“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.
CHAPTER LIII.
“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.