyte, if she wishes it," said Hans, with a shrug and a laugh. "Don't talk nonsense, Hans. I thought you professed a serious love for her," said Deronda, getting heated. "So I do. You think it desperate, but I don't." "I know nothing; I can't tell what has happened. We must be prepared for surprises. But I can hardly imagine a greater surprise to me than that there should have seemed to be anything in Mirah's sentiments for you to found a romantic hope on." Deronda felt that he was too contemptuous. "I don't found my romantic hopes on a woman's sentiments," said Hans, perversely inclined to be the merrier when he was addressed with gravity. "I go to science and philosophy for my romance. Nature designed Mirah to fall in love with me. The amalgamation of races demands it--the mitigation of human ugliness demands it--the affinity of contrasts assures it. I am the utmost contrast to Mirah--a bleached Christian, who can't sing two notes in tune. Who has a chance against me?" "I see now; it was all _persiflage_. You don't mean a word you say, Meyrick," said Deronda, laying his hand on Meyrick's shoulder, and speaking in a tone of cordial relief. "I was a wiseacre to answer you seriously." "Upon my honor I do mean it, though," said Hans, facing round and laying his left hand on Deronda's shoulder, so that their eyes fronted each other closely. "I am at the confessional. I meant to tell you as soon as you came. My mother says you are Mirah's guardian, and she thinks herself responsible to you for every breath that falls on Mirah in her house. Well, I love her--I worship her--I won't despair--I mean to deserve her." "My dear fellow, you can't do it," said Deronda, quickly. "I should have said, I mean to try." "You can't keep your resolve, Hans. You used to resolve what you would do for your mother and sisters." "You have a right to reproach me, old fellow," said Hans, gently. "Perhaps I am ungenerous," said Deronda, not apologetically, however. "Yet it can't be ungenerous to warn you that you are indulging mad, Quixotic expectations." "Who will be hurt but myself, then?" said Hans, putting out his lip. "I am not going to say anything to her unless I felt sure of the answer. I dare not ask the oracles: I prefer a cheerful caliginosity, as Sir Thomas Browne might say. I would rather run my chance there and lose, than be sure of winning anywhere else. And I don't mean to swallow the poison of despair, though you are disposed to thrust it on me. I am giving up wine, so let me get a little drunk on hope and vanity." "With all my heart, if it will do you any good," said Deronda, loosing Hans's shoulder, with a little push. He made his tone kindly, but his words were from the lip only. As to his real feeling he was silenced. He was conscious of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes befall the man whom others are inclined to trust as a mentor--the irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him. Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes. Throughout their friendship Deronda had been used to Hans's egotism, but he had never before felt intolerant of it: when Hans, habitually pouring out his own feelings and affairs, had never cared for any detail in return, and, if he chanced to know any, had soon forgotten it. Deronda had been inwardly as well as outwardly indulgent--nay, satisfied. But now he had noted with some indignation, all the stronger because it must not be betrayed, Hans's evident assumption that for any danger of rivalry or jealousy in relation to Mirah, Deronda was not as much out of the question as the angel Gabriel. It is one thing to be resolute in placing one's self out of the question, and another to endure that others should perform that exclusion for us. He had expected that Hans would give him trouble: what he had not expected was that the trouble would have a strong element of personal feeling. And he was rather ashamed that Hans's hopes caused him uneasiness in spite of his well-warranted conviction that they would never be fulfilled. They had raised an image of Mirah changing; and however he might protest that the change would not happen, the protest kept up the unpleasant image. Altogether poor Hans seemed to be entering into Deronda's experience in a disproportionate manner--going beyond his part of rescued prodigal, and rousing a feeling quite distinct from compassionate affection. When Deronda went to Chelsea he was not made as comfortable as he ought to have been by Mrs. Meyrick's evident release from anxiety about the beloved but incalculable son. Mirah seemed livelier than before, and for the first time he saw her laugh. It was when they were talking of Hans, he being naturally the mother's first topic. Mirah wished to know if Deronda had seen Mr. Hans going through a sort of character piece without changing his dress. "He passes from one figure to another as if he were a bit of flame where you fancied the figures without seeing them," said Mirah, full of her subject; "he is so wonderfully quick. I used never to like comic things on the stage--they were dwelt on too long; but all in one minute Mr. Hans makes himself a blind bard, and then Rienzi addressing the Romans, and then an opera-dancer, and then a desponding young gentleman--I am sorry for them all, and yet I laugh, all in one"--here Mirah gave a little laugh that might have entered into a song. "We hardly thought that Mirah could laugh till Hans came," said Mrs. Meyrick, seeing that Deronda, like herself, was observing the pretty picture. "Hans seems in great force just now," said Deronda in a tone of congratulation. "I don't wonder at his enlivening you." "He's been just perfect ever since he came back," said Mrs. Meyrick, keeping to herself the next clause--"if it will but last." "It is a great happiness," said Mirah, "to see the son and brother come into this dear home. And I hear them all talk about what they did together when they were little. That seems like heaven, and to have a mother and brother who talk in that way. I have never had it." "Nor I," said Deronda, involuntarily. "No?" said Mirah, regretfully. "I wish you had. I wish you had had every good." The last words were uttered with a serious ardor as if they had been part of a litany, while her eyes were fixed on Deronda, who with his elbow on the back of his chair was contemplating her by the new light of the impression she had made on Hans, and the possibility of her being attracted by that extraordinary contrast. It was no more than what had happened on each former visit of his, that Mirah appeared to enjoy speaking of what she felt very much as a little girl fresh from school pours forth spontaneously all the long-repressed chat for which she has found willing ears. For the first time in her life Mirah was among those whom she entirely trusted, and her original visionary impression that Deronda was a divinely-sent messenger hung about his image still, stirring always anew the disposition to reliance and openness. It was in this way she took what might have been the injurious flattery of admiring attention into which her helpless dependence had been suddenly transformed. Every one around her watched for her looks and words, and the effect on her was simply that of having passed from a trifling imprisonment into an exhilarating air which made speech and action a delight. To her mind it was all a gift from others' goodness. But that word of Deronda's implying that there had been some lack in his life which might be compared with anything she had known in hers, was an entirely new inlet of thought about him. After her first expression of sorrowful surprise she went on, "But Mr. Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of Buddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. And he said you were like Buddha. That is what we all imagine of you." "Pray don't imagine that," said Deronda, who had lately been finding such suppositions rather exasperating. "Even if it were true that I thought so much of others, it would not follow that I had no wants for myself. When Buddha let the tigress eat him he might have been very hungry himself." "Perhaps if he was starved he would not mind so much about being eaten," said Mab, shyly. "Please don't think that, Mab; it takes away the beauty of the action," said Mirah. "But if it were true, Mirah?" said the rational Amy, having a half-holiday from her teaching; "you always take what is beautiful as if it were true." "So it is," said Mirah, gently. "If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there." "Now, Mirah, what do you mean?" said Amy. "I understand her," said Deronda, coming to the rescue. "It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action. It lives as an idea. Is that it?" He turned to Mirah, who was listening with a blind look in her lovely eyes. "It must be that, because you understand me, but I cannot quite explain," said Mirah, rather abstractedly--still searching for some expression. "But _was_ it beautiful for Buddha to let the tiger eat him?" said Amy, changing her ground. "It would be a bad pattern." "The world would get full of fat tigers," said Mab. Deronda laughed, but defended the myth. "It is like a passionate word," he said; "the exaggeration is a flash of fervor. It is an extreme image of what is happening every day--the transmutation of self." "I think I can say what I mean, now," said Mirah, who had not heard the intermediate talk. "When the best thing comes into our thoughts, it is like what my mother has been to me. She has been just as really with me as all the other people about me--often more really with me." Deronda, inwardly wincing under this illustration, which brought other possible realities about that mother vividly before him, presently turned the conversation by saying, "But we must not get too far away from practical matters. I came, for one thing, to tell of an interview I had yesterday, which I hope Mirah will find to have been useful to her. It was with Klesmer, the great pianist." "Ah?" said Mrs. Meyrick, with satisfaction. "You think he will help her?" "I hope so. He is very much occupied, but has promised to fix a time for receiving and hearing Miss Lapidoth, as we must learn to call her"--here Deronda smiled at Mirah--"If she consents to go to him." "I shall be very grateful," said Mirah. "He wants to hear me sing, before he can judge whether I ought to be helped." Deronda was struck with her plain sense about these matters of practical concern. "It will not be at all trying to you, I hope, if Mrs. Meyrick will kindly go with you to Klesmer's house." "Oh, no, not at all trying. I have been doing that all my life--I mean, told to do things that others may judge of me. And I have gone through a bad trial of that sort. I am prepared to bear it, and do some very small thing. Is Klesmer a severe man?" "He is peculiar, but I have not had experience enough of him to know whether he would be what you would call severe." "I know he is kind-hearted--kind in action, if not in speech." "I have been used to be frowned at and not praised," said Mirah. "By the by, Klesmer frowns a good deal," said Deronda, "but there is often a sort of smile in his eyes all the while. Unhappily he wears spectacles, so you must catch him in the right light to see the smile." "I shall not be frightened," said Mirah. "If he were like a roaring lion, he only wants me to sing. I shall do what I can." "Then I feel sure you will not mind being invited to sing in Lady Mallinger's drawing-room," said Deronda. "She intends to ask you next month, and will invite many ladies to hear you, who are likely to want lessons from you for their daughters." "How fast we are mounting!" said Mrs. Meyrick, with delight. "You never thought of getting grand so quickly, Mirah." "I am a little frightened at being called Miss Lapidoth," said Mirah, coloring with a new uneasiness. "Might I be called Cohen?" "I understand you," said Deronda, promptly. "But I assure you, you must not be called Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. This is one of the trifles in which we must conform to vulgar prejudice. We could choose some other name, however--such as singers ordinarily choose--an Italian or Spanish name, which would suit your _physique_." To Deronda just now the name Cohen was equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges. Mirah reflected a little, anxiously, then said, "No. If Cohen will not do, I will keep the name I have been called by. I will not hide myself. I have friends to protect me. And now--if my father were very miserable and wanted help--no," she said, looking at Mrs. Meyrick, "I should think, then, that he was perhaps crying as I used to see him, and had nobody to pity him, and I had hidden myself from him. He had none belonging to him but me. Others that made friends with him always left him." "Keep to what you feel right, my dear child," said Mrs. Meyrick. "_I_ would not persuade you to the contrary." For her own part she had no patience or pity for that father, and would have left him to his crying. Deronda was saying to himself, "I am rather base to be angry with Hans. How can he help being in love with her? But it is too absurdly presumptuous for him even to frame the idea of appropriating her, and a sort of blasphemy to suppose that she could possibly give herself to him." What would it be for Daniel Deronda to entertain such thoughts? He was not one who could quite naively introduce himself where he had just excluded his friend, yet it was undeniable that what had just happened made a new stage in his feeling toward Mirah. But apart from other grounds for self-repression, reasons both definite and vague made him shut away that question as he might have shut up a half-opened writing that would have carried his imagination too far, and given too much shape to presentiments. Might there not come a disclosure which would hold the missing determination of his course? What did he really know about his origin? Strangely in these latter months when it seemed right that he should exert his will in the choice of a destination, the passion of his nature had got more and more locked by this uncertainty. The disclosure might bring its pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to him to be all on that side; but if it helped him to make his life a sequence which would take the form of duty--if it saved him from having to make an arbitrary selection where he felt no preponderance of desire? Still more, he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside the activities of men, stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of self-assigned superiority. His chief tether was his early inwrought affection for Sir Hugo, making him gratefully deferential to wishes with which he had little agreement: but gratitude had been sometimes disturbed by doubts which were near reducing it to a fear of being ungrateful. Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty: Deronda was more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half; yet he accused himself, as he would have accused another, of being weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the altar-fire in them; and the thought of all closest relations of our nature held still something of the mystic power which had made his neck and ears burn in boyhood. The average man may regard this sensibility on the question of birth as preposterous and hardly credible; but with the utmost respect for his knowledge as the rock from which all other knowledge is hewn, it must be admitted that many well-proved facts are dark to the average man, even concerning the action of his own heart and the structure of his own retina. A century ago he and all his forefathers had not had the slightest notion of that electric discharge by means of which they had all wagged their tongues mistakenly; any more than they were awake to the secluded anguish of exceptional sensitiveness into which many a carelessly-begotten child of man is born. Perhaps the ferment was all the stronger in Deronda's mind because he had never had a confidant to whom he could open himself on these delicate subjects. He had always been leaned on instead of being invited to lean. Sometimes he had longed for the sort of friend to whom he might possibly unfold his experience: a young man like himself who sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty, yet socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign of equality either in bodily or spiritual wrestling--for he had found it impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him. But he had no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. Deronda's was not one of those quiveringly-poised natures that lend themselves to second-sight.

In spite of Deronda's reasons for wishing to be in London again - anxiety for Mirah, combined with curiosity about Mordecai - he did not manage to go there before Sir Hugo, who went ahead of his family for the opening of Parliament in February. Deronda took up his quarters in Park Lane, since his chambers were tenanted by Hans Meyrick - but he found things there not altogether according to his expectations. It is a peculiar test of a man's mettle when, after painfully adjusting himself to a wise precaution, he finds he has missed the mark, so that quite a different call is made upon him to that which he expected. On visiting Hans, Deronda's first impression was one of pure pleasure and amusement, at finding his sitting-room transformed into a studio. It was strewn with drawings and the contents of the trunks from Rome, with Hans as the presiding genius of the littered place - his hair longer than before, his face more whimsically creased, and his high voice getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk. "I knew you would like to see my casts and antiquities," said Hans, after the first hearty greetings, "but I didn't unload my chests here. I've found two rooms at Chelsea close to my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready to hang out there - when they've scraped the walls and put in some new lights. But you see I've already begun working: you can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me." "Only a fungoid growth, I dare say," said Deronda, accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fashion. He walked toward some drawings propped on the bookcases; five rapidly-sketched heads - different aspects of the same face. He looked at them without making any remark. Hans, too, was silent for a minute, and began touching up the picture on his easel. "What do you think of them?" he said at last. "The full face looks too massive; otherwise the likenesses are good," said Deronda, somewhat coldly. "No, it is not too massive," said Hans, decisively. "But I shall enlarge her scale for Berenice. I am making a Berenice series - there are the sketches - and you are just the model I want for Agrippa. No, I forgot; you don't like sitting for your portrait, confound you! However, I've picked up a capital Titus. There are to be five in the series." "Agrippa's legs will never do," said Deronda. "The legs are realistic," said Hans; "public men are often shaky about the legs. But never mind the legs: the third sketch is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover Titus his successor." "You must put a scroll in her mouth, else people will not understand that." "It will make them feel their ignorance then - an excellent sthetic effect. The fourth is, Titus sending Berenice away from Rome after she has shared his palace for ten years - both reluctant and sad." "Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She must have been that." "No, no; a few mature touches to show the lapse of time. But now, here is the fifth: Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure imagination. That is what ought to have been - perhaps was. Nobody knows what became of her. There is no sixth picture. I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak. But now come and look at this on the easel." "That beseeching attitude is really good," said Deronda, after a moment's contemplation. "You have been very industrious over Christmas; for I suppose you have taken up the subject since you came to London." Neither of them had yet mentioned Mirah. "No," said Hans, "I decided on the subject before. I saw a splendid woman in the Trastevere - the grandest women there are half Jewesses - and she set me hunting for a fine subject of a Jewess at Rome. I'll show you a sketch of the Trasteverina's head when I can lay my hands on it." "I should think she would be a more suitable model for Berenice," said Deronda, not knowing exactly how to express his discontent. "Not at all. The model ought to be the most beautiful Jewess in the world, and I have found her." "Are you sure that she would like to figure in that character? I should think no woman would be more abhorrent to her. Does she quite know what you are doing?" "Certainly. I got her to throw herself into this attitude. Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees." "I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda, with some indignation. "Oh, yes, she does - ladies' edition. Berenice was a fervid patriot, but was beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the arch-enemy of her people. Mirah takes it as a tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation. That was her own phrase. I couldn't find it in my heart to tell her I invented that part of the story." "Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, chiefly in order to stop himself from saying something else. "Look in that folio," said Hans. "My portrait studies are all there, Cambridge heads and others all mixed up. You'll find her about the middle." "Is this one of your undergraduates?" said Deronda, holding up a drawing. "It's an unusually agreeable face." "Oh, that's a man named Gascoigne - Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly good fellow; I coached him before he got his scholarship. He was ill, and has had to stay up another year. I must look him up." "Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, holding up a sketch of the Trasteverina. "Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather contemptuously, "too coarse. I was unregenerate then." Deronda was silent while he closed the folio. Then turning toward Hans, he said, "I dare say my scruples are excessive, Meyrick, but I must ask you to give up this notion." Hans threw himself into a tragic attitude, screaming, "What! my immortal Berenice series? Think of what you are saying, man - destroying not a life but an immortality. Wait, while I deposit the implements of my art and uproot my hair." Here Hans laid down his pencil, threw himself into a great chair, and shaking his long hair over his face, hooked his fingers onto it and looked up with comic terror at Deronda, who was obliged to smile, as he said- "Paint as many Berenices as you like, but I wish you would choose another model." "Why?" said Hans, standing up, and looking serious again. "Because she may get into such a position that her face is recognized. Mrs. Meyrick and I are anxious that she should be known as an admirable singer. She wishes to make herself independent. And she has excellent chances. One good introduction is secured already, and I am going to speak to Klesmer. Her face may come to be very well known, and I believe that if Mirah saw the circumstances clearly, she would strongly object to being exhibited in this way - to allowing herself to be used as a model for a heroine of this sort." As Hans stood with his thumbs in his belt, listening to this speech, his face showed surprise melting into amusement: but seeing that Deronda looked gravely offended, he said, "Excuse my laughing, Deronda. You never gave me an advantage over you before. So you actually believe that I could get my five pictures hung in a conspicuous position, and carefully studied by the public? Zounds, man! what a beautiful dream. My pictures are likely to remain as private as you could desire." Hans turned to paint again to fill up the awkward pause. Deronda stood still, recognizing his mistake as to publicity; but his repugnance was not diminished. Hans presently went on, painting the while- "Even supposing I had the public rushing after my pictures as if they were a railway series including nurses, babies and bonnet-boxes, I can't see any justice in your objection. Every painter paints the face he admires most. Part of his soul goes out into his pictures. He puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic form." "Every objection can be answered by generalising, Hans," said Deronda, impatiently. "I might admit your generalities, and yet be right in saying you ought not to publish Mirah's face. I was unreasonable about publicity; but there might be other good reasons for your not indulging yourself too much in painting her. Her situation is very delicate; and until she is more independent, she should be carefully kept safe. Are you quite sure of your own discretion? Excuse me, Hans. My having found her binds me to watch over her. Do you understand?" "Perfectly," said Hans, putting on a good-humoured smile. "You think I shall get into a scrape. Quite fair. Since I got into the scrape of being born, everything I have liked best has been a scrape either for myself or somebody else. My painting is the latest scrape; and I shall be all my life getting out of it. You think I am head over heels in love with Mirah. Quite right; so I am. But if you think I shall scream and plunge and spoil everything, you are mistaken. Awe prevents me. Ask the little mother." "You don't reckon a hopeless love among your scrapes, then," said Deronda, whose voice seemed to get deeper as Hans's went higher. "I don't mean to call mine hopeless," said Hans, with provoking coolness. "My dear fellow, you are only preparing misery for yourself. She would not marry a Christian, even if she loved him. Have you heard her speak of her people and her religion?" "That can't last," said Hans. "She will see no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that race is insupportable." "She may rejoin her family. That is what she longs for. Her mother and brother are probably strict Jews." "I'll turn proselyte, if she wishes it," said Hans, with a shrug and a laugh. "Don't talk nonsense, Hans. I thought you professed a serious love for her," said Deronda, getting heated. "So I do. You think it desperate, but I don't." "I can hardly imagine that there was anything in Mirah's sentiments for you to found a romantic hope on." "I don't found my romantic hopes on a woman's sentiments," said Hans. "I go to science and philosophy for my romance. Nature designed Mirah to fall in love with me. The amalgamation of races demands it." "You don't mean a word you say, Meyrick," said Deronda, laying his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Upon my honour I do mean it, though," said Hans, in turn laying his hand on Deronda's shoulder. "I am at the confessional. My mother says you are Mirah's guardian, and she thinks herself responsible to you for every breath that falls on Mirah in her house. Well, I worship her - I won't despair - I mean to deserve her." "My dear fellow, you can't do it," said Deronda, quickly. "Perhaps I am ungenerous, but I warn you that you are indulging mad, Quixotic expectations." "Who will be hurt but myself, then?" said Hans. "I am not going to say anything to her unless I am sure of the answer. I am giving up wine, so let me get a little drunk on hope and vanity." "With all my heart, if it will do you any good," said Deronda, making his tone kindly, as he loosed Hans's shoulder with a little push. He was conscious of that irritation which sometimes befalls the man whom others trust as a mentor - the irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him. Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless. Deronda had grown used to Hans's egotism, but he had never before felt intolerant of it. When Hans poured out his own feelings, and never cared for any detail in return, Deronda had been indulgent. But now he was indignant at Hans's assumption that as far as rivalry over Mirah was concerned, Deronda was as much out of the question as the angel Gabriel. He had expected that Hans would give him trouble: what he had not expected was that the trouble would make him feel so strongly. And he was rather ashamed that Hans's hopes caused him uneasiness. They had raised an unpleasant image of Mirah changing. When Deronda went to Chelsea he was not comforted by Mrs. Meyrick's lack of anxiety about her son. Mirah seemed livelier than before, and for the first time he saw her laugh, as she described Hans play-acting. "He is so wonderfully quick," said Mirah. "I used never to like comic things on the stage; but all in one minute Mr. Hans makes himself a blind bard, and then an opera-dancer, and then a desponding young gentleman - I am sorry for them, and yet I laugh." "We hardly thought that Mirah could laugh till Hans came," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Hans seems in great force just now," said Deronda in a tone of congratulation. "He's been just perfect ever since he came back," said Mrs. Meyrick. "It is a great happiness," said Mirah, "to see the son and brother come into this dear home, and to hear them all talk about what they did together when they were little. That seems like heaven, to have a mother and brother who talk in that way. I have never had it." "Nor I," said Deronda, involuntarily. "No?" said Mirah, regretfully. "I wish you had. I wish you had had every good." The last words were uttered with a serious ardour, while her eyes were fixed on Deronda, who was contemplating her by the new light of Hans's worship, and the possibility of her being attracted to his friend. For the first time in her life Mirah was among those whom she trusted, and her original vision of Deronda as a divinely-sent messenger hung about him still. She felt that she had passed from imprisonment into an exhilarating air which made speech and action a delight. But Deronda's implying that there had been some lack in his life comparable to hers, was an entirely new inlet of thought about him. She went on- "Mr. Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of Buddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. And he said you were like Buddha." "Pray don't imagine that," said Deronda, rather exasperated. "Even if it were true that I thought so much of others, it would not follow that I had no wants. When Buddha let the tigress eat him he might have been very hungry himself." "Perhaps if he was starved he would not mind about being eaten," said Mab, shyly. "Please don't think that, Mab; it takes away the beauty of the action," said Mirah. "But if it were true, Mirah?" said the rational Amy; "you always take what is beautiful as if it were true." "So it is," said Mirah, gently. "If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there." "Now, Mirah, what do you mean?" said Amy. "I understand her," said Deronda, coming to the rescue. "It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action. It lives as an idea. Is that it?" He turned to Mirah, who was listening with a blind look in her lovely eyes. "It must be that, because you understand me, but I cannot quite explain," said Mirah, rather abstractedly. "But was it beautiful for Buddha to let the tiger eat him?" said Amy. "It would be a bad example." "The world would get full of fat tigers," said Mab. "When the best thing comes into our thoughts, it is like what my mother has been to me," said Mirah. Deronda, inwardly wincing as he thought of other possibilities about that mother, turned the conversation, saying, "I came to tell you of an interview I had yesterday with Klesmer, the great pianist. He has promised to fix a time for hearing Miss Lapidoth, if she consents." "I shall be very grateful," said Mirah. "He wants to hear me sing, before he can judge whether I ought to be helped." Deronda was struck with her plain sense and practicality. "Is Klesmer a severe man?" "He is peculiar, but I do not know if you would call him severe. He is kind in action, if not in speech." "I have been used to be frowned at and not praised," said Mirah. "Klesmer frowns a good deal," said Deronda, "but with a sort of smile in his eyes, if you can catch it." "I shall not be frightened. I shall do what I can." "Then I feel sure you will not mind being invited to sing in Lady Mallinger's drawing-room," said Deronda. "She intends to ask you next month, and will invite many ladies to hear you, who are likely to want lessons from you for their daughters." "How fast we are mounting!" said Mrs. Meyrick, with delight. "I am a little frightened at being called Miss Lapidoth," said Mirah, with a new uneasiness. "Might I be called Cohen?" "I understand you," said Deronda, promptly. "But I assure you, you must not be called Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. This is one of the trifles in which we must conform to vulgar prejudice. We could choose some other name, however: an Italian or Spanish name, which would suit your looks." To Deronda just now the name Cohen was equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges. Mirah reflected anxiously, then said, "No. I will keep the name Lapidoth. I will not hide myself. I have friends to protect me. And now - if my father were very miserable and wanted help," she said, looking at Mrs. Meyrick, "I should think, then, that I had hidden myself from him. He had no one but me." "Do what you feel right, my dear child," said Mrs. Meyrick. For her own part she had no patience or pity for that father. Deronda thought, "I should not be angry with Hans. How can he help being in love with her? But it is too absurd for him even to think of marrying her, and a sort of blasphemy to suppose that she could possibly give herself to him." What would it be for Daniel Deronda to entertain such hopes? He could not naively introduce himself where he had just excluded his friend, yet it was undeniable that he had reached a new stage in his feeling toward Mirah. But reasons both definite and vague made him shut away that question. What did he really know about his origin? What was his destination? Strangely, in these latter months when it seemed right that he should choose a destination, he had become more and more locked in by this uncertainty. His chief tether was his early affection for Sir Hugo: he was gratefully deferential to his wishes, while not agreeing with them; but now his doubts were close to making him ungrateful. He accused himself of being weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. To Daniel the words Father and Mother still held the mystic power which had made his neck and ears burn in boyhood. The average man may regard this sensitivity on the question of birth as preposterous; but the average man does not even understand the action of his own heart and the structure of his own retina, let alone his mind. Perhaps Deronda struggled all the more because he had never had a confidant to speak openly to on these delicate subjects. He had always been leaned on instead of being invited to lean. Sometimes he had longed for the sort of friend to whom he might unfold his experience: a young man like himself who had sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own career. But he had no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. Deronda's was not one of those natures that lend themselves to second-sight.

Daniel Deronda

Book 5 - MORDECAI | Chapter 37

"I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers."--STERNE: _Sentimental Journey_. To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of every-day life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near? To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before--saw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons were extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientific experiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the mixed feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah. The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly haunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly occurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had been parted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity. When she was in the boat she said that her mother and brother were good; but the goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and yearning memory, and the ten or twelve years since the parting had been time enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, and in general with those who got the worst of it, his interest had never been practically drawn toward existing Jews, and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous in fine apparel or lurked in by-streets, were chiefly of a sort most repugnant to him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion, and wished to be merged in the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy in griefs of inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race will often strike a specimen who has well earned it on his own account, and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam. It appears that the Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice peculiarly connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allege experimental grounds for this opinion. Deronda could not escape (who can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and though one of his favorite protests was against the severance of past and present history, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race. But now that Mirah's longing roused his mind to a closer survey of details, very disagreeable images urged themselves of what it might be to find out this middle-aged Jewess and her son. To be sure, there was the exquisite refinement and charm of the creature herself to make a presumption in favor of her immediate kindred, but--he must wait to know more: perhaps through Mrs. Meyrick he might gather some guiding hints from Mirah's own lips. Her voice, her accent, her looks--all the sweet purity that clothed her as with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from giving her, either ideally or practically, an association with what was hateful or contaminating. But these fine words with which we fumigate and becloud unpleasant facts are not the language in which we think. Deronda's thinking went on in rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided by some official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a hawk-eyed woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl's last bit of finery; or in some quarter only the more hideous for being smarter, he found himself under the breath of a young Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with gentlemen's tastes, and not fastidious in any transactions with which they would favor him--and so on through the brief chapter of his experience in this kind. Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into insulting ideas, or to practice a form of wit which identifies Moses with the advertisement sheet; but he was just now governed by dread, and if Mirah's parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have been that his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the habit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this case as well as his own there was enough to make the connection reasonable. But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection in the fullest sense, and all his chivalrous sentiment roused itself to insist that the sooner and the more fully he could engage for her the interest of others besides himself, the better he should fulfill her claims on him. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he might be able to do so; the very depth of the impression she had produced made him desire that she should understand herself to be entirely independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried to dispel as fantastic left their influence in an anxiety stronger than any motive he could give for it, that those who saw his actions closely should be acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. He had learned to hate secrecy about the grand ties and obligations of his life--to hate it the more because a strong spell of interwoven sensibilities hindered him from breaking such secrecy. Deronda had made a vow to himself that--since the truths which disgrace mortals are not all of their own making--the truth should never be made a disgrace to another by his act. He was not without terror lest he should break this vow, and fall into the apologetic philosophy which explains the world into containing nothing better than one's own conduct. At one moment he resolved to tell the whole of his adventure to Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger the next morning at breakfast, but the possibility that something quite new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs. Meyrick's checked this impulse, and he finally went to sleep on the conclusion that he would wait until that visit had been made.

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which easily found poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. To him this event of finding Mirah was heart-stirring. He sat up half the night, living again the moments since he had first seen Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh vividness of emotive memory. When he took up a book, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before - not only the actual events, but possibilities of what had been and what might be, imagined with hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search for her mother to grip his imagination. His first sympathetic instinct was to aid her in her search: there were ways of finding people in London. But here the mixed feelings of Deronda's own experience naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety for Mirah. His desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly haunted with dread; and in imagining Mirah's mother and brother, it quickly occurred to him that finding them might turn out to be a calamity. In the boat, she had said that her mother and brother were good; but the goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and longing; and it was ten or twelve years since she had seen them. Despite his strong tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, Deronda's interest had never been drawn toward Jews, and the facts he knew about them were chiefly of a sort repugnant to him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion to merge in with the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy; but Deronda could not escape (who can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and he had never cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race. But now that Mirah's longing roused his mind, very disagreeable images urged themselves of what this middle-aged Jewess and her son might be. To be sure, Mirah's refinement and charm were in their favour, but - he must wait to know more: perhaps through Mrs. Meyrick. Mirah's voice, her accent, her looks - all the sweet purity that clothed her like a consecrating garment made him shrink from associating her with anything hateful or contaminating. In his mind's eye flashed rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided down a dingy street; entering through a dim doorway, he saw a hawk-eyed woman, unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl's last bit of finery; or in some other quarter he saw a young Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with gentlemen's tastes, and not fastidious about any business - and so on, through his brief experience of this kind. Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into insulting ideas; but he was just now governed by dread, and if Mirah's parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have been that his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the habit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this case as well as his own there was enough uncertainty to make the connection reasonable. But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection in the fullest sense, and his chivalrous nature felt that the sooner he could engage for her the interest of others besides himself, the better. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he might be able to do so; he wished that she should understand herself to be entirely independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried to dispel as fantastic made him anxious that his friends should be acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. He had learned to hate secrecy about the ties and obligations of his life - to hate it the more because he felt unable to break such secrecy. At one moment he resolved to tell the whole adventure to Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger the next morning, but the possibility that something new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs. Meyrick's checked this impulse. He finally went to sleep having decided that he would wait until that visit had been made.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 19

"Moses, trotz seiner Befeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein groer Knstler war und den wahren Knstlergeist besa. Nur war dieser Knstlergeist bei ihm, wie bei seinen gyptischen Landsleuten, nur auf das Kolossale und Unverwstliche gerichtet. Aber nicht wie die gypter formierte er seine Kunstwerke aus Backstein und Gra- nit, sondern er baute Menschenpyramiden, er meisselte Menschenobelisken, er nahm einen armen Hirten- stamm und schuf daraus ein Volk, das ebenfalls den Jahrhunderten 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?

Imagine the difference in Deronda's state of mind when he left England and when he returned. He had set out for Genoa in total uncertainty of how far his wishes would be encouraged. He came back with the inheritance that he had begun to yearn for: with what was better than freedom - with a bond which he accepted gladly, even if it offered no promise of satisfying a secret passionate longing never yet allowed to grow into a hope. But now he dared avow to himself his hidden love. Since the hour when he left the house at Chelsea in silence after Mirah's farewell look and words - stirring in him his habitual deep-laid care for womanhood - 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 Mirah; yet she had taken her place in his soul, reducing the power of other fascination and making a difference in it that became deficiency. The influence had been continually strengthened. Poor Gwendolen's dependence on Deronda tended to rouse in him self-martyring pity rather than love, and his tenderness dwelt on an image in all things unlike Gwendolen. His relation to Mordecai had brought a new nearness to Mirah which was agitating, not less because there was no apparent change in his position toward her; and she had been bound up in his thoughts about his parentage. Deronda had been conscious of this process, 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 an acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had compelled him to a definite resolve. This new state of decision acted on Deronda with a force which surprised even himself. There was a release of energy: it was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry, which drew him shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance. He wanted to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain dissent, and also to see Mirah without the embarrassment of seeking her, to interpret her looks and words from a new starting-point. He was not greatly alarmed about Hans's attentions, but he had a presentiment that her feelings toward himself did not include 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. What wonder that Deronda went straight from the London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in Brompton? He wished to lose no time, but to deposit the precious chest with Mordecai: and that he should pay this visit without pause would gratify Mordecai's heart. The strongest tendencies of Deronda's nature were rushing in one current - the fervent affection which made him delight in meeting others' wishes, and the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily acts. There was an added radiance in his eyes as he entered the house noiselessly, wondering what exactly he should find. It was the evening of that same day on which Mirah had met her father. Mordecai, penetrated by her grief, and by sad memories, had not resumed his task of sifting papers. They had sat perfectly still together while the light faded. Mirah, unable to think of eating, had not moved, while he had laid his head back, with closed eyes and difficult breathing, looking, Mirah thought, as he would look after death. The thought that his death might be near continually visited her; and now, to her grief, was added the regret that she had been unable to control her violent outburst. She sat watching him - her cheeks pallid, her eyes brilliant with young tears, her curls in as much disorder as a just-awakened child's - watching that emaciated face. Life at that moment stretched before Mirah with a double bereavement - of one living as well as one dead. But now the door opened, and a well-known voice said: "Daniel Deronda - may he come in?" "Come! come!" said Mordecai, immediately rising, apparently unsurprised; 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, he laid his other hand on Mordecai's shoulder, and stood so a moment, 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." Mirah thought, "It is for something he cannot tell us." But when they sat down, Deronda said, emphatically- "That is true. I did not tell you the reason of my journey abroad, Mordecai, but I went to learn my parentage. And you were right. I am a Jew." The two men clasped hands, while the words passed through Mirah like an electric shock. Deronda went on- "We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall not be separated by life or by death." Mordecai's whispered answer was uttered in Hebrew. It was the liturgical words which express the religious bond: "Our God and the God of our fathers." Mirah fell on her knees by her brother's side, and looked at his now illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. For the moment she thought of the news 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 one; "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. My grandfather, Daniel Charisi, preserved manuscripts stretching far back, in the hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. Now his hope is fulfilled: I possess the chest containing them, 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. We will study them together." Deronda ended with that bright smile which seemed a revelation. But when this happy glance rested on Mirah, it acted like a little too much sunshine, and made her change her position. She had knelt, but now she coloured under Deronda's glance, and rose to take her seat again in her usual posture, trying to look as quiet as possible. Deronda, equally sensitive, imagined that his feeling for her had entered too much into his eyes, and had been repugnant to her. He was afraid that his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred. If Mirah could not love him, advances of love on his part would make her wretched in their inevitable contact. While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah, Mordecai, conscious of nothing but a blessed fulfilment, was speaking- "Daniel, as I 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 draws the elements toward it, and is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in that Omnipresence which is the habitation of the world. And if it seems that the erring 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 a people can be blessed only by having counsellors 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; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood to my sister, and seeking out her brother, 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. What I feel now is that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the accord between your mind and mine which has brought that about." As Deronda was speaking, he remembered that first evening in the book-shop, and his struggling aloofness from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature to delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul; and he went on with fuller fervour- "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 passionate thoughts in many ancestors - thoughts that were intensely present in my grandfather. 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 prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me - to bind our race together in spite of heresy. I mean to try what can be done with that union. Failure will not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for me not to try." "Even as my brother," said Mordecai, falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose. To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself a sacramental solemnity. On Mirah the effect was equally strong, though she felt more surprise than her brother at Deronda's suddenly revealed 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. Mordecai spoke again- "It has begun already - the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing away of this body, and then we shall unite in a stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I have written, Daniel; for the willing marriage melts soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made fuller. 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. I think our duty is faithful tradition where we can attain it. 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. "But for years my hope has been, not that the imperfect image of my thought should live, but that my vision and passion should enter into yours; for he whom I longed for afar, was he not you whom I discerned when you came near? Nevertheless, you shall judge. For my soul is satisfied." "I will relate the whole story of my journey at some time," said Deronda. "But now tell me 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. She hoped he would not think it necessary to tell Deronda about her father this evening. Just when Deronda had brought himself so near, it hurt her that he should hear of this disgrace clinging about them. She rose to take up her cloak, meaning to 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 raised a dread that we must submit to. But let us defer speaking of it, as if this evening were the beginning of the festival in which we must offer the fruits of our joy, and mingle no mourning with them." Deronda guessed the hinted grief, and asked no more. Rising as he saw Mirah rise, he said, "Are you going? I must leave as soon as I have delivered the key to Mordecai - no, Ezra - may I call him Ezra now?" "Please do," said Mirah, faintly, feeling a new timidity under Deronda's glance. Was there really something different about him, or was the difference only in her feeling? The 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; but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which, superficially, was the reverse of that - though to a reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of rank which makes a man keenly susceptible about the appearance of his addresses. Deronda was affected peculiarly because of his imaginative sympathy with her mind. Mirah, he knew, felt bound to him by deep obligations, which might seem to her to give every wish of his the aspect of a claim; and an inability to fulfil it would cause her a pain continually revived by their inevitable meetings in care of Ezra. Here were fears not of pride only, but of extreme tenderness. Altogether, his character as a benefactor seemed to Deronda an insurmountable obstacle to confessing himself a lover, unless in some inconceivable way it could be revealed to him that Mirah already loved him. As for Mirah, her former suspicions were thrown out of shape but still present, like an ugly story which had been discredited but not therefore dissipated. All that she knew about Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such fetters upon him as she had begun to believe in. His whole manner as well as his words implied that he had no hidden bonds. But uneasiness still clung about her 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 that any possibility of attachment was as remote as before? 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?

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 63

"Ritorna a tua scienza Che vuol, quanto la cosa e pi perfetta Pi senta il bene, e cosi la doglienza." --DANTE. When Deronda met Gwendolen and Grandcourt on the staircase, his mind was seriously preoccupied. He had just been summoned to the second interview with his mother. In two hours after his parting from her he knew that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had left the hotel, and so far as the purpose of his journey to Genoa was concerned, he might himself have set off on his way to Mainz, to deliver the letter from Joseph Kalonymos, and get possession of the family chest. But mixed mental conditions, which did not resolve themselves into definite reasons, hindered him from departure. Long after the farewell he was kept passive by a weight of retrospective feeling. He lived again, with the new keenness of emotive memory, through the exciting scenes which seemed past only in the sense of preparation for their actual presence in his soul. He allowed himself in his solitude to sob, with perhaps more than a woman's acuteness of compassion, over that woman's life so near to his, and yet so remote. He beheld the world changed for him by the certitude of ties that altered the poise of hopes and fears, and gave him a new sense of fellowship, as if under cover of the night he had joined the wrong band of wanderers, and found with the rise of morning that the tents of his kindred were grouped far off. He had a quivering imaginative sense of close relation to the grandfather who had been animated by strong impulses and beloved thoughts, which were now perhaps being roused from their slumber within himself. And through all this passionate meditation Mordecai and Mirah were always present, as beings who clasped hands with him in sympathetic silence. Of such quick, responsive fibre was Deronda made, under that mantle of self-controlled reserve into which early experience had thrown so much of his young strength. When the persistent ringing of a bell as a signal reminded him of the hour he thought of looking into _Bradshaw_, and making the brief necessary preparations for starting by the next train--thought of it, but made no movement in consequence. Wishes went to Mainz and what he was to get possession of there--to London and the beings there who made the strongest attachments of his life; but there were other wishes that clung in these moments to Genoa, and they kept him where he was by that force which urges us to linger over an interview that carries a presentiment of final farewell or of overshadowing sorrow. Deronda did not formally say, "I will stay over to-night, because it is Friday, and I should like to go to the evening service at the synagogue where they must all have gone; and besides, I may see the Grandcourts again." But simply, instead of packing and ringing for his bill, he sat doing nothing at all, while his mind went to the synagogue and saw faces there probably little different from those of his grandfather's time, and heard the Spanish-Hebrew liturgy which had lasted through the seasons of wandering generations like a plant with wandering seed, that gives the far-off lands a kinship to the exile's home--while, also, his mind went toward Gwendolen, with anxious remembrance of what had been, and with a half-admitted impression that it would be hardness in him willingly to go away at once without making some effort, in spite of Grandcourt's probable dislike, to manifest the continuance of his sympathy with her since their abrupt parting. In this state of mind he deferred departure, ate his dinner without sense of flavor, rose from it quickly to find the synagogue, and in passing the porter asked if Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt were still in the hotel, and what was the number of their apartment. The porter gave him the number, but added that they were gone out boating. That information had somehow power enough over Deronda to divide his thoughts with the memories wakened among the sparse _talithim_ and keen dark faces of worshippers whose way of taking awful prayers and invocations with the easy familiarity which might be called Hebrew dyed Italian, made him reflect that his grandfather, according to the Princess's hints of his character, must have been almost as exceptional a Jew as Mordecai. But were not men of ardent zeal and far-reaching hope everywhere exceptional? the men who had the visions which, as Mordecai said, were the creators and feeders of the world--moulding and feeding the more passive life which without them would dwindle and shrivel into the narrow tenacity of insects, unshaken by thoughts beyond the reach of their antennae. Something of a mournful impatience perhaps added itself to the solicitude about Gwendolen (a solicitude that had room to grow in his present release from immediate cares) as an incitement to hasten from the synagogue and choose to take his evening walk toward the quay, always a favorite haunt with him, and just now attractive with the possibility that he might be in time to see the Grandcourts come in from their boating. In this case, he resolved that he would advance to greet them deliberately, and ignore any grounds that the husband might have for wishing him elsewhere. The sun had set behind a bank of cloud, and only a faint yellow light was giving its farewell kisses to the waves, which were agitated by an active breeze. Deronda, sauntering slowly within sight of what took place on the strand, observed the groups there concentrating their attention on a sailing-boat which was advancing swiftly landward, being rowed by two men. Amidst the clamorous talk in various languages, Deronda held it the surer means of getting information not to ask questions, but to elbow his way to the foreground and be an unobstructed witness of what was occurring. Telescopes were being used, and loud statements made that the boat held somebody who had been drowned. One said it was the _milord_ who had gone out in a sailing boat; another maintained that the prostrate figure he discerned was _miladi_; a Frenchman who had no glass would rather say that it was _milord_ who had probably taken his wife out to drown her, according to the national practice--a remark which an English skipper immediately commented on in our native idiom (as nonsense which--had undergone a mining operation), and further dismissed by the decision that the reclining figure was a woman. For Deronda, terribly excited by fluctuating fears, the strokes of the oars as he watched them were divided by swift visions of events, possible and impossible, which might have brought about this issue, or this broken-off fragment of an issue, with a worse half undisclosed--if this woman apparently snatched from the waters were really Mrs. Grandcourt. But soon there was no longer any doubt: the boat was being pulled to land, and he saw Gwendolen half raising herself on her hands, by her own effort, under her heavy covering of tarpaulin and pea-jackets--pale as one of the sheeted dead, shivering, with wet hair streaming, a wild amazed consciousness in her eyes, as if she had waked up in a world where some judgment was impending, and the beings she saw around were coming to seize her. The first rower who jumped to land was also wet through, and ran off; the sailors, close about the boat, hindered Deronda from advancing, and he could only look on while Gwendolen gave scared glances, and seemed to shrink with terror as she was carefully, tenderly helped out, and led on by the strong arms of those rough, bronzed men, her wet clothes clinging about her limbs, and adding to the impediment of her weakness. Suddenly her wandering eyes fell on Deronda, standing before her, and immediately, as if she had been expecting him and looking for him, she tried to stretch out her arms, which were held back by her supporters, saying, in a muffled voice, "It is come, it is come! He is dead!" "Hush, hush!" said Deronda, in a tone of authority; "quiet yourself." Then to the men who were assisting her, "I am a connection of this lady's husband. If you will get her on to the _Italia_ as quickly as possible, I will undertake everything else." He stayed behind to hear from the remaining boatman that her husband had gone down irrecoverably, and that his boat was left floating empty. He and his comrade had heard a cry, had come up in time to see the lady jump in after her husband, and had got her out fast enough to save her from much damage. After this, Deronda hastened to the hotel to assure himself that the best medical help would be provided; and being satisfied on this point, he telegraphed the event to Sir Hugo, begging him to come forthwith, and also to Mr. Gascoigne, whose address at the rectory made his nearest known way of getting the information to Gwendolen's mother. Certain words of Gwendolen's in the past had come back to him with the effectiveness of an inspiration: in moments of agitated confession she had spoken of her mother's presence, as a possible help, if she could have had it.

When Deronda met Gwendolen and Grandcourt on the staircase, he was seriously preoccupied. He had just been summoned to the second interview with his mother. Two hours after his parting from her, the Princess Halm-Eberstein left the hotel, and he might himself have set off to Mainz, to deliver the letter from Joseph Kalonymos, and get possession of the family chest. But indefinite reasons stopped him from departing. Long after the farewell he was kept passive by a weight of memory. He lived again through the exciting scenes which seemed past only in the sense of preparation for their actual presence in his soul. He allowed himself in solitude to weep over that woman's life so near to his, and yet so remote. He beheld the world changed for him by the ties that altered his hopes and fears and gave him a new sense of fellowship, as if by darkness he had joined the wrong band of wanderers, and found with the rise of morning that the tents of his kindred were far off. He imagined the grandfather who had been moved by the same strong impulses as were now being roused from slumber within himself. And through all this passionate meditation, Mordecai and Mirah were always present. When the persistent ringing of a bell reminded him of the hour, he thought of looking at the railway timetable, but made no movement. He was drawn to Mainz, and to London and his strong attachments there; but other wishes clung to Genoa, with the force of lingering final farewell. He did not formally say, "I will stay over tonight, because it is Friday, and I should like to go to the evening service at the synagogue where they must all have gone; and besides, I may see the Grandcourts again." But he sat doing nothing at all, thinking of the synagogue and also of Gwendolen. He half admitted that it would be cruel to go away without making some effort, in spite of Grandcourt's dislike, to show his sympathy with her. In this state of mind he ate his dinner, rose from it quickly to find the synagogue, and in passing the porter asked if Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt were still in the hotel. The porter told him they were gone out boating. That information had somehow power enough over Deronda to divide his thoughts with the memories wakened among the keen dark faces of worshippers whose way of praying made him reflect that his grandfather must have been almost as exceptional a Jew as Mordecai. But were not men of ardent zeal and hope everywhere exceptional? They were the creators and feeders of the world - moulding and feeding the more passive life which without them would shrivel into the narrow tenacity of insects, unshaken by thoughts beyond the reach of their antennae. Some solicitude about Gwendolen caused him to hasten from the synagogue and choose to take his evening walk toward the quay, thinking it possible that he might be in time to see the Grandcourts come in from their boating. In this case, he resolved to greet them deliberately, and ignore any grounds that the husband might have for wishing him elsewhere. The sun had set behind a bank of cloud, and the waves were agitated by an active breeze. Deronda, sauntering slowly, observed the groups upon the strand watching a sailing-boat which was advancing swiftly landward, being rowed by two men. Amidst the clamorous talk in various languages, Deronda elbowed his way to the foreground to see what was happening. Telescopes were being used, and loud statements made that the boat held somebody who had been drowned. One said it was the milord who had gone out in a sailing boat; another maintained that the prostrate figure he could see was miladi; a Frenchman said that milord had probably taken his wife out to drown her, according to the national practice - a remark which an English skipper immediately condemned as nonsense. Deronda watched in fear, seeing swift visions of possible events which might have happened - if this woman apparently snatched from the waters were really Mrs. Grandcourt. But soon there was no doubt: the boat was pulled to land, and he saw Gwendolen half raising herself under her heavy covering of tarpaulin - pale as one of the sheeted dead, shivering, with wet hair streaming and wild amazed eyes, as if she had waked up in a world where some judgment was impending, and the beings she saw around were coming to seize her. The sailors, close about the boat, hindered Deronda from advancing, and he could only look on while Gwendolen, seeming to shrink with terror, was tenderly helped out by the strong arms of those rough, bronzed men, her wet clothes clinging about her limbs. Suddenly her wandering eyes fell on Deronda, standing before her, and as if she had been expecting him, she tried to stretch out her arms, saying- "It is come, it is come! He is dead!" "Hush, hush!" said Deronda, in a tone of authority; "quiet yourself." Then to the men who were assisting her, "I am a connection of this lady's husband. If you will get her to the Italia as quickly as possible, I will undertake everything else." He stayed behind to hear the account of one of the boatmen, who told Deronda that her husband had gone down irrecoverably, and his boat was left floating empty. He and his comrade had heard a cry, had come up in time to see the lady jump in after her husband, and had got her out fast enough to save her from much damage. Deronda then hastened to the hotel to assure himself that the best medical help would be provided; and he telegraphed the event to Sir Hugo and also to Mr. Gascoigne, as the nearest way of getting the information to Gwendolen's mother. He remembered that in agitated moments, Gwendolen had spoken of her mother's presence as a possible help, if she could have had it.

Daniel Deronda

Book 7 - THE MOTHER AND THE SON | Chapter 55

"Il est plus ais de connotre l'homme en gnral que de connotre un homme en particulier."--LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. An hour after Grandcourt had left, the important news of Gwendolen's engagement was known at the rectory, and Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne, with Anna, spent the evening at Offendene. "My dear, let me congratulate you on having created a strong attachment," said the rector. "You look serious, and I don't wonder at it: a lifelong union is a solemn thing. But from the way Mr. Grandcourt has acted and spoken I think we may already see some good arising out of our adversity. It has given you an opportunity of observing your future husband's delicate liberality." Mr. Gascoigne referred to Grandcourt's mode of implying that he would provide for Mrs. Davilow--a part of the love-making which Gwendolen had remembered to cite to her mother with perfect accuracy. "But I have no doubt that Mr. Grandcourt would have behaved quite as handsomely if you had not gone away to Germany, Gwendolen, and had been engaged to him, as you no doubt might have been, more than a month ago," said Mrs. Gascoigne, feeling that she had to discharge a duty on this occasion. "But now there is no more room for caprice; indeed, I trust you have no inclination to any. A woman has a great debt of gratitude to a man who perseveres in making her such an offer. But no doubt you feel properly." "I am not at all sure that I do, aunt," said Gwendolen, with saucy gravity. "I don't know everything it is proper to feel on being engaged." The rector patted her shoulder and smiled as at a bit of innocent naughtiness, and his wife took his behavior as an indication that she was not to be displeased. As for Anna, she kissed Gwendolen and said, "I do hope you will be happy," but then sank into the background and tried to keep the tears back too. In the late days she had been imagining a little romance about Rex--how if he still longed for Gwendolen her heart might be softened by trouble into love, so that they could by-and-by be married. And the romance had turned to a prayer that she, Anna, might be able to rejoice like a good sister, and only think of being useful in working for Gwendolen, as long as Rex was not rich. But now she wanted grace to rejoice in something else. Miss Merry and the four girls, Alice with the high shoulders, Bertha and Fanny the whisperers, and Isabel the listener, were all present on this family occasion, when everything seemed appropriately turning to the honor and glory of Gwendolen, and real life was as interesting as "Sir Charles Grandison." The evening passed chiefly in decisive remarks from the rector, in answer to conjectures from the two elder ladies. According to him, the case was not one in which he could think it his duty to mention settlements: everything must, and doubtless would safely be left to Mr. Grandcourt. "I should like to know exactly what sort of places Ryelands and Gadsmere are," said Mrs. Davilow. "Gadsmere, I believe, is a secondary place," said Mr. Gascoigne; "But Ryelands I know to be one of our finest seats. The park is extensive and the woods of a very valuable order. The house was built by Inigo Jones, and the ceilings are painted in the Italian style. The estate is said to be worth twelve thousand a year, and there are two livings, one a rectory, in the gift of the Grandcourts. There may be some burdens on the land. Still, Mr. Grandcourt was an only child." "It would be most remarkable," said Mrs. Gascoigne, "if he were to become Lord Stannery in addition to everything else. Only think: there is the Grandcourt estate, the Mallinger estate, _and_ the baronetcy, _and_ the peerage,"--she was marking off the items on her fingers, and paused on the fourth while she added, "but they say there will be no land coming to him with the peerage." It seemed a pity there was nothing for the fifth finger. "The peerage," said the rector, judiciously, "must be regarded as a remote chance. There are two cousins between the present peer and Mr. Grandcourt. It is certainly a serious reflection how death and other causes do sometimes concentrate inheritances on one man. But an excess of that kind is to be deprecated. To be Sir Mallinger Grandcourt Mallinger--I suppose that will be his style--with corresponding properties, is a valuable talent enough for any man to have committed to him. Let us hope it will be well used." "And what a position for the wife, Gwendolen!" said Mrs. Gascoigne; "a great responsibility indeed. But you must lose no time in writing to Mrs. Mompert, Henry. It is a good thing that you have an engagement of marriage to offer as an excuse, else she might feel offended. She is rather a high woman." "I am rid of that horror," thought Gwendolen, to whom the name of Mompert had become a sort of Mumbo-jumbo. She was very silent through the evening, and that night could hardly sleep at all in her little white bed. It was a rarity in her strong youth to be wakeful: and perhaps a still greater rarity for her to be careful that her mother should not know of her restlessness. But her state of mind was altogether new: she who had been used to feel sure of herself, and ready to manage others, had just taken a decisive step which she had beforehand thought that she would not take--nay, perhaps, was bound not to take. She could not go backward now; she liked a great deal of what lay before her; and there was nothing for her to like if she went back. But her resolution was dogged by the shadow of that previous resolve which had at first come as the undoubting movement of her whole being. While she lay on her pillow with wide-open eyes, "looking on darkness which the blind do see," she was appalled by the idea that she was going to do what she had once started away from with repugnance. It was new to her that a question of right or wrong in her conduct should rouse her terror; she had known no compunction that atoning caresses and presents could not lay to rest. But here had come a moment when something like a new consciousness was awaked. She seemed on the edge of adopting deliberately, as a notion for all the rest of her life, what she had rashly said in her bitterness, when her discovery had driven her away to Leubronn:--that it did not signify what she did; she had only to amuse herself as best she could. That lawlessness, that casting away of all care for justification, suddenly frightened her: it came to her with the shadowy array of possible calamity behind it--calamity which had ceased to be a mere name for her; and all the infiltrated influences of disregarded religious teaching, as well as the deeper impressions of something awful and inexorable enveloping her, seemed to concentrate themselves in the vague conception of avenging power. The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage, the deliverance from the dull insignificance of her girlhood--all immediately before her; and yet they had come to her hunger like food with the taint of sacrilege upon it, which she must snatch with terror. In the darkness and loneliness of her little bed, her more resistant self could not act against the first onslaught of dread after her irrevocable decision. That unhappy-faced woman and her children--Grandcourt and his relations with her--kept repeating themselves in her imagination like the clinging memory of a disgrace, and gradually obliterated all other thought, leaving only the consciousness that she had taken those scenes into her life. Her long wakefulness seemed a delirium; a faint, faint light penetrated beside the window-curtain; the chillness increased. She could bear it no longer, and cried "Mamma!" "Yes, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, immediately, in a wakeful voice. "Let me come to you." She soon went to sleep on her mother's shoulder, and slept on till late, when, dreaming of a lit-up ball-room, she opened her eyes on her mother standing by the bedside with a small packet in her hand. "I am sorry to wake you, darling, but I thought it better to give you this at once. The groom has brought Criterion; he has come on another horse, and says he is to stay here." Gwendolen sat up in bed and opened the packet. It was a delicate enameled casket, and inside was a splendid diamond ring with a letter which contained a folded bit of colored paper and these words: Pray wear this ring when I come at twelve in sign of our betrothal. I enclose a check drawn in the name of Mr. Gascoigne, for immediate expenses. Of course Mrs. Davilow will remain at Offendene, at least for some time. I hope, when I come, you will have granted me an early day, when you may begin to command me at a shorter distance. Yours devotedly, H. M. GRANDCOURT. The check was for five hundred pounds, and Gwendolen turned it toward her mother, with the letter. "How very kind and delicate!" said Mrs. Davilow, with much feeling. "But I really should like better not to be dependent on a son-in-law. I and the girls could get along very well." "Mamma, if you say that again, I will not marry him," said Gwendolen, angrily. "My dear child, I trust you are not going to marry only for my sake," said Mrs. Davilow, deprecatingly. Gwendolen tossed her head on the pillow away from her mother, and let the ring lie. She was irritated at this attempt to take away a motive. Perhaps the deeper cause of her irritation was the consciousness that she was not going to marry solely for her mamma's sake--that she was drawn toward the marriage in ways against which stronger reasons than her mother's renunciation were yet not strong enough to hinder her. She had waked up to the signs that she was irrevocably engaged, and all the ugly visions, the alarms, the arguments of the night, must be met by daylight, in which probably they would show themselves weak. "What I long for is your happiness, dear," continued Mrs. Davilow, pleadingly. "I will not say anything to vex you. Will you not put on the ring?" For a few moments Gwendolen did not answer, but her thoughts were active. At last she raised herself with a determination to do as she would do if she had started on horseback, and go on with spirit, whatever ideas might be running in her head. "I thought the lover always put on the betrothal ring himself," she said laughingly, slipping the ring on her finger, and looking at it with a charming movement of her head. "I know why he has sent it," she added, nodding at her mamma. "Why?" "He would rather make me put it on than ask me to let him do it. Aha! he is very proud. But so am I. We shall match each other. I should hate a man who went down on his knees, and came fawning on me. He really is not disgusting." "That is very moderate praise, Gwen." "No, it is not, for a man," said Gwendolen gaily. "But now I must get up and dress. Will you come and do my hair, mamma, dear," she went on, drawing down her mamma's face to caress it with her own cheeks, "and not be so naughty any more as to talk of living in poverty? You must bear to be made comfortable, even if you don't like it. And Mr. Grandcourt behaves perfectly, now, does he not?" "Certainly he does," said Mrs. Davilow, encouraged, and persuaded that after all Gwendolen was fond of her betrothed. She herself thought him a man whose attentions were likely to tell on a girl's feeling. Suitors must often be judged as words are, by the standing and the figure they make in polite society: it is difficult to know much else of them. And all the mother's anxiety turned not on Grandcourt's character, but on Gwendolen's mood in accepting him. The mood was necessarily passing through a new phase this morning. Even in the hour of making her toilet, she had drawn on all the knowledge she had for grounds to justify her marriage. And what she most dwelt on was the determination, that when she was Grandcourt's wife, she would urge him to the most liberal conduct toward Mrs. Glasher's children. "Of what use would it be to her that I should not marry him? He could have married her if he liked; but he did _not_ like. Perhaps she is to blame for that. There must be a great deal about her that I know nothing of. And he must have been good to her in many ways, else she would not have wanted to marry him." But that last argument at once began to appear doubtful. Mrs. Glasher naturally wished to exclude other children who would stand between Grandcourt and her own: and Gwendolen's comprehension of this feeling prompted another way of reconciling claims. "Perhaps we shall have no children. I hope we shall not. And he might leave the estate to the pretty little boy. My uncle said that Mr. Grandcourt could do as he liked with the estates. Only when Sir Hugo Mallinger dies there will be enough for two." This made Mrs. Glasher appear quite unreasonable in demanding that her boy should be sole heir; and the double property was a security that Grandcourt's marriage would do her no wrong, when the wife was Gwendolen Harleth with all her proud resolution not to be fairly accused. This maiden had been accustomed to think herself blameless; other persons only were faulty. It was striking, that in the hold which this argument of her doing no wrong to Mrs. Glasher had taken on her mind, her repugnance to the idea of Grandcourt's past had sunk into a subordinate feeling. The terror she had felt in the night-watches at overstepping the border of wickedness by doing what she had at first felt to be wrong, had dulled any emotions about his conduct. She was thinking of him, whatever he might be, as a man over whom she was going to have indefinite power; and her loving him having never been a question with her, any agreeableness he had was so much gain. Poor Gwendolen had no awe of unmanageable forces in the state of matrimony, but regarded it as altogether a matter of management, in which she would know how to act. In relation to Grandcourt's past she encouraged new doubts whether he were likely to have differed much from other men; and she devised little schemes for learning what was expected of men in general. But whatever else might be true in the world, her hair was dressed suitably for riding, and she went down in her riding-habit, to avoid delay before getting on horseback. She wanted to have her blood stirred once more with the intoxication of youth, and to recover the daring with which she had been used to think of her course in life. Already a load was lifted off her; for in daylight and activity it was less oppressive to have doubts about her choice, than to feel that she had no choice but to endure insignificance and servitude. "Go back and make yourself look like a duchess, mamma," she said, turning suddenly as she was going down-stairs. "Put your point-lace over your head. I must have you look like a duchess. You must not take things humbly." When Grandcourt raised her left hand gently and looked at the ring, she said gravely, "It was very good of you to think of everything and send me that packet." "You will tell me if there is anything I forget?" he said, keeping the hand softly within his own. "I will do anything you wish." "But I am very unreasonable in my wishes," said Gwendolen, smiling. "Yes, I expect that. Women always are." "Then I will not be unreasonable," said Gwendolen, taking away her hand and tossing her head saucily. "I will not be told that I am what women always are." "I did not say that," said Grandcourt, looking at her with his usual gravity. "You are what no other woman is." "And what is that, pray?" said Gwendolen, moving to a distance with a little air of menace. Grandcourt made his pause before he answered. "You are the woman I love." "Oh, what nice speeches!" said Gwendolen, laughing. The sense of that love which he must once have given to another woman under strange circumstances was getting familiar. "Give me a nice speech in return. Say when we are to be married." "Not yet. Not till we have had a gallop over the downs. I am so thirsty for that, I can think of nothing else. I wish the hunting had begun. Sunday the twentieth, twenty-seventh, Monday, Tuesday." Gwendolen was counting on her fingers with the prettiest nod while she looked at Grandcourt, and at last swept one palm over the other while she said triumphantly, "It will begin in ten days!" "Let us be married in ten days, then," said Grandcourt, "and we shall not be bored about the stables." "What do women always say in answer to that?" said Gwendolen, mischievously. "They agree to it," said the lover, rather off his guard. "Then I will not!" said Gwendolen, taking up her gauntlets and putting them on, while she kept her eyes on him with gathering fun in them. The scene was pleasant on both sides. A cruder lover would have lost the view of her pretty ways and attitudes, and spoiled all by stupid attempts at caresses, utterly destructive of drama. Grandcourt preferred the drama; and Gwendolen, left at ease, found her spirits rising continually as she played at reigning. Perhaps if Klesmer had seen more of her in this unconscious kind of acting, instead of when she was trying to be theatrical, he might have rated her chance higher. When they had had a glorious gallop, however, she was in a state of exhilaration that disposed her to think well of hastening the marriage which would make her life all of apiece with this splendid kind of enjoyment. She would not debate any more about an act to which she had committed herself; and she consented to fix the wedding on that day three weeks, notwithstanding the difficulty of fulfilling the customary laws of the _trousseau_. Lush, of course, was made aware of the engagement by abundant signs, without being formally told. But he expected some communication as a consequence of it, and after a few days he became rather impatient under Grandcourt's silence, feeling sure that the change would affect his personal prospects, and wishing to know exactly how. His tactics no longer included any opposition--which he did not love for its own sake. He might easily cause Grandcourt a great deal of annoyance, but it would be to his own injury, and to create annoyance was not a motive with him. Miss Gwendolen he would certainly not have been sorry to frustrate a little, but--after all there was no knowing what would come. It was nothing new that Grandcourt should show a perverse wilfulness; yet in his freak about this girl he struck Lush rather newly as something like a man who was _fey_--led on by an ominous fatality; and that one born to his fortune should make a worse business of his life than was necessary, seemed really pitiable. Having protested against the marriage, Lush had a second-sight for its evil consequences. Grandcourt had been taking the pains to write letters and give orders himself instead of employing Lush, and appeared to be ignoring his usefulness, even choosing, against the habit of years, to breakfast alone in his dressing-room. But a _tete--tete_ was not to be avoided in a house empty of guests; and Lush hastened to use an opportunity of saying--it was one day after dinner, for there were difficulties in Grandcourt's dining at Offendene, "And when is the marriage to take place?" Grandcourt, who drank little wine, had left the table and was lounging, while he smoked, in an easy chair near the hearth, where a fire of oak boughs was gaping to its glowing depths, and edging them with a delicate tint of ashes delightful to behold. The chair of red-brown velvet brocade was a becoming back-ground for his pale-tinted, well-cut features and exquisite long hands. Omitting the cigar, you might have imagined him a portrait by Moroni, who would have rendered wonderfully the impenetrable gaze and air of distinction; and a portrait by that great master would have been quite as lively a companion as Grandcourt was disposed to be. But he answered without unusual delay. "On the tenth." "I suppose you intend to remain here." "We shall go to Ryelands for a little while; but we shall return here for the sake of the hunting." After this word there was the languid inarticulate sound frequent with Grandcourt when he meant to continue speaking, and Lush waited for something more. Nothing came, and he was going to put another question, when the inarticulate sound began again and introduced the mildly uttered suggestion, "You had better make some new arrangement for yourself." "What! I am to cut and run?" said Lush, prepared to be good-tempered on the occasion. "Something of that kind." "The bride objects to me. I hope she will make up to you for the want of my services." "I can't help your being so damnably disagreeable to women," said Grandcourt, in soothing apology. "To one woman, if you please." "It makes no difference since she is the one in question." "I suppose I am not to be turned adrift after fifteen years without some provision." "You must have saved something out of me." "Deuced little. I have often saved something for you." "You can have three hundred a year. But you must live in town and be ready to look after things when I want you. I shall be rather hard up." "If you are not going to be at Ryelands this winter, I might run down there and let you know how Swinton goes on." "If you like. I don't care a toss where you are, so that you keep out of sight." "Much obliged," said Lush, able to take the affair more easily than he had expected. He was supported by the secret belief that he should by-and-by be wanted as much as ever. "Perhaps you will not object to packing up as soon as possible," said Grandcourt. "The Torringtons are coming, and Miss Harleth will be riding over here." "With all my heart. Can't I be of use in going to Gadsmere?" "No. I am going myself." "About your being rather hard up. Have you thought of that plan--" "Just leave me alone, will you?" said Grandcourt, in his lowest audible tone, tossing his cigar into the fire, and rising to walk away. He spent the evening in the solitude of the smaller drawing-room, where, with various new publications on the table of the kind a gentleman may like to have on hand without touching, he employed himself (as a philosopher might have done) in sitting meditatively on the sofa and abstaining from literature--political, comic, cynical, or romantic. In this way hours may pass surprisingly soon, without the arduous invisible chase of philosophy; not from love of thought, but from hatred of effort--from a state of the inward world, something like premature age, where the need for action lapses into a mere image of what has been, is, and may or might be; where impulse is born and dies in a phantasmal world, pausing in rejection of even a shadowy fulfillment. That is a condition which often comes with whitening hair; and sometimes, too, an intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, like the main trunk of an exorbitant egoism, conspicuous in proportion as the varied susceptibilities of younger years are stripped away. But Grandcourt's hair, though he had not much of it, was of a fine, sunny blonde, and his moods were not entirely to be explained as ebbing energy. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material. The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in its actions; but by a roundabout course even a gentleman may make of himself a chancy personage, raising an uncertainty as to what he may do next, that sadly spoils companionship. Grandcourt's thoughts this evening were like the circlets one sees in a dark pool, continually dying out and continually started again by some impulse from below the surface. The deeper central impulse came from the image of Gwendolen; but the thoughts it stirred would be imperfectly illustrated by a reference to the amatory poets of all ages. It was characteristic that he got none of his satisfaction from the belief that Gwendolen was in love with him; and that love had overcome the jealous resentment which had made her run away from him. On the contrary, he believed that this girl was rather exceptional in the fact that, in spite of his assiduous attention to her, she was not in love with him; and it seemed to him very likely that if it had not been for the sudden poverty which had come over her family, she would not have accepted him. From the very first there had been an exasperating fascination in the tricksiness with which she had--not met his advances, but--wheeled away from them. She had been brought to accept him in spite of everything--brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena, though she might have an objection to it all the while. On the whole, Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this notion than he could have done out of winning a girl of whom he was sure that she had a strong inclination for him personally. And yet this pleasure in mastering reluctance flourished along with the habitual persuasion that no woman whom he favored could be quite indifferent to his personal influence; and it seemed to him not unlikely that by-and-by Gwendolen might be more enamored of him than he of her. In any case, she would have to submit; and he enjoyed thinking of her as his future wife, whose pride and spirit were suited to command every one but himself. He had no taste for a woman who was all tenderness to him, full of petitioning solicitude and willing obedience. He meant to be master of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been capable of mastering another man. Lush, having failed in his attempted reminder to Grandcourt, thought it well to communicate with Sir Hugo, in whom, as a man having perhaps interest enough to command the bestowal of some place where the work was light, gentlemanly, and not ill-paid, he was anxious to cultivate a sense of friendly obligation, not feeling at all secure against the future need of such a place. He wrote the following letter, and addressed it to Park Lane, whither he knew the family had returned from Leubronn: MY DEAR SIR HUGO--Since we came home the marriage has been absolutely decided on, and is to take place in less than three weeks. It is so far the worse for him that her mother has lately lost all her fortune, and he will have to find supplies. Grandcourt, I know, is feeling the want of cash; and unless some other plan is resorted to, he will be raising money in a foolish way. I am going to leave Diplow immediately, and I shall not be able to start the topic. What I should advise is, that Mr. Deronda, who I know has your confidence, should propose to come and pay a short visit here, according to invitation (there are going to be other people in the house), and that you should put him fully in possession of your wishes and the possible extent of your offer. Then, that he should introduce the subject to Grandcourt so as not to imply that you suspect any particular want of money on his part, but only that there is a strong wish on yours. What I have formerly said to him has been in the way of a conjecture that you might be willing to give a good sum for his chance of Diplow; but if Mr. Deronda came armed with a definite offer, that would take another sort of hold. Ten to one he will not close for some time to come; but the proposal will have got a stronger lodgment in his mind; and though at present he has a great notion of the hunting here, I see a likelihood, under the circumstances, that he will get a distaste for the neighborhood, and there will be the notion of the money sticking by him without being urged. I would bet on your ultimate success. As I am not to be exiled to Siberia, but am to be within call, it is possible that, by and by, I may be of more service to you. But at present I can think of no medium so good as Mr. Deronda. Nothing puts Grandcourt in worse humor than having the lawyers thrust their paper under his nose uninvited. Trusting that your visit to Leubronn has put you in excellent condition for the winter, I remain, my dear Sir Hugo, Yours very faithfully, THOMAS CRANMER LUSH. Sir Hugo, having received this letter at breakfast, handed it to Deronda, who, though he had chambers in town, was somehow hardly ever in them, Sir Hugo not being contented without him. The chatty baronet would have liked a young companion even if there had been no peculiar reasons for attachment between them: one with a fine harmonious unspoiled face fitted to keep up a cheerful view of posterity and inheritance generally, notwithstanding particular disappointments; and his affection for Deronda was not diminished by the deep-lying though not obtrusive difference in their notions and tastes. Perhaps it was all the stronger; acting as the same sort of difference does between a man and a woman in giving a piquancy to the attachment which subsists in spite of it. Sir Hugo did not think unapprovingly of himself; but he looked at men and society from a liberal-menagerie point of view, and he had a certain pride in Deronda's differing from him, which, if it had found voice, might have said--"You see this fine young fellow--not such as you see every day, is he?--he belongs to me in a sort of way. I brought him up from a child; but you would not ticket him off easily, he has notions of his own, and he's as far as the poles asunder from what I was at his age." This state of feeling was kept up by the mental balance in Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine. When he had read the letter, he returned it without speaking, inwardly wincing under Lush's mode of attributing a neutral usefulness to him in the family affairs. "What do you say, Dan? It would be pleasant enough for you. You have not seen the place for a good many years now, and you might have a famous run with the harriers if you went down next week," said Sir Hugo. "I should not go on that account," said Deronda, buttering his bread attentively. He had an objection to this transparent kind of persuasiveness, which all intelligent animals are seen to treat with indifference. If he went to Diplow he should be doing something disagreeable to oblige Sir Hugo. "I think Lush's notion is a good one. And it would be a pity to lose the occasion." "That is a different matter--if you think my going of importance to your object," said Deronda, still with that aloofness of manner which implied some suppression. He knew that the baronet had set his heart on the affair. "Why, you will see the fair gambler, the Leubronn Diana, I shouldn't wonder," said Sir Hugo, gaily. "We shall have to invite her to the Abbey, when they are married," he added, turning to Lady Mallinger, as if she too had read the letter. "I cannot conceive whom you mean," said Lady Mallinger, who in fact had not been listening, her mind having been taken up with her first sips of coffee, the objectionable cuff of her sleeve, and the necessity of carrying Theresa to the dentist--innocent and partly laudable preoccupations, as the gentle lady's usually were. Should her appearance be inquired after, let it be said that she had reddish blonde hair (the hair of the period), a small Roman nose, rather prominent blue eyes and delicate eyelids, with a figure which her thinner friends called fat, her hands showing curves and dimples like a magnified baby's. "I mean that Grandcourt is going to marry the girl you saw at Leubronn--don't you remember her--the Miss Harleth who used to play at roulette." "Dear me! Is that a good match for him?" "That depends on the sort of goodness he wants," said Sir Hugo, smiling. "However, she and her friends have nothing, and she will bring him expenses. It's a good match for my purposes, because if I am willing to fork out a sum of money, he may be willing to give up his chance of Diplow, so that we shall have it out and out, and when I die you will have the consolation of going to the place you would like to go to--wherever I may go." "I wish you would not talk of dying in that light way, dear." "It's rather a heavy way, Lou, for I shall have to pay a heavy sum--forty thousand, at least." "But why are we to invite them to the Abbey?" said Lady Mallinger. "I do _not_ like women who gamble, like Lady Cragstone." "Oh, you will not mind her for a week. Besides, she is not like Lady Cragstone because she gambled a little, any more than I am like a broker because I'm a Whig. I want to keep Grandcourt in good humor, and to let him see plenty of this place, that he may think the less of Diplow. I don't know yet whether I shall get him to meet me in this matter. And if Dan were to go over on a visit there, he might hold out the bait to him. It would be doing me a great service." This was meant for Deronda. "Daniel is not fond of Mr. Grandcourt, I think, is he?" said Lady Mallinger, looking at Deronda inquiringly. "There is no avoiding everybody one doesn't happen to be fond of," said Deronda. "I will go to Diplow--I don't know that I have anything better to do--since Sir Hugo wishes it." "That's a trump!" said Sir Hugo, well pleased. "And if you don't find it very pleasant, it's so much experience. Nothing used to come amiss to me when I was young. You must see men and manners." "Yes; but I have seen that man, and something of his manners too," said Deronda. "Not nice manners, I think," said Lady Mallinger. "Well, you see they succeed with your sex," said Sir Hugo, provokingly. "And he was an uncommonly good-looking fellow when he was two or three and twenty--like his father. He doesn't take after his father in marrying the heiress, though. If he had got Miss Arrowpoint and my land too, confound him, he would have had a fine principality." Deronda, in anticipating the projected visit, felt less disinclination than when consenting to it. The story of that girl's marriage did interest him: what he had heard through Lush of her having run away from the suit of the man she was now going to take as a husband, had thrown a new sort of light on her gambling; and it was probably the transition from that fevered worldliness into poverty which had urged her acceptance where she must in some way have felt repulsion. All this implied a nature liable to difficulty and struggle--elements of life which had a predominant attraction for his sympathy, due perhaps to his early pain in dwelling on the conjectured story of his own existence. Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some sort of redeeming influence; and he had to resist an inclination, easily accounted for, to withdraw coldly from the fortunate. But in the movement which had led him to repurchase Gwendolen's necklace for her, and which was at work in him still, there was something beyond his habitual compassionate fervor--something due to the fascination of her womanhood. He was very open to that sort of charm, and mingled it with the consciously Utopian pictures of his own future; yet any one able to trace the folds of his character might have conceived that he would be more likely than many less passionate men to love a woman without telling her of it. Sprinkle food before a delicate-eared bird: there is nothing he would more willingly take, yet he keeps aloof, because of his sensibility to checks which to you are imperceptible. And one man differs from another, as we all differ from the Bosjesman, in a sensibility to checks, that come from variety of needs, spiritual or other. It seemed to foreshadow that capability of reticence in Deronda that his imagination was much occupied with two women, to neither of whom would he have held it possible that he should ever make love. Hans Meyrick had laughed at him for having something of the knight-errant in his disposition; and he would have found his proof if he had known what was just now going on in Deronda's mind about Mirah and Gwendolen. Deronda wrote without delay to announce his visit to Diplow, and received in reply a polite assurance that his coming would give great pleasure. That was not altogether untrue. Grandcourt thought it probable that the visit was prompted by Sir Hugo's desire to court him for a purpose which he did not make up his mind to resist; and it was not a disagreeable idea to him that this fine fellow, whom he believed to be his cousin under the rose, would witness, perhaps with some jealousy, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt play the commanding part of betrothed lover to a splendid girl whom the cousin had already looked at with admiration. Grandcourt himself was not jealous of anything unless it threatened his mastery--which he did not think himself likely to lose.

The news of Gwendolen's engagement was soon known at the rectory, and the Gascoignes spent the evening at Offendene. "My dear, let me congratulate you," said the rector. "You look serious, and I don't wonder: a lifelong union is a solemn thing. But from the way Mr. Grandcourt has spoken we may already see some good arising out of our adversity, in showing you your future husband's delicate liberality." For Gwendolen had told her mother of Mr. Grandcourt's offer to provide for her. "No doubt he would have behaved as handsomely had you become engaged to him a month ago," said Mrs. Gascoigne, feeling that she had to discharge a duty. "But now there is no more room for caprice. A woman has a great debt of gratitude to a man who perseveres in making her such an offer. But no doubt you feel properly." "I am not sure that I do, aunt," said Gwendolen, with saucy gravity. "I don't know everything it is proper to feel on being engaged." The rector patted her shoulder and smiled. Anna kissed her, saying, "I do hope you will be happy," but then moved away and tried to keep the tears back. Lately she had been imagining a little romance about Rex - how Gwendolen's heart might be softened by trouble into love, so that they could marry. But now she wanted grace to rejoice in something else. "I should like to know exactly what sort of places Ryelands and Gadsmere are," said Mrs. Davilow. "Gadsmere, I believe, is a secondary place," said Mr. Gascoigne; "But Ryelands I know to be one of our finest seats, with an extensive park. The house was built by Inigo Jones. The estate is said to be worth twelve thousand a year." "It would be most remarkable," said Mrs. Gascoigne, "if Mr. Grandcourt were to become Lord Stannery in addition to everything else. What a position for his wife! You must lose no time in writing to Mrs. Mompert, Henry. It is a good thing that you have an engagement of marriage to offer as an excuse, else she might feel offended. She is rather a high woman." "I am rid of that horror," thought Gwendolen, to whom the name of Mompert had become a sort of evil charm. She was silent all evening, and that night could hardly sleep. It was rare for her to be wakeful: and perhaps still rarer for her to be careful that her mother should not know of it. But her state of mind was altogether new: she who used to feel sure of herself, had just taken a decisive step which she had thought that she would not take. She could not go backward now; she liked a great deal of what lay before her; and there was nothing for her to like if she went back. But she was dogged by the shadow of that previous, instinctive resolve. Lying awake, she was appalled by the idea that she was going to do what she had once recoiled from. A question of right or wrong in her conduct had never raised terror in her before; she had known no compunction that atoning caresses could not lay to rest. But now something like a new consciousness was awaked. She seemed on the edge of adopting deliberately, for the rest of her life, what she had rashly said in her bitterness - that it did not signify what she did; she had only to amuse herself. That lawlessness, that casting away of all care about justification, suddenly frightened her: she glimpsed shadowy calamity behind it. All the influences of her disregarded religious teaching, as well as the deeper impressions of something awful and inexorable enveloping her, seemed to concentrate themselves in the vague idea of avenging power. The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom of marriage, the deliverance from dull insignificance - all had come to her hunger like food with the taint of sacrilege upon it, which she must snatch with terror. That unhappy-faced woman and her children kept reappearing in her imagination, and gradually obliterated all other thought. Her long wakefulness seemed a delirium; a faint light penetrated the window-curtain; the chillness increased. She could bear it no longer, and cried "Mamma!" "Yes, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, immediately wakeful. "Let me come to you." She soon went to sleep on her mother's shoulder, and slept on till late, when, dreaming of a lit-up ball-room, she opened her eyes on her mother standing by the bedside with a small packet in her hand. "I am sorry to wake you, darling, but I thought it better to give you this at once. The groom has brought Criterion for you." Gwendolen sat up in bed and opened the packet. It was a delicate enamelled casket, and inside was a splendid diamond ring with a letter which contained a folded paper and these words: 'Pray wear this ring when I come at twelve in sign of our betrothal. I enclose a cheque for immediate expenses. Of course Mrs. Davilow will remain at Offendene, at least for some time. I hope, when I come, you will have granted me an early day, when you may begin to command me at a shorter distance. 'Yours devotedly, H. M. GRANDCOURT.' The cheque was for five hundred pounds. "How very kind and delicate!" said Mrs. Davilow, with feeling. "But I should prefer not to be dependent on a son-in-law. I and the girls could get along very well." "Mamma, if you say that again, I will not marry him," said Gwendolen, angrily. "My dear child, I trust you are not going to marry only for my sake," said Mrs. Davilow, deprecatingly. Gwendolen tossed her head, irritated at this attempt to take away a motive. Perhaps the deeper cause of her irritation was the consciousness that she was drawn toward the marriage for other reasons, as well as for her mamma's sake. She had woken to the knowledge that she was irrevocably engaged, and the ugly visions of the night would probably show themselves weak by day. "What I long for is your happiness, dear," continued Mrs. Davilow, pleadingly. "Will you not put on the ring?" At first Gwendolen did not answer. Then she decided to act as if she were riding on horseback: she would go on with spirit, whatever ideas might be running in her head. "I thought the lover always put on the betrothal ring himself," she said with a laugh, slipping the ring on her finger, and looking at it. "I know why he has sent it." "Why?" "He would rather make me put it on than ask me to let him do it. Aha! he is very proud. But so am I. We shall match each other. I should hate a man who went down on his knees, and fawned on me. He really is not disgusting." "That is very moderate praise, Gwen." "No, it is not, for a man," said Gwendolen gaily. "But now I must get up and dress. Will you do my hair, mamma, dear, and not be so naughty any more as to talk of living in poverty? You must bear to be made comfortable, even if you don't like it. And Mr. Grandcourt behaves perfectly, now, does he not?" "Certainly he does," said Mrs. Davilow, encouraged, and persuaded that after all Gwendolen was fond of her betrothed. She was not anxious about Grandcourt's character, but about Gwendolen's mood in accepting him. The mood was passing through a new phase this morning. Even while she dressed, she was drawing on all her knowledge to justify her marriage. And what she most dwelt on was the determination that, when she was Grandcourt's wife, she would urge him to be generous to Mrs. Glasher's children. "What use would it be to her if I did not marry him? He could have married her if he liked; but he did not like. Perhaps she is to blame for that. There must be a great deal about her that I know nothing of. And he must have been good to her, else she would not want to marry him." But that last argument at once appeared doubtful. Mrs. Glasher naturally wished her own children to inherit, and to exclude other children. "Perhaps we shall have no children," thought Gwendolen. "I hope we shall not. And he might leave the estate to the pretty little boy. When Sir Hugo Mallinger dies there will be enough for two." This made Mrs. Glasher appear quite unreasonable in demanding that her little boy should be sole heir. Grandcourt's marriage would her do no wrong, when the wife was Gwendolen Harleth. That maiden was accustomed to think herself blameless; other persons only were faulty. It was striking that her repugnance to the idea of Grandcourt's past had sunk into a subordinate feeling. She was thinking of him as a man over whom she was going to have indefinite power; and since her loving him had never been a question with her, any agreeableness he had was so much gain. Poor Gwendolen regarded matrimony as altogether a matter of management, in which she would know how to act. By now her hair was dressed, and she went down in her riding-habit, eager to stir her blood again in riding with the daring intoxication of youth. Already a load was lifted off her; for in daylight and activity it was less oppressive to have doubts about her choice, than to feel that she had no choice but to endure insignificance and servitude. When Grandcourt raised her left hand gently and looked at the ring, she said gravely, "It was very good of you to think of everything." "You will tell me if there is anything I forget?" he said, keeping the hand softly within his own. "I will do anything you wish." "But I am very unreasonable in my wishes," said Gwendolen, smiling. "Yes, I expect that. Women always are." "Then I will not be unreasonable," said Gwendolen, taking away her hand and tossing her head saucily. "I will not be told that I am what women always are." "I did not say that," said Grandcourt, looking at her with his usual gravity. "You are what no other woman is." "And what is that, pray?" said Gwendolen, moving to a distance with a little air of menace. Grandcourt made his pause before he answered. "You are the woman I love." "Oh, what nice speeches!" said Gwendolen, laughing. The sense of that love which he must once have given to another woman under strange circumstances was getting familiar. "Give me a nice speech in return. Say when we are to be married." "Not yet. Not till we have had a gallop over the downs. I am so thirsty for that, I can think of nothing else. I wish the hunting season had begun. It will begin in ten days!" "Let us be married in ten days, then," said Grandcourt, "and we shall not be bored about the stables." "What do women always say in answer to that?" said Gwendolen, mischievously. "They agree to it," said the lover, rather off his guard. "Then I will not!" said Gwendolen, taking up her gauntlets, while she kept her eyes on him with gathering fun in them. The scene was pleasant on both sides. A cruder lover would have lost the view of her pretty ways, and spoiled all by stupid attempts at caresses, utterly destructive of drama. Grandcourt preferred the drama; and Gwendolen, left at ease, found her spirits rising continually as she played at reigning. When they had had a glorious gallop, she was in a state of exhilaration that made her think well of hastening the marriage and having more of this splendid kind of enjoyment. She would not debate it any longer; and she consented to fix the wedding on that day three weeks. Lush, of course, was made aware of the engagement without being formally told. But, expecting some communication, after a few days he became rather impatient under Grandcourt's silence; he was sure that the change would affect his personal prospects. He had no wish to annoy Grandcourt. Miss Gwendolen he would certainly not have been sorry to frustrate a little; in his freak about this girl Grandcourt struck Lush as a man who was fey - led on by an ominous fatality. Having protested against the marriage, Lush foresaw evil consequences. Grandcourt appeared to be ignoring him, even choosing, against the habit of years, to breakfast alone in his dressing-room. But Lush found an opportunity of saying- "And when is the marriage to take place?" Grandcourt had left the dinner table and was lounging, while he smoked, in an easy chair near the hearth. The red-brown velvet brocade was a becoming background for his pale, well-cut features and exquisite long hands. He had a portrait's impenetrable gaze and air of distinction; and was just as lively a companion. But he answered without unusual delay. "On the tenth." "I suppose you intend to remain here." "We shall go to Ryelands for a little while; but we shall return here for the hunting." After these words there was the languid inarticulate sound frequent with Grandcourt when he meant to continue speaking, and Lush waited for something more. "You had better make some new arrangement for yourself." "What! I am to cut and run?" said Lush, prepared to be good-tempered. "Something of that kind." "The bride objects to me. I hope she will make up to you for the want of my services." "I can't help your being so damnably disagreeable to women," said Grandcourt, in soothing apology. "To one woman, if you please." "It makes no difference, since she is the one in question." "I suppose I am not to be turned adrift after fifteen years without some provision." "You can have three hundred a year. But you must live in town and be ready to look after things when I want you. I shall be rather hard up." "If you are not going to be at Ryelands this winter, I might run down there." "If you like. I don't care a toss where you are, so that you keep out of sight." "Much obliged," said Lush, able to take the affair more easily than he had expected. He was supported by the secret belief that he should by-and-by be wanted as much as ever. "Perhaps you will not object to packing up as soon as possible," said Grandcourt. "Certainly. Can't I be of use in going to Gadsmere?" "No. I am going myself." "About your being rather hard up. Have you thought of that plan-" "Just leave me alone, will you?" said Grandcourt, in his lowest audible tone, tossing his cigar into the fire, and rising to walk away. He spent the evening in the solitude of the smaller drawing-room, where, with various new publications on the table of the kind a gentleman may like to have on hand without reading, he employed himself in sitting meditatively on the sofa and abstaining from any literature. In this way hours may pass surprisingly soon, without the arduous chase of philosophy; not from love of thought, but from hatred of effort. But Grandcourt's moods were not to be explained as ebbing energy. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation may be preparing one knows not what explosive material. Grandcourt's thoughts this evening were like the circlets one sees in a dark pool, continually dying out and continually started again by some impulse from below the surface. The deeper central impulse came from the image of Gwendolen; but the thoughts it stirred were not the ones of love poetry. He got none of his satisfaction from the belief that Gwendolen was in love with him. On the contrary, he believed that this girl was rather exceptional in the fact that, in spite of his assiduous attention, she was not in love with him; and it seemed to him very likely that if it had not been for her family's sudden poverty, she would not have accepted him. From the very first there had been an exasperating fascination in the tricksiness with which she had wheeled away from him. She had been brought to accept him in spite of everything - brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena, though she might object to it. On the whole, Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this notion than he could have done out of winning a girl whom he thought was attracted to him personally. And yet along with this pleasure in mastering reluctance, he was persuaded that no woman whom he favoured could be quite indifferent to him; and it seemed likely that by-and-by Gwendolen might be more enamoured of him than he of her. In any case, she would have to submit; and he enjoyed thinking of her as his future wife, whose pride and spirit were suited to command everyone but himself. He had no taste for a woman who was all tenderness and willing obedience. He meant to be master of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been capable of mastering another man. Lush thought it well to communicate with Sir Hugo, whose friendship he was anxious to cultivate, in case he should have need of future employment. He wrote the following letter, and addressed it to Park Lane, whither he knew the family had returned from Leubronn: 'MY DEAR SIR HUGO - Since we came home the marriage has been decided on, and is to take place in less than three weeks. It is the worse for him that her mother has lately lost all her fortune. Grandcourt, I know, is feeling the want of cash; but I am leaving Diplow immediately, and I shall not be able to raise the topic with him. Therefore I advise that Mr. Deronda, who I know has your confidence, should propose to pay a short visit here (there will be other people in the house). Then he should introduce the subject to Grandcourt so as not to imply that you suspect his need of money. I have told him that you might be willing to give a good sum to rent Diplow; but if Mr. Deronda came armed with a definite offer, the proposal will get a stronger lodgement in his mind; and though at present he has a great notion of the hunting here, I see a likelihood that he will get a distaste for the neighbourhood, and will not need urging. I would bet on your ultimate success. As I am not exiled to Siberia, but am to be within call, it is possible that I may be of more service to you. But at present I can think of no medium so good as Mr. Deronda. 'I remain, my dear Sir Hugo, Yours very faithfully, THOMAS CRANMER LUSH.' Sir Hugo, having received this letter at breakfast, handed it to Deronda, who, though he had chambers in town, was hardly ever in them, since Sir Hugo was not contented without him. The chatty baronet's affection for Deronda was not diminished by the differences in their ideas and tastes. Sir Hugo had a certain pride in Deronda's differing from him, and his having strong notions of his own. Deronda, in turn, was moved by an affectionate nature such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details; while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine. When he had read the letter, he returned it without speaking. "What do you say, Dan? It would be pleasant enough for you. You have not seen the place for a good many years, and you might have a run with the harriers if you went down next week," said Sir Hugo. "I should not go on that account," said Deronda, buttering his bread. He objected to this transparent kind of persuasiveness. "I think Lush's notion is a good one. And it would be a pity to lose the chance." "That is a different matter - if you think my going is important to your object," said Deronda, still aloof. "Why, you will see the fair gambler, the Leubronn Diana, I shouldn't wonder," said Sir Hugo, gaily. "We shall have to invite her to the Abbey, when they are married," he added, turning to Lady Mallinger. "I cannot conceive whom you mean," said Lady Mallinger, who in fact had not been listening. "Grandcourt is going to marry the girl you saw at Leubronn - the Miss Harleth who played at roulette." "Dear me! Is that a good match for him?" "That depends on the sort of goodness he wants," said Sir Hugo, smiling. "She has nothing: so it's a good match for my purposes, because if I am willing to fork out a large enough sum of money, he may be willing to give up Diplow, so that we shall have it." "But why are we to invite them to the Abbey?" said Lady Mallinger. "I do not like women who gamble." "Oh, you will not mind her for a week. I want to keep Grandcourt in good humour, and to let him see plenty of this place, that he may think the less of Diplow. I don't know yet whether I shall get him to agree. If Dan were to visit there, he might hold out the bait to him. It would be doing me a great service." This was meant for Deronda. "Daniel is not fond of Mr. Grandcourt, is he?" said Lady Mallinger, looking at Deronda inquiringly. "There is no avoiding everybody one doesn't happen to be fond of," said Deronda. "I will go to Diplow, since Sir Hugo wishes it." "That's a good fellow!" said Sir Hugo, well pleased. "And if you don't find it very pleasant, it's so much experience. You must see men and manners." "Yes; but I have seen that man, and something of his manners too," said Deronda. "Not nice manners, I think," said Lady Mallinger. "Well, they succeed with your sex," said Sir Hugo, provokingly. "And he was an uncommonly good-looking fellow when he was two or three and twenty." Deronda felt more willingness than at first. The story of that girl's marriage interested him: what he had heard through Lush, about her having run away from the man she was now going to take as a husband, had thrown a new light on her gambling. It was probably the transition into poverty which had urged her acceptance where she must have felt repulsion. All this implied a nature liable to difficulty and struggle - elements of life which had attracted his sympathy, due perhaps to his early pain in conjecturing about his own story. People attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the possibility of his defending and rescuing them; and he had to resist an inclination to withdraw coldly from the fortunate. But his impulse to repurchase Gwendolen's necklace for her had been due to something beyond his habitual compassion - to the fascination of her womanhood. He was very open to that sort of charm; yet he would be more likely than many less passionate men to love a woman without telling her of it. Deronda's imagination was much occupied with two women, to neither of whom would he have held it possible that he should ever make love. Hans Meyrick had laughed at him for having something of the knight-errant in his disposition; and he would have found his proof if he had known what was just now going on in Deronda's mind about Mirah and Gwendolen. Deronda wrote to announce his visit to Diplow, and received in reply a polite assurance that his coming would give great pleasure. That was not altogether untrue. Grandcourt understood the reason behind Sir Hugo's desire to court him; and it was not disagreeable to him that this fine fellow, whom he believed to be his cousin, would witness with some jealousy Henleigh Grandcourt play the commanding part of betrothed lover to a splendid girl, whom the cousin had seen and admired. Grandcourt himself was not jealous of anything unless it threatened his mastery - which he did not think himself likely to lose.

Daniel Deronda

Book 4 - GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE | Chapter 28

"I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends." --SHAKESPEARE. Sir Hugo Mallinger was not so prompt in starting for Genoa as Mr. Gascoigne had been, and Deronda on all accounts would not take his departure until he had seen the baronet. There was not only Grandcourt's death, but also the late crisis in his own life to make reasons why his oldest friend would desire to have the unrestrained communication of speech with him, for in writing he had not felt able to give any details concerning the mother who had come and gone like an apparition. It was not till the fifth evening that Deronda, according to telegram, waited for Sir Hugo at the station, where he was to arrive between eight and nine; and while he was looking forward to the sight of the kind, familiar face, which was part of his earliest memories, something like a smile, in spite of his late tragic experience, might have been detected in his eyes and the curve of his lips at the idea of Sir Hugo's pleasure in being now master of his estates, able to leave them to his daughters, or at least--according to a view of inheritance which had just been strongly impressed on Deronda's imagination--to take makeshift feminine offspring as intermediate to a satisfactory heir in a grandson. We should be churlish creatures if we could have no joy in our fellow-mortals' joy, unless it were in agreement with our theory of righteous distribution and our highest ideal of human good: what sour corners our mouths would get--our eyes, what frozen glances! and all the while our own possessions and desires would not exactly adjust themselves to our ideal. We must have some comradeship with imperfection; and it is, happily, possible to feel gratitude even where we discern a mistake that may have been injurious, the vehicle of the mistake being an affectionate intention prosecuted through a life-time of kindly offices. Deronda's feeling and judgment were strongly against the action of Sir Hugo in making himself the agent of a falsity--yes, a falsity: he could give no milder name to the concealment under which he had been reared. But the baronet had probably had no clear knowledge concerning the mother's breach of trust, and with his light, easy way of taking life, had held it a reasonable preference in her that her son should be made an English gentleman, seeing that she had the eccentricity of not caring to part from her child, and be to him as if she were not. Daniel's affectionate gratitude toward Sir Hugo made him wish to find grounds of excuse rather than blame; for it is as possible to be rigid in principle and tender in blame, as it is to suffer from the sight of things hung awry, and yet to be patient with the hanger who sees amiss. If Sir Hugo in his bachelorhood had been beguiled into regarding children chiefly as a product intended to make life more agreeable to the full-grown, whose convenience alone was to be consulted in the disposal of them--why, he had shared an assumption which, if not formally avowed, was massively acted on at that date of the world's history; and Deronda, with all his keen memory of the painful inward struggle he had gone through in his boyhood, was able also to remember the many signs that his experience had been entirely shut out from Sir Hugo's conception. Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant _un_kindness, the most remote from Deronda's large imaginative lenience toward others. And perhaps now, after the searching scenes of the last ten days, in which the curtain had been lifted for him from the secrets of lives unlike his own, he was more than ever disposed to check that rashness of indignation or resentment which has an unpleasant likeness to the love of punishing. When he saw Sir Hugo's familiar figure descending from the railway carriage, the life-long affection which had been well accustomed to make excuses, flowed in and submerged all newer knowledge that might have seemed fresh ground for blame. "Well, Dan," said Sir Hugo, with a serious fervor, grasping Deronda's hand. He uttered no other words of greeting; there was too strong a rush of mutual consciousness. The next thing was to give orders to the courier, and then to propose walking slowly in the mild evening, there being no hurry to get to the hotel. "I have taken my journey easily, and am in excellent condition," he said, as he and Deronda came out under the starlight, which was still faint with the lingering sheen of day. "I didn't hurry in setting off, because I wanted to inquire into things a little, and so I got sight of your letter to Lady Mallinger before I started. But now, how is the widow?" "Getting calmer," said Deronda. "She seems to be escaping the bodily illness that one might have feared for her, after her plunge and terrible excitement. Her uncle and mother came two days ago, and she is being well taken care of." "Any prospect of an heir being born?" "From what Mr. Gascoigne said to me, I conclude not. He spoke as if it were a question whether the widow would have the estates for her life." "It will not be much of a wrench to her affections, I fancy, this loss of the husband?" said Sir Hugo, looking round at Deronda. "The suddenness of the death has been a great blow to her," said Deronda, quietly evading the question. "I wonder whether Grandcourt gave her any notion what were the provisions of his will?" said Sir Hugo. "Do you know what they are, sir?" parried Deronda. "Yes, I do," said the baronet, quickly. "Gad! if there is no prospect of a legitimate heir, he has left everything to a boy he had by a Mrs. Glasher; you know nothing about the affair, I suppose, but she was a sort of wife to him for a good many years, and there are three older children--girls. The boy is to take his father's name; he is Henleigh already, and he is to be Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallinger will be of no use to him, I am happy to say; but the young dog will have more than enough with his fourteen years' minority--no need to have had holes filled up with my fifty thousand for Diplow that he had no right to: and meanwhile my beauty, the young widow, is to put up with a poor two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere--a nice kind of banishment for her if she chose to shut herself up there, which I don't think she will. The boy's mother has been living there of late years. I'm perfectly disgusted with Grandcourt. I don't know that I'm obliged to think the better of him because he's drowned, though, so far as my affairs are concerned, nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." "In my opinion he did wrong when he married this wife--not in leaving his estates to the son," said Deronda, rather dryly. "I say nothing against his leaving the land to the lad," said Sir Hugo; "but since he had married this girl he ought to have given her a handsome provision, such as she could live on in a style fitted to the rank he had raised her to. She ought to have had four or five thousand a year and the London house for her life; that's what I should have done for her. I suppose, as she was penniless, her friends couldn't stand out for a settlement, else it's ill trusting to the will a man may make after he's married. Even a wise man generally lets some folly ooze out of him in his will--my father did, I know; and if a fellow has any spite or tyranny in him, he's likely to bottle off a good deal for keeping in that sort of document. It's quite clear Grandcourt meant that his death should put an extinguisher on his wife, if she bore him no heir." "And, in the other case, I suppose everything would have been reversed--illegitimacy would have had the extinguisher?" said Deronda, with some scorn. "Precisely--Gadsmere and the two thousand. It's queer. One nuisance is that Grandcourt has made me an executor; but seeing he was the son of my only brother, I can't refuse to act. And I shall mind it less if I can be of any use to the widow. Lush thinks she was not in ignorance about the family under the rose, and the purport of the will. He hints that there was no very good understanding between the couple. But I fancy you are the man who knew most about what Mrs. Grandcourt felt or did not feel--eh, Dan?" Sir Hugo did not put this question with his usual jocoseness, but rather with a lowered tone of interested inquiry; and Deronda felt that any evasion would be misinterpreted. He answered gravely, "She was certainly not happy. They were unsuited to each other. But as to the disposal of the property--from all I have seen of her, I should predict that she will be quite contented with it." "Then she is not much like the rest of her sex; that's all I can say," said Sir Hugo, with a slight shrug. "However, she ought to be something extraordinary, for there must be an entanglement between your horoscope and hers--eh? When that tremendous telegram came, the first thing Lady Mallinger said was, 'How very strange that it should be Daniel who sends it!' But I have had something of the same sort in my own life. I was once at a foreign hotel where a lady had been left by her husband without money. When I heard of it, and came forward to help her, who should she be but an early flame of mine, who had been fool enough to marry an Austrian baron with a long mustache and short affection? But it was an affair of my own that called me there--nothing to do with knight-errantry, any more than you coming to Genoa had to do with the Grandcourts." There was silence for a little while. Sir Hugo had begun to talk of the Grandcourts as the less difficult subject between himself and Deronda; but they were both wishing to overcome a reluctance to perfect frankness on the events which touched their relation to each other. Deronda felt that his letter, after the first interview with his mother, had been rather a thickening than a breaking of the ice, and that he ought to wait for the first opening to come from Sir Hugo. Just when they were about to lose sight of the port, the baronet turned, and pausing as if to get a last view, said in a tone of more serious feeling--"And about the main business of your coming to Genoa, Dan? You have not been deeply pained by anything you have learned, I hope? There is nothing that you feel need change your position in any way? You know, whatever happens to you must always be of importance to me." "I desire to meet your goodness by perfect confidence, sir," said Deronda. "But I can't answer those questions truly by a simple yes or no. Much that I have heard about the past has pained me. And it has been a pain to meet and part with my mother in her suffering state, as I have been compelled to do. But it is no pain--it is rather a clearing up of doubts for which I am thankful, to know my parentage. As to the effect on my position, there will be no change in my gratitude to you, sir, for the fatherly care and affection you have always shown me. But to know that I was born a Jew, may have a momentous influence on my life, which I am hardly able to tell you of at present." Deronda spoke the last sentence with a resolve that overcame some diffidence. He felt that the differences between Sir Hugo's nature and his own would have, by-and-by, to disclose themselves more markedly than had ever yet been needful. The baronet gave him a quick glance, and turned to walk on. After a few moments' silence, in which he had reviewed all the material in his memory which would enable him to interpret Deronda's words, he said, "I have long expected something remarkable from you, Dan; but, for God's sake, don't go into any eccentricities! I can tolerate any man's difference of opinion, but let him tell it me without getting himself up as a lunatic. At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be taken seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, it's a bad ground of selection. However, I don't ask you to anticipate your inclination in anything you have to tell me. When you make up your mind to a course that requires money, I have some sixteen thousand pounds that have been accumulating for you over and above what you have been having the interest of as income. And now I am come, I suppose you want to get back to England as soon as you can?" "I must go first to Mainz to get away a chest of my grandfather's, and perhaps to see a friend of his," said Deronda. "Although the chest has been lying there these twenty years, I have an unreasonable sort of nervous eagerness to get it away under my care, as if it were more likely now than before that something might happen to it. And perhaps I am the more uneasy, because I lingered after my mother left, instead of setting out immediately. Yet I can't regret that I was here--else Mrs. Grandcourt would have had none but servants to act for her." "Yes, yes," said Sir Hugo, with a flippancy which was an escape of some vexation hidden under his more serious speech; "I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian." Deronda colored, and repressed a retort. They were just turning into the _Italia_.

Sir Hugo Mallinger was not so prompt in starting for Genoa as Mr. Gascoigne had been, and Deronda would not depart until he had seen the baronet. Not only Grandcourt's death, but also the late crisis in his own life made him wish to speak with his oldest friend. So on the fifth evening Deronda waited for Sir Hugo at the station; and while he was looking forward to the sight of the kind, familiar face, he almost smiled, despite his late tragic experience, at the idea of Sir Hugo's pleasure in being now master of his estates, able to leave them to his daughters. We should be churlish creatures if we could have no joy in our fellow-mortals' joy; and it is, happily, possible to feel gratitude even where we discern a mistake that may have injured us, if it was made with an affectionate intention through a life-time of kindly offices. Deronda felt that Sir Hugo had committed a falsity. But the baronet had probably had no knowledge of the mother's breach of trust, and had assumed that she would prefer her son to be made an English gentleman, since she did not seem to care about parting from him. Daniel's affectionate gratitude toward Sir Hugo made him wish to excuse rather than to blame him; and, with all his keen memory of the painful inward struggle he had gone through in his boyhood, he was aware also that Sir Hugo had had no idea of his distress. Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness, remote from Deronda's large imaginative lenience toward others. And perhaps now, after the last ten days, he was more than ever disposed to avoid that rash resentment which is close to a love of punishment. When he saw Sir Hugo's familiar figure descending from the railway carriage, his life-long affection submerged all ground for blame. "Well, Dan," said Sir Hugo, grasping Deronda's hand. He uttered no other words of greeting; there was too strong a rush of mutual consciousness. The courier having taken the baggage, they walked slowly to the hotel together. "I didn't hurry in setting off," Sir Hugo said, "because I wanted to inquire into things, and so I saw your letter to Lady Mallinger before I started. How is the widow?" "Getting calmer," said Deronda. "She seems to be escaping the illness that one might have feared, after her plunge and terrible excitement. Her uncle and mother came two days ago, and she is being well taken care of." "Any prospect of an heir being born?" "From what Mr. Gascoigne said to me, I conclude not." "It will not be much of a wrench to her affections, I fancy, this loss of the husband?" said Sir Hugo. "The suddenness of the death has been a great blow to her," said Deronda, quietly evading the question. "I wonder whether Grandcourt gave her any notion what were the provisions of his will?" said Sir Hugo. "Do you know what they are, sir?" "Yes, I do," said the baronet, quickly. "Gad! if there is no prospect of a legitimate heir, he has left everything to a boy he had by a Mrs. Glasher. You know nothing about the affair, I suppose, but she was a sort of wife to him for a good many years, and there are three older girls. The boy is to take his father's name, and he will have more than enough: and meanwhile my beauty, the young widow, is to put up with a poor two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere. I'm perfectly disgusted with Grandcourt. I don't know that I'm obliged to think the better of him because he's drowned; though, so far as I'm concerned, nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." "In my opinion he did wrong when he married this wife, not in leaving his estates to the son," said Deronda, rather dryly. "I say nothing against his leaving the land to the lad," said Sir Hugo; "but since he had married this girl he ought to have given her a handsome provision. She ought to have had four or five thousand a year and the London house for her life; that's what I should have done for her. Even a wise man generally lets some folly ooze out of him in his will - my father did, I know; and if a fellow has any spite in him, he's likely to bottle up a good deal in that sort of document. It's quite clear Grandcourt meant that his death should put an extinguisher on his wife, if she bore him no heir." "And, in the other case, I suppose everything would have been reversed?" said Deronda, with some scorn. "Precisely - Gadsmere and the two thousand. It's queer. One nuisance is that Grandcourt has made me an executor; but seeing he was my nephew, I can't refuse. And I hope to be of use to the widow. Lush thinks she knew about the family under the rose, and the purport of the will. But I fancy you are the man who knew most about what Mrs. Grandcourt felt - eh, Dan?" Sir Hugo did not put this question with his usual jocoseness, but with a tone of inquiry; and Deronda answered gravely- "She was certainly not happy. They were unsuited to each other. But as to the disposal of the property, I should predict that she will be quite contented with it." "Then she is not much like the rest of her sex; that's all I can say," said Sir Hugo, with a shrug. "There must be an entanglement between your horoscope and hers - eh? When that tremendous telegram came, the first thing Lady Mallinger said was, 'How strange that it should be Daniel who sends it!' But I have had something of the same sort in my own life. I was once at a foreign hotel where a lady had been left by her husband without money. When I came forward to help her, who should she be but an early flame of mine? But my being there had nothing to do with her, any more than you coming to Genoa had to do with the Grandcourts." There was silence for a little while. They both wished to overcome a reluctance to perfect frankness on the events surrounding Daniel's parentage. Deronda felt that he ought to wait for the first opening to come from Sir Hugo. At last the baronet turned, and said in a tone of serious feeling- "And about the main business of your coming to Genoa, Dan? You have not been deeply pained by anything you have learned, I hope? Whatever happens to you must always be important to me." "Much that I have heard about the past has pained me," answered Deronda. "And it has been painful to meet and part with my mother in her suffering state. But it is no pain to know my parentage. And there will be no change in my gratitude to you, sir, for the fatherly care and affection you have always shown me. But to know that I was born a Jew, may have a momentous influence on my life, which I am hardly able to tell you of at present." Deronda spoke the last sentence with a resolve that overcame some diffidence; for he was aware of the differences between Sir Hugo's nature and his own. The baronet gave him a quick glance, and walked on. After a few moments' silence, he said- "I have long expected something remarkable from you, Dan; but, for God's sake, don't go into any eccentricities! If a man wants to be taken seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, it's a bad ground of selection. However, when you do make up your mind to a course that requires money, I have some sixteen thousand pounds that have been accumulating for you over and above your income. I suppose you want to go back to England as soon as you can?" "I must go first to Mainz to get a chest of my grandfather's, and to see a friend of his," said Deronda. "I lingered after my mother left, instead of setting out immediately. Yet I can't regret that I was here - else Mrs. Grandcourt would have had none but servants to act for her." "Yes, yes," said Sir Hugo, with a flippancy which was an escape of some vexation; "I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian." Deronda coloured, and repressed a retort. They were just turning into the hotel.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 59

"O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!" --MILTON. Deronda did not obey Gwendolen's new summons without some agitation. Not his vanity, but his keen sympathy made him susceptible to the danger that another's heart might feel larger demands on him than he would be able to fulfill; and it was no longer a matter of argument with him, but of penetrating consciousness, that Gwendolen's soul clung to his with a passionate need. We do not argue the existence of the anger or the scorn that thrills through us in a voice; we simply feel it, and it admits of no disproof. Deronda felt this woman's destiny hanging on his over a precipice of despair. Any one who knows him cannot wonder at his inward confession, that if all this had happened little more than a year ago, he would hardly have asked himself whether he loved her; the impetuous determining impulse which would have moved him would have been to save her from sorrow, to shelter her life forevermore from the dangers of loneliness, and carry out to the last the rescue he had begun in that monitory redemption of the necklace. But now, love and duty had thrown other bonds around him, and that impulse could no longer determine his life; still, it was present in him as a compassionate yearning, a painful quivering at the very imagination of having again and again to meet the appeal of her eyes and words. The very strength of the bond, the certainty of the resolve, that kept him asunder from her, made him gaze at her lot apart with the more aching pity. He awaited her coming in the back drawing-room--part of that white and crimson space where they had sat together at the musical party, where Gwendolen had said for the first time that her lot depended on his not forsaking her, and her appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic cry--_Per piet non dirmi addio_. But the melody had come from Mirah's dear voice. Deronda walked about this room, which he had for years known by heart, with a strange sense of metamorphosis in his own life. The familiar objects around him, from Lady Mallinger's gently smiling portrait to the also human and urbane faces of the lions on the pilasters of the chimney-piece, seemed almost to belong to a previous state of existence which he was revisiting in memory only, not in reality; so deep and transforming had been the impressions he had lately experienced, so new were the conditions under which he found himself in the house he had been accustomed to think of as a home--standing with his hat in his hand awaiting the entrance of a young creature whose life had also been undergoing a transformation--a tragic transformation toward a wavering result, in which he felt with apprehensiveness that his own action was still bound up. But Gwendolen was come in, looking changed; not only by her mourning dress, but by a more satisfied quietude of expression than he had seen in her face at Genoa. Her satisfaction was that Deronda was there; but there was no smile between them as they met and clasped hands; each was full of remembrance--full of anxious prevision. She said, "It was good of you to come. Let us sit down," immediately seating herself in the nearest chair. He placed himself opposite to her. "I asked you to come because I want you to tell me what I ought to do," she began, at once. "Don't be afraid of telling me what you think is right, because it seems hard. I have made up my mind to do it. I was afraid once of being poor; I could not bear to think of being under other people; and that was why I did something--why I married. I have borne worse things now. I think I could bear to be poor, if you think I ought. Do you know about my husband's will?" "Yes, Sir Hugo told me," said Deronda, already guessing the question she had to ask. "Ought I to take anything he has left me? I will tell you what I have been thinking," said Gwendolen, with a more nervous eagerness. "Perhaps you may not quite know that I really did think a good deal about my mother when I married. I _was_ selfish, but I did love her, and feel about her poverty; and what comforted me most at first, when I was miserable, was her being better off because I had married. The thing that would be hardest to me now would be to see her in poverty again; and I have been thinking that if I took enough to provide for her, and no more--nothing for myself--it would not be wrong; for I was very precious to my mother--and he took me from her--and he meant--and if she had known--" Gwendolen broke off. She had been preparing herself for this interview by thinking of hardly anything else than this question of right toward her mother; but the question had carried with it thoughts and reasons which it was impossible for her to utter, and these perilous remembrances swarmed between her words, making her speech more and more agitated and tremulous. She looked down helplessly at her hands, now unladen of all rings except her wedding-ring. "Do not hurt yourself by speaking of that," said Deronda, tenderly. "There is no need; the case is very simple. I think I can hardly judge wrongly about it. You consult me because I am the only person to whom you have confided the most painful part of your experience: and I can understand your scruples." He did not go on immediately, waiting for her to recover herself. The silence seemed to Gwendolen full of the tenderness that she heard in his voice, and she had courage to lift up her eyes and look at him as he said, "You are conscious of something which you feel to be a crime toward one who is dead. You think that you have forfeited all claim as a wife. You shrink from taking what was his. You want to keep yourself from profiting by his death. Your feeling even urges you to some self-punishment--some scourging of the self that disobeyed your better will--the will that struggled against temptation. I have known something of that myself. Do I understand you?" "Yes--at least, I want to be good--not like what I have been," said Gwendolen. "I will try to bear what you think I ought to bear. I have tried to tell you the worst about myself. What ought I to do?" "If no one but yourself were concerned in this question of income," said Deronda, "I should hardly dare to urge you against any remorseful prompting; but I take as a guide now, your feeling about Mrs. Davilow, which seems to me quite just. I cannot think that your husband's dues even to yourself are nullified by any act you have committed. He voluntarily entered into your life, and affected its course in what is always the most momentous way. But setting that aside, it was due from him in his position that he should provide for your mother, and he of course understood that if this will took effect she would share the provision he had made for you." "She has had eight hundred a year. What I thought of was to take that and leave the rest," said Gwendolen. She had been so long inwardly arguing for this as a permission, that her mind could not at once take another attitude. "I think it is not your duty to fix a limit in that way," said Deronda. "You would be making a painful enigma for Mrs. Davilow; an income from which you shut yourself out must be embittered to her. And your own course would become too difficult. We agreed at Genoa that the burden on your conscience is one what no one ought to be admitted to the knowledge of. The future beneficence of your life will be best furthered by your saving all others from the pain of that knowledge. In my opinion you ought simply to abide by the provisions of your husband's will, and let your remorse tell only on the use that you will make of your monetary independence." In uttering the last sentence Deronda automatically took up his hat which he had laid on the floor beside him. Gwendolen, sensitive to his slightest movement, felt her heart giving a great leap, as if it too had a consciousness of its own, and would hinder him from going: in the same moment she rose from her chair, unable to reflect that the movement was an acceptance of his apparent intention to leave her; and Deronda, of course, also rose, advancing a little. "I will do what you tell me," said Gwendolen, hurriedly; "but what else shall I do?" No other than these simple words were possible to her; and even these were too much for her in a state of emotion where her proud secrecy was disenthroned: as the child-like sentences fell from her lips they re-acted on her like a picture of her own helplessness, and she could not check the sob which sent the large tears to her eyes. Deronda, too, felt a crushing pain; but imminent consequences were visible to him, and urged him to the utmost exertion of conscience. When she had pressed her tears away, he said, in a gently questioning tone, "You will probably be soon going with Mrs. Davilow into the country." "Yes, in a week or ten days." Gwendolen waited an instant, turning her eyes vaguely toward the window, as if looking at some imagined prospect. "I want to be kind to them all--they can be happier than I can. Is that the best I can do?" "I think so. It is a duty that cannot be doubtful," said Deronda. He paused a little between his sentences, feeling a weight of anxiety on all his words. "Other duties will spring from it. Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant." Gwendolen turned her eyes on him with the look of one athirst toward the sound of unseen waters. Deronda felt the look as if she had been stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore. His voice took an affectionate imploringness when he said, "This sorrow, which has cut down to the root, has come to you while you are so young--try to think of it not as a spoiling of your life, but as a preparation for it. Let it be a preparation----" Any one overhearing his tones would have thought he was entreating for his own happiness. "See! you have been saved from the worst evils that might have come from your marriage, which you feel was wrong. You have had a vision of injurious, selfish action--a vision of possible degradation; think that a severe angel, seeing you along the road of error, grasped you by the wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has come to you in your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. You can, you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that they were born." The words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen. Mingled emotions streamed through her frame with a strength that seemed the beginning of a new existence, having some new power or other which stirred in her vaguely. So pregnant is the divine hope of moral recovery with the energy that fulfills it. So potent in us is the infused action of another soul, before which we bow in complete love. But the new existence seemed inseparable from Deronda: the hope seemed to make his presence permanent. It was not her thought, that he loved her, and would cling to her--a thought would have tottered with improbability; it was her spiritual breath. For the first time since that terrible moment on the sea a flush rose and spread over her cheek, brow and neck, deepened an instant or two, and then gradually disappeared. She did not speak. Deronda advanced and put out his hand, saying, "I must not weary you." She was startled by the sense that he was going, and put her hand in his, still without speaking. "You look ill yet--unlike yourself," he added, while he held her hand. "I can't sleep much," she answered, with some return of her dispirited manner. "Things repeat themselves in me so. They come back--they will all come back," she ended, shudderingly, a chill fear threatening her. "By degrees they will be less insistent," said Deronda. He could not drop her hand or move away from her abruptly. "Sir Hugo says he shall come to stay at Diplow," said Gwendolen, snatching at previously intended words which had slipped away from her. "You will come too." "Probably," said Deronda, and then feeling that the word was cold, he added, correctively, "Yes, I shall come," and then released her hand, with the final friendly pressure of one who has virtually said good-bye. "And not again here, before I leave town?" said Gwendolen, with timid sadness, looking as pallid as ever. What could Deronda say? "If I can be of any use--if you wish me--certainly I will." "I must wish it," said Gwendolen, impetuously; "you know I must wish it. What strength have I? Who else is there?" Again a sob was rising. Deronda felt a pang, which showed itself in his face. He looked miserable as he said, "I will certainly come." Gwendolen perceived the change in his face; but the intense relief of expecting him to come again could not give way to any other feeling, and there was a recovery of the inspired hope and courage in her. "Don't be unhappy about me," she said, in a tone of affectionate assurance. "I shall remember your words--every one of them. I shall remember what you believe about me; I shall try." She looked at him firmly, and put out her hand again as if she had forgotten what had passed since those words of his which she promised to remember. But there was no approach to a smile on her lips. She had never smiled since her husband's death. When she stood still and in silence, she looked like a melancholy statue of the Gwendolen whose laughter had once been so ready when others were grave. It is only by remembering the searching anguish which had changed the aspect of the world for her that we can understand her behavior to Deronda--the unreflecting openness, nay, the importunate pleading, with which she expressed her dependence on him. Considerations such as would have filled the minds of indifferent spectators could not occur to her, any more than if flames had been mounting around her, and she had flung herself into his open arms and clung about his neck that he might carry her into safety. She identified him with the struggling regenerative process in her which had begun with his action. Is it any wonder that she saw her own necessity reflected in his feeling? She was in that state of unconscious reliance and expectation which is a common experience with us when we are preoccupied with our own trouble or our own purposes. We diffuse our feeling over others, and count on their acting from our motives. Her imagination had not been turned to a future union with Deronda by any other than the spiritual tie which had been continually strengthening; but also it had not been turned toward a future separation from him. Love-making and marriage--how could they now be the imagery in which poor Gwendolen's deepest attachment could spontaneously clothe itself? Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her; but what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of rebuke--the hard task of self-change--confession--endurance. If she cried toward him, what then? She cried as the child cries whose little feet have fallen backward--cried to be taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself. The cry pierced Deronda. What position could have been more difficult for a man full of tenderness, yet with clear foresight? He was the only creature who knew the real nature of Gwendolen's trouble: to withdraw himself from any appeal of hers would be to consign her to a dangerous loneliness. He could not reconcile himself to the cruelty of apparently rejecting her dependence on him; and yet in the nearer or farther distance he saw a coming wrench, which all present strengthening of their bond would make the harder. He was obliged to risk that. He went once and again to Park Lane before Gwendolen left; but their interviews were in the presence of Mrs. Davilow, and were therefore less agitating. Gwendolen, since she had determined to accept her income, had conceived a project which she liked to speak of: it was to place her mother and sisters with herself in Offendene again, and, as she said, piece back her life unto that time when they first went there, and when everything was happiness about her, only she did not know it. The idea had been mentioned to Sir Hugo, who was going to exert himself about the letting of Gadsmere for a rent which would more than pay the rent of Offendene. All this was told to Deronda, who willingly dwelt on a subject that seemed to give some soothing occupation to Gwendolen. He said nothing and she asked nothing, of what chiefly occupied himself. Her mind was fixed on his coming to Diplow before the autumn was over; and she no more thought of the Lapidoths--the little Jewess and her brother--as likely to make a difference in her destiny, than of the fermenting political and social leaven which was making a difference in the history of the world. In fact poor Gwendolen's memory had been stunned, and all outside the lava-lit track of her troubled conscience, and her effort to get deliverance from it, lay for her in dim forgetfulness.

Deronda did not obey Gwendolen's new summons without some agitation. He felt the danger that her heart might make larger demands on him than he could fulfil; and he knew that Gwendolen's soul clung to his with a passionate need. Deronda felt this woman's destiny hanging on his over a precipice of despair. Inwardly he confessed that if all this had happened a year ago, he would hardly have asked himself whether he loved her; his impulse would have been to save her from sorrow, to shelter her life forevermore from loneliness, and to complete the rescue he had begun in that redemption of the necklace. But now, love and duty had thrown other bonds around him, and that impulse could no longer determine his life; still, it was present in him as a compassionate yearning, and he pitied her all the more. He awaited her in the drawing-room where they had sat together at the musical party, when Gwendolen had asked for the first time that he should not forsake her, and her appeal had seemed to melt into the song. But the melody had come from Mirah's dear voice. Deronda walked about this familiar room with a strange sense of metamorphosis. The objects around him seemed almost to belong to a previous state of existence which he was revisiting in memory only, not in reality; so deep and transforming had been his recent experiences. And he was awaiting the entrance of a young creature whose life had also been undergoing a transformation - a tragic transformation toward a wavering result, in which he felt apprehensively that he was still bound up. Gwendolen came in, looking changed; not only by her mourning dress, but by a more satisfied quietude of expression than he had seen in her face at Genoa. Her satisfaction was that Deronda was there; but there was no smile between them as they met and clasped hands. She said, "It was good of you to come. Let us sit down." He placed himself opposite her. "I asked you to come because I want you to tell me what I ought to do," she began. "Don't be afraid of telling me what you think is right, because it seems hard. I have made up my mind to do it. I was afraid once of being poor; that was why I married. I have borne worse things now, and I could bear to be poor, if you think I ought. Do you know about my husband's will?" "Yes, Sir Hugo told me," said Deronda. "Ought I to take anything he has left me? I will tell you what I have been thinking," said Gwendolen, with nervous eagerness. "I really did care about my mother when I married. I was selfish, but I did love her; and what comforted me most at first, when I was miserable, was her being better off. The thing that would be hardest to me now would be to see her in poverty again; and I have been thinking that if I took enough to provide for her, and no more, it would not be wrong; for I was very precious to my mother - and he took me from her - and he meant - and if she had known-" Gwendolen broke off as perilous remembrances swarmed between her words, making her speech more and more tremulous. She looked down helplessly at her hands, now unladen of all rings except her wedding-ring. "Do not hurt yourself by speaking of that," said Deronda, tenderly. "The case is very simple. I think I can hardly judge wrongly about it." He waited until Gwendolen had courage to lift up her eyes before he continued, "You think that you have forfeited all claim as a wife. You shrink from taking what was his. You want to keep yourself from profiting by his death. Your feeling even urges you to some self-punishment - some scourging of the self that disobeyed your better will. Do I understand you?" "Yes - I want to be good," said Gwendolen. "I will try to bear what you think I ought to bear. I have tried to tell you the worst about myself. What ought I to do?" "If no one but yourself were concerned in this question of income," said Deronda, "I should hardly dare to urge you against any remorseful prompting; but I take as a guide now, your feeling about Mrs. Davilow, which seems to me quite just. Your husband's dues are not nullified by any act you have committed. He voluntarily entered into your life: it was due from him that he should provide for your mother, and he of course understood that if this will took effect she would share the provision he had made for you." "She has had eight hundred a year. What I thought of was to take that and leave the rest," said Gwendolen, who had been inwardly arguing for this so long, that her mind could not at once take another attitude. "I think it is not your duty to fix a limit in that way," said Deronda. "You would be making a painful enigma for Mrs. Davilow; an income from which you shut yourself out must be embittered to her. And your own course would become too difficult. We agreed at Genoa that no-one else should know of the burden on your conscience. It is best if you save all others from the pain of that knowledge. In my opinion you ought simply to abide by your husband's will, and let your remorse decide only on the use that you will make of your money." In uttering the last sentence Deronda automatically took up his hat to go. Gwendolen felt her heart giving a great leap, as if it would hinder him from going: she rose from her chair, unable to reflect that the movement was an acceptance of his apparent intention to leave; and Deronda, of course, also rose. "I will do what you tell me," said Gwendolen, hurriedly; "but what else shall I do?" No other than these simple words were possible to her; as the child-like sentences fell from her lips they acted on her like a picture of her own helplessness, and she could not check a sob. Deronda, too, felt a crushing pain; but knew the need of the utmost exertion of conscience. He said gently- "You will probably be soon going with Mrs. Davilow into the country." "Yes, in a week or so." Gwendolen turned her eyes vaguely toward the window. "I want to be kind to them all - they can be happier than I can. Is that the best I can do?" "I think so. It is a duty that cannot be doubtful," said Deronda. He paused, feeling a weight of anxiety on all his words. "Other duties will spring from it. Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfaction - there will be new needs - continually carrying you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant." Gwendolen turned her eyes on him with the look of one athirst toward the sound of unseen waters. Deronda felt as if she had been stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore. He said imploringly- "This sorrow, which has cut to the root, has come to you while you are young - try to think of it not as a spoiling of your life, but as a preparation for it." Anyone listening would have thought he was entreating for his own happiness. "See! you have been saved from the worst evils that might have come from your marriage, which you feel was wrong. You have had a vision of degradation; think that a severe angel, seeing you on the road of error, grasped your wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has come to you in your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. You can, you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that they were born." The words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen. Mingled emotions streamed through her frame with the strength of a new existence. So potent in us is the infused action of another soul, before which we bow in complete love. But the new existence seemed inseparable from Deronda: the hope seemed to make his presence permanent. It was not her thought, that he loved her; it was her spiritual breath. For the first time since that terrible moment on the sea a flush rose and spread over her cheek, brow and neck, deepened an instant or two, and then gradually disappeared. She did not speak. Deronda put out his hand, saying, "I must not weary you." Startled by the sense that he was going, she put her hand in his without speaking. "You look ill," he added. "I can't sleep much," she answered, with some return of her dispirited manner. "Things come back - they will all come back." She shuddered. "By degrees they will be less insistent," said Deronda. He could not drop her hand abruptly. "Sir Hugo says he shall come to stay at Diplow," said Gwendolen. "You will come too." "Probably," he said, and then feeling that the word was cold, he added, "Yes, I shall come." He released her hand, with a final friendly pressure. "And not again here, before I leave town?" said Gwendolen, with timid sadness. What could Deronda say? "If I can be of any use - if you wish - certainly I will." "I must wish it," said Gwendolen impetuously; "you know I must wish it. What strength have I? Who else is there?" Again a sob was rising. Deronda felt and looked miserable as he said, "I will certainly come." She perceived the change in his face; but her intense relief could not give way to any other feeling, and there was a recovery of hope and courage in her. "Don't be unhappy about me," she said, in a tone of affectionate assurance. "I shall remember your words. I shall remember what you believe about me; I shall try." She looked at him firmly, and put out her hand again, but without a smile. She had never smiled since her husband's death. She looked like a melancholy statue of the Gwendolen whose laughter had once been so ready when others were grave. It is only by remembering her life-changing anguish that we can understand her behaviour to Deronda - the unreflecting openness, the pleading, with which she expressed her dependence on him. She did not think about how it would appear to others, any more than if flames had been mounting, and she had flung herself into his arms and clung about his neck that he might carry her into safety. Is it any wonder that she saw her own need reflected in his feeling? She was in that state of unconscious reliance and expectation which is common when we are preoccupied with our own trouble. We diffuse our feeling over others, and count on their acting from our motives. She had not imagined any future union with Deronda other than the spiritual tie between them; but also she had not envisaged a future separation. Love-making and marriage had no connection with attachment for poor Gwendolen now. Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her; but what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of rebuke - the hard task of self-change - confession - endurance. If she cried, what then? She cried as the child cries whose little feet have fallen behind - cries to be taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself. The cry pierced Deronda. He was the only creature who knew the real nature of Gwendolen's trouble: to withdraw himself from her appeal would be to consign her to a dangerous loneliness. He could not cruelly reject her dependence on him; and yet in the distance he saw a coming wrench, which all present strengthening of their bond would make the harder. He was obliged to risk that. He went again to Park Lane before Gwendolen left; but their interviews were in the presence of Mrs. Davilow, and were therefore less agitating. Gwendolen, since she had determined to accept her income, had decided to move with her mother and sisters to Offendene again, and, as she said, piece back her life unto that time when they first went there, when everything was happiness, only she did not know it. Sir Hugo was going to arrange the letting of Gadsmere for a rent which would more than pay the rent of Offendene. All this was told to Deronda, who willingly dwelt on a subject that seemed to soothe Gwendolen. Her mind was fixed on his coming to Diplow before the autumn was over; and she never thought of the Lapidoths as likely to make a difference in her destiny. In fact, poor Gwendolen's memory had been stunned, and all outside the lava-lit track of her troubled conscience lay for her in dim forgetfulness.

Daniel Deronda

Book 8 - FRUIT AND SEED | Chapter 65

"It will hardly be denied that even in this frail and corrupted world, we sometimes meet persons who, in their very mien and aspect, as well as in the whole habit of life, manifest such a signature and stamp of virtue, as to make our judgment of them a matter of intuition rather than the result of continued examination."--ALEXANDER KNOX: quoted in Southey's Life of Wesley. Mirah said that she had slept well that night; and when she came down in Mab's black dress, her dark hair curling in fresh fibrils as it gradually dried from its plenteous bath, she looked like one who was beginning to take comfort after the long sorrow and watching which had paled her cheek and made blue semicircles under her eyes. It was Mab who carried her breakfast and ushered her down--with some pride in the effect produced by a pair of tiny felt slippers which she had rushed out to buy because there were no shoes in the house small enough for Mirah, whose borrowed dress ceased about her ankles and displayed the cheap clothing that, moulding itself on her feet, seemed an adornment as choice as the sheaths of buds. The farthing buckles were bijoux. "Oh, if you please, mamma?" cried Mab, clasping her hands and stooping toward Mirah's feet, as she entered the parlor; "look at the slippers, how beautiful they fit! I declare she is like the Queen Budoor--'two delicate feet, the work of the protecting and all-recompensing Creator, support her; and I wonder how they can sustain what is above them.'" Mirah looked down at her own feet in a childlike way and then smiled at Mrs. Meyrick, who was saying inwardly, "One could hardly imagine this creature having an evil thought. But wise people would tell me to be cautious." She returned Mirah's smile and said, "I fear the feet have had to sustain their burden a little too often lately. But to-day she will rest and be my companion." "And she will tell you so many things and I shall not hear them," grumbled Mab, who felt herself in the first volume of a delightful romance and obliged to miss some chapters because she had to go to pupils. Kate was already gone to make sketches along the river, and Amy was away on business errands. It was what the mother wished, to be alone with this stranger, whose story must be a sorrowful one, yet was needful to be told. The small front parlor was as good as a temple that morning. The sunlight was on the river and soft air came in through the open window; the walls showed a glorious silent cloud of witnesses--the Virgin soaring amid her cherubic escort; grand Melancholia with her solemn universe; the Prophets and Sibyls; the School of Athens; the Last Supper; mystic groups where far-off ages made one moment; grave Holbein and Rembrandt heads; the Tragic Muse; last-century children at their musings or their play; Italian poets--all were there through the medium of a little black and white. The neat mother who had weathered her troubles, and come out of them with a face still cheerful, was sorting colored wools for her embroidery. Hafiz purred on the window-ledge, the clock on the mantle-piece ticked without hurry, and the occasional sound of wheels seemed to lie outside the more massive central quiet. Mrs. Meyrick thought that this quiet might be the best invitation to speech on the part of her companion, and chose not to disturb it by remark. Mirah sat opposite in her former attitude, her hands clasped on her lap, her ankles crossed, her eyes at first traveling slowly over the objects around her, but finally resting with a sort of placid reverence on Mrs. Meyrick. At length she began to speak softly. "I remember my mother's face better than anything; yet I was not seven when I was taken away, and I am nineteen now." "I can understand that," said Mrs. Meyrick. "There are some earliest things that last the longest." "Oh, yes, it was the earliest. I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother's face: it was so near to me, and her arms were round me, and she sang to me. One hymn she sang so often, so often: and then she taught me to sing it with her: it was the first I ever sang. They were always Hebrew hymns she sang; and because I never knew the meaning of the words they seemed full of nothing but our love and happiness. When I lay in my little bed and it was all white above me, she used to bend over me, between me and the white, and sing in a sweet, low voice. I can dream myself back into that time when I am awake, and it often comes back to me in my sleep--my hand is very little, I put it up to her face and she kisses it. Sometimes in my dreams I begin to tremble and think that we are both dead; but then I wake up and my hand lies like this, and for a moment I hardly know myself. But if I could see my mother again I should know her." "You must expect some change after twelve years," said Mrs. Meyrick, gently. "See my grey hair: ten years ago it was bright brown. The days and months pace over us like restless little birds, and leave the marks of their feet backward and forward; especially when they are like birds with heavy hearts--then they tread heavily." "Ah, I am sure her heart has been heavy for want of me. But to feel her joy if we could meet again, and I could make her know I love her and give her deep comfort after all her mourning! If that could be, I should mind nothing; I should be glad that I have lived through my trouble. I did despair. The world seemed miserable and wicked; none helped me so that I could bear their looks and words; I felt that my mother was dead, and death was the only way to her. But then in the last moment--yesterday, when I longed for the water to close over me--and I thought that death was the best image of mercy--then goodness came to me living, and I felt trust in the living. And--it is strange--but I began to hope that she was living too. And now I with you--here--this morning, peace and hope have come into me like a flood. I want nothing; I can wait; because I hope and believe and am grateful--oh, so grateful! You have not thought evil of me--you have not despised me." Mirah spoke with low-toned fervor, and sat as still as a picture all the while. "Many others would have felt as we do, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, feeling a mist come over her eyes as she looked at her work. "But I did not meet them--they did not come to me." "How was it that you were taken from your mother?" "Ah, I am a long while coming to that. It is dreadful to speak of, yet I must tell you--I must tell you everything. My father--it was he that took me away. I thought we were only going on a little journey; and I was pleased. There was a box with all my little things in. But we went on board a ship, and got farther and farther away from the land. Then I was ill; and I thought it would never end--it was the first misery, and it seemed endless. But at last we landed. I knew nothing then, and believed what my father said. He comforted me, and told me I should go back to my mother. But it was America we had reached, and it was long years before we came back to Europe. At first I often asked my father when we were going back; and I tried to learn writing fast, because I wanted to write to my mother; but one day when he found me trying to write a letter, he took me on his knee and told me that my mother and brother were dead; that was why we did not go back. I remember my brother a little; he carried me once; but he was not always at home. I believed my father when he said that they were dead. I saw them under the earth when he said they were there, with their eyes forever closed. I never thought of its not being true; and I used to cry every night in my bed for a long while. Then when she came so often to me, in my sleep, I thought she must be living about me though I could not always see her, and that comforted me. I was never afraid in the dark, because of that; and very often in the day I used to shut my eyes and bury my face and try to see her and to hear her singing. I came to do that at last without shutting my eyes." Mirah paused with a sweet content in her face, as if she were having her happy vision, while she looked out toward the river. "Still your father was not unkind to you, I hope," said Mrs. Meyrick, after a minute, anxious to recall her. "No; he petted me, and took pains to teach me. He was an actor; and I found out, after, that the 'Coburg' I used to hear of his going to at home was a theatre. But he had more to do with the theatre than acting. He had not always been an actor; he had been a teacher, and knew many languages. His acting was not very good; I think, but he managed the stage, and wrote and translated plays. An Italian lady, a singer, lived with us a long time. They both taught me, and I had a master besides, who made me learn by heart and recite. I worked quite hard, though I was so little; and I was not nine when I first went on the stage. I could easily learn things, and I was not afraid. But then and ever since I hated our way of life. My father had money, and we had finery about us in a disorderly way; always there were men and women coming and going; there was loud laughing and disputing, strutting, snapping of fingers, jeering, faces I did not like to look at--though many petted and caressed me. But then I remembered my mother. Even at first when I understood nothing, I shrank away from all those things outside me into companionship with thoughts that were not like them; and I gathered thoughts very fast, because I read many things--plays and poetry, Shakespeare and Schiller, and learned evil and good. My father began to believe that I might be a great singer: my voice was considered wonderful for a child; and he had the best teaching for me. But it was painful that he boasted of me, and set me to sing for show at any minute, as if I had been a musical box. Once when I was nine years old, I played the part of a little girl who had been forsaken and did not know it, and sat singing to herself while she played with flowers. I did it without any trouble; but the clapping and all the sounds of the theatre were hateful to me; and I never liked the praise I had, because it all seemed very hard and unloving: I missed the love and trust I had been born into. I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about me: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it; and it was like a sharp knife always grazing me that we had two sorts of life which jarred so with each other--women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners. My father sometimes noticed my shrinking ways; and Signora said one day, when I had been rehearsing, 'She will never be an artist: she has no notion of being anybody but herself. That does very well now, but by-and-by you will see--she will have no more face and action than a singing-bird.' My father was angry, and they quarreled. I sat alone and cried, because what she had said was like a long unhappy future unrolled before me. I did not want to be an artist; but this was what my father expected of me. After a while Signora left us, and a governess used to come and give me lessons in different things, because my father began to be afraid of my singing too much; but I still acted from time to time. Rebellious feelings grew stronger in me, and I wished to get away from this life; but I could not tell where to go, and I dreaded the world. Besides, I felt it would be wrong to leave my father: I dreaded doing wrong, for I thought I might get wicked and hateful to myself, in the same way that many others seemed hateful to me. For so long, so long I had never felt my outside world happy; and if I got wicked I should lose my world of happy thoughts where my mother lived with me. That was my childish notion all through those years. Oh how long they were!" Mirah fell to musing again. "Had you no teaching about what was your duty?" said Mrs. Meyrick. She did not like to say "religion"--finding herself on inspection rather dim as to what the Hebrew religion might have turned into at this date. "No--only that I ought to do what my father wished. He did not follow our religion at New York, and I think he wanted me not to know much about it. But because my mother used to take me to the synagogue, and I remembered sitting on her knee and looking through the railing and hearing the chanting and singing, I longed to go. One day when I was quite small I slipped out and tried to find the synagogue, but I lost myself a long while till a peddler questioned me and took me home. My father, missing me, had been much in fear, and was very angry. I too had been so frightened at losing myself that it was long before I thought of venturing out again. But after Signora left us we went to rooms where our landlady was a Jewess and observed her religion. I asked her to take me with her to the synagogue; and I read in her prayer-books and Bible, and when I had money enough I asked her to buy me books of my own, for these books seemed a closer companionship with my mother: I knew that she must have looked at the very words and said them. In that way I have come to know a little of our religion, and the history of our people, besides piecing together what I read in plays and other books about Jews and Jewesses; because I was sure my mother obeyed her religion. I had left off asking my father about her. It is very dreadful to say it, but I began to disbelieve him. I had found that he did not always tell the truth, and made promises without meaning to keep them; and that raised my suspicion that my mother and brother were still alive though he had told me they were dead. For in going over the past again as I got older and knew more, I felt sure that my mother had been deceived, and had expected to see us back again after a very little while; and my father taking me on his knee and telling me that my mother and brother were both dead seemed to me now but a bit of acting, to set my mind at rest. The cruelty of that falsehood sank into me, and I hated all untruth because of it. I wrote to my mother secretly: I knew the street, Colman Street, where we lived, and that it was not Blackfriars Bridge and the Coburg, and that our name was Cohen then, though my father called us Lapidoth, because, he said, it was a name of his forefathers in Poland. I sent my letter secretly; but no answer came, and I thought there was no hope for me. Our life in America did not last much longer. My father suddenly told me we were to pack up and go to Hamburg, and I was rather glad. I hoped we might get among a different sort of people, and I knew German quite well--some German plays almost all by heart. My father spoke it better than he spoke English. I was thirteen then, and I seemed to myself quite old--I knew so much, and yet so little. I think other children cannot feel as I did. I had often wished that I had been drowned when I was going away from my mother. But I set myself to obey and suffer: what else could I do? One day when we were on our voyage, a new thought came into my mind. I was not very ill that time, and I kept on deck a good deal. My father acted and sang and joked to amuse people on board, and I used often to hear remarks about him. One day, when I was looking at the sea and nobody took notice of me, I overheard a gentleman say, 'Oh, he is one of those clever Jews--a rascal, I shouldn't wonder. There's no race like them for cunning in the men and beauty in the women. I wonder what market he means that daughter for.' When I heard this it darted into my mind that the unhappiness in my life came from my being a Jewess, and that always to the end the world would think slightly of me and that I must bear it, for I should be judged by that name; and it comforted me to believe that my suffering was part of the affliction of my people, my part in the long song of mourning that has been going on through ages and ages. For if many of our race were wicked and made merry in their wickedness--what was that but part of the affliction borne by the just among them, who were despised for the sins of their brethren?--But you have not rejected me." Mirah had changed her tone in this last sentence, having suddenly reflected that at this moment she had reason not for complaint but for gratitude. "And we will try to save you from being judged unjustly by others, my poor child," said Mrs. Meyrick, who had now given up all attempt at going on with her work, and sat listening with folded hands and a face hardly less eager than Mab's would have been. "Go on, go on: tell me all." "After that we lived in different towns--Hamburg and Vienna, the longest. I began to study singing again: and my father always got money about the theatres. I think he brought a good deal of money from America, I never knew why we left. For some time he was in great spirits about my singing, and he made me rehearse parts and act continually. He looked forward to my coming out in the opera. But by-and-by it seemed that my voice would never be strong enough--it did not fulfill its promise. My master at Vienna said, 'Don't strain it further: it will never do for the public:--it is gold, but a thread of gold dust.' My father was bitterly disappointed: we were not so well off at that time. I think I have not quite told you what I felt about my father. I knew he was fond of me and meant to indulge me, and that made me afraid of hurting him; but he always mistook what would please me and give me happiness. It was his nature to take everything lightly; and I soon left off asking him any questions about things that I cared for much, because he always turned them off with a joke. He would even ridicule our own people; and once when he had been imitating their movements and their tones in praying, only to make others laugh, I could not restrain myself--for I always had an anger in my heart about my mother--and when we were alone, I said, 'Father, you ought not to mimic our own people before Christians who mock them: would it not be bad if I mimicked you, that they might mock you?' But he only shrugged his shoulders and laughed and pinched my chin, and said, 'You couldn't do it, my dear." It was this way of turning off everything, that made a great wall between me and my father, and whatever I felt most I took the most care to hide from him. For there were some things--when they were laughed at I could not bear it: the world seemed like a hell to me. Is this world and all the life upon it only like a farce or a vaudeville, where you find no great meanings? Why then are there tragedies and grand operas, where men do difficult things and choose to suffer? I think it is silly to speak of all things as a joke. And I saw that his wishing me to sing the greatest music, and parts in grand operas, was only wishing for what would fetch the greatest price. That hemmed in my gratitude for his affectionateness, and the tenderest feeling I had toward him was pity. Yes, I did sometimes pity him. He had aged and changed. Now he was no longer so lively. I thought he seemed worse--less good to others than to me. Every now and then in the latter years his gaiety went away suddenly, and he would sit at home silent and gloomy; or he would come in and fling himself down and sob, just as I have done myself when I have been in trouble. If I put my hand on his knee and say, 'What is the matter, father?' he would make no answer, but would draw my arm round his neck and put his arm round me and go on crying. There never came any confidence between us; but oh, I was sorry for him. At those moments I knew he must feel his life bitter, and I pressed my cheek against his head and prayed. Those moments were what most bound me to him; and I used to think how much my mother once loved him, else she would not have married him. "But soon there came the dreadful time. We had been at Pesth and we came back to Vienna. In spite of what my master Leo had said, my father got me an engagement, not at the opera, but to take singing parts at a suburb theatre in Vienna. He had nothing to do with the theatre then; I did not understand what he did, but I think he was continually at a gambling house, though he was careful always about taking me to the theatre. I was very miserable. The plays I acted in were detestable to me. Men came about us and wanted to talk to me: women and men seemed to look at me with a sneering smile; it was no better than a fiery furnace. Perhaps I make it worse than it was--you don't know that life: but the glare and the faces, and my having to go on and act and sing what I hated, and then see people who came to stare at me behind the scenes--it was all so much worse than when I was a little girl. I went through with it; I did it; I had set my mind to obey my father and work, for I saw nothing better that I could do. But I felt that my voice was getting weaker, and I knew that my acting was not good except when it was not really acting, but the part was one that I could be myself in, and some feeling within me carried me along. That was seldom. "Then, in the midst of all this, the news came to me one morning that my father had been taken to prison, and he had sent for me. He did not tell me the reason why he was there, but he ordered me to go to an address he gave me, to see a Count who would be able to get him released. The address was to some public rooms where I was to ask for the Count, and beg him to come to my father. I found him, and recognized him as a gentleman whom I had seen the other night for the first time behind the scenes. That agitated me, for I remembered his way of looking at me and kissing my hand--I thought it was in mockery. But I delivered my errand, and he promised to go immediately to my father, who came home again that very evening, bringing the Count with him. I now began to feel a horrible dread of this man, for he worried me with his attentions, his eyes were always on me: I felt sure that whatever else there might be in his mind toward me, below it all there was scorn for the Jewess and the actress. And when he came to me the next day in the theatre and would put my shawl around me, a terror took hold of me; I saw that my father wanted me to look pleased. The Count was neither very young nor very old; his hair and eyes were pale; he was tall and walked heavily, and his face was heavy and grave except when he looked at me. He smiled at me, and his smile went through me with horror: I could not tell why he was so much worse to me than other men. Some feelings are like our hearing: they come as sounds do, before we know their reason. My father talked to me about him when we were alone, and praised him--said what a good friend he had been. I said nothing, because I supposed he had got my father out of prison. When the Count came again, my father left the room. He asked me if I liked being on the stage. I said No, I only acted in obedience to my father. He always spoke French, and called me _petite ange_ and such things, which I felt insulting. I knew he meant to make love to me, and I had it firmly in my mind that a nobleman and one who was not a Jew could have no love for me that was not half contempt. But then he told me that I need not act any longer; he wished me to visit him at his beautiful place, where I might be queen of everything. It was difficult to me to speak, I felt so shaken with anger: I could only say, 'I would rather stay on the stage forever,' and I left him there. Hurrying out of the room I saw my father sauntering in the passage. My heart was crushed. I went past him and locked myself up. It had sunk into me that my father was in a conspiracy with that man against me. But the next day he persuaded me to come out: he said that I had mistaken everything, and he would explain: if I did not come out and act and fulfill my engagement, we should be ruined and he must starve. So I went on acting, and for a week or more the Count never came near me. My father changed our lodgings, and kept at home except when he went to the theatre with me. He began one day to speak discouragingly of my acting, and say, I could never go on singing in public--I should lose my voice--I ought to think of my future, and not put my nonsensical feelings between me and my fortune. He said, 'What will you do? You will be brought down to sing and beg at people's doors. You have had a splendid offer and ought to accept it.' I could not speak: a horror took possession of me when I thought of my mother and of him. I felt for the first time that I should not do wrong to leave him. But the next day he told me that he had put an end to my engagement at the theatre, and that we were to go to Prague. I was getting suspicious of everything, and my will was hardening to act against him. It took us two days to pack and get ready; and I had it in my mind that I might be obliged to run away from my father, and then I would come to London and try if it were possible to find my mother. I had a little money, and I sold some things to get more. I packed a few clothes in a little bag that I could carry with me, and I kept my mind on the watch. My father's silence--his letting drop that subject of the Count's offer--made me feel sure that there was a plan against me. I felt as if it had been a plan to take me to a madhouse. I once saw a picture of a madhouse, that I could never forget; it seemed to me very much like some of the life I had seen--the people strutting, quarreling, leering--the faces with cunning and malice in them. It was my will to keep myself from wickedness; and I prayed for help. I had seen what despised women were: and my heart turned against my father, for I saw always behind him that man who made me shudder. You will think I had not enough reason for my suspicions, and perhaps I had not, outside my own feeling; but it seemed to me that my mind had been lit up, and all that might be stood out clear and sharp. If I slept, it was only to see the same sort of things, and I could hardly sleep at all. Through our journey I was everywhere on the watch. I don't know why, but it came before me like a real event, that my father would suddenly leave me and I should find myself with the Count where I could not get away from him. I thought God was warning me: my mother's voice was in my soul. It was dark when we reached Prague, and though the strange bunches of lamps were lit it was difficult to distinguish faces as we drove along the street. My father chose to sit outside--he was always smoking now--and I watched everything in spite of the darkness. I do believe I could see better then than I ever did before: the strange clearness within seemed to have got outside me. It was not my habit to notice faces and figures much in the street; but this night I saw every one; and when we passed before a great hotel I caught sight only of a back that was passing in--the light of the great bunch of lamps a good way off fell on it. I knew it--before the face was turned, as it fell into shadow, I knew who it was. Help came to me. I feel sure help came. I did not sleep that night. I put on my plainest things--the cloak and hat I have worn ever since; and I sat watching for the light and the sound of the doors being unbarred. Some one rose early--at four o'clock, to go to the railway. That gave me courage. I slipped out, with my little bag under my cloak, and none noticed me. I had been a long while attending to the railway guide that I might learn the way to England; and before the sun had risen I was in the train for Dresden. Then I cried for joy. I did not know whether my money would last out, but I trusted. I could sell the things in my bag, and the little rings in my ears, and I could live on bread only. My only terror was lest my father should follow me. But I never paused. I came on, and on, and on, only eating bread now and then. When I got to Brussels I saw that I should not have enough money, and I sold all that I could sell; but here a strange thing happened. Putting my hand into the pocket of my cloak, I found a half-napoleon. Wondering and wondering how it came there, I remembered that on the way from Cologne there was a young workman sitting against me. I was frightened at every one, and did not like to be spoken to. At first he tried to talk, but when he saw that I did not like it, he left off. It was a long journey; I ate nothing but a bit of bread, and he once offered me some of the food he brought in, but I refused it. I do believe it was he who put that bit of gold in my pocket. Without it I could hardly have got to Dover, and I did walk a good deal of the way from Dover to London. I knew I should look like a miserable beggar-girl. I wanted not to look very miserable, because if I found my mother it would grieve her to see me so. But oh, how vain my hope was that she would be there to see me come! As soon as I set foot in London, I began to ask for Lambeth and Blackfriars Bridge, but they were a long way off, and I went wrong. At last I got to Blackfriars Bridge and asked for Colman Street. People shook their heads. None knew it. I saw it in my mind--our doorsteps, and the white tiles hung in the windows, and the large brick building opposite with wide doors. But there was nothing like it. At last when I asked a tradesman where the Coburg Theatre and Colman Street were, he said, 'Oh, my little woman, that's all done away with. The old streets have been pulled down; everything is new.' I turned away and felt as if death had laid a hand on me. He said: 'Stop, stop! young woman; what is it you're wanting with Colman Street, eh?' meaning well, perhaps. But his tone was what I could not bear; and how could I tell him what I wanted? I felt blinded and bewildered with a sudden shock. I suddenly felt that I was very weak and weary, and yet where could I go? for I looked so poor and dusty, and had nothing with me--I looked like a street-beggar. And I was afraid of all places where I could enter. I lost my trust. I thought I was forsaken. It seemed that I had been in a fever of hope--delirious--all the way from Prague: I thought that I was helped, and I did nothing but strain my mind forward and think of finding my mother; and now--there I stood in a strange world. All who saw me would think ill of me, and I must herd with beggars. I stood on the bridge and looked along the river. People were going on to a steamboat. Many of them seemed poor, and I felt as if it would be a refuge to get away from the streets; perhaps the boat would take me where I could soon get into a solitude. I had still some pence left, and I bought a loaf when I went on the boat. I wanted to have a little time and strength to think of life and death. How could I live? And now again it seemed that if ever I were to find my mother again, death was the way to her. I ate, that I might have strength to think. The boat set me down at a place along the river--I don't know where--and it was late in the evening. I found some large trees apart from the road, and I sat down under them that I might rest through the night. Sleep must have soon come to me, and when I awoke it was morning. The birds were singing, and the dew was white about me, I felt chill and oh, so lonely! I got up and walked and followed the river a long way and then turned back again. There was no reason why I should go anywhere. The world about me seemed like a vision that was hurrying by while I stood still with my pain. My thoughts were stronger than I was; they rushed in and forced me to see all my life from the beginning; ever since I was carried away from my mother I had felt myself a lost child taken up and used by strangers, who did not care what my life was to me, but only what I could do for them. It seemed all a weary wandering and heart-loneliness--as if I had been forced to go to merrymakings without the expectation of joy. And now it was worse. I was lost again, and I dreaded lest any stranger should notice me and speak to me. I had a terror of the world. None knew me; all would mistake me. I had seen so many in my life who made themselves glad with scorning, and laughed at another's shame. What could I do? This life seemed to be closing in upon me with a wall of fire--everywhere there was scorching that made me shrink. The high sunlight made me shrink. And I began to think that my despair was the voice of God telling me to die. But it would take me long to die of hunger. Then I thought of my people, how they had been driven from land to land and been afflicted, and multitudes had died of misery in their wandering--was I the first? And in the wars and troubles when Christians were cruelest, our fathers had sometimes slain their children and afterward themselves: it was to save them from being false apostates. That seemed to make it right for me to put an end to my life; for calamity had closed me in too, and I saw no pathway but to evil. But my mind got into war with itself, for there were contrary things in it. I knew that some had held it wrong to hasten their own death, though they were in the midst of flames; and while I had some strength left it was a longing to bear if I ought to bear--else where was the good of all my life? It had not been happy since the first years: when the light came every morning I used to think, 'I will bear it.' But always before I had some hope; now it was gone. With these thoughts I wandered and wandered, inwardly crying to the Most High, from whom I should not flee in death more than in life--though I had no strong faith that He cared for me. The strength seemed departing from my soul; deep below all my cries was the feeling that I was alone and forsaken. The more I thought the wearier I got, till it seemed I was not thinking at all, but only the sky and the river and the Eternal God were in my soul. And what was it whether I died or lived? If I lay down to die in the river, was it more than lying down to sleep?--for there too I committed my soul--I gave myself up. I could not bear memories any more; I could only feel what was present in me--it was all one longing to cease from my weary life, which seemed only a pain outside the great peace that I might enter into. That was how it was. When the evening came and the sun was gone, it seemed as if that was all I had to wait for. And a new strength came into me to will what I would do. You know what I did. I was going to die. You know what happened--did he not tell you? Faith came to me again; I was not forsaken. He told you how he found me?" Mrs. Meyrick gave no audible answer, but pressed her lips against Mirah's forehead. * * * * * "She's just a pearl; the mud has only washed her," was the fervid little woman's closing commentary when, _tete--tete_ with Deronda in the back parlor that evening, she had conveyed Mirah's story to him with much vividness. "What is your feeling about a search for this mother?" said Deronda. "Have you no fears? I have, I confess." "Oh, I believe the mother's good," said Mrs. Meyrick, with rapid decisiveness; "or _was_ good. She may be dead--that's my fear. A good woman, you may depend: you may know it by the scoundrel the father is. Where did the child get her goodness from? Wheaten flour has to be accounted for." Deronda was rather disappointed at this answer; he had wanted a confirmation of his own judgment, and he began to put in demurrers. The argument about the mother would not apply to the brother; and Mrs. Meyrick admitted that the brother might be an ugly likeness of the father. Then, as to advertising, if the name was Cohen, you might as well advertise for two undescribed terriers; and here Mrs. Meyrick helped him, for the idea of an advertisement, already mentioned to Mirah, had roused the poor child's terror; she was convinced that her father would see it--he saw everything in the papers. Certainly there were safer means than advertising; men might be set to work whose business it was to find missing persons; but Deronda wished Mrs. Meyrick to feel with him that it would be wiser to wait, before seeking a dubious--perhaps a deplorable result; especially as he was engaged to go abroad the next week for a couple of months. If a search were made, he would like to be at hand, so that Mrs. Meyrick might not be unaided in meeting any consequences--supposing that she would generously continue to watch over Mirah. "We should be very jealous of any one who took the task from us," said Mrs. Meyrick. "She will stay under my roof; there is Hans's old room for her." "Will she be content to wait?" said Deronda, anxiously. "No trouble there. It is not her nature to run into planning and devising: only to submit. See how she submitted to that father! It was a wonder to herself how she found the will and contrivance to run away from him. About finding her mother, her only notion now is to trust; since you were sent to save her and we are good to her, she trusts that her mother will be found in the same unsought way. And when she is talking I catch her feeling like a child." Mrs. Meyrick hoped that the sum Deronda put into her hands as a provision for Mirah's wants was more than would be needed; after a little while Mirah would perhaps like to occupy herself as the other girls did, and make herself independent. Deronda pleaded that she must need a long rest. "Oh, yes; we will hurry nothing," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Rely upon it, she shall be taken tender care of. If you like to give me your address abroad, I will write to let you know how we get on. It is not fair that we should have all the pleasure of her salvation to ourselves. And besides, I want to make believe that I am doing something for you as well as for Mirah." "That is no make-believe. What should I have done without you last night? Everything would have gone wrong. I shall tell Hans that the best of having him for a friend is, knowing his mother." After that they joined the girls in the other room, where Mirah was seated placidly, while the others were telling her what they knew about Mr. Deronda--his goodness to Hans, and all the virtues that Hans had reported of him. "Kate burns a pastille before his portrait every day," said Mab. "And I carry his signature in a little black-silk bag round my neck to keep off the cramp. And Amy says the multiplication-table in his name. We must all do something extra in honor of him, now he has brought you to us." "I suppose he is too great a person to want anything," said Mirah, smiling at Mab, and appealing to the graver Amy. "He is perhaps very high in the world?" "He is very much above us in rank," said Amy. "He is related to grand people. I dare say he leans on some of the satin cushions we prick our fingers over." "I am glad he is of high rank," said Mirah, with her usual quietness. "Now, why are you glad of that?" said Amy, rather suspicious of this sentiment, and on the watch for Jewish peculiarities which had not appeared. "Because I have always disliked men of high rank before." "Oh, Mr. Deronda is not so very high," said Kate, "He need not hinder us from thinking ill of the whole peerage and baronetage if we like." When he entered, Mirah rose with the same look of grateful reverence that she had lifted to him the evening before: impossible to see a creature freer at once from embarrassment and boldness. Her theatrical training had left no recognizable trace; probably her manners had not much changed since she played the forsaken child at nine years of age; and she had grown up in her simplicity and truthfulness like a little flower-seed that absorbs the chance confusion of its surrounding into its own definite mould of beauty. Deronda felt that he was making acquaintance with something quite new to him in the form of womanhood. For Mirah was not childlike from ignorance: her experience of evil and trouble was deeper and stranger than his own. He felt inclined to watch her and listen to her as if she had come from a far off shore inhabited by a race different from our own. But for that very reason he made his visit brief with his usual activity of imagination as to how his conduct might affect others, he shrank from what might seem like curiosity or the assumption of a right to know as much as he pleased of one to whom he had done a service. For example, he would have liked to hear her sing, but he would have felt the expression of such a wish to be rudeness in him--since she could not refuse, and he would all the while have a sense that she was being treated like one whose accomplishments were to be ready on demand. And whatever reverence could be shown to woman, he was bent on showing to this girl. Why? He gave himself several good reasons; but whatever one does with a strong unhesitating outflow of will has a store of motive that it would be hard to put into words. Some deeds seem little more than interjections which give vent to the long passion of a life. So Deronda soon took his farewell for the two months during which he expected to be absent from London, and in a few days he was on his way with Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger to Leubronn. He had fulfilled his intention of telling them about Mirah. The baronet was decidedly of opinion that the search for the mother and brother had better be let alone. Lady Mallinger was much interested in the poor girl, observing that there was a society for the conversion of the Jews, and that it was to be hoped Mirah would embrace Christianity; but perceiving that Sir Hugo looked at her with amusement, she concluded that she had said something foolish. Lady Mallinger felt apologetically about herself as a woman who had produced nothing but daughters in a case where sons were required, and hence regarded the apparent contradictions of the world as probably due to the weakness of her own understanding. But when she was much puzzled, it was her habit to say to herself, "I will ask Daniel." Deronda was altogether a convenience in the family; and Sir Hugo too, after intending to do the best for him, had begun to feel that the pleasantest result would be to have this substitute for a son always ready at his elbow. This was the history of Deronda, so far as he knew it, up to the time of that visit to Leubronn in which he saw Gwendolen Harleth at the gaming-table.

Mirah said that she had slept well that night; and when she came down in Mab's black dress, her dark hair curling as it gradually dried after its bath, she looked like one who was beginning to take comfort after the long sorrow which had paled her cheek and made blue semicircles under her eyes. Mab ushered her down - with some pride in the pair of tiny felt slippers which she had rushed out to buy because there were no shoes in the house small enough for Mirah. "Oh, if you please, mamma!" cried Mab, as Mirah entered the parlour; "look at the slippers, how beautifully they fit!'" Mirah looked down at her own feet in a childlike way and then smiled at Mrs. Meyrick, who said inwardly, "One could hardly imagine this creature having an evil thought. But I should be cautious." Returning Mirah's smile, she said, "I fear the feet have had to sustain their burden too often lately. But to-day she will rest and be my companion." "And she will tell you so many things and I shall not hear them," grumbled Mab, who had to go to pupils. Kate was already gone to make sketches along the river, and Amy was away on business errands. It was what the mother wished, to be alone with this stranger, whose story must be sorrowful, yet needed to be told. Soft air came in through the open window of the small front parlour; the walls showed a glorious silent cloud of witnesses - the Virgin soaring amid her cherubic escort; Prophets and Sibyls; the Last Supper; grave Holbein and Rembrandt heads; the Tragic Muse; Italian poets - all there in black and white. The neat mother who had weathered her troubles cheerfully was sorting wool for her embroidery. Hafiz purred on the window-ledge, the clock on the mantelpiece ticked without hurry, and the room was peaceful. Mrs. Meyrick thought that this quiet might invite her companion to speak, and chose not to disturb it. Mirah sat opposite, her hands clasped on her lap, her ankles crossed, her eyes travelling slowly over the objects around her, but finally resting with a sort of reverence on Mrs. Meyrick. At length she began to speak softly. "I remember my mother's face better than anything; yet I was not seven when I was taken away, and I am nineteen now." "I can understand that," said Mrs. Meyrick. "The earliest things last the longest." "Oh, yes, it was the earliest. I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother's face: it was so near to me, and her arms were round me, and she sang to me. One hymn she sang so often: and she taught it me. It was the first I ever sang. They were always Hebrew hymns; and because I never knew the meaning of the words they seemed full of our love and happiness. When I lay in my little bed, she used to bend over me, and sing in a sweet, low voice. I can dream myself back into that time when I am awake, and it often comes back to me in my sleep - my hand is very little, I put it up to her face and she kisses it. Sometimes in my dreams I begin to tremble and think we are both dead; but then I wake up and my hand lies like this, and for a moment I hardly know myself. But if I could see my mother again I should know her." "You must expect some change after twelve years," said Mrs. Meyrick, gently. "I am sure her heart has been heavy for want of me. But to feel her joy if we could meet again, and I could give her comfort after all her mourning! If that could be, I should be glad that I have lived through my trouble. I did despair. The world seemed miserable and wicked; nobody helped me, I felt that my mother was dead, and death was the only way to her. But then in the last moment, when I longed for the water to close over me, then goodness came to me, and I felt trust in the living. And - it is strange - but I began to hope that she was living too. And now this morning, peace and hope have come into me like a flood. I can wait; because I hope and believe and am grateful - oh, so grateful! You have not thought evil of me - you have not despised me." Mirah spoke with low-toned fervour. "Many others would have felt as we do, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, feeling a mist come over her eyes as she looked at her work. "But I did not meet them." "How was it that you were taken from your mother?" "It is dreadful to speak of, yet I must tell you everything. My father took me away. I thought we were only going on a little journey; but we went on board a ship, and got farther and farther away from the land. Then I was ill; and I thought it would never end. But at last we landed. I knew nothing then, and believed my father when he said I should soon go back to my mother. But it was America we had reached, and it was long years before we came back to Europe. "At first I often asked my father when we were going back; and I tried to learn writing fast, because I wanted to write to my mother; but one day when he found me writing a letter, he took me on his knee and told me that my mother and brother were dead; that was why we did not go back. I remember my brother a little; he carried me once; but he was not always at home. I believed my father when he said that they were dead. I saw them under the earth, with their eyes forever closed. I never thought of its not being true; and I used to cry every night in my bed. Then when she came so often to me, in my sleep, I thought she must be living around me though I could not always see her, and that comforted me. Very often I used to shut my eyes and try to see her and to hear her singing. I came to do that at last without shutting my eyes." Mirah paused with a sweet content in her face, while she looked out toward the river. "Still your father was not unkind to you, I hope," said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously. "No; he petted me, and took pains to teach me. He was an actor. He had not always been an actor; he had been a teacher, and knew many languages. His acting was not very good, I think; but he managed the stage, and wrote and translated plays. An Italian Signora, a singer, lived with us a long time. They both taught me, and I had a master besides, who made me learn by heart and recite. I worked hard, though I was so little; I was not nine when I first went on the stage. I could easily learn things, and I was not afraid. But I hated our way of life. My father had money, and we had finery in a disorderly way; always there were men and women coming and going; laughing and disputing, strutting, snapping fingers, jeering - though many petted and caressed me. But I remembered my mother and shrank away into my thoughts; I read plays and poetry, Shakespeare and Schiller, and learned evil and good. "My father began to believe that I might be a great singer: my voice was considered wonderful for a child; and he had the best teaching for me. But it was painful that he boasted of me, and made me sing for show as if I had been a musical box. I did it without any trouble; but the clapping was hateful to me; and the praise I had seemed hard and unloving: I missed the love and trust I had been born into. I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about me: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays, and made my world out of it; and it was like a sharp knife that the two sorts of life jarred so with each other - women seeming good and gentle on the stage, and directly afterwards using coarse, ugly manners. "Signora said one day, 'She will never be an artist: she has no notion of being anybody but herself. That does very well now, but by-and-by she will have no more face and action than a singing-bird.' My father was angry, and they quarrelled. I sat alone and cried, because I saw a long unhappy future before me. I did not want to be an artist; but my father expected it. "Then Signora left us, and a governess came, but I still acted from time to time. I wished to get away; but I could not tell where to go, and I was afraid of the world. Besides, I felt it would be wrong to leave my father: I dreaded doing wrong and getting wicked. For so long, I had never felt my outside world happy; and if I got wicked I should lose my world of happy thoughts where my mother lived with me. That was my childish notion all through those years. Oh, how long they were!" Mirah fell to musing again. "Had you no teaching about your duty?" said Mrs. Meyrick. She did not like to say "religion" - finding herself rather vague as to what the Hebrew religion involved. "No - only that I ought to do what my father wished. He did not follow our religion at New York. But because my mother used to take me to the synagogue, and I remembered sitting on her knee and looking through the railing and hearing the chanting and singing, I longed to go. Once when I was small I slipped out and tried to find the synagogue, but I lost myself till a peddler questioned me and took me home. My father was very angry, and I had been so frightened that it was long before I thought of venturing out again. "After Signora left, we went to rooms where our landlady was a practising Jewess. I asked her to take me to the synagogue; and I read in her prayer-books and Bible, and asked her to buy me books of my own, for they seemed a closer companionship with my mother: I knew that she must have looked at the very words and said them. In that way I have come to know a little of our religion, and the history of our people. "I was sure my mother obeyed her religion, but I had stopped asking my father about her. It is dreadful to say it, but I began to disbelieve him. I found that he did not always tell the truth or keep his promises; and I suspected that my mother and brother were still alive. For in going over the past, I felt sure that my mother had been deceived, and had expected to see us again after a very little while; and my father had told me a falsehood. The cruelty of it sank into me, and I hated all untruth because of it. "I wrote to my mother secretly: I knew the street, Colman Street, where we lived, and that our name was Cohen then, though my father called us Lapidoth, which was a name of his forefathers in Poland. I sent my letter secretly; but no answer came, and I lost hope. Then my father suddenly told me we were to go to Hamburg, and I was glad. I hoped we might get among a different sort of people, and I knew German quite well. I was thirteen then, and I felt old - I knew so much, and yet so little. But I set myself to obey and suffer: what else could I do? "One day on our voyage, a new thought came to me. My father sang and joked to amuse people on board, and I overheard a gentleman say, 'Oh, he is one of those clever Jews - a rascal, I shouldn't wonder. I wonder what market he means that daughter for.' Then it darted into my mind that the unhappiness in my life came from my being a Jewess, and that always the world would think little of me and judge me by that name; and it comforted me to believe that my suffering was part of the affliction of my people, my part in the long song of mourning that has been going on through ages and ages. But you have not rejected me." Mirah said this last sentence in a different tone of voice. "And we will try to save you from being judged unjustly by others, my poor child," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Go on: tell me all." "After that we lived in Hamburg and Vienna. I began to study singing again: and my father made money in theatres. He made me rehearse continually, and looked forward to my coming out in the opera. But it seemed that my voice would never be strong enough. My master at Vienna said, 'Don't strain it further: it will never do for the public:- it is gold, but a thread of gold dust.' My father was bitterly disappointed. I knew he was fond of me, and that made me afraid of hurting him; but he always mistook what would please me and give me happiness. It was his nature to take everything lightly; and I soon stopped asking him questions about things that I cared for, because he always turned them off with a joke. He would even ridicule our own people, imitating them to make others laugh. "Once, I said, 'Father, you ought not to mimic our own people before Christians who mock them: would it not be bad if I mimicked you, so that they might mock you?' But he only shrugged and laughed, and said, 'You couldn't do it, my dear.' This mockery made a great wall between me and my father. Is this world like a farce, with no great meanings? Why then are there tragedies and grand operas? I think it is silly to speak of all things as a joke. And I saw that his wishing me to sing the greatest music, was only to fetch the greatest price. "I did sometimes pity him. He had aged; he was no longer so lively. I thought he seemed less good to others than to me. Sometimes he would sit at home silent and gloomy; or fling himself down and sob. If I asked him what was the matter, he would not answer, but would put his arm round me and go on crying. Oh, I was sorry for him then. I knew he must feel his life bitter, and I pressed my cheek against his head and prayed. Those moments bound me to him; and I used to think how much my mother must have once loved him. "But soon there came the dreadful time. My father got me singing parts at a theatre in Vienna. I think he spent his own time at a gambling house. I was very miserable. The plays I acted in were detestable to me: it was like a fiery furnace. The glare and the faces, and having to go on and act and sing what I hated, and then to see people who came to stare at me behind the scenes - it was all much worse than when I was little. I went through with it; I had set my mind to obey my father and work. But I felt that my voice was getting weaker. "Then, in the midst of all this, news came to me that my father had been taken to prison, and had sent for me. He did not tell me why he was there, but he ordered me to go to an address he gave me, to see a Count who would get him released. The address was to some public rooms; I found the Count, and recognized him as a gentleman whom I had seen the other night for the first time behind the scenes. That agitated me, for I remembered his way of looking at me and kissing my hand. But I delivered my errand, and he promised to go immediately to my father, who came home that very evening, bringing the Count. "I now began to feel a horrible dread of this man, for he worried me with his attentions. His eyes were always on me: when he came to the theatre the next day and wanted to put my shawl around me, a terror took hold of me. The Count walked heavily, and his face was heavy and grave except when he looked at me. He smiled at me, and his smile went through me with horror: I could not tell why. My father praised him to me, saying what a good friend he had been, and when the Count came again, my father left the room. The Count asked me if I liked being on stage. I said No, I only acted in obedience to my father. Then he told me that I need not act any longer; he wished me to visit him at his beautiful place, where I might be queen of everything. It was difficult for me to speak, I felt so shaken with anger: I could only say, 'I would rather stay on the stage forever.' I hurried out of the room and saw my father sauntering in the passage. My heart was crushed. I went past him and locked myself up. "Next day my father persuaded me to come out: he said that I had mistaken everything: if I did not come out and act and fulfil my engagement, we should be ruined and he must starve. So I went on acting, and for a week the Count never came near me. My father changed our lodgings, and stayed at home. He began one day to say, I could never go on singing in public - I should lose my voice - I ought to think of my future, and not put nonsensical feelings between me and my fortune. He said, 'You have had a splendid offer and ought to accept it.' I could not speak: a horror took possession of me. I felt for the first time that I should not do wrong to leave him. "But the next day he told me that we were to go to Prague. It took us two days to get ready; and I thought that I might be obliged to run away from my father, and then I would come to London and try to find my mother. I had a little money, and I sold some things to get more. I packed a few clothes in a little bag, and I kept on the watch. My father's silence about the Count's offer made me feel sure that there was a plan against me. I prayed for help. I had seen what despised women were: and my heart turned against my father, for I saw always behind him that man who made me shudder. "You will think I had not enough reason for my suspicions, and perhaps I had not; but it seemed to me that my mind had been lit up, and that all was clear and sharp. I could hardly sleep. Throughout our journey I was always on the watch. I feared that my father would suddenly leave me and I should find myself with the Count. "It was dark when we reached Prague, and difficult to distinguish faces as we drove along the street. I watched everything in spite of the darkness; and when we passed before a great hotel I caught sight of a back that was passing. I knew it - before the face was turned, I knew who it was. Help came to me. I did not sleep that night. I put on my plainest things, and I sat watching for the light and the sound of the doors being unbarred. Some one rose at four o'clock, to go to the railway. That gave me courage. I slipped out, with my little bag under my cloak, and none noticed me. I had been reading the railway guide so that I might learn the way to England; and before the sun had risen I was in the train for Dresden. Then I cried for joy. I did not know whether my money would last out, but I trusted. I could sell the things in my bag, and the little rings in my ears, and I could live on bread only. My only terror was lest my father should follow me. But I never paused. I came on, and on, and on, only eating bread now and then. "When I got to Brussels I saw that I should not have enough money, and I sold all that I could; but here a strange thing happened. Putting my hand into the pocket of my cloak, I found a half-napoleon. Wondering how it came there, I remembered that on the way from Cologne there was a young workman sitting next to me. I was frightened at everyone, and did not like to be spoken to. At first he tried to talk, but when he saw I did not like it, he left off. It was a long journey; I ate nothing but a bit of bread, and he offered me some of his food, but I refused it. I believe he put that bit of gold in my pocket. Without it I could hardly have got to Dover, and I did walk a good deal of the way from Dover to London. I knew I should look like a miserable beggar-girl, and I felt it would grieve my mother to see me so. "As soon as I reached London, I began to ask for Lambeth and Blackfriars Bridge, but they were a long way off, and I went wrong. At last I got to Blackfriars Bridge and asked for Colman Street. People shook their heads. None knew it. A tradesman said, 'Oh, that's done away with. The old streets have been pulled down; everything is new.' I felt as if death had laid a hand on me. I felt blinded, weak and weary, and yet where could I go? I thought I was forsaken. It seemed that I had been in a fever of hope - delirious - all the way from Prague: and now I stood in a strange world. I crossed the bridge and looked along the river. "People were going on to a steamboat; perhaps that would take me where I could soon find solitude. I bought a loaf when I went on the boat. I wanted to have a little time and strength to think of life and death. How could I live? It seemed that death was the way to find my mother. The boat set me down at a place along the river. I sat down under some trees that I might rest through the night. When I awoke the birds were singing, and the dew was white about me. I felt chill and oh, so lonely! "I got up and walked along the river. There was no reason why I should go anywhere. The world about me seemed like a vision that was hurrying by while I stood still with my pain. I saw all my life from the beginning; ever since I was carried away from my mother I had felt myself a lost child and used by strangers, who did not care what my life was to me, but only what I could do for them. And now I was lost again, and I dreaded lest any stranger should notice me. I had a terror of the world. What could I do? This life seemed to be closing in upon me with a scorching wall of fire that made me shrink. "I began to think that my despair was the voice of God telling me to die. Then I thought of my people, how they had been driven from land to land and been afflicted, and multitudes had died of misery in their wandering; and in the wars when Christians were cruellest, our fathers had sometimes slain their children and afterward themselves. That seemed to make it right for me to put an end to my life; but I knew that some held it wrong to hasten their own death, and while I had some strength left I ought to bear it - else where was the good of all my life? It had not been happy since the first years: every morning I used to think, 'I will bear it.' But always before I had some hope; now it was gone. "With these thoughts I wandered, inwardly crying to the Most High, though I had no strong faith that He cared for me. The strength seemed departing from my soul. The more I thought the wearier I got, till it seemed I was not thinking at all, but only the sky and the river and the Eternal God were in my soul. And what was it whether I died or lived? If I lay down to die in the river, was it more than lying down to sleep? I gave myself up to it. I could not bear memories any more; I could only feel a longing to cease from my weary life, and enter the great peace. That was how it was. When the evening came and the sun was gone, a new strength came into me to decide what I would do. You know what I did. You know what happened - did he not tell you? Faith came to me again; I was not forsaken. He told you how he found me?" Mrs. Meyrick gave no audible answer, but pressed her lips against Mirah's forehead. * * * * * "She's just a pearl; the mud has only washed her," was her closing comment to Deronda that evening, after she had related Mirah's story with much vividness. "What is your feeling about a search for this mother?" said Deronda. "Have you no fears? I have, I confess." "Oh, I believe the mother's good," said Mrs. Meyrick decisively; "or was good. She may be dead - that's my fear. You may know she was good by the scoundrel the father is. Where did the child get her goodness from?" Deronda was disappointed at this answer, for he had wanted a confirmation of his own judgment; but Mrs. Meyrick admitted that the brother might be an ugly likeness of the father. Then, as to advertising, if the name was Cohen, you might as well advertise for two undescribed terriers. The idea of an advertisement, already mentioned to Mirah, had roused the poor child's terror; she was convinced that her father would see it. Men might be set to work whose business it was to find missing persons; but Deronda wished to wait before seeking a dubious result; especially as he was soon to go abroad for a couple of months. If a search were made, he would like to be at hand, to help Mrs. Meyrick in meeting any consequences - supposing that she would generously continue to watch over Mirah. "Of course she will stay here," said Mrs. Meyrick; "there is Hans's old room for her." "Will she be content to wait?" "Yes; it is her nature to submit. See how she submitted to that father! It was a wonder to herself how she found the will to run away from him. As to finding her mother, since you were sent to save her, she trusts that her mother will be found in the same unsought way." Deronda gave her some money for Mirah's wants; but she expressed her hope that after a little while Mirah would perhaps like to work as the other girls did, and make herself independent. "We will hurry nothing," she said. "We will take tender care of her. I will write to let you know how we get on." They joined the girls in the other room, where Mirah was seated placidly while the others were telling her about Mr. Deronda's goodness to Hans. "Amy says the multiplication-table in his name," said Mab. "We must all do something in his honour, now he has brought you to us." "He is perhaps very high in the world?" asked Mirah. "He is very much above us in rank," said Amy. "I am glad," said Mirah quietly, "because I have always disliked men of high rank before." "Oh, Mr. Deronda is not so very high," said Kate. "He need not hinder us from thinking ill of the whole peerage if we like." When he entered, Mirah rose with a look of grateful reverence, free from either embarrassment or boldness. Her theatrical training had left no trace; she had grown up in her simplicity and truthfulness like a flower. Deronda felt that she was a form of womanhood quite new to him. For Mirah was not childlike from ignorance: her experience of trouble was deeper and stranger than his own. But he made his visit brief, shrinking from what might seem like curiosity or the assumption of a right to know as much as he pleased about her. He would have liked to hear her sing, but felt it would be rude to ask, since she could not refuse. He wished to show her due reverence. So Deronda soon took his farewell, and in a few days he was on his way with Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger to Leubronn. He had told them about Mirah; and the baronet felt decidedly that the search for the mother and brother had better be let alone. This was the history of Deronda up to that visit to Leubronn in which he saw Gwendolen Harleth at the gaming-table.

Daniel Deronda

Book 3 - MAIDENS CHOOSING | Chapter 20