167636

GEORGE ELIOT
DANIEL DERONDA
2008 – All rights reserved
Non commercial use permitted
DANIEL DERONDA
BY GEORGE ELIOT
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I. THE SPOILED CHILD
" II. MEETING STREAMS
" III. MAIDENS CHOOSING
" IV. GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE
"
V. MORDECAI
" VI. REVELATIONS
" VII. THE MOTHER AND THE SON
" VIII. FRUIT AND SEED
DANIEL DERONDA.
BOOK I.--THE SPOILED CHILD.
CHAPTER I.
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even
science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his
sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate
grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle;
but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different
from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward,
divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought
really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us to
the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth,
it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our
story sets out.
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or
expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or
the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was
the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the
wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the
whole being consents?
She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda's mind was occupied in
gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a
ruined wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid
resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same species
of pleasure at a heavy cost of guilt mouldings, dark-toned color and
chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy--forming a suitable condenser
for human breath belonging, in great part, to the highest fashion, and not
easily procurable to be breathed in elsewhere in the like proportion, at
least by persons of little fashion.
It was near four o'clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was
well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a
light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional
monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously
constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried
crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent
on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his
knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for
the rest of his person in a fancy dress. He alone had his face turned
toward the doorway, and fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child
stationed as a masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant
show, stood close behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table.
About this table fifty or sixty persons were assembled, many in the outer
rows, where there was occasionally a deposit of new-comers, being mere
spectators, only that one of them, usually a woman, might now and then be
observed putting down a five-franc with a simpering air, just to see what
the passion of gambling really was. Those who were taking their pleasure
at a higher strength, and were absorbed in play, showed very distant
varieties of European type: Livonian and Spanish, Graeco-Italian and
miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian. Here
certainly was a striking admission of human equality. The white bejewelled
fingers of an English countess were very near touching a bony, yellow,
crab-like hand stretching a bared wrist to clutch a heap of coin--a hand
easy to sort with the square, gaunt face, deep-set eyes, grizzled
eyebrows, and ill-combed scanty hair which seemed a slight metamorphosis
of the vulture. And where else would her ladyship have graciously
consented to sit by that dry-lipped feminine figure prematurely old,
withered after short bloom like her artificial flowers, holding a shabby
velvet reticule before her, and occasionally putting in her mouth the
point with which she pricked her card? There too, very near the fair
countess, was a respectable London tradesman, blonde and soft-handed, his
sleek hair scrupulously parted behind and before, conscious of circulars
addressed to the nobility and gentry, whose distinguished patronage
enabled him to take his holidays fashionably, and to a certain extent in
their distinguished company. Not his gambler's passion that nullifies
appetite, but a well-fed leisure, which, in the intervals of winning money
in business and spending it showily, sees no better resource than winning
money in play and spending it yet more showily--reflecting always that
Providence had never manifested any disapprobation of his amusement, and
dispassionate enough to leave off if the sweetness of winning much and
seeing others lose had turned to the sourness of losing much and seeing
others win. For the vice of gambling lay in losing money at it. In his
bearing there might be something of the tradesman, but in his pleasures he
was fit to rank with the owners of the oldest titles. Standing close to
his chair was a handsome Italian, calm, statuesque, reaching across him to
place the first pile of napoleons from a new bagful just brought him by an
envoy with a scrolled mustache. The pile was in half a minute pushed over
to an old bewigged woman with eye-glasses pinching her nose. There was a
slight gleam, a faint mumbling smile about the lips of the old woman; but
the statuesque Italian remained impassive, and--probably secure in an
infallible system which placed his foot on the neck of chance--immediately
prepared a new pile. So did a man with the air of an emaciated beau or
worn-out libertine, who looked at life through one eye-glass, and held out
his hand tremulously when he asked for change. It could surely be no
severity of system, but rather some dream of white crows, or the induction
that the eighth of the month was lucky, which inspired the fierce yet
tottering impulsiveness of his play.
But, while every single player differed markedly from every other, there
was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a
mask--as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled
the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.
Deronda's first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull, gaspoisoned absorption, was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys had
seemed to him more enviable:--so far Rousseau might be justified in
maintaining that art and science had done a poor service to mankind. But
suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic. His attention was arrested by
a young lady who, standing at an angle not far from him, was the last to
whom his eyes traveled. She was bending and speaking English to a middleaged lady seated at play beside her: but the next instant she returned to
her play, and showed the full height of a graceful figure, with a face
which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but could hardly be
passed with indifference.
The inward debate which she raised in Deronda gave to his eyes a growing
expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow of
mingled undefined sensibilities forming admiration. At one moment they
followed the movements of the figure, of the arms and hands, as this
problematic sylph bent forward to deposit her stake with an air of firm
choice; and the next they returned to the face which, at present
unaffected by beholders, was directed steadily toward the game. The sylph
was a winner; and as her taper fingers, delicately gloved in pale-gray,
were adjusting the coins which had been pushed toward her in order to pass
them back again to the winning point, she looked round her with a survey
too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it a little of that nature
which we call art concealing an inward exultation.
But in the course of that survey her eyes met Deronda's, and instead of
averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly
conscious that they were arrested--how long? The darting sense that he was
measuring her and looking down on her as an inferior, that he was of
different quality from the human dross around her, that he felt himself in
a region outside and above her, and was examining her as a specimen of a
lower order, roused a tingling resentment which stretched the moment with
conflict. It did not bring the blood to her cheeks, but it sent it away
from her lips. She controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance,
and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness turned to her
play. But Deronda's gaze seemed to have acted as an evil eye. Her stake
was gone. No matter; she had been winning ever since she took to roulette
with a few napoleons at command, and had a considerable reserve. She had
begun to believe in her luck, others had begun to believe in it: she had
visions of being followed by a _cortège_ who would worship her as a
goddess of luck and watch her play as a directing augury. Such things had
been known of male gamblers; why should not a woman have a like supremacy?
Her friend and chaperon who had not wished her to play at first was
beginning to approve, only administering the prudent advice to stop at the
right moment and carry money back to England--advice to which Gwendolen
had replied that she cared for the excitement of play, not the winnings.
On that supposition the present moment ought to have made the flood-tide
in her eager experience of gambling. Yet, when her next stake was swept
away, she felt the orbits of her eyes getting hot, and the certainty she
had (without looking) of that man still watching her was something like a
pressure which begins to be torturing. The more reason to her why she
should not flinch, but go on playing as if she were indifferent to loss or
gain. Her friend touched her elbow and proposed that they should quit the
table. For reply Gwendolen put ten louis on the same spot: she was in that
mood of defiance in which the mind loses sight of any end beyond the
satisfaction of enraged resistance; and with the puerile stupidity of a
dominant impulse includes luck among its objects of defiance. Since she
was not winning strikingly, the next best thing was to lose strikingly.
She controlled her muscles, and showed no tremor of mouth or hands. Each
time her stake was swept off she doubled it. Many were now watching her,
but the sole observation she was conscious of was Deronda's, who, though
she never looked toward him, she was sure had not moved away. Such a drama
takes no long while to play out: development and catastrophe can often be
measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand. "Faites votre jeu,
mesdames et messieurs," said the automatic voice of destiny from between
the mustache and imperial of the croupier: and Gwendolen's arm was
stretched to deposit her last poor heap of napoleons. "Le jeu ne va plus,"
said destiny. And in five seconds Gwendolen turned from the table, but
turned resolutely with her face toward Deronda and looked at him. There
was a smile of irony in his eyes as their glances met; but it was at least
better that he should have disregarded her as one of an insect swarm who
had no individual physiognomy. Besides, in spite of his superciliousness
and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit
as well as her person: he was young, handsome, distinguished in
appearance--not one of these ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought
it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of
protest as they passed by it. The general conviction that we are admirable
does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of
Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance received
coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the
unaccountable dissident. In Gwendolen's habits of mind it had been taken
for granted that she knew what was admirable and that she herself was
admired. This basis of her thinking had received a disagreeable
concussion, and reeled a little, but was not easily to be overthrown.
In the evening the same room was more stiflingly heated, was brilliant
with gas and with the costumes of ladies who floated their trains along it
or were seated on the ottomans.
The Nereid in sea-green robes and silver ornaments, with a pale sea-green
feather fastened in silver falling backward over her green hat and light
brown hair, was Gwendolen Harleth. She was under the wing, or rather
soared by the shoulder, of the lady who had sat by her at the roulettetable; and with them was a gentleman with a white mustache and clipped
hair: solid-browed, stiff and German. They were walking about or standing
to chat with acquaintances, and Gwendolen was much observed by the seated
groups.
"A striking girl--that Miss Harleth--unlike others."
"Yes, she has got herself up as a sort of serpent now--all green and
silver, and winds her neck about a little more than usual."
"Oh, she must always be doing something extraordinary. She is that kind of
girl, I fancy. Do you think her pretty, Mr. Vandernoodt?"
"Very. A man might risk hanging for her--I mean a fool might."
"You like a _nez retroussé_", then, and long narrow eyes?"
"When they go with such an _ensemble_."
"The _ensemble du serpent_?"
"If you will. Woman was tempted by a serpent; why not man?"
"She is certainly very graceful; but she wants a tinge of color in her
cheeks. It is a sort of Lamia beauty she has."
"On the contrary, I think her complexion one of her chief charms. It is a
warm paleness; it looks thoroughly healthy. And that delicate nose with
its gradual little upward curve is distracting. And then her mouth--there
never was a prettier mouth, the lips curled backward so finely, eh,
Mackworth?"
"Think so? I cannot endure that sort of mouth. It looks so selfcomplacent, as if it knew its own beauty--the curves are too immovable. I
like a mouth that trembles more."
"For my part, I think her odious," said a dowager. "It is wonderful what
unpleasant girls get into vogue. Who are these Langens? Does anybody know
them?"
"They are quite _comme il faut_. I have dined with them several times at
the _Russie_. The baroness is English. Miss Harleth calls her cousin. The
girl herself is thoroughly well-bred, and as clever as possible."
"Dear me! and the baron?".
"A very good furniture picture."
"Your baroness is always at the roulette-table," said Mackworth. "I fancy
she has taught the girl to gamble."
"Oh, the old woman plays a very sober game; drops a ten-franc piece here
and there. The girl is more headlong. But it is only a freak."
"I hear she has lost all her winnings to-day. Are they rich? Who knows?"
"Ah, who knows? Who knows that about anybody?" said Mr. Vandernoodt,
moving off to join the Langens.
The remark that Gwendolen wound her neck about more than usual this
evening was true. But it was not that she might carry out the serpent idea
more completely: it was that she watched for any chance of seeing Deronda,
so that she might inquire about this stranger, under whose measuring gaze
she was still wincing. At last her opportunity came.
"Mr. Vandernoodt, you know everybody," said Gwendolen, not too eagerly,
rather with a certain languor of utterance which she sometimes gave to her
clear soprano. "Who is that near the door?"
"There are half a dozen near the door. Do you mean that old Adonis in the
George the Fourth wig?"
"No, no; the dark-haired young man on the right with the dreadful
expression."
"Dreadful, do you call it? I think he is an uncommonly fine fellow."
"But who is he?"
"He is lately come to our hotel with Sir Hugo Mallinger."
"Sir Hugo Mallinger?"
"Yes. Do you know him?"
"No." (Gwendolen colored slightly.) "He has a place near us, but he never
comes to it. What did you say was the name of that gentleman near the
door?"
"Deronda--Mr. Deronda."
"What a delightful name! Is he an Englishman?"
"Yes. He is reported to be rather closely related to the baronet. You are
interested in him?"
"Yes. I think he is not like young men in general."
"And you don't admire young men in general?"
"Not in the least. I always know what they will say. I can't at all guess
what this Mr. Deronda would say. What _does_ he say?"
"Nothing, chiefly. I sat with his party for a good hour last night on the
terrace, and he never spoke--and was not smoking either. He looked bored."
"Another reason why I should like to know him. I am always bored."
"I should think he would be charmed to have an introduction. Shall I bring
it about? Will you allow it, baroness?"
"Why not?--since he is related to Sir Hugo Mallinger. It is a new _rôle_
of yours, Gwendolen, to be always bored," continued Madame von Langen,
when Mr. Vandernoodt had moved away. "Until now you have always seemed
eager about something from morning till night."
"That is just because I am bored to death. If I am to leave off play I
must break my arm or my collar-bone. I must make something happen; unless
you will go into Switzerland and take me up the Matterhorn."
"Perhaps this Mr. Deronda's acquaintance will do instead of the
Matterhorn."
"Perhaps."
But Gwendolen did not make Deronda's acquaintance on this occasion. Mr.
Vandernoodt did not succeed in bringing him up to her that evening, and
when she re-entered her own room she found a letter recalling her home.
CHAPTER II.
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 selfsatisfaction, 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 _naïve_
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. Weiner 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 gamingtable 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 _nécessaire_, 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 roulettetable, 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.
CHAPTER III.
"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 _rôle_, 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 be
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 _naïve_ 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-sighed 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
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-gammonboard, 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.
CHAPTER IV.
"_Gorgibus._-- * * * Je te dis que le mariage est une chose sainte
et sacrée: et que c'est faire en honnêtes gens, que de débuter par là.
"_Madelon._--Mon Dieu! que si tout le monde vous ressemblait, un
roman serait bientôt fini! La belle chose que ce serait, si d'abord
Cyrus épousait Mandane, et qu'Aronce de plain-pied fût marié à Clélie!
* * * Laissez-nous faire à loisir le tissu de notre roman, et n'en
pressez pas tant la conclusion."
MOLIÈRE. _Les Précieuses Ridicules._
It would be a little hard to blame the rector of Pennicote that in the
course of looking at things from every point of view, he looked at
Gwendolen as a girl likely to make a brilliant marriage. Why should he be
expected to differ from his contemporaries in this matter, and wish his
niece a worse end of her charming maidenhood than they would approve as
the best possible? It is rather to be set down to his credit that his
feelings on the subject were entirely good-natured. And in considering the
relation of means to ends, it would have been mere folly to have been
guided by the exceptional and idylic--to have recommended that Gwendolen
should wear a gown as shabby as Griselda's in order that a marquis might
fall in love with her, or to have insisted that since a fair maiden was to
be sought, she should keep herself out of the way. Mr. Gascoigne's
calculations were of the kind called rational, and he did not even think
of getting a too frisky horse in order that Gwendolen might be threatened
with an accident and be rescued by a man of property. He wished his niece
well, and he meant her to be seen to advantage in the best society of the
neighborhood.
Her uncle's intention fell in perfectly with Gwendolen's own wishes. But
let no one suppose that she also contemplated a brilliant marriage as the
direct end of her witching the world with her grace on horseback, or with
any other accomplishment. That she was to be married some time or other
she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be
of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt
quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage
as the fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined
herself a heroine were not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued
or hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and
agreeable guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all
the domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious
necessity. Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it
rather a dreary state in which a woman could not do what she liked, had
more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became
irrevocably immersed in humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion;
she could not look forward to a single life; but promotions have sometimes
to be taken with bitter herbs--a peerage will not quite do instead of
leadership to the man who meant to lead; and this delicate-limbed sylph of
twenty meant to lead. For such passions dwell in feminine breasts also. In
Gwendolen's, however, they dwelt among strictly feminine furniture, and
had no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning or the balance
of the constitution; her knowledge being such as with no sort of standingroom or length of lever could have been expected to move the world. She
meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather,
whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in
that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her
fancy.
"Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet," said Miss
Merry, the meek governess: hyperbolical words which have long come to
carry the most moderate meanings; for who has not heard of private persons
having the world at their feet in the shape of some half-dozen items of
flattering regard generally known in a genteel suburb? And words could
hardly be too wide or vague to indicate the prospect that made a hazy
largeness about poor Gwendolen on the heights of her young selfexultation. Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to
have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no
will was present. It was not to be so with her; she would no longer be
sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would make the very
best of the chances that life offered her, and conquer circumstances by
her exceptional cleverness. Certainly, to be settled at Offendene, with
the notice of Lady Brackenshaw, the archery club, and invitations to dine
with the Arrowpoints, as the highest lights in her scenery, was not a
position that seemed to offer remarkable chances; but Gwendolen's
confidence lay chiefly in herself. She felt well equipped for the mastery
of life. With regard to much in her lot hitherto, she held herself rather
hardly dealt with, but as to her "education," she would have admitted that
it had left her under no disadvantages. In the school-room her quick mind
had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected
facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness; and what
remained of all things knowable, she was conscious of being sufficiently
acquainted with through novels, plays and poems. About her French and
music, the two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no
ground for uneasiness; and when to all these qualifications, negative and
positive, we add the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons
are born with, so that any subject they turn their attention to impresses
them with their own power of forming a correct judgment on it, who can
wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own destiny?
There were many subjects in the world--perhaps the majority--in which she
felt no interest, because they were stupid; for subjects are apt to appear
stupid to the young as light seems dull to the old; but she would not have
felt at all helpless in relation to them if they had turned up in
conversation. It must be remembered that no one had disputed her power or
her general superiority. As on the arrival at Offendene, so always, the
first thought of those about her had been, what will Gwendolen think?--if
the footman trod heavily in creaking boots, or if the laundress's work was
unsatisfactory, the maid said, "This will never do for Miss Harleth"; if
the wood smoked in the bedroom fireplace, Mrs. Davilow, whose own weak
eyes suffered much from this inconvenience, spoke apologetically of it to
Gwendolen. If, when they were under the stress of traveling, she did not
appear at the breakfast table till every one else had finished, the only
question was, how Gwendolen's coffee and toast should still be of the
hottest and crispest; and when she appeared with her freshly-brushed
light-brown hair streaming backward and awaiting her mamma's hand to coil
it up, her large brown eyes glancing bright as a wave-washed onyx from
under their long lashes, it was always she herself who had to be tolerant
--to beg that Alice who sat waiting on her would not stick up her
shoulders in that frightful manner, and that Isabel, instead of pushing up
to her and asking questions, would go away to Miss Merry.
Always she was the princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have
her breakfast-roll made of the finest-bolted flour from the seven thin
ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver folk
kept out of the baggage. How was this to be accounted for? The answer may
seem to lie quite on the surface:--in her beauty, a certain unusualness
about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her graceful
movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that if she came into the room
on a rainy day when everybody else was flaccid and the use of things in
general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a sudden, sufficient
reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even the waiters at hotels
showed the more alacrity in doing away with crumbs and creases and dregs
with struggling flies in them. This potent charm, added to the fact that
she was the eldest daughter, toward whom her mamma had always been in an
apologetic state of mind for the evils brought on her by a step-father,
may seem so full a reason for Gwendolen's domestic empire, that to look
for any other would be to ask the reason of daylight when the sun is
shining. But beware of arriving at conclusions without comparison. I
remember having seen the same assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to
persons who were not at all beautiful or unusual, whose firmness showed
itself in no very graceful or euphonious way, and who were not eldest
daughters with a tender, timid mother, compunctious at having subjected
them to inconveniences. Some of them were a very common sort of men. And
the only point of resemblance among them all was a strong determination to
have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves
disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it. Who is so much cajoled
and served with trembling by the weak females of a household as the
unscrupulous male--capable, if he has not free way at home, of going and
doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even without her
potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might not still have
played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her inborn energy of
egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to what she might say
or do. However, she had the charm, and those who feared her were also fond
of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what
may be called the iridescence of her character--the play of various, nay,
contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's rhetoric about the impossibility of
being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy
necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We
cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not
kill in the same moment; but a moment is wide enough for the loyal and
mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward
stroke of repentance.
CHAPTER V.
"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 Winchester, 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-devisite_ 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 parrotlike voice, and a sytematically 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-à-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 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; and 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 _naïveté_.
"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 stilliness 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 fourhanded 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," 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.
CHAPTER VI.
"Croyez-vous m'avoir humiliée pour m'avoir appris que la terre tourne
autour du soleil? Je vous jure que je ne m'en estime pas moins."
--FONTENELLE: _Pluralité des Mondes_.
That lofty criticism had caused Gwendolen a new sort of pain. She would
not have chosen to confess how unfortunate she thought herself in not
having had Miss Arrowpoint's musical advantages, so as to be able to
question Herr Klesmer's taste with the confidence of thorough knowledge;
still less, to admit even to herself that Miss Arrowpoint each time they
met raised an unwonted feeling of jealousy in her: not in the least
because she was an heiress, but because it was really provoking that a
girl whose appearance you could not characterize except by saying that her
figure was slight and of middle stature, her features small, her eyes
tolerable, and her complexion sallow, had nevertheless a certain mental
superiority which could not be explained away--an exasperating
thoroughness in her musical accomplishment, a fastidious discrimination in
her general tastes, which made it impossible to force her admiration and
kept you in awe of her standard. This insignificant-looking young lady of
four-and-twenty, whom any one's eyes would have passed over negligently if
she had not been Miss Arrowpoint, might be suspected of a secret opinion
that Miss Harleth's acquirements were rather of a common order, and such
an opinion was not made agreeable to think of by being always veiled under
a perfect kindness of manner.
But Gwendolen did not like to dwell on facts which threw an unfavorable
light on itself. The musical Magus who had so suddenly widened her horizon
was not always on the scene; and his being constantly backward and forward
between London and Quetcham soon began to be thought of as offering
opportunities for converting him to a more admiring state of mind.
Meanwhile, in the manifest pleasure her singing gave at Brackenshaw
Castle, the Firs, and elsewhere, she recovered her equanimity, being
disposed to think approval more trustworthy than objection, and not being
one of the exceptional persons who have a parching thirst for a perfection
undemanded by their neighbors. Perhaps it would have been rash to say then
that she was at all exceptional inwardly, or that the unusual in her was
more than her rare grace of movement and bearing, and a certain daring
which gave piquancy to a very common egoistic ambition, such as exists
under many clumsy exteriors and is taken no notice of. For I suppose that
the set of the head does not really determine the hunger of the inner self
for supremacy: it only makes a difference sometimes as to the way in which
the supremacy is held attainable, and a little also to the degree in which
it can be attained; especially when the hungry one is a girl, whose
passion for doing what is remarkable has an ideal limit in consistency
with the highest breeding and perfect freedom from the sordid need of
income. Gwendolen was as inwardly rebellious against the restraints of
family conditions, and as ready to look through obligations into her own
fundamental want of feeling for them, as if she had been sustained by the
boldest speculations; but she really had no such speculations, and would
at once have marked herself off from any sort of theoretical or
practically reforming women by satirizing them. She rejoiced to feel
herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of the genteel romance where
the heroine's soul poured out in her journal is full of vague power,
originality, and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly in the
sphere of fashion; and if she wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies
partly, so to speak, in her having on her satin shoes. Here is a restraint
which nature and society have provided on the pursuit of striking
adventure; so that a soul burning with a sense of what the universe is
not, and ready to take all existence as fuel, is nevertheless held captive
by the ordinary wirework of social forms and does nothing particular.
This commonplace result was what Gwendolen found herself threatened with
even in the novelty of the first winter at Offendene. What she was clear
upon was, that she did not wish to lead the same sort of life as ordinary
young ladies did; but what she was not clear upon was, how she should set
about leading any other, and what were the particular acts which she would
assert her freedom by doing. Offendene remained a good background, if
anything would happen there; but on the whole the neighborhood was in
fault.
Beyond the effect of her beauty on a first presentation, there was not
much excitement to be got out of her earliest invitations, and she came
home after little sallies of satire and knowingness, such as had offended
Mrs. Arrowpoint, to fill the intervening days with the most girlish
devices. The strongest assertion she was able to make of her individual
claims was to leave out Alice's lessons (on the principle that Alice was
more likely to excel in ignorance), and to employ her with Miss Merry, and
the maid who was understood to wait on all the ladies, in helping to
arrange various dramatic costumes which Gwendolen pleased herself with
having in readiness for some future occasions of acting in charades or
theatrical pieces, occasions which she meant to bring about by force of
will or contrivance. She had never acted--only made a figure in _tableaux
vivans_ at school; but she felt assured that she could act well, and
having been once or twice to the Théâtre Français, and also heard her
mamma speak of Rachel, her waking dreams and cogitations as to how she
would manage her destiny sometimes turned on the question whether she
would become an actress like Rachel, since she was more beautiful than
that thin Jewess. Meanwhile the wet days before Christmas were passed
pleasantly in the preparation of costumes, Greek, Oriental, and Composite,
in which Gwendolen attitudinized and speechified before a domestic
audience, including even the housekeeper, who was once pressed into it
that she might swell the notes of applause; but having shown herself
unworthy by observing that Miss Harleth looked far more like a queen in
her own dress than in that baggy thing with her arms all bare, she was not
invited a second time.
"Do I look as well as Rachel, mamma?" said Gwendolen, one day when she had
been showing herself in her Greek dress to Anna, and going through scraps
of scenes with much tragic intention.
"You have better arms than Rachel," said Mrs. Davilow, "your arms would do
for anything, Gwen. But your voice is not so tragic as hers; it is not so
deep."
"I can make it deeper, if I like," said Gwendolen, provisionally; then she
added, with decision, "I think a higher voice is more tragic: it is more
feminine; and the more feminine a woman is, the more tragic it seems when
she does desperate actions."
"There may be something in that," said Mrs. Davilow, languidly. "But I
don't know what good there is in making one's blood creep. And if there is
anything horrible to be done, I should like it to be left to the men."
"Oh, mamma, you are so dreadfully prosaic! As if all the great poetic
criminals were not women! I think the men are poor cautious creatures."
"Well, dear, and you--who are afraid to be alone in the night--I don't
think you would be very bold in crime, thank God."
"I am not talking about reality, mamma," said Gwendolen, impatiently. Then
her mamma being called out of the room, she turned quickly to her cousin,
as if taking an opportunity, and said, "Anna, do ask my uncle to let us
get up some charades at the rectory. Mr. Middleton and Warham could act
with us--just for practice. Mamma says it will not do to have Mr.
Middleton consulting and rehearsing here. He is a stick, but we could give
him suitable parts. Do ask, or else I will."
"Oh, not till Rex comes. He is so clever, and such a dear old thing, and
he will act Napoleon looking over the sea. He looks just like Napoleon.
Rex can do anything."
"I don't in the least believe in your Rex, Anna," said Gwendolen, laughing
at her. "He will turn out to be like those wretched blue and yellow watercolors of his which you hang up in your bedroom and worship."
"Very well, you will see," said Anna. "It is not that I know what is
clever, but he has got a scholarship already, and papa says he will get a
fellowship, and nobody is better at games. He is cleverer than Mr.
Middleton, and everybody but you call Mr. Middleton clever."
"So he may be in a dark-lantern sort of way. But he _is_ a stick. If he
had to say, 'Perdition catch my soul, but I do love her,' he would say it
in just the same tone as, 'Here endeth the second lesson.'"
"Oh, Gwendolen!" said Anna, shocked at these promiscuous allusions. "And
it is very unkind of you to speak so of him, for he admires you very much.
I heard Warham say one day to mamma, 'Middleton is regularly spooney upon
Gwendolen.' She was very angry with him; but I know what it means. It is
what they say at college for being in love."
"How can I help it?" said Gwendolen, rather contemptuously. "Perdition
catch my soul if I love _him_."
"No, of course; papa, I think, would not wish it. And he is to go away
soon. But it makes me sorry when you ridicule him."
"What shall you do to me when I ridicule Rex?" said Gwendolen, wickedly.
"Now, Gwendolen, dear, you _will not_?" said Anna, her eyes filling with
tears. "I could not bear it. But there really is nothing in him to
ridicule. Only you may find out things. For no one ever thought of
laughing at Mr. Middleton before you. Every one said he was nice-looking,
and his manners perfect. I am sure I have always been frightened at him
because of his learning and his square-cut coat, and his being a nephew of
the bishop's, and all that. But you will not ridicule Rex--promise me."
Anna ended with a beseeching look which touched Gwendolen.
"You are a dear little coz," she said, just touching the tip of Anna's
chin with her thumb and forefinger. "I don't ever want to do anything that
will vex you. Especially if Rex is to make everything come off--charades
and everything."
And when at last Rex was there, the animation he brought into the life of
Offendene and the rectory, and his ready partnership in Gwendolen's plans,
left her no inclination for any ridicule that was not of an open and
flattering kind, such as he himself enjoyed. He was a fine open-hearted
youth, with a handsome face strongly resembling his father's and Anna's,
but softer in expression than the one, and larger in scale than the other:
a bright, healthy, loving nature, enjoying ordinary innocent things so
much that vice had no temptation for him, and what he knew of it lay too
entirely in the outer courts and little-visited chambers of his mind for
him to think of it with great repulsion. Vicious habits were with him
"what some fellows did"--"stupid stuff" which he liked to keep aloof from.
He returned Anna's affection as fully as could be expected of a brother
whose pleasures apart from her were more than the sum total of hers; and
he had never known a stronger love.
The cousins were continually together at the one house or the other-chiefly at Offendene, where there was more freedom, or rather where there
was a more complete sway for Gwendolen; and whatever she wished became a
ruling purpose for Rex. The charades came off according to her plans; and
also some other little scenes not contemplated by her in which her acting
was more impromptu. It was at Offendene that the charades and _tableaux_
were rehearsed and presented, Mrs. Davilow seeing no objection even to Mr.
Middleton's being invited to share in them, now that Rex too was there-especially as his services were indispensable: Warham, who was studying
for India with a Wanchester "coach," having no time to spare, and being
generally dismal under a cram of everything except the answers needed at
the forthcoming examination, which might disclose the welfare of our
Indian Empire to be somehow connected with a quotable knowledge of
Browne's Pastorals.
Mr. Middleton was persuaded to play various grave parts, Gwendolen having
flattered him on his enviable immobility of countenance; and at first a
little pained and jealous at her comradeship with Rex, he presently drew
encouragement from the thought that this sort of cousinly familiarity
excluded any serious passion. Indeed, he occasionally felt that her more
formal treatment of himself was such a sign of favor as to warrant his
making advances before he left Pennicote, though he had intended to keep
his feelings in reserve until his position should be more assured. Miss
Gwendolen, quite aware that she was adored by this unexceptionable young
clergyman with pale whiskers and square-cut collar, felt nothing more on
the subject than that she had no objection to being adored: she turned her
eyes on him with calm mercilessness and caused him many mildly agitating
hopes by seeming always to avoid dramatic contact with him--for all
meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
Some persons might have thought beforehand that a young man of Anglican
leanings, having a sense of sacredness much exercised on small things as
well as great, rarely laughing save from politeness, and in general
regarding the mention of spades by their naked names as rather coarse,
would not have seen a fitting bride for himself in a girl who was daring
in ridicule, and showed none of the special grace required in the
clergyman's wife; or, that a young man informed by theological reading
would have reflected that he was not likely to meet the taste of a lively,
restless young lady like Miss Harleth. But are we always obliged to
explain why the facts are not what some persons thought beforehand? The
apology lies on their side, who had that erroneous way of thinking.
As for Rex, who would possibly have been sorry for poor Middleton if he
had been aware of the excellent curate's inward conflict, he was too
completely absorbed in a first passion to have observation for any person
or thing. He did not observe Gwendolen; he only felt what she said or did,
and the back of his head seemed to be a good organ of information as to
whether she was in the room or out. Before the end of the first fortnight
he was so deeply in love that it was impossible for him to think of his
life except as bound up with Gwendolen's. He could see no obstacles, poor
boy; his own love seemed a guarantee of hers, since it was one with the
unperturbed delight in her image, so that he could no more dream of her
giving him pain than an Egyptian could dream of snow. She sang and played
to him whenever he liked, was always glad of his companionship in riding,
though his borrowed steeds were often comic, was ready to join in any fun
of his, and showed a right appreciation of Anna. No mark of sympathy
seemed absent. That because Gwendolen was the most perfect creature in the
world she was to make a grand match, had not occurred to him. He had no
conceit--at least not more than goes to make up the necessary gum and
consistence of a substantial personality: it was only that in the young
bliss of loving he took Gwendolen's perfection as part of that good which
had seemed one with life to him, being the outcome of a happy, well-
embodied nature.
One incident which happened in the course of their dramatic attempts
impressed Rex as a sign of her unusual sensibility. It showed an aspect of
her nature which could not have been preconceived by any one who, like
him, had only seen her habitual fearlessness in active exercises and her
high spirits in society.
After a good deal of rehearsing it was resolved that a select party should
be invited to Offendene to witness the performances which went with so
much satisfaction to the actors. Anna had caused a pleasant surprise;
nothing could be neater than the way in which she played her little parts;
one would even have suspected her of hiding much sly observation under her
simplicity. And Mr. Middleton answered very well by not trying to be
comic. The main source of doubt and retardation had been Gwendolen's
desire to appear in her Greek dress. No word for a charade would occur to
her either waking or dreaming that suited her purpose of getting a
statuesque pose in this favorite costume. To choose a motive from Racine
was of no use, since Rex and the others could not declaim French verse,
and improvised speeches would turn the scene into burlesque. Besides, Mr.
Gascoigne prohibited the acting of scenes from plays: he usually protested
against the notion that an amusement which was fitting for every one else
was unfitting for a clergyman; but he would not in this matter overstep
the line of decorum as drawn in that part of Wessex, which did not exclude
his sanction of the young people's acting charades in his sister-in-law's
house--a very different affair from private theatricals in the full sense
of the word.
Everybody of course was concerned to satisfy this wish of Gwendolen's, and
Rex proposed that they should wind up with a tableau in which the effect
of her majesty would not be marred by any one's speech. This pleased her
thoroughly, and the only question was the choice of the tableau.
"Something pleasant, children, I beseech you," said Mrs. Davilow; "I can't
have any Greek wickedness."
"It is no worse than Christian wickedness, mamma," said Gwendolen, whose
mention of Rachelesque heroines had called forth that remark.
"And less scandalous," said Rex. "Besides, one thinks of it as all gone by
and done with. What do you say to Briseis being led away? I would be
Achilles, and you would be looking round at me--after the print we have at
the rectory."
"That would be a good attitude for me," said Gwendolen, in a tone of
acceptance. But afterward she said with decision, "No. It will not do.
There must be three men in proper costume, else it will be ridiculous."
"I have it," said Rex, after a little reflection. "Hermione as the statue
in Winter's Tale? I will be Leontes, and Miss Merry, Paulina, one on each
side. Our dress won't signify," he went on laughingly; "it will be more
Shakespearian and romantic if Leontes looks like Napoleon, and Paulina
like a modern spinster."
And Hermione was chosen; all agreeing that age was of no consequence, but
Gwendolen urged that instead of the mere tableau there should be just
enough acting of the scene to introduce the striking up of the music as a
signal for her to step down and advance; when Leontes, instead of
embracing her, was to kneel and kiss the hem of her garment, and so the
curtain was to fall. The antechamber with folding doors lent itself
admirably to the purpose of a stage, and the whole of the establishment,
with the addition of Jarrett the village carpenter, was absorbed in the
preparations for an entertainment, which, considering that it was an
imitation of acting, was likely to be successful, since we know from
ancient fable that an imitation may have more chance of success than the
original.
Gwendolen was not without a special exultation in the prospect of this
occasion, for she knew that Herr Klesmer was again at Quetcham, and she
had taken care to include him among the invited.
Klesmer came. He was in one of his placid, silent moods, and sat in serene
contemplation, replying to all appeals in benignant-sounding syllables
more or less articulate--as taking up his cross meekly in a world
overgrown with amateurs, or as careful how he moved his lion paws lest he
should crush a rampant and vociferous mouse.
Everything indeed went off smoothly and according to expectation--all that
was improvised and accidental being of a probable sort--until the incident
occurred which showed Gwendolen in an unforeseen phase of emotion. How it
came about was at first a mystery.
The tableau of Hermione was doubly striking from its dissimilarity with
what had gone before: it was answering perfectly, and a murmur of applause
had been gradually suppressed while Leontes gave his permission that
Paulina should exercise her utmost art and make the statue move.
Hermione, her arm resting on a pillar, was elevated by about six inches,
which she counted on as a means of showing her pretty foot and instep,
when at the given signal she should advance and descend.
"Music, awake her, strike!" said Paulina (Mrs. Davilow, who, by special
entreaty, had consented to take the part in a white burnous and hood).
Herr Klesmer, who had been good-natured enough to seat himself at the
piano, struck a thunderous chord--but in the same instant, and before
Hermione had put forth her foot, the movable panel, which was on a line
with the piano, flew open on the right opposite the stage and disclosed
the picture of the dead face and the fleeing figure, brought out in pale
definiteness by the position of the wax-lights. Everyone was startled, but
all eyes in the act of turning toward the open panel were recalled by a
piercing cry from Gwendolen, who stood without change of attitude, but
with a change of expression that was terrifying in its terror. She looked
like a statue into which a soul of Fear had entered: her pallid lips were
parted; her eyes, usually narrowed under their long lashes, were dilated
and fixed. Her mother, less surprised than alarmed, rushed toward her, and
Rex, too, could not help going to her side. But the touch of her mother's
arm had the effect of an electric charge; Gwendolen fell on her knees and
put her hands before her face. She was still trembling, but mute, and it
seemed that she had self-consciousness enough to aim at controlling her
signs of terror, for she presently allowed herself to be raised from her
kneeling posture and led away, while the company were relieving their
minds by explanation.
"A magnificent bit of _plastik_ that!" said Klesmer to Miss Arrowpoint.
And a quick fire of undertoned question and answer went round.
"Was it part of the play?"
"Oh, no, surely not. Miss Harleth was too much affected. A sensitive
creature!"
"Dear me! I was not aware that there was a painting behind that panel;
were you?"
"No; how should I? Some eccentricity in one of the Earl's family long ago,
I suppose."
"How very painful! Pray shut it up."
"Was the door locked? It is very mysterious. It must be the spirits."
"But there is no medium present."
"How do you know that? We must conclude that there is, when such things
happen."
"Oh, the door was not locked; it was probably the sudden vibration from
the piano that sent it open."
This conclusion came from Mr. Gascoigne, who begged Miss Merry if possible
to get the key. But this readiness to explain the mystery was thought by
Mrs. Vulcany unbecoming in a clergyman, and she observed in an undertone
that Mr. Gascoigne was always a little too worldly for her taste. However,
the key was produced, and the rector turned it in the lock with an
emphasis rather offensively rationalizing--as who should say, "it will not
start open again"--putting the key in his pocket as a security.
However, Gwendolen soon reappeared, showing her usual spirits, and
evidently determined to ignore as far as she could the striking change she
had made in the part of Hermione.
But when Klesmer said to her, "We have to thank you for devising a perfect
climax: you could not have chosen a finer bit of _plastik_," there was a
flush of pleasure in her face. She liked to accept as a belief what was
really no more than delicate feigning. He divined that the betrayal into a
passion of fear had been mortifying to her, and wished her to understand
that he took it for good acting. Gwendolen cherished the idea that now he
was struck with her talent as well as her beauty, and her uneasiness about
his opinion was half turned to complacency.
But too many were in the secret of what had been included in the
rehearsals, and what had not, and no one besides Klesmer took the trouble
to soothe Gwendolen's imagined mortification. The general sentiment was
that the incident should be let drop.
There had really been a medium concerned in the starting open of the
panel: one who had quitted the room in haste and crept to bed in much
alarm of conscience. It was the small Isabel, whose intense curiosity,
unsatisfied by the brief glimpse she had had of the strange picture on the
day of arrival at Offendene, had kept her on the watch for an opportunity
of finding out where Gwendolen had put the key, of stealing it from the
discovered drawer when the rest of the family were out, and getting on a
stool to unlock the panel. While she was indulging her thirst for
knowledge in this way, a noise which she feared was an approaching
footstep alarmed her: she closed the door and attempted hurriedly to lock
it, but failing and not daring to linger, she withdrew the key and trusted
that the panel would stick, as it seemed well inclined to do. In this
confidence she had returned the key to its former place, stilling any
anxiety by the thought that if the door were discovered to be unlocked
nobody would know how the unlocking came about. The inconvenient Isabel,
like other offenders, did not foresee her own impulse to confession, a
fatality which came upon her the morning after the party, when Gwendolen
said at the breakfast-table, "I know the door was locked before the
housekeeper gave me the key, for I tried it myself afterward. Some one
must have been to my drawer and taken the key."
It seemed to Isabel that Gwendolen's awful eyes had rested on her more
than on the other sisters, and without any time for resolve, she said,
with a trembling lip:
"Please forgive me, Gwendolen."
The forgiveness was sooner bestowed than it would have been if Gwendolen
had not desired to dismiss from her own and every one else's memory any
case in which she had shown her susceptibility to terror. She wondered at
herself in these occasional experiences, which seemed like a brief
remembered madness, an unexplained exception from her normal life; and in
this instance she felt a peculiar vexation that her helpless fear had
shown itself, not, as usual, in solitude, but in well-lit company. Her
ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both
moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal,
this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the
narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive
herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which would
lack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness of other
fetters, or of more spiritual restraints, having always disliked whatever
was presented to her under the name of religion, in the same way that some
people dislike arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in
her, no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it
had not occurred to her any more than it had occurred to her to inquire
into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she had
had many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was dependent. All
these facts about herself she would have been ready to admit, and even,
more or less indirectly, to state. What she unwillingly recognized, and
would have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability of
hers to fits of spiritual dread, though this fountain of awe within her
had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or with
any human relations. She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might
happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone,
when, for example, she was walking without companionship and there came
some rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her
with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the
midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. The
little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her
imagination at work in a way that made her tremble: but always when some
one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which she
seemed an exile; she found again her usual world in which her will was of
some avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to this world was no
more identified for her with those uneasy impressions of awe than her
uncle's surplices seen out of use at the rectory. With human ears and eyes
about her, she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the
possibility of winning empire.
To her mamma and others her fits of timidity or terror were sufficiently
accounted for by her "sensitiveness" or the "excitability of her nature";
but these explanatory phrases required conciliation with much that seemed
to be blank indifference or rare self-mastery. Heat is a great agent and a
useful word, but considered as a means of explaining the universe it
requires an extensive knowledge of differences; and as a means of
explaining character "sensitiveness" is in much the same predicament. But
who, loving a creature like Gwendolen, would not be inclined to regard
every peculiarity in her as a mark of preeminence? That was what Rex did.
After the Hermione scene he was more persuaded than ever that she must be
instinct with all feeling, and not only readier to respond to a worshipful
love, but able to love better than other girls. Rex felt the summer on his
young wings and soared happily.
CHAPTER VII.
"_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 throws 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 bonesetter, 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 coldblooded, 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.
CHAPTER VIII.
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 shirtsleeves 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.
CHAPTER IX.
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 proprieter 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 chère." "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, pigued 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--crying 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.
CHAPTER X.
_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 resources 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 wellbred 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 today! 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 règle_ to bring one so far out of our own set; but she said, 'Genius
itself is not _en règle_; 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 arches 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?"
BOOK II--MEETING STREAMS.
CHAPTER XI.
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 solicitious 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 castoff 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-à-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 midday 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 not 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 We 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 firstrate 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 désespoir_."
"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 felicitious 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, halfserious 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.
CHAPTER XII.
"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-adozen 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 saltcellar), 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.
CHAPTER XIII.
"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 midharvest 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 to 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-à-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,
riot 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 thirtysix 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 _distingué_." 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 verbation, 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 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 sevenand-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."
CHAPTER XIV.
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 it's 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 how--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
thereby 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 slie 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 let 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 purls 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 old 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 _opéra 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 incur 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.
CHAPTER XV.
"_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 am used 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 lifeinterest. 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'hôte_, 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 ham. 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'imprévu_. 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 ancêtre_" 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.
CHAPTER XVI.
Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The
astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so
for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of
human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would
have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead
up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense
suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of
Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea
and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.
Deronda's circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had been
burned into his life as its chief epoch--a moment full of July sunshine
and large pink roses shedding their last petals on a grassy court enclosed
on three sides by a gothic cloister. Imagine him in such a scene: a boy of
thirteen, stretched prone on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly
head propped on his arms over a book, while his tutor, also reading, sat
on a camp-stool under shelter. Deronda s book was Sismondi's "History of
the Italian Republics";--the lad had a passion for history, eager to know
how time had been filled up since the flood, and how things were carried
on in the dull periods. Suddenly he let down his left arm and looked at
his tutor, saying in purest boyish tones-"Mr. Fraser, how was it that the popes and cardinals always had so many
nephews?"
The tutor, an able young Scotchman, who acted as Sir Hugo Mallinger's
secretary, roused rather unwillingly from his political economy, answered
with the clear-cut emphatic chant which makes a truth doubly telling in
Scotch utterance-"Their own children were called nephews."
"Why?" said Deronda.
"It was just for the propriety of the thing; because, as you know very
well, priests don't marry, and the children were illegitimate."
Mr. Fraser, thrusting out his lower lip and making his chant of the last
word the more emphatic for a little impatience at being interrupted, had
already turned his eyes on his book again, while Deronda, as if something
had stung him, started up in a sitting attitude with his back to the
tutor.
He had always called Sir Hugo Mallinger his uncle, and when it once
occurred to him to ask about his father and mother, the baronet had
answered, "You lost your father and mother when you were quite a little
one; that is why I take care of you." Daniel then straining to discern
something in that early twilight, had a dim sense of having been kissed
very much, and surrounded by thin, cloudy, scented drapery, till his
ringers caught in something hard, which hurt him, and he began to cry.
Every other memory he had was of the little world in which he still lived.
And at that time he did not mind about learning more, for he was too fond
of Sir Hugo to be sorry for the loss of unknown parents. Life was very
delightful to the lad, with an uncle who was always indulgent and
cheerful--a fine man in the bright noon of life, whom Daniel thought
absolutely perfect, and whose place was one of the finest in England, at
once historical; romantic, and home-like: a picturesque architectural
outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the old monastic
trunk. Diplow lay in another county, and was a comparatively landless
place which had come into the family from a rich lawyer on the female side
who wore the perruque of the restoration; whereas the Mallingers had the
grant of Monk's Topping under Henry the Eighth, and ages before had held
the neighboring lands of King's Topping, tracing indeed their origin to a
certain Hugues le Malingre, who came in with the Conqueror--and also
apparently with a sickly complexion which had been happily corrected in
his descendants. Two rows of these descendants, direct and collateral,
females of the male line, and males of the female, looked down in the
gallery over the cloisters on the nephew Daniel as he walked there: men in
armor with pointed beards and arched eyebrows, pinched ladies in hoops and
ruffs with no face to speak of; grave-looking men in black velvet and
stuffed hips, and fair, frightened women holding little boys by the hand;
smiling politicians in magnificent perruques, and ladies of the prizeanimal kind, with rosebud mouths and full eyelids, according to Lely; then
a generation whose faces were revised and embellished in the taste of
Kneller; and so on through refined editions of the family types in the
time of Reynolds and Romney, till the line ended with Sir Hugo and his
younger brother Henleigh. This last had married Miss Grandcourt, and taken
her name along with her estates, thus making a junction between two
equally old families, impaling the three Saracens' heads proper and three
bezants of the one with the tower and falcons _argent_ of the other, and,
as it happened, uniting their highest advantages in the prospects of that
Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt who is at present more of an acquaintance to
us than either Sir Hugo or his nephew Daniel Deronda.
In Sir Hugo's youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir
Thomas Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of expression
and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original, but had done
something more than justice in slightly lengthening the nose, which was in
reality shorter than might have been expected in a Mallinger. Happily the
appropriate nose of the family reappeared in his younger brother, and was
to be seen in all its refined regularity in his nephew Mallinger
Grandcourt. But in the nephew Daniel Deronda the family faces of various
types, seen on the walls of the gallery; found no reflex. Still he was
handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as
model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys: you
could hardly have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours without believing
that human creatures had done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly
in time to come. The finest childlike faces have this consecrating power,
and make us shudder anew at all the grossness and basely-wrought griefs of
the world, lest they should enter here and defile.
But at this moment on the grass among the rose-petals, Daniel Deronda was
making a first acquaintance with those griefs. A new idea had entered his
mind, and was beginning to change the aspect of his habitual feelings as
happy careless voyagers are changed with the sky suddenly threatened and
the thought of danger arises. He sat perfectly still with his back to the
tutor, while his face expressed rapid inward transition. The deep blush,
which had come when he first started up, gradually subsided; but his
features kept that indescribable look of subdued activity which often
accompanies a new mental survey of familiar facts. He had not lived with
other boys, and his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance
with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen in bright girls. Having
read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked
with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock
and were held unfortunate in consequence, being under disadvantages which
required them to be a sort of heroes if they were to work themselves up to
an equal standing with their legally born brothers. But he had never
brought such knowledge into any association with his own lot, which had
been too easy for him ever to think about it--until this moment when there
had darted into his mind with the magic of quick comparison, the
possibility that here was the secret of his own birth, and that the man
whom he called uncle was really his father. Some children, even younger
than Daniel, have known the first arrival of care, like an ominous
irremovable guest in their tender lives, on the discovery that their
parents, whom they had imagined able to buy everything, were poor and in
hard money troubles. Daniel felt the presence of a new guest who seemed to
come with an enigmatic veiled face, and to carry dimly-conjectured,
dreaded revelations. The ardor which he had given to the imaginary world
in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history and spent its
pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown.
The uncle whom he loved very dearly took the aspect of a father who held
secrets about him--who had done him a wrong--yes, a wrong: and what had
become of his mother, for whom he must have been taken away?--Secrets
about which he, Daniel, could never inquire; for to speak or to be spoken
to about these new thoughts seemed like falling flakes of fire to his
imagination. Those who have known an impassioned childhood will understand
this dread of utterance about any shame connected with their parents. The
impetuous advent of new images took possession of him with the force of
fact for the first time told, and left him no immediate power for the
reflection that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The
terrible sense of collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread
of its betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell
without restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying:
"Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your book?"
Daniel immediately moved the book without turning round, and after holding
it before him for an instant, rose with it and walked away into the open
grounds, where he could dry his tears unobserved. The first shock of
suggestion past, he could remember that he had no certainty how things
really had been, and that he had been making conjectures about his own
history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to
fill up the blanks before they became famous. Only there came back certain
facts which had an obstinate reality,--almost like the fragments of a
bridge, telling you unmistakably how the arches lay. And again there came
a mood in which his conjectures seemed like a doubt of religion, to be
banished as an offense, and a mean prying after what he was not meant to
know; for there was hardly a delicacy of feeling this lad was not capable
of. But the summing-up of all his fluctuating experience at this epoch
was, that a secret impression had come to him which had given him
something like a new sense in relation to all the elements of his life.
And the idea that others probably knew things concerning which they did
not choose to mention, set up in him a premature reserve which helped to
intensify his inward experience. His ears open now to words which before
that July day would have passed by him unnoted; and round every trivial
incident which imagination could connect with his suspicions, a newlyroused set of feelings were ready to cluster themselves.
One such incident a month later wrought itself deeply into his life.
Daniel had not only one of those thrilling boy voices which seem to bring
an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes, but a fine musical instinct,
and had early made out accompaniments for himself on the piano, while he
sang from memory. Since then he had had some teaching, and Sir Hugo, who
delighted in the boy, used to ask for his music in the presence of guests.
One morning after he had been singing "Sweet Echo" before a small party of
gentlemen whom the rain had kept in the house, the baronet, passing from a
smiling remark to his next neighbor said:
"Come here, Dan!"
The boy came forward with unusual reluctance. He wore an embroidered
holland blouse which set off the rich coloring of his head and throat, and
the resistant gravity about his mouth and eyes as he was being smiled
upon, made their beauty the more impressive. Every one was admiring him,
"What do you say to being a great singer? Should you like to be adored by
the world and take the house by storm; like Mario and Tamberlik?"
Daniel reddened instantaneously, but there was a just perceptible interval
before he answered with angry decision-"No; I should hate it!"
"Well, well, well!" said Sir Hugo, with surprised kindliness intended to
be soothing. But Daniel turned away quickly, left the room, and going to
his own chamber threw himself on the broad window-sill, which was a
favorite retreat of his when he had nothing particular to do. Here he
could see the rain gradually subsiding with gleams through the parting
clouds which lit up a great reach of the park, where the old oaks stood
apart from each other, and the bordering wood was pierced with a green
glade which met the eastern sky. This was a scene which had always been
part of his home--part of the dignified ease which had been a matter of
course in his life. And his ardent clinging nature had appropriated it all
with affection. He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by
inheritance, and without thinking much about himself--for he was a boy of
active perceptions and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert
Bruce--he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot, or
have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted
him. It is possible (though not greatly believed in at present) to be fond
of poverty and take it for a bride, to prefer scoured deal, red quarries
and whitewash for one's private surroundings, to delight in no splendor
but what has open doors for the whole nation, and to glory in having no
privileges except such as nature insists on; and noblemen have been known
to run away from elaborate ease and the option of idleness, that they
might bind themselves for small pay to hard-handed labor. But Daniel's
tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was
one in which everyday scenes and habits beget not _ennui_ or rebellion,
but delight, affection, aptitudes; and now the lad had been stung to the
quick by the idea that his uncle--perhaps his father--thought of a career
for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was
not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English
gentlemen. He had often stayed in London with Sir Hugo, who to indulge the
boy's ear had carried him to the opera to hear the great tenors, so that
the image of a singer taking the house by storm was very vivid to him; but
now, spite of his musical gift, he set himself bitterly against the notion
of being dressed up to sing before all those fine people, who would not
care about him except as a wonderful toy. That Sir Hugo should have
thought of him in that position for a moment, seemed to Daniel an
unmistakable proof that there was something about his birth which threw
him out from the class of gentlemen to which the baronet belonged. Would
it ever be mentioned to him? Would the time come when his uncle would tell
him everything? He shrank from the prospect: in his imagination he
preferred ignorance. If his father had been wicked--Daniel inwardly used
strong words, for he was feeling the injury done him as a maimed boy feels
the crushed limb which for others is merely reckoned in an average of
accidents--if his father had done any wrong, he wished it might never be
spoken of to him: it was already a cutting thought that such knowledge
might be in other minds. Was it in Mr. Fraser's? probably not, else he
would not have spoken in that way about the pope's nephews. Daniel
fancied, as older people do, that every one else's consciousness was as
active as his own on a matter which was vital to him. Did Turvey the valet
know?--and old Mrs. French the housekeeper?--and Banks the bailiff, with
whom he had ridden about the farms on his pony?--And now there came back
the recollection of a day some years before when he was drinking Mrs.
Banks's whey, and Banks said to his wife with a wink and a cunning laugh,
"He features the mother, eh?" At that time little Daniel had merely
thought that Banks made a silly face, as the common farming men often did,
laughing at what was not laughable; and he rather resented being winked at
and talked of as if he did not understand everything. But now that small
incident became information: it was to be reasoned on. How could he be
like his mother and not like his father? His mother must have been a
Mallinger, if Sir Hugo were his uncle. But no! His father might have been
Sir Hugo's brother and have changed his name, as Mr. Henleigh Mallinger
did when he married Miss Grandcourt. But then, why had he never heard Sir
Hugo speak of his brother Deronda, as he spoke of his brother Grandcourt?
Daniel had never before cared about the family tree--only about that
ancestor who had killed three Saracens in one encounter. But now his mind
turned to a cabinet of estate-maps in the library, where he had once seen
an illuminated parchment hanging out, that Sir Hugo said was the family
tree. The phrase was new and odd to him--he was a little fellow then-hardly mare than half his present age--and he gave it no precise meaning.
He knew more now and wished that he could examine that parchment. He
imagined that the cabinet was always locked, and longed to try it. But
here he checked himself. He might be seen: and he would never bring
himself near even a silent admission of the sore that had opened in him.
It is in such experiences of a boy or girlhood, while elders are debating
whether most education lies in science or literature, that the main lines
of character are often laid down. If Daniel had been of a less ardently
affectionate nature, the reserve about himself and the supposition that
others had something to his disadvantage in their minds, might have turned
into a hard, proud antagonism. But inborn lovingness was strong enough to
keep itself level with resentment. There was hardly any creature in his
habitual world that he was not fond of; teasing them occasionally, of
course--all except his uncle, or "Nunc," as Sir Hugo had taught him to
say; for the baronet was the reverse of a strait-laced man, and left his
dignity to take care of itself. Him Daniel loved in that deep-rooted
filial way which makes children always the happier for being in the same
room with father or mother, though their occupations may be quite apart.
Sir Hugo's watch-chain and seals, his handwriting, his mode of smoking and
of talking to his dogs and horses, had all a rightness and charm about
them to the boy which went along with the happiness of morning and
breakfast time. That Sir Hugo had always been a Whig, made Tories and
Radicals equally opponents of the truest and best; and the books he had
written were all seen under the same consecration of loving belief which
differenced what was his from what was not his, in spite of general
resemblance. Those writings were various, from volumes of travel in the
brilliant style, to articles on things in general, and pamphlets on
political crises; but to Daniel they were alike in having an
unquestionable rightness by which other people's information could be
tested.
Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in
this object of complete love was _not_ quite right? Children demand that
their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a
first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a
passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which
makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
But some time after this renewal of Daniel's agitation it appeared that
Sir Hugo must have been making a merely playful experiment in his question
about the singing. He sent for Daniel into the library, and looking up
from his writing as the boy entered threw himself sideways in his
armchair. "Ah, Dan!" he said kindly, drawing one of the old embroidered
stools close to him. "Come and sit down here."
Daniel obeyed, and Sir Hugo put a gentle hand on his shoulder, looking at
him affectionately.
"What is it, my boy? Have you heard anything that has put you out of
spirits lately?"
Daniel was determined not to let the tears come, but he could not speak.
"All changes are painful when people have been happy, you know," said Sir
Hugo, lifting his hand from the boy's shoulder to his dark curls and
rubbing them gently. "You can't be educated exactly as I wish you to be
without our parting. And I think you will find a great deal to like at
school."
This was not what Daniel expected, and was so far a relief, which gave him
spirit to answer-"Am I to go to school?"
"Yes, I mean you to go to Eton. I wish you to have the education of an
English gentleman; and for that it is necessary that you should go to a
public school in preparation for the university: Cambridge I mean you to
go to; it was my own university."
Daniel's color came went.
"What do you say, sirrah?" said Sir Hugo, smiling.
"I should like to be a gentleman," said Daniel, with firm distinctness,
"and go to school, if that is what a gentleman's son must do."
Sir Hugo watched him silently for a few moments, thinking he understood
now why the lad had seemed angry at the notion of becoming a singer. Then
he said tenderly-"And so you won't mind about leaving your old Nunc?"
"Yes, I shall," said Daniel, clasping Sir Hugo's caressing arm with both
his hands. "But shan't I come home and be with you in the holidays?"
"Oh yes, generally," said Sir Hugo. "But now I mean you to go at once to a
new tutor, to break the change for you before you go to Eton."
After this interview Daniel's spirit rose again. He was meant to be a
gentleman, and in some unaccountable way it might be that his conjectures
were all wrong. The very keenness of the lad taught him to find comfort in
his ignorance. While he was busying his mind in the construction of
possibilities, it became plain to him that there must be possibilities of
which he knew nothing. He left off brooding, young joy and the spirit of
adventure not being easily quenched within him, and in the interval before
his going away he sang about the house, danced among the old servants,
making them parting gifts, and insisted many times to the groom on the
care that was to be taken of the black pony.
"Do you think I shall know much less than the other boys, Mr. Fraser?"
said Daniel. It was his bent to think that every stranger would be
surprised at his ignorance.
"There are dunces to be found everywhere," said the judicious Fraser.
"You'll not be the biggest; but you've not, the makings of a Porson in
you, or a Leibnitz either."
"I don't want to be a Porson or a Leibnitz," said Daniel. "I would rather
be a greater leader, like Pericles or Washington."
"Ay, ay; you've a notion they did with little parsing, and less algebra,"
said Fraser. But in reality he thought his pupil a remarkable lad, to whom
one thing was as easy as another, if he had only a mind to it.
Things went on very well with Daniel in his new world, except that a boy
with whom he was at once inclined to strike up a close friendship talked
to him a great deal about his home and parents, and seemed to expect a
like expansiveness in return. Daniel immediately shrank into reserve, and
this experience remained a check on his naturally strong bent toward the
formation of intimate friendship. Every one, his tutor included, set him
down as a reserved boy, though he was so good-humored and unassuming, as
well as quick, both at study and sport, that nobody called his reserve
disagreeable. Certainly his face had a great deal to do with that
favorable interpretation; but in this instance the beauty of the closed
lips told no falsehood.
A surprise that came to him before his first vacation strengthened the
silent consciousness of a grief within, which might be compared in some
ways with Byron's susceptibility about his deformed foot. Sir Hugo wrote
word that he was married to Miss Raymond, a sweet lady, whom Daniel must
remember having seen. The event would make no difference about his
spending the vacation at the Abbey; he would find Lady Mallinger a new
friend whom he would be sure to love--and much more to the usual effect
when a man, having done something agreeable to himself, is disposed to
congratulate others on his own good fortune, and the deducible
satisfactoriness of events in general.
Let Sir Hugo be partly excused until the grounds of his action can be more
fully known. The mistakes in his behavior to Deronda were due to that
dullness toward what may be going on in other minds, especially the minds
of children, which is among the commonest deficiencies, even in goodnatured men like him, when life has been generally easy to themselves, and
their energies have been quietly spent in feeling gratified. No one was
better aware than he that Daniel was generally suspected to be his own
son. But he was pleased with that suspicion; and his imagination had never
once been troubled with the way in which the boy himself might be
affected, either then or in the future, by the enigmatic aspect of his
circumstances. He was as fond of him as could be, and meant the best by
him. And, considering the lightness with which the preparation of young
lives seem to lie on respectable consciences, Sir Hugo Mallinger can
hardly be held open to exceptional reproach. He had been a bachelor till
he was five-and-forty, had always been regarded as a fascinating man of
elegant tastes; what could be more natural, even according to the index of
language, than that he should have a beautiful boy like the little Deronda
to take care of? The mother might even, perhaps, be in the great world-met with in Sir Hugo's residence abroad. The only person to feel any
objection was the boy himself, who could not have been consulted. And the
boy's objections had never been dreamed of by anybody but himself.
By the time Deronda was ready to go to Cambridge, Lady Mallinger had
already three daughters--charming babies, all three, but whose sex was
announced as a melancholy alternative, the offspring desired being a son;
if Sir Hugo had no son the succession must go to his nephew, Mallinger
Grandcourt. Daniel no longer held a wavering opinion about his own birth.
His fuller knowledge had tended to convince him that Sir Hugo was his
father, and he conceived that the baronet, since he never approached a
communication on the subject, wished him to have a tacit understanding of
the fact, and to accept in silence what would be generally considered more
than the due love and nurture. Sir Hugo's marriage might certainly have
been felt as a new ground of resentment by some youths in Deronda's
position, and the timid Lady Mallinger with her fast-coming little ones
might have been images to scowl at, as likely to divert much that was
disposable in the feelings and possessions of the baronet from one who
felt his own claim to be prior. But hatred of innocent human obstacles was
a form of moral stupidity not in Deronda's grain; even the indignation
which had long mingled itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the
quality of pain rather than of temper; and as his mind ripened to the idea
of tolerance toward error, he habitually liked the idea with his own
silent grievances.
The sense of an entailed disadvantage--the deformed foot doubtfully hidden
by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a
self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort,
who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the
inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination
tender. Deronda's early-weakened susceptibility, charged at first with
ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature
reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his
conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in
certain directions, who marked him off from other youths much more than
any talents he possessed.
One day near the end of the long vacation, when he had been making a tour
in the Rhineland with his Eton tutor, and was come for a farewell stay at
the Abbey before going to Cambridge, he said to Sir Hugo-"What do you intend me to be, sir?" They were in the library, and it was
the fresh morning. Sir Hugo had called him in to read a letter from a
Cambridge Don who was to be interested in him; and since the baronet wore
an air at once business-like and leisurely, the moment seemed propitious
for entering on a grave subject which had never yet been thoroughly
discussed.
"Whatever your inclination leads you to, my boy. I thought it right to
give you the option of the army, but you shut the door on that, and I was
glad. I don't expect you to choose just yet--by-and-by, when you have
looked about you a little more and tried your mettle among older men. The
university has a good wide opening into the forum. There are prizes to be
won, and a bit of good fortune often gives the turn to a man's taste. From
what I see and hear, I should think you can take up anything you like. You
are in the deeper water with your classics than I ever got into, and if
you are rather sick of that swimming, Cambridge is the place where you can
go into mathematics with a will, and disport yourself on the dry sand as
much as you like. I floundered along like a carp."
"I suppose money will make some difference, sir," said Daniel blushing. "I
shall have to keep myself by-and-by."
"Not exactly. I recommend you not to be extravagant--yes, yes, I know--you
are not inclined to that;--but you need not take up anything against the
grain. You will have a bachelor's income--enough for you to look about
with. Perhaps I had better tell you that you may consider yourself secure
of seven hundred a year. You might make yourself a barrister--be a writer
--take up politics. I confess that is what would please me best. I should
like to have you at my elbow and pulling with me."
Deronda looked embarrassed. He felt that he ought to make some sign of
gratitude, but other feelings clogged his tongue. A moment was passing by
in which a question about his birth was throbbing within him, and yet it
seemed more impossible than ever that the question should find vent--more
impossible than ever that he could hear certain things from Sir Hugo's
lips. The liberal way in which he was dealt with was the more striking
because the baronet had of late cared particularly for money, and for
making the utmost of his life-interest in the estate by way of providing
for his daughters; and as all this flashed through Daniel's mind it was
momentarily within his imagination that the provision for him might come
in some way from his mother. But such vaporous conjecture passed away as
quickly as it came.
Sir Hugo appeared not to notice anything peculiar in Daniel's manner, and
presently went on with his usual chatty liveliness.
"I am glad you have done some good reading outside your classics, and have
got a grip of French and German. The truth is, unless a man can get the
prestige and income of a Don and write donnish books, it's hardly worth
while for him to make a Greek and Latin machine of himself and be able to
spin you out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as
a cue. That's all very fine, but in practical life nobody does give you
the cue for pages of Greek. In fact, it's a nicety of conversation which I
would have you attend to--much quotation of any sort, even in English is
bad. It tends to choke ordinary remark. One couldn't carry on life
comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything had
been said better than we can put it ourselves. But talking of Dons, I have
seen Dons make a capital figure in society; and occasionally he can shoot
you down a cart-load of learning in the right place, which will tell in
politics. Such men are wanted; and if you have any turn for being a Don, I
say nothing against it."
"I think there's not much chance of that. Quicksett and Puller are both
stronger than I am. I hope you will not be much disappointed if I don't
come out with high honors."
"No, no. I should like you to do yourself credit, but for God's sake don't
come out as a superior expensive kind of idiot, like young Brecon, who got
a Double First, and has been learning to knit braces ever since. What I
wish you to get is a passport in life. I don't go against our university
system: we want a little disinterested culture to make head against cotton
and capital, especially in the House. My Greek has all evaporated; if I
had to construe a verse on a sudden, I should get an apoplectic fit. But
it formed my taste. I dare say my English is the better for it."
On this point Daniel kept a respectful silence. The enthusiastic belief in
Sir Hugo's writings as a standard, and in the Whigs as the chosen race
among politicians, had gradually vanished along with the seraphic boy's
face. He had not been the hardest of workers at Eton. Though some kinds of
study and reading came as easily as boating to him, he was not of the
material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There had sprung
up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which is likely
always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in narrow tracks.
Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-*ness in himself simply as
a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority.
Still Mr. Eraser's high opinion of the lad had not been altogether belied
by the youth: Daniel had the stamp of rarity in a subdued fervor of
sympathy, an activity of imagination on behalf of others which did not
show itself effusively, but was continually seen in acts of
considerateness that struck his companions as moral eccentricity. "Deronda
would have been first-rate if he had had more ambition," was a frequent
remark about him. But how could a fellow push his way properly when he
objected to swop for his own advantage, knocked under by choice when he
was within an inch of victory, and, unlike the great Clive, would rather
be the calf than the butcher? It was a mistake, however, to suppose that
Deronda had not his share of ambition. We know he had suffered keenly from
the belief that there was a tinge of dishonor in his lot; but there are
some cases, and his was one of them, in which the sense of injury breeds-not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a
hatred of all injury. He had his flashes of fierceness and could hit out
upon occasion, but the occasions were not always what might have been
expected. For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had been
early checked by a mastering affectionateness. Love has a habit of saying
"Never mind" to angry self, who, sitting down for the nonce in the lower
place, by-and-by gets used to it. So it was that as Deronda approached
manhood his feeling for Sir Hugo, while it was getting more and more mixed
with criticism, was gaining in that sort of allowance which reconciles
criticism with tenderness. The dear old beautiful home and everything
within it, Lady Mallinger and her little ones included, were consecrated
for the youth as they had been for the boy--only with a certain difference
of light on the objects. The altarpiece was no longer miraculously
perfect, painted under infallible guidance, but the human hand discerned
in the work was appealing to a reverent tenderness safer from the gusts of
discovery. Certainly Deronda's ambition, even in his spring-time, lay
exceptionally aloof from conspicuous, vulgar triumph, and from other ugly
forms of boyish energy; perhaps because he was early impassioned by ideas,
and burned his fire on those heights. One may spend a good deal of energy
in disliking and resisting what others pursue, and a boy who is fond of
somebody else's pencil-case may not be more energetic than another who is
fond of giving his own pencil-case away. Still it was not Deronda's
disposition to escape from ugly scenes; he was more inclined to sit
through them and take care of the fellow least able to take care of
himself. It had helped to make him popular that he was sometimes a little
compromised by this apparent comradeship. For a meditative interest in
learning how human miseries are wrought--as precocious in him as another
sort of genius in the poet who writes a Queen Mab at nineteen--was so
infused with kindliness that it easily passed for comradeship. Enough. In
many of our neighbors' lives there is much not only of error and lapse,
but of a certain exquisite goodness which can never be written or even
spoken--only divined by each of us, according to the inward instruction of
our own privacy.
The impression he made at Cambridge corresponded to his position at Eton.
Every one interested in him agreed that he might have taken a high place
if his motives had been of a more pushing sort, and if he had not, instead
of regarding studies as instruments of success, hampered himself with the
notion that they were to feed motive and opinion--a notion which set him
criticising methods and arguing against his freight and harness when he
should have been using all his might to pull. In the beginning his work at
the university had a new zest for him: indifferent to the continuation of
Eton classical drill, he applied himself vigorously to mathematics, for
which he had shown an early aptitude under Mr. Fraser, and he had the
delight of feeling his strength in a comparatively fresh exercise of
thought. That delight, and the favorable opinion of his tutor, determined
him to try for a mathematical scholarship in the Easter of his second
year: he wished to gratify Sir Hugo by some achievement, and the study of
the higher mathematics, having the growing fascination inherent in all
thinking which demands intensity, was making him a more exclusive worker
than he had been before.
But here came the old check which had been growing with his growth. He
found the inward bent toward comprehension and thoroughness diverging more
and more from the track marked out by the standards of examination: he
felt a heightening discontent with the wearing futility and enfeebling
strain of a demand for excessive retention and dexterity without any
insight into the principles which form the vital connections of knowledge.
(Deronda's undergraduateship occurred fifteen years ago, when the
perfection of our university methods was not yet indisputable.) In hours
when his dissatisfaction was strong upon him he reproached himself for
having been attracted by the conventional advantage of belonging to an
English university, and was tempted toward the project of asking Sir Hugo
to let him quit Cambridge and pursue a more independent line of study
abroad. The germs of this inclination had been already stirring in his
boyish love of universal history, which made him want to be at home in
foreign countries, and follow in imagination the traveling students of the
middle ages. He longed now to have the sort of apprenticeship to life
which would not shape him too definitely, and rob him of the choice that
might come from a free growth. One sees that Deronda's demerits were
likely to be on the side of reflective hesitation, and this tendency was
encouraged by his position; there was no need for him to get an immediate
income, or to fit himself in haste for a profession; and his sensibility
to the half-known facts of his parentage made him an excuse for lingering
longer than others in a state of social neutrality. Other men, he inwardly
said, had a more definite place and duties. But the project which
flattered his inclination might not have gone beyond the stage of
ineffective brooding, if certain circumstances had not quickened it into
action.
The circumstances arose out of an enthusiastic friendship which extended
into his after-life. Of the same year with himself, and occupying small
rooms close to his, was a youth who had come as an exhibitioner from
Christ's Hospital, and had eccentricities enough for a Charles Lamb. Only
to look at his pinched features and blonde hair hanging over his collar
reminded one of pale quaint heads by early German painters; and when this
faint coloring was lit up by a joke, there came sudden creases about the
mouth and eyes which might have been moulded by the soul of an aged
humorist. His father, an engraver of some distinction, had been dead
eleven years, and his mother had three girls to educate and maintain on a
meagre annuity. Hans Meyrick--he had been daringly christened after
Holbein--felt himself the pillar, or rather the knotted and twisted trunk,
round which these feeble climbing plants must cling. There was no want of
ability or of honest well-meaning affection to make the prop trustworthy:
the ease and quickness with which he studied might serve him to win prizes
at Cambridge, as he had done among the Blue Coats, in spite of
irregularities. The only danger was, that the incalculable tendencies in
him might be fatally timed, and that his good intentions might be
frustrated by some act which was not due to habit but to capricious,
scattered impulses. He could not be said to have any one bad habit; yet at
longer or shorter intervals he had fits of impish recklessness, and did
things that would have made the worst habits.
Hans in his right mind, however, was a lovable creature, and in Deronda he
had happened to find a friend who was likely to stand by him with the more
constancy, from compassion for these brief aberrations that might bring a
long repentance. Hans, indeed, shared Deronda's rooms nearly as much as he
used his own: to Deronda he poured himself out on his studies, his
affairs, his hopes; the poverty of his home, and his love for the
creatures there; the itching of his fingers to draw, and his determination
to fight it away for the sake of getting some sort of a plum that he might
divide with his mother and the girls. He wanted no confidence in return,
but seemed to take Deronda as an Olympian who needed nothing--an egotism
in friendship which is common enough with mercurial, expansive natures.
Deronda was content, and gave Meyrick all the interest he claimed, getting
at last a brotherly anxiety about him, looking after him in his erratic
moments, and contriving by adroitly delicate devices not only to make up
for his friend's lack of pence, but to save him from threatening chances.
Such friendship easily becomes tender: the one spreads strong sheltering
wings that delight in spreading, the other gets the warm protection which
is also a delight. Meyrick was going in for a classical scholarship, and
his success, in various ways momentous, was the more probable from the
steadying influence of Deronda's friendship.
But an imprudence of Meyrick's, committed at the beginning of the autumn
term, threatened to disappoint his hopes. With his usual alternation
between unnecessary expense and self-privation, he had given too much
money for an old engraving which fascinated him, and to make up for it,
had come from London in a third-class carriage with his eyes exposed to a
bitter wind and any irritating particles the wind might drive before it.
The consequence was a severe inflammation of the eyes, which for some time
hung over him the threat of a lasting injury. This crushing trouble called
out all Deronda's readiness to devote himself, and he made every other
occupation secondary to that of being companion and eyes to Hans, working
with him and for him at his classics, that if possible his chance of the
classical scholarship might be saved. Hans, to keep the knowledge of his
suffering from his mother and sisters, alleged his work as a reason for
passing the Christmas at Cambridge, and his friend stayed up with him.
Meanwhile Deronda relaxed his hold on his mathematics, and Hans,
reflecting on this, at length said: "Old fellow, while you are hoisting me
you are risking yourself. With your mathematical cram one may be like
Moses or Mahomet or somebody of that sort who had to cram, and forgot in
one day what it had taken him forty to learn."
Deronda would not admit that he cared about the risk, and he had really
been beguiled into a little indifference by double sympathy: he was very
anxious that Hans should not miss the much-needed scholarship, and he felt
a revival of interest in the old studies. Still, when Hans, rather late in
the day, got able to use his own eyes, Deronda had tenacity enough to try
hard and recover his lost ground. He failed, however; but he had the
satisfaction of seeing Meyrick win.
Success, as a sort of beginning that urged completion, might have
reconciled Deronda to his university course; but the emptiness of all
things, from politics to pastimes, is never so striking to us as when we
fail in them. The loss of the personal triumph had no severity for him,
but the sense of having spent his time ineffectively in a mode of working
which had been against the grain, gave him a distaste for any renewal of
the process, which turned his imagined project of quitting Cambridge into
a serious intention. In speaking of his intention to Meyrick he made it
appear that he was glad of the turn events had taken--glad to have the
balance dip decidedly, and feel freed from his hesitations; but he
observed that he must of course submit to any strong objection on the part
of Sir Hugo.
Meyrick's joy and gratitude were disturbed by much uneasiness. He believed
in Deronda's alleged preference, but he felt keenly that in serving him
Daniel had placed himself at a disadvantage in Sir Hugo's opinion, and he
said mournfully, "If you had got the scholarship, Sir Hugo would have
thought that you asked to leave us with a better grace. You have spoiled
your luck for my sake, and I can do nothing to amend it."
"Yes, you can; you are to be a first-rate fellow. I call that a first-rate
investment of my luck."
"Oh, confound it! You save an ugly mongrel from drowning, and expect him
to cut a fine figure. The poets have made tragedies enough about signing
one's self over to wickedness for the sake of getting something plummy; I
shall write a tragedy of a fellow who signed himself over to be good, and
was uncomfortable ever after."
But Hans lost no time in secretly writing the history of the affair to Sir
Hugo, making it plain that but for Deronda's generous devotion he could
hardly have failed to win the prize he had been working for.
The two friends went up to town together: Meyrick to rejoice with his
mother and the girls in their little home at Chelsea; Deronda to carry out
the less easy task of opening his mind to Sir Hugo. He relied a little on
the baronet's general tolerance of eccentricities, but he expected more
opposition than he met with. He was received with even warmer kindness
than usual, the failure was passed over lightly, and when he detailed his
reasons for wishing to quit the university and go to study abroad. Sir
Hugo sat for some time in a silence which was rather meditative than
surprised. At last he said, looking at Daniel with examination, "So you
don't want to be an Englishman to the backbone after all?"
"I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of
view. And I want to get rid of a merely English attitude in studies."
"I see; you don't want to be turned out in the same mould as every other
youngster. And I have nothing to say against your doffing some of our
national prejudices. I feel the better myself for having spent a good deal
of my time abroad. But, for God's sake, keep an English cut, and don't
become indifferent to bad tobacco! And, my dear boy, it is good to be
unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to
give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you
must know where to find yourself. However, I shall put no vote on your
going. Wait until I can get off Committee, and I'll run over with you."
So Deronda went according to his will. But not before he had spent some
hours with Hans Meyrick, and been introduced to the mother and sisters in
the Chelsea home. The shy girls watched and registered every look of their
brother's friend, declared by Hans to have been the salvation of him, a
fellow like nobody else, and, in fine, a brick. They so thoroughly
accepted Deronda as an ideal, that when he was gone the youngest set to
work, under the criticism of the two elder girls, to paint him as Prince
Camaralzaman.
CHAPTER XVII.
"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 began 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 girltragedies 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, halfinvoluntary 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.
CHAPTER XVIII.
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 allyes, 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 mediæval 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 _à 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.
BOOK III--MAIDENS CHOOSING.
CHAPTER XIX.
"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.
CHAPTER XX.
"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 byand-by you will see--she will have no more face and action than a singingbird.' 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-à-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 gamingtable.
CHAPTER XXI.
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 anew 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 a 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's 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 daughter's," 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 Arrowpoint's 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, Jefferies 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.
CHAPTER XXII.
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 independentspirited 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. Tannhäuser, 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 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 _mésalliance_ 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 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 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.
CHAPTER XXIII.
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 knicknacks 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--_Bösewicht_." 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 insistance-"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
Fräulein, 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 selfdenial? 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 selfconfidence 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 nationality 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
_protégé_, 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.
CHAPTER XXIV.
"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 wordly
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 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 illnatured 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 _éclat_. 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 _à 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 _nécessaire_, 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.
CHAPTER XXV.
How trace the why and wherefore in a mind reduced to the barrenness of
a fastidious egoism, in which all direct desires are dulled, and have
dwindled from motives into a vacillating expectation of motives: a
mind made up of moods, where a fitful impulse springs here and there
conspicuously rank amid the general weediness? 'Tis a condition apt to
befall a life too much at large, unmoulded by the pressure of
obligation. _Nam deteriores omnes sumus licentiae_, or, as a more
familiar tongue might deliver it, _"As you like" is a bad fingerpost._
Potentates make known their intentions and affect the funds at a small
expense of words. So when Grandcourt, after learning that Gwendolen had
left Leubronn, incidentally pronounced that resort of fashion a beastly
hole, worse than Baden, the remark was conclusive to Mr. Lush that his
patron intended straightway to return to Diplow. The execution was sure to
be slower than the intention, and, in fact, Grandcourt did loiter through
the next day without giving any distinct orders about departure--perhaps
because he discerned that Lush was expecting them: he lingered over his
toilet, and certainly came down with a faded aspect of perfect distinction
which made fresh complexions and hands with the blood in them, seem signs
of raw vulgarity; he lingered on the terrace, in the gambling-rooms, in
the reading-room, occupying himself in being indifferent to everybody and
everything around him. When he met Lady Mallinger, however, he took some
trouble--raised his hat, paused, and proved that he listened to her
recommendation of the waters by replying, "Yes; I heard somebody say how
providential it was that there always happened to be springs at gambling
places."
"Oh, that was a joke," said innocent Lady Mallinger, misled by
Grandcourt's languid seriousness, "in imitation of the old one about the
towns and the rivers, you know."
"Ah, perhaps," said Grandcourt, without change of expression. Lady
Mallinger thought this worth telling to Sir Hugo, who said, "Oh, my dear,
he is not a fool. You must not suppose that he can't see a joke. He can
play his cards as well as most of us."
"He has never seemed to me a very sensible man," said Lady Mallinger, in
excuse of herself. She had a secret objection to meeting Grandcourt, who
was little else to her than a large living sign of what she felt to be her
failure as a wife--the not having presented Sir Hugo with a son. Her
constant reflection was that her husband might fairly regret his choice,
and if he had not been very good might have treated her with some
roughness in consequence, gentlemen naturally disliking to be
disappointed.
Deronda, too, had a recognition from Grandcourt, for which he was not
grateful, though he took care to return it with perfect civility. No
reasoning as to the foundations of custom could do away with the earlyrooted feeling that his birth had been attended with injury for which his
father was to blame; and seeing that but for this injury Grandcourt's
prospects might have been his, he was proudly resolute not to behave in
any way that might be interpreted into irritation on that score. He saw a
very easy descent into mean unreasoning rancor and triumph in others'
frustration; and being determined not to go down that ugly pit, he turned
his back on it, clinging to the kindlier affections within him as a
possession. Pride certainly helped him well--the pride of not recognizing
a disadvantage for one's self which vulgar minds are disposed to
exaggerate, such as the shabby equipage of poverty: he would not have a
man like Grandcourt suppose himself envied by him. But there is no
guarding against interpretation. Grandcourt did believe that Deronda, poor
devil, who he had no doubt was his cousin by the father's side, inwardly
winced under their mutual position; wherefore the presence of that less
lucky person was more agreeable to him than it would otherwise have been.
An imaginary envy, the idea that others feel their comparative deficiency,
is the ordinary _cortège_ of egoism; and his pet dogs were not the only
beings that Grandcourt liked to feel his power over in making them
jealous. Hence he was civil enough to exchange several words with Deronda
on the terrace about the hunting round Diplow, and even said, "You had
better come over for a run or two when the season begins."
Lush, not displeased with delay, amused himself very well, partly in
gossiping with Sir Hugo and in answering his questions about Grandcourt's
affairs so far as they might affect his willingness to part with his
interest in Diplow. Also about Grandcourt's personal entanglements, the
baronet knew enough already for Lush to feel released from silence on a
sunny autumn day, when there was nothing more agreeable to do in lounging
promenades than to speak freely of a tyrannous patron behind his back. Sir
Hugo willingly inclined his ear to a little good-humored scandal, which he
was fond of calling _traits de moeurs_; but he was strict in keeping such
communications from hearers who might take them too seriously. Whatever
knowledge he had of his nephew's secrets, he had never spoken of it to
Deronda, who considered Grandcourt a pale-blooded mortal, but was far from
wishing to hear how the red corpuscles had been washed out of him. It was
Lush's policy and inclination to gratify everybody when he had no reason
to the contrary; and the baronet always treated him well, as one of those
easy-handled personages who, frequenting the society of gentlemen, without
being exactly gentlemen themselves, can be the more serviceable, like the
second-best articles of our wardrobe, which we use with a comfortable
freedom from anxiety.
"Well, you will let me know the turn of events," said Sir Hugo, "if this
marriage seems likely to come off after all, or if anything else happens
to make the want of money pressing. My plan would be much better for him
than burdening Ryelands."
"That's true," said Lush, "only it must not be urged on him--just placed
in his way that the scent may tickle him. Grandcourt is not a man to be
always led by what makes for his own interest; especially if you let him
see that it makes for your interest too. I'm attached to him, of course.
I've given up everything else for the sake of keeping by him, and it has
lasted a good fifteen years now. He would not easily get any one else to
fill my place. He's a peculiar character, is Henleigh Grandcourt, and it
has been growing on him of late years. However, I'm of a constant
disposition, and I've been a sort of guardian to him since he was twenty;
an uncommonly fascinating fellow he was then, to be sure--and could be
now, if he liked. I'm attached to him; and it would be a good deal worse
for him if he missed me at his elbow."
Sir Hugo did not think it needful to express his sympathy or even assent,
and perhaps Lush himself did not expect this sketch of his motives to be
taken as exact. But how can a man avoid himself as a subject in
conversation? And he must make some sort of decent toilet in words, as in
cloth and linen. Lush's listener was not severe: a member of Parliament
could allow for the necessities of verbal toilet; and the dialogue went on
without any change of mutual estimate.
However, Lush's easy prospect of indefinite procrastination was cut off
the next morning by Grandcourt's saluting him with the question-"Are you making all the arrangements for our starting by the Paris train?"
"I didn't know you meant to start," said Lush, not exactly taken by
surprise.
"You might have known," said Grandcourt, looking at the burned length of
his cigar, and speaking in that lowered tone which was usual with him when
he meant to express disgust and be peremptory. "Just see to everything,
will you? and mind no brute gets into the same carriage with us. And leave
my P. P. C. at the Mallingers."
In consequence they were at Paris the next day; but here Lush was
gratified by the proposal or command that he should go straight on to
Diplow and see that everything was right, while Grandcourt and the valet
remained behind; and it was not until several days later that Lush
received the telegram ordering the carriage to the Wanchester station.
He had used the interim actively, not only in carrying out Grandcourt's
orders about the stud and household, but in learning all he could of
Gwendolen, and how things were going on at Offendene. What was the
probable effect that the news of the family misfortunes would have on
Grandcourt's fitful obstinacy he felt to be quite incalculable. So far as
the girl's poverty might be an argument that she would accept an offer
from him now in spite of any previous coyness, it might remove that bitter
objection to risk a repulse which Lush divined to be one of Grandcourt's
deterring motives; on the other hand, the certainty of acceptance was just
"the sort of thing" to make him lapse hither and thither with no more
apparent will than a moth. Lush had had his patron under close observation
for many years, and knew him perhaps better than he knew any other
subject; but to know Grandcourt was to doubt what he would do in any
particular case. It might happen that he would behave with an apparent
magnanimity, like the hero of a modern French drama, whose sudden start
into moral splendor after much lying and meanness, leaves you little
confidence as to any part of his career that may follow the fall of the
curtain. Indeed, what attitude would have been more honorable for a final
scene than that of declining to seek an heiress for her money, and
determining to marry the attractive girl who had none? But Lush had some
general certainties about Grandcourt, and one was that of all inward
movements those of generosity were least likely to occur in him. Of what
use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his
head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus
that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? Thus
Lush was much at fault as to the probable issue between Grandcourt and
Gwendolen, when what he desired was a perfect confidence that they would
never be married. He would have consented willingly that Grandcourt should
marry an heiress, or that he should marry Mrs. Glasher: in the one match
there would have been the immediate abundance that prospective heirship
could not supply, in the other there would have been the security of the
wife's gratitude, for Lush had always been Mrs. Glasher's friend; and that
the future Mrs. Grandcourt should not be socially received could not
affect his private comfort. He would not have minded, either, that there
should be no marriage in question at all; but he felt himself justified in
doing his utmost to hinder a marriage with a girl who was likely to bring
nothing but trouble to her husband--not to speak of annoyance if not
ultimate injury to her husband's old companion, whose future Mr. Lush
earnestly wished to make as easy as possible, considering that he had well
deserved such compensation for leading a dog's life, though that of a dog
who enjoyed many tastes undisturbed, and who profited by a large
establishment. He wished for himself what he felt to be good, and was not
conscious of wishing harm to any one else; unless perhaps it were just now
a little harm to the inconvenient and impertinent Gwendolen. But the
easiest-humored of luxury and music, the toad-eater the least liable to
nausea, must be expected to have his susceptibilities. And Mr. Lush was
accustomed to be treated by the world in general as an apt, agreeable
fellow: he had not made up his mind to be insulted by more than one
person.
With this imperfect preparation of a war policy, Lush was awaiting
Grandcourt's arrival, doing little more than wondering how the campaign
would begin. The first day Grandcourt was much occupied with the stables,
and amongst other things he ordered a groom to put a side-saddle on
Criterion and let him review the horse's paces. This marked indication of
purpose set Lush on considering over again whether he should incur the
ticklish consequences of speaking first, while he was still sure that no
compromising step had been taken; and he rose the next morning almost
resolved that if Grandcourt seemed in as good a humor as yesterday and
entered at all into talk, he would let drop the interesting facts about
Gwendolen and her family, just to see how they would work, and to get some
guidance. But Grandcourt did not enter into talk, and in answer to a
question even about his own convenience, no fish could have maintained a
more unwinking silence. After he had read his letters he gave various
orders to be executed or transmitted by Lush, and then thrust his shoulder
toward that useful person, who accordingly rose to leave the room. But
before he was out of the door Grandcourt turned his head slightly and gave
a broken, languid "Oh."
"What is it?" said Lush, who, it must have been observed, did not take his
dusty puddings with a respectful air.
"Shut the door, will you? I can't speak into the corridor."
Lush closed the door, came forward, and chose to sit down.
After a little pause Grandcourt said, "Is Miss Harleth at Offendene?" He
was quite certain that Lush had made it his business to inquire about her,
and he had some pleasure in thinking that Lush did not want _him_ to
inquire.
"Well, I hardly know," said Lush, carelessly. "The family's utterly done
up. They and the Gascoignes too have lost all their money. It's owing to
some rascally banking business. The poor mother hasn't a _sou_, it seems.
She and the girls have to huddle themselves into a little cottage like a
laborer's."
"Don't lie to me, if you please," said Grandcourt, in his lowest audible
tone. "It's not amusing, and it answers no other purpose."
"What do you mean?" said Lush, more nettled than was common with him--the
prospect before him being more than commonly disturbing.
"Just tell me the truth, will you?"
"It's no invention of mine. I have heard the story from several--Bazley,
Brackenshaw's man, for one. He is getting a new tenant for Offendene."
"I don't mean that. Is Miss Harleth there, or is she not?" said
Grandcourt, in his former tone.
"Upon my soul, I can't tell," said Lush, rather sulkily. "She may have
left yesterday. I heard she had taken a situation as governess; she may be
gone to it for what I know. But if you wanted to see her no doubt the
mother would send for her back." This sneer slipped off his tongue without
strict intention.
"Send Hutchins to inquire whether she will be there tomorrow." Lush did
not move. Like many persons who have thought over beforehand what they
shall say in given cases, he was impelled by an unexpected irritation to
say some of those prearranged things before the cases were given.
Grandcourt, in fact, was likely to get into a scrape so tremendous that it
was impossible to let him take the first step toward it without
remonstrance. Lush retained enough caution to use a tone of rational
friendliness, still he felt his own value to his patron, and was prepared
to be daring.
"It would be as well for you to remember, Grandcourt, that you are coming
under closer fire now. There can be none of the ordinary flirting done,
which may mean everything or nothing. You must make up your mind whether
you wish to be accepted; and more than that, how you would like being
refused. Either one or the other. You can't be philandering after her
again for six weeks."
Grandcourt said nothing, but pressed the newspaper down on his knees and
began to light another cigar. Lush took this as a sign that he was willing
to listen, and was the more bent on using the opportunity; he wanted, if
possible, to find out which would be the more potent cause of hesitation-probable acceptance or probable refusal.
"Everything has a more serious look now than it had before. There is her
family to be provided for. You could not let your wife's mother live in
beggary. It will be a confoundedly hampering affair. Marriage will pin you
down in a way you haven't been used to; and in point of money you have not
too much elbow-room. And after all, what will you get by it? You are
master over your estates, present or future, as far as choosing your heir
goes; it's a pity to go on encumbering them for a mere whim, which you may
repent of in a twelvemonth. I should be sorry to see you making a mess of
your life in that way. If there were anything solid to be gained by the
marriage, that would be a different affair."
Lush's tone had gradually become more and more unctuous in its
friendliness of remonstrance, and he was almost in danger of forgetting
that he was merely gambling in argument. When he left off, Grandcourt took
his cigar out of his mouth, and looking steadily at the moist end while he
adjusted the leaf with his delicate finger-tips, said-"I knew before that you had an objection to my marrying Miss Harleth."
Here he made a little pause before he continued. "But I never considered
that a reason against it."
"I never supposed you did," answered Lush, not unctuously but dryly. "It
was not _that_ I urged as a reason. I should have thought it might have
been a reason against it, after all your experience, that you would be
acting like the hero of a ballad, and making yourself absurd--and all for
what? You know you couldn't make up your mind before. It's impossible you
can care much about her. And as for the tricks she is likely to play, you
may judge of that from what you heard at Leubronn. However, what I wished
to point out to you was, that there can be no shilly-shally now."
"Perfectly," said Grandcourt, looking round at Lush and fixing him with
narrow eyes; "I don't intend that there should be. I dare say it's
disagreeable to you. But if you suppose I care a damn for that you are
most stupendously mistaken."
"Oh, well," said Lush, rising with his hands in his pockets, and feeling
some latent venom still within him, "if you have made up your mind!--only
there's another aspect of the affair. I have been speaking on the
supposition that it was absolutely certain she would accept you, and that
destitution would have no choice. But I am not so sure that the young lady
is to be counted on. She is kittle cattle to shoe, I think. And she had
her reasons for running away before." Lush had moved a step or two till he
stood nearly in front of Grandcourt, though at some distance from him. He
did not feel himself much restrained by consequences, being aware that the
only strong hold he had on his present position was his serviceableness;
and even after a quarrel the want of him was likely sooner or later to
recur. He foresaw that Gwendolen would cause him to be ousted for a time,
and his temper at this moment urged him to risk a quarrel.
"She had her reasons," he repeated more significantly.
"I had come to that conclusion before," said Grandcourt, with contemptuous
irony.
"Yes, but I hardly think you know what her reasons were."
"You do, apparently," said Grandcourt, not betraying by so much as an
eyelash that he cared for the reasons.
"Yes, and you had better know too, that you may judge of the influence you
have over her if she swallows her reasons and accepts you. For my own part
I would take odds against it. She saw Lydia in Cardell Chase and heard the
whole story."
Grandcourt made no immediate answer, and only went on smoking. He was so
long before he spoke that Lush moved about and looked out of the windows,
unwilling to go away without seeing some effect of his daring move. He had
expected that Grandcourt would tax him with having contrived the affair,
since Mrs. Glasher was then living at Gadsmere, a hundred miles off, and
he was prepared to admit the fact: what he cared about was that Grandcourt
should be staggered by the sense that his intended advances must be made
to a girl who had that knowledge in her mind and had been scared by it. At
length Grandcourt, seeing Lush turn toward him, looked at him again and
said, contemptuously, "What follows?"
Here certainly was a "mate" in answer to Lush's "check:" and though his
exasperation with Grandcourt was perhaps stronger than it had ever been
before, it would have been idiocy to act as if any further move could be
useful. He gave a slight shrug with one shoulder, and was going to walk
away, when Grandcourt, turning on his seat toward the table, said, as
quietly as if nothing had occurred, "Oblige me by pushing that pen and
paper here, will you?"
No thunderous, bullying superior could have exercised the imperious spell
that Grandcourt did. Why, instead of being obeyed, he had never been told
to go to a warmer place, was perhaps a mystery to those who found
themselves obeying him. The pen and paper were pushed to him, and as he
took them he said, "Just wait for this letter."
He scrawled with ease, and the brief note was quickly addressed. "Let
Hutchins go with it at once, will you?" said Grandcourt, pushing the
letter away from him.
As Lush had expected, it was addressed to Miss Harleth, Offendene. When
his irritation had cooled down he was glad there had been no explosive
quarrel; but he felt sure that there was a notch made against him, and
that somehow or other he was intended to pay. It was also clear to him
that the immediate effect of his revelation had been to harden
Grandcourt's previous determination. But as to the particular movements
that made this process in his baffling mind, Lush could only toss up his
chin in despair of a theory.
CHAPTER XXVI.
He brings white asses laden with the freight
Of Tyrian vessels, purple, gold and balm,
To bribe my will: I'll bid them chase him forth,
Nor let him breathe the taint of his surmise
On my secure resolve.
Ay, 'tis secure:
And therefore let him come to spread his freight.
For firmness hath its appetite and craves
The stronger lure, more strongly to resist;
Would know the touch of gold to fling it off;
Scent wine to feel its lip the soberer;
Behold soft byssus, ivory, and plumes
To say, "They're fair, but I will none of them,"
And flout Enticement in the very face.
Mr. Gascoigne one day came to Offendene with what he felt to be the
satisfactory news that Mrs. Mompert had fixed Tuesday in the following
week for her interview with Gwendolen at Wanchester. He said nothing of
his having incidentally heard that Mr. Grandcourt had returned to Diplow;
knowing no more than she did that Leubronn had been the goal of her
admirer's journeying, and feeling that it would be unkind uselessly to
revive the memory of a brilliant prospect under the present reverses. In
his secret soul he thought of his niece's unintelligible caprice with
regret, but he vindicated her to himself by considering that Grandcourt
had been the first to behave oddly, in suddenly walking away when there
had the best opportunity for crowning his marked attentions. The rector's
practical judgment told him that his chief duty to his niece now was to
encourage her resolutely to face the change in her lot, since there was no
manifest promise of any event that would avert it.
"You will find an interest in varied experience, my dear, and I have no
doubt you will be a more valuable woman for having sustained such a part
as you are called to."
"I cannot pretend to believe that I shall like it," said Gwendolen, for
the first time showing her uncle some petulance. "But I am quite aware
that I am obliged to bear it."
She remembered having submitted to his admonition on a different occasion
when she was expected to like a very different prospect.
"And your good sense will teach you to behave suitably under it," said Mr.
Gascoigne, with a shade more gravity. "I feel sure that Mrs. Mompert will
be pleased with you. You will know how to conduct yourself to a woman who
holds in all senses the relation of a superior to you. This trouble has
come on you young, but that makes it in some respects easier, and there is
a benefit in all chastisement if we adjust our minds to it."
This was precisely what Gwendolen was unable to do; and after her uncle
was gone, the bitter tears, which had rarely come during the late trouble,
rose and fell slowly as she sat alone. Her heart denied that the trouble
was easier because she was young. When was she to have any happiness, if
it did not come while she was young? Not that her visions of possible
happiness for herself were as unmixed with necessary evil as they used to
be--not that she could still imagine herself plucking the fruits of life
without suspicion of their core. But this general disenchantment with the
world--nay, with herself, since it appeared that she was not made for easy
pre-eminence--only intensified her sense of forlornness; it was a visibly
sterile distance enclosing the dreary path at her feet, in which she had
no courage to tread. She was in that first crisis of passionate youthful
rebellion against what is not fitly called pain, but rather the absence of
joy--that first rage of disappointment in life's morning, which we whom
the years have subdued are apt to remember but dimly as part of our own
experience, and so to be intolerant of its self-enclosed unreasonableness
and impiety. What passion seems more absurd, when we have got outside it
and looked at calamity as a collective risk, than this amazed anguish that
I and not Thou, He or She, should be just the smitten one? Yet perhaps
some who have afterward made themselves a willing fence before the breast
of another, and have carried their own heart-wound in heroic silence--some
who have made their deeds great, nevertheless began with this angry
amazement at their own smart, and on the mere denial of their fantastic
desires raged as if under the sting of wasps which reduced the universe
for them to an unjust infliction of pain. This was nearly poor Gwendolen's
condition. What though such a reverse as hers had often happened to other
girls? The one point she had been all her life learning to care for was,
that it had happened to _her_: it was what _she_ felt under Klesmer's
demonstration that she was not remarkable enough to command for tune by
force of will and merit; it was what _she_ would feel under the rigors of
Mrs. Mompert's constant expectation, under the dull demand that she should
be cheerful with three Miss Momperts, under the necessity of showing
herself entirely submissive, and keeping her thoughts to herself. To be a
queen disthroned is not so hard as some other down-stepping: imagine one
who had been made to believe in his own divinity finding all homage
withdrawn, and himself unable to perform a miracle that would recall the
homage and restore his own confidence. Something akin to this illusion and
this helplessness had befallen the poor spoiled child, with the lovely
lips and eyes and the majestic figure--which seemed now to have no magic
in them.
She rose from the low ottoman where she had been sitting purposeless, and
walked up and down the drawing-room, resting her elbow on one palm while
she leaned down her cheek on the other, and a slow tear fell. She thought,
"I have always, ever since I was little, felt that mamma was not a happy
woman; and now I dare say I shall be more unhappy than she has been."
Her mind dwelt for a few moments on the picture of herself losing her
youth and ceasing to enjoy--not minding whether she did this or that: but
such picturing inevitably brought back the image of her mother.
"Poor mamma! it will be still worse for her now. I can get a little money
for her--that is all I shall care about now." And then with an entirely
new movement of her imagination, she saw her mother getting quite old and
white, and herself no longer young but faded, and their two faces meeting
still with memory and love, and she knowing what was in her mother's mind
--"Poor Gwen too is sad and faded now"--and then, for the first time, she
sobbed, not in anger, but with a sort of tender misery.
Her face was toward the door, and she saw her mother enter. She barely saw
that; for her eyes were large with tears, and she pressed her handkerchief
against them hurriedly. Before she took it away she felt her mother's arms
round her, and this sensation, which seemed a prolongation of her inward
vision, overcame her will to be reticent; she sobbed anew in spite of
herself, as they pressed their cheeks together.
Mrs. Davilow had brought something in her hand which had already caused
her an agitating anxiety, and she dared not speak until her darling had
become calmer. But Gwendolen, with whom weeping had always been a painful
manifestation to be resisted, if possible, again pressed her handkerchief
against her eyes, and, with a deep breath, drew her head backward and
looked at her mother, who was pale and tremulous.
"It was nothing, mamma," said Gwendolen, thinking that her mother had been
moved in this way simply by finding her in distress. "It is all over now."
But Mrs. Davilow had withdrawn her arms, and Gwendolen perceived a letter
in her hand.
"What is that letter?--worse news still?" she asked, with a touch of
bitterness.
"I don't know what you will think it, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, keeping
the letter in her hand. "You will hardly guess where it comes from."
"Don't ask me to guess anything," said Gwendolen, rather impatiently, as
if a bruise were being pressed.
"It is addressed to you, dear."
Gwendolen gave the slightest perceptible toss of the head.
"It comes from Diplow," said Mrs. Davilow, giving her the letter.
She knew Grandcourt's indistinct handwriting, and her mother was not
surprised to see her blush deeply; but watching her as she read, and
wondering much what was the purport of the letter, she saw the color die
out. Gwendolen's lips even were pale as she turned the open note toward
her mother. The words were few and formal:
Mr. Grandcourt presents his compliments to Miss Harleth, and begs to know
whether he may be permitted to call at Offendene tomorrow after two and to
see her alone. Mr. Grandcourt has just returned from Leubronn, where he
had hoped to find Miss Harleth.
Mrs. Davilow read, and then looked at her daughter inquiringly, leaving
the note in her hand. Gwendolen let it fall to the floor, and turned away.
"It must be answered, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, timidly. "The man
waits."
Gwendolen sank on the settee, clasped her hands, and looked straight
before her, not at her mother. She had the expression of one who had been
startled by a sound and was listening to know what would come of it. The
sudden change of the situation was bewildering. A few minutes before she
was looking along an inescapable path of repulsive monotony, with hopeless
inward rebellion against the imperious lot which left her no choice: and
lo, now, a moment of choice was come. Yet--was it triumph she felt most or
terror? Impossible for Gwendolen not to feel some triumph in a tribute to
her power at a time when she was first tasting the bitterness of
insignificance: again she seemed to be getting a sort of empire over her
own life. But how to use it? Here came the terror. Quick, quick, like
pictures in a book beaten open with a sense of hurry, came back vividly,
yet in fragments, all that she had gone through in relation to Grandcourt
--the allurements, the vacillations, the resolve to accede, the final
repulsion; the incisive face of that dark-eyed lady with the lovely boy:
her own pledge (was it a pledge not to marry him?)--the new disbelief in
the worth of men and things for which that scene of disclosure had become
a symbol. That unalterable experience made a vision at which in the first
agitated moment, before tempering reflections could suggest themselves,
her native terror shrank.
Where was the good of choice coming again? What did she wish? Anything
different? No! And yet in the dark seed-growths of consciousness a new
wish was forming itself--"I wish I had never known it!" Something,
anything she wished for that would have saved her from the dread to let
Grandcourt come.
It was no long while--yet it seemed long to Mrs. Davilow, before she
thought it well to say, gently-"It will be necessary for you to write, dear. Or shall I write an answer
for you--which you will dictate?"
"No, mamma," said Gwendolen, drawing a deep breath. "But please lay me out
the pen and paper."
That was gaining time. Was she to decline Grandcourt's visit--close the
shutters--not even look out on what would happen?--though with the
assurance that she should remain just where she was? The young activity
within her made a warm current through her terror and stirred toward
something that would be an event--toward an opportunity
in which she could look and speak with the former effectiveness.
The interest of the morrow was no longer at a deadlock.
"There is really no reason on earth why you should be so
alarmed at the man's waiting a few minutes, mamma," said
Gwendolen, remonstrantly, as Mrs. Davilow, having prepared
the writing materials, looked toward her expectantly. "Servants expect
nothing else than to wait. It is not to be supposed that I must write on
the instant."
"No, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, in the tone of one corrected, turning to
sit down and take up a bit of work that lay at hand; "he can wait another
quarter of an hour, if you like."
If was very simple speech and action on her part, but it was what might
have been subtly calculated. Gwendolen felt a contradictory desire to be
hastened: hurry would save her from deliberate choice.
"I did not mean him to wait long enough for that needlework to be
finished," she said, lifting her hands to stroke the backward curves of
her hair, while she rose from her seat and stood still.
"But if you don't feel able to decide?" said Mrs. Davilow, sympathizingly.
"I _must_ decide," said Gwendolen, walking to the writing-table and
seating herself. All the while there was a busy undercurrent in her, like
the thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue while he is considering how
he can slip away. Why should she not let him come? It bound her to
nothing. He had been to Leubronn after her: of course he meant a direct
unmistakable renewal of the suit which before had been only implied. What
then? She could reject him. Why was she to deny herself the freedom of
doing this--which she would like to do?
"If Mr. Grandcourt has only just returned from Leubronn," said Mrs.
Davilow, observing that Gwendolen leaned back in her chair after taking
the pen in her hand--"I wonder whether he has heard of our misfortunes?"
"That could make no difference to a man in his position," said Gwendolen,
rather contemptuously,
"It would to some men," said Mrs. Davilow. "They would not like to take a
wife from a family in a state of beggary almost, as we are. Here we are at
Offendene with a great shell over us, as usual. But just imagine his
finding us at Sawyer's Cottage. Most men are afraid of being bored or
taxed by a wife's family. If Mr. Grandcourt did know, I think it a strong
proof of his attachment to you."
Mrs. Davilow spoke with unusual emphasis: it was the first time she had
ventured to say anything about Grandcourt which would necessarily seem
intended as an argument in favor of him, her habitual impression being
that such arguments would certainly be useless and might be worse. The
effect of her words now was stronger than she could imagine. They raised a
new set of possibilities in Gwendolen's mind--a vision of what Grandcourt
might do for her mother if she, Gwendolen, did--what she was no going to
do. She was so moved by a new rush of ideas that, like one conscious of
being urgently called away, she felt that the immediate task must be
hastened: the letter must be written, else it might be endlessly deferred.
After all, she acted in a hurry, as she had wished to do. To act in a
hurry was to have a reason for keeping away from an absolute decision, and
to leave open as many issues as possible.
She wrote: "Miss Harleth presents her compliments to Mr. Grandcourt. She
will be at home after two o'clock to-morrow."
Before addressing the note she said, "Pray ring the bell, mamma, if there
is any one to answer it." She really did not know who did the work of the
house.
It was not till after the letter had been taken away and Gwendolen had
risen again, stretching out one arm and then resting it on her head, with
a low moan which had a sound of relief in it, that Mrs. Davilow ventured
to ask-"What did you say, Gwen?"
"I said that I should be at home," answered Gwendolen, rather loftily.
Then after a pause, "You must not expect, because Mr. Grandcourt is
coming, that anything is going to happen, mamma."
"I don't allow myself to expect anything, dear. I desire you to follow
your own feeling. You have never told me what that was."
"What is the use of telling?" said Gwendolen, hearing a reproach in that
true statement. "When I have anything pleasant to tell, you may be sure I
will tell you."
"But Mr. Grandcourt will consider that you have already accepted him, in
allowing him to come. His note tells you plainly enough that he is coming
to make you an offer."
"Very well; and I wish to have the pleasure of refusing him."
"Mrs. Davilow looked up in wonderment, but Gwendolen implied her wish not
to be questioned further by saying-"Put down that detestable needle-work, and let us walk in the avenue. I am
stifled."
CHAPTER XXVII.
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,
who 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 baldly," 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 selfpossession. 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."
BOOK IV--GWENDOLEN GETS HER CHOICE.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"Il est plus aisé de connoître l'homme en général que de connoître 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 checks 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, depreciatingly.
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-à-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, whose,
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 forshadow 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.
CHAPTER XXIX.
"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?--tomorrow? 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
naïvely 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-àtete_? 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 halfbreeds.
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 like 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.
CHAPTER XXX.
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 waterfowl fluttered and screamed: all around, a vast meadow which might be
called a park, bordered by an old plantation and guarded by stone ledges
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 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 bronzecolored 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 byand-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 mantlepiece 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 breastpocket 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.
CHAPTER XXXI.
"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 freshcolored--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'smaid 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 _éclat_ 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 underconsciousness 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 foreshortened 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.
CHAPTER XXXII.
In all ages it hath been a favorite text that a potent love hath the
nature of an isolated fatality, whereto the mind's opinions and wonted
resolves are altogether alien; as, for example, Daphnis his frenzy,
wherein it had little availed him to have been convinced of Heraclitus
his doctrine; or the philtre-bred passion of Tristan, who, though he
had been as deep as Duns Scotus, would have had his reasoning marred
by that cup too much; or Romeo in his sudden taking for Juliet,
wherein any objections he might have held against Ptolemy had made
little difference to his discourse under the balcony. Yet all love is
not such, even though potent; nay, this passion hath as large scope as
any for allying itself with every operation of the soul: so that it
shall acknowledge an effect from the imagined light of unproven
firmaments, and have its scale set to the grander orbits of what hath
been and shall be.
Deronda, on his return to town, could assure Sir Hugo of his having lodged
in Grandcourt's mind a distinct understanding that he could get fifty
thousand pounds by giving up a prospect which was probably distant, and
not absolutely certain; but he had no further sign of Grandcourt's
disposition in the matter than that he was evidently inclined to keep up
friendly communications.
"And what did you think of the future bride on a nearer survey?" said Sir
Hugo.
"I thought better of her than I did in Leubronn. Roulette was not a good
setting for her; it brought out something of the demon. At Dinlow she
seemed much more womanly and attractive--less hard and self-possessed. I
thought her mouth and eyes had quite a different expression."
"Don't flirt with her too much, Dan," said Sir Hugo, meaning to be
agreeably playful. "If you make Grandcourt savage when they come to the
Abbey at Christmas, it will interfere with my affairs."
"I can stay in town, sir."
"No, no. Lady Mallinger and the children can't do without you at
Christmas. Only don't make mischief--unless you can get up a duel, and
manage to shoot Grandcourt, which might be worth a little inconvenience."
"I don't think you ever saw me flirt," said Deronda, not amused.
"Oh, haven't I, though?" said Sir Hugo, provokingly. "You are always
looking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a Jesuitical way.
You are a dangerous young fellow--a kind of Lovelace who will make the
Clarissas run after you instead of you running after them."
What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke?--only the
exasperation comes before the reflection on utility. Few friendly remarks
are more annoying than the information that we are always seeming to do
what we never mean to do. Sir Hugo's notion of flirting, it was to be
hoped, was rather peculiar; for his own part, Deronda was sure that he had
never flirted. But he was glad that the baronet had no knowledge about the
repurchase of Gwendolen's necklace to feed his taste for this kind of
rallying.
He would be on his guard in future; for example, in his behavior at Mrs.
Meyrick's, where he was about to pay his first visit since his arrival
from Leubronn. For Mirah was certainly a creature in whom it was difficult
not to show a tender kind of interest both by looks and speech.
Mrs. Meyrick had not failed to send Deronda a report of Mirah's well-being
in her family. "We are getting fonder of her every day," she had written.
"At breakfast-time we all look toward the door with expectation to see her
come in; and we watch her and listen to her as if she were a native from a
new country. I have not heard a word from her lips that gives me a doubt
about her. She is quite contented and full of gratitude. My daughters are
learning from her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for she is
anxious not to eat the bread of idleness, but to work, like my girls. Mab
says our life has become like a fairy tale, and all she is afraid of is
that Mirah will turn into a nightingale again and fly away from us. Her
voice is just perfect: not loud and strong, but searching and melting,
like the thoughts of what has been. That is the way old people like me
feel a beautiful voice."
But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particulars which would have required
her to say that Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue,
found the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes in her case
than in that of Scott's Rebecca. They kept silence out of delicacy to
Mirah, with whom her religion was too tender a subject to be touched
lightly; but after a while Amy, who was much of a practical reformer,
could not restrain a question.
"Excuse me, Mirah, but _does_ it seem quite right to you that the women
should sit behind rails in a gallery apart?"
"Yes, I never thought of anything else," said Mirah, with mild surprise.
"And you like better to see the men with their hats on?" said Mab,
cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.
"Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back to
me the same feelings--the feelings I would not part with for anything else
in the world."
After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine or practice, would have
seemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah's
religion was of one fibre with her affections, and had never presented
itself to her as a set of propositions.
"She says herself she is a very bad Jewess, and does not half know her
people's religion," said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. "Perhaps it
would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity
like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never
found her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jews' religion now."
"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "I wish I were not such a hideous Christian. How
can an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert a
beautiful Jewess, who has not a fault?"
"It may be wicked of me," said shrewd Kate, "but I cannot help wishing
that her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant.
"I don't think it, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I believe Mirah is cut
out after the pattern of her mother. And what a joy it would be to her to
have such a daughter brought back again! But a mother's feelings are not
worth reckoning, I suppose" (she shot a mischievous glance at her own
daughters), "and a dead mother is worth more that a living one?"
"Well, and so she may be, little mother," said Kate; "but we would rather
hold you cheaper, and have you alive."
Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the
irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, but
Deronda himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been roused by
this apparition of Mirah to the consciousness of knowing hardly anything
about modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history. The Chosen People have
been commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake of somebody else;
and their thinking as something (no matter exactly what) that ought to
have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like his neighbors, had
regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which an
accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists.
But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning
after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that
Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for
them the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idling
excursion on which he immediately afterward set out with Sir Hugo he began
to look for the outsides of synagogues, and the title of books about the
Jews. This awakening of a new interest--this passing from the supposition
that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a
sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance--is an
effectual remedy for _ennui_, which, unhappily, cannot be secured on a
physician's prescription; but Deronda had carried it with him, and endured
his weeks of lounging all the better. It was on this journey that he first
entered a Jewish synagogue--at Frankfort--where his party rested on a
Friday. In exploring the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long before, he
remembered well enough its picturesque old houses; what his eyes chiefly
dwelt on now were the human types there; and his thought, busily
connecting them with the past phases of their race, stirred that fibre of
historic sympathy which had helped to determine in him certain traits
worth mentioning for those who are interested in his future. True, when a
young man has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the education of
a gentleman, and a present income, it is not customary to feel a prying
curiosity about his way of thinking, or his peculiar tastes. He may very
well be settled in life as an agreeable clever young fellow without
passing a special examination on those heads. Later, when he is getting
rather slovenly and portly, his peculiarities are more distinctly
discerned, and it is taken as a mercy if they are not highly
objectionable. But any one wishing to understand the effect of afterevents on Deronda should know a little more of what he was at five-andtwenty than was evident in ordinary intercourse.
It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him
the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent
indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early-wakened sensibility and
reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened
to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any
antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine
warriors in the memorable story--with nothing to meet his spear but flesh
of his flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought
itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others,
that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediate
oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible
sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective
analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep
themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used
to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human
natures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to
trace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was
fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his
affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of
speculations on government and religion, yet both to part with longsanctioned 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 dwellingplace of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe
into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but
everything else about everything--as if one should be ignorant of nothing
concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself for which one had
no nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?--the
influence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to
be, yet was unable to make himself--an organic part of social life,
instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with
a vague social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render
fellowship real? To make a little difference for the better was what he
was not contented to live without; but how to make it? It is one thing to
see your road, another to cut it. He found some of the fault in his birth
and the way he had been brought up, which had laid no special demands on
him and had given him no fixed relationship except one of a doubtful kind;
but he did not attempt to hide from himself that he had fallen into a
meditative numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that life of
practically energetic sentiment which he would have proclaimed (if he had
been inclined to proclaim anything) to be the best of all life, and for
himself the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotion
and its progeny of sentiments--which make the savors of life--substantial
and strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all
differences. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep
sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for
making cannon--to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron;
whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish
what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of
cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions?
Something like this was the common under-current in Deronda's mind while
he was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite conversation.
Meanwhile he had not set about one function in particular with zeal and
steadiness. Not an admirable experience, to be proposed as an ideal; but a
form of struggle before break of day which some young men since the
patriarch have had to pass through, with more or less of bruising if not
laming.
I have said that under his calm exterior he had a fervor which made him
easily feel the presence of poetry in everyday events; and the forms of
the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set him
musing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises into
the same region of poetry;--the faint beginnings of faiths and
institutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and withered
remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for the
awakened perception the impressiveness either of a sublimely penetrating
life, as in the twin green leaves that will become the sheltering tree, or
of a pathetic inheritance in which all the grandeur and the glory have
become a sorrowing memory.
This imaginative stirring, as he turned out of the Juden-gasse, and
continued to saunter in the warm evening air, meaning to find his way to
the synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect of certain ugly little
incidents on his way. Turning into an old book-shop to ask the exact time
of service at the synagogue, he was affectionately directed by a
precocious Jewish youth, who entered cordially into his wanting, not the
fine new building of the Reformed but the old Rabbinical school of the
orthodox; and then cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with more amenity,
in his charge for a book quite out of request as one "nicht so leicht zu
bekommen." Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf and grisly tradesman
was casting a flinty look at certain cards, apparently combining
advantages of business with religion, and shoutingly proposed to him in
Jew-dialect by a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag
in hand, and a broad low hat surmounting his chosen nose--who had no
sooner disappeared than another dingy man of the same pattern issued from
the background glooms of the shop and also shouted in the same dialect. In
fact, Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites not altogether without
guile, and just distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the same
mixed _morale_. In his anxiety about Mirah's relatives, he had lately been
thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But a little
comparison will often diminish our surprise and disgust at the aberrations
of Jews and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a consistent or
lovely pattern of their creed; and this evening Deronda, becoming more
conscious that he was falling into unfairness and ridiculous exaggeration,
began to use that corrective comparison: he paid his thaler too much,
without prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew destiny, or his wish to
find the _Rabbinische Schule_, which he arrived at by sunset, and entered
with a good congregation of men.
He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom he
was distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a noticeable
figure--his ample white beard and felt hat framing a profile of that fine
contour which may as easily be Italian as Hebrew. He returned Deronda's
notice till at last their eyes met; an undesirable chance with unknown
persons, and a reason to Deronda for not looking again; but he immediately
found an open prayer-book pushed toward him and had to bow his thanks.
However, the congregation had mustered, the reader had mounted to the
_almemor_ or platform, and the service began. Deronda, having looked
enough at the German translation of the Hebrew in the book before him to
know that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and Old Testament passages or
phrases, gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies
which is independent of detailed verbal meaning--like the effect of an
Allegri's _Miserere_ or a Palestrina's _Magnificat_. The most powerful
movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing
special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own
weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else
a self-oblivious lifting up of Gladness, a _Gloria in excelsis_ that such
Good exists; both the yearning and the exaltation gathering their utmost
force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both,
for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like
others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement
and blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the
_Chazaris_ or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from
monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys' voices from the
little choir, the devotional swaying of men's bodies backward and forward,
the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a
national faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, and
moulded the splendid forms of that world's religion, was finding a remote,
obscure echo--all were blent for him as one expression of a binding
history, tragic and yet glorious. He wondered at the strength of his own
feeling; it seemed beyond the occasion--what one might imagine to be a
divine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret.
The whole scene was a coherent strain, its burden a passionate regret,
which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might
have clad in its authentic burden; "Happy the eye which saw all these
things; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye
that saw our temple and the joy of our congregation; but verily to hear
only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw the fingers when
tuning every kind of song; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our
soul."
But with the cessation of the devotional sounds and the movement of many
indifferent faces and vulgar figures before him there darted into his mind
the frigid idea that he had probably been alone in his feeling, and
perhaps the only person in the congregation for whom the service was more
than a dull routine. There was just time for this chilling thought before
he had bowed to his civil neighbor and was moving away with the rest--when
he felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasant
sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring, he saw close to
him the white-bearded face of that neighbor, who said to him in German,
"Excuse me, young gentleman--allow me--what is your parentage--your
mother's family--her maiden name?"
Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off
hastily the touch on his arm; but he managed to slip it away and said
coldly, "I am an Englishman."
The questioner looked at him dubiously still for an instant, then just
lifted his hat and turned away; whether under a sense of having made a
mistake or of having been repulsed, Deronda was uncertain. In his walk
back to the hotel he tried to still any uneasiness on the subject by
reflecting that he could not have acted differently. How could he say that
he did not know the name of his mother's family to that total stranger?-who indeed had taken an unwarrantable liberty in the abruptness of his
question, dictated probably by some fancy of likeness such as often occurs
without real significance. The incident, he said to himself, was trivial;
but whatever import it might have, his inward shrinking on the occasion
was too strong for him to be sorry that he had cut it short. It was a
reason, however, for his not mentioning the synagogue to the Mallingers-in addition to his usual inclination to reticence on anything that the
baronet would have been likely to call Quixotic enthusiasm. Hardly any man
could be more good-natured than Sir Hugo; indeed in his kindliness
especially to women, he did actions which others would have called
romantic; but he never took a romantic view of them, and in general smiled
at the introduction of motives on a grand scale, or of reasons that lay
very far off. This was the point of strongest difference between him and
Deronda, who rarely ate at breakfast without some silent discursive flight
after grounds for filling up his day according to the practice of his
contemporaries.
This halt at Frankfort was taken on their way home, and its impressions
were kept the more actively vibrating in him by the duty of caring for
Mirah's welfare. That question about his parentage, which if he had not
both inwardly and outwardly shaken it off as trivial, would have seemed a
threat rather than a promise of revelation, and reinforced his anxiety as
to the effect of finding Mirah's relatives and his resolve to proceed with
caution. If he made any unpleasant discovery, was he bound to a disclosure
that might cast a new net of trouble around her? He had written to Mrs.
Meyrick to announce his visit at four o'clock, and he found Mirah seated
at work with only Mrs. Meyrick and Mab, the open piano, and all the
glorious company of engravings. The dainty neatness of her hair and dress,
the glow of tranquil happiness in a face where a painter need have changed
nothing if he had wanted to put it in front of the host singing "peace on
earth and good will to men," made a contrast to his first vision of her
that was delightful to Deronda's eyes. Mirah herself was thinking of it,
and immediately on their greeting said-"See how different I am from the miserable creature by the river! all
because you found me and brought me to the very best."
"It was my good chance to find you," said Deronda. "Any other man would
have been glad to do what I did."
"That is not the right way to be thinking about it," said Mirah, shaking
her head with decisive gravity, "I think of what really was. It was you,
and not another, who found me and were good to me."
"I agree with Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick. Saint Anybody is a bad saint to
pray to."
"Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you," said Mirah, smiling
at Mrs. Meyrick. "And I would rather be with you than with any one else in
the world except my mother. I wonder if ever a poor little bird, that was
lost and could not fly, was taken and put into a warm nest where was a
mother and sisters who took to it so that everything came naturally, as if
it had been always there. I hardly thought before that the world could
ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me now." She looked
meditative a moment, and then said, "sometimes I am a _little_ afraid."
"What is it you are afraid of?" said Deronda with anxiety.
"That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father. It
seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only
sorrow," said Mirah, plaintively.
"It is surely not very probable," said Deronda, wishing that it were less
so; then, not to let the opportunity escape--"Would it be a great grief to
you now if you were never to meet your mother?"
She did not answer immediately, but meditated again, with her eyes fixed
on the opposite wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and said firmly, as
if she had arrived at the exact truth, "I want her to know that I have
always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort her. She may be
dead. If she were I should long to know where she was buried; and to know
whether my brother lives, so that we can remember her together. But I will
try not to grieve. I have thought much for so many years of her being
dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We
can never be really parted. I think I have never sinned against her. I
have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry
that I was not a good Jewess."
"In what way are you not a good Jewess?" said Deronda.
"I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians
just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of
the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not liking
Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not
to like those who are better to me than any of my own people I have ever
known. I think I could obey in other things that she wished but not in
that. It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred. I
remember a play I read in German--since I have been here it has come into
my mind--where the heroine says something like that."
"Antigone," said Deronda.
"Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to
love my best friends. She would be grateful to them." Here Mirah had
turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her whole
countenance, she said, "Oh, if we ever do meet and know each other as we
are now, so that I could tell what would comfort her--I should be so full
of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!"
"God bless you, child!" said Mrs. Meyrick, the words escaping
involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of
feeling she looked at Deronda and said, "It is curious that Mirah, who
remembers her mother so well it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her
brother the least bit--except the feeling of having been carried by him
when she was tired, and of his being near her when she was in her mother's
lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up. It is
a pity her brother should be quite a stranger to her."
"He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good," said Mirah, eagerly. "He loved my
mother--he would take care of her. I remember more of him than that. I
remember my mother's voice once calling, 'Ezra!' and then his answering
from a distance 'Mother!'"--Mirah had changed her voice a little in each
of these words and had given them a loving intonation--"and then he came
close to us. I feel sure he is good. I have always taken comfort from
that."
It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs.
Meyrick and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt
as painfully dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her
memories-"Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything else?
I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have often
fancied heaven might be made of voices."
"Like your singing--yes," said Mab, who had hitherto kept a modest
silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of
Prince Camaralzaman--"Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard
her."
"Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?" said Deronda, with a more
deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.
"Oh, I shall like it," said Mirah. "My voice has come back a little with
rest."
Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity
of her nature. The circumstances of her life made her think of everything
she did as work demanded from her, in which affectation had nothing to do;
and she had begun her work before self-consciousness was born.
She immediately rose and went to the piano--a somewhat worn instrument
that seemed to get the better of its infirmities under the firm touch of
her small fingers as she preluded. Deronda placed himself where he could
see her while she sang; and she took everything as quietly as if she had
been a child going to breakfast.
Imagine her--it is always good to imagine a human creature in whom bodily
loveliness seems as properly one with the entire being as the bodily
loveliness of those wondrous transparent orbs of life that we find in the
sea--imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, but yet
showing certain tiny rings there which had cunningly found their own way
back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in
curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being
bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect
cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy
fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the
delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive movements, the
finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck, entering into the
expression of a refinement which was not feebleness.
She sang Beethoven's "Per pietà non dirmi addio" with a subdued but
searching pathos which had that essential of perfect singing, the making
one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessing one with the song. It
was the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a
bird's wooing for an audience near and beloved. Deronda began by looking
at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand,
wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; then he refrained from what
might seem oddity, and was ready to meet the look of mute appeal which she
turned toward him at the end.
"I think I never enjoyed a song more than that," he said, gratefully.
"You like my singing? I am so glad," she said, with a smile of delight.
"It has been a great pain to me, because it failed in what it was wanted
for. But now we think I can use it to get my bread. I have really been
taught well. And now I have two pupils, that Miss Meyrick found for me.
They pay me nearly two crowns for their two lessons."
"I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after
Christmas," said Deronda. "You would not mind singing before any one who
wished to hear you?"
"Oh no, I want to do something to get money. I could teach reading and
speaking, Mrs. Meyrick thinks. But if no one would learn of me, that is
difficult." Mirah smiled with a touch of merriment he had not seen in her
before. "I dare say I should find her poor--I mean my mother. I should
want to get money for her. And I can not always live on charity; though"-here she turned so as to take all three of her companions in one glance-"it is the sweetest charity in all the world."
"I should think you can get rich," said Deronda, smiling. "Great ladies
will perhaps like you to teach their daughters, We shall see. But now do
sing again to us."
She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by
Gordigiani and Schubert; then, when she had left the piano, Mab said,
entreatingly, "Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn."
"It is too childish," said Mirah. "It is like lisping."
"What is the hymn?" said Deronda.
"It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother singing over her when she
lay in her cot," said Mrs. Meyrick.
"I should like very much to hear it," said Deronda, "if you think I am
worthy to hear what is so sacred."
"I will sing it if you like," said Mirah, "but I don't sing real words-only here and there a syllable like hers--the rest is lisping. Do you know
Hebrew? because if you do, my singing will seem childish nonsense."
Deronda shook his head. "It will be quite good Hebrew to me."
Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her easiest attitude, and then
lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some
invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint
melancholy intervals, with syllables that really seemed childish lisping
to her audience; the voice in which she gave it forth had gathered even a
sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in her other songs.
"If I were ever to know the real words, I should still go on in my old way
with them," said Mirah, when she had repeated the hymn several times.
"Why not?" said Deronda. "The lisped syllables are very full of meaning."
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Meyrick. "A mother hears something of a lisp in
her children's talk to the very last. Their words are not just what
everybody else says, though they may be spelled the same. If I were to
live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother's
love, I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it, from
the very first it made."
"Is not that the way with friendship, too?" said Deronda, smiling. "We
must not let the mothers be too arrogant."
The little woman shook her head over her darning.
"It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend. Friendships begin
with liking or gratitude--roots that can be pulled up. Mother's love
begins deeper down."
"Like what you were saying about the influence of voices," said Deronda,
looking at Mirah. "I don't think your hymn would have had more expression
for me if I had known the words. I went to the synagogue at Frankfort
before I came home, and the service impressed me just as much as if I had
followed the words--perhaps more."
"Oh, was it great to you? Did it go to your heart?" said Mirah, eagerly.
"I thought none but our people would feel that. I thought it was all shut
away like a river in a deep valley, where only heaven saw--I mean---" she
hesitated feeling that she could not disentangle her thought from its
imagery.
"I understand," said Deronda. "But there is not really such a separation-deeper down, as Mrs. Meyrick says. Our religion is chiefly a Hebrew
religion; and since Jews are men, their religious feelings must have much
in common with those of other men--just as their poetry, though in one
sense peculiar, has a great deal in common with the poetry of other
nations. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his
people's religion more than one of another race--and yet"--here Deronda
hesitated in his turn--"that is perhaps not always so."
"Ah no," said Mirah, sadly. "I have seen that. I have seen them mock. Is
it not like mocking your parents?--like rejoicing in your parents' shame?"
"Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in, and
like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them," said
Deronda apologetically.
"But you are not like that," said Mirah, looking at him with unconscious
fixedness.
"No, I think not," said Deronda; "but you know I was not brought up as a
Jew."
"Ah, I am always forgetting," said Mirah, with a look of disappointed
recollection, and slightly blushing.
Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause,
which he put an end to by saying playfully-"Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we all
went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just the
same."
"To be sure. We should go on forever in zig-zags," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I
think it is very weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the
contrary. Still one may honor one's parents, without following their
notions exactly, any more than the exact cut of their clothing. My father
was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither
quite Scotch, nor quite French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I
honor my parents' memory."
"But I could not make myself not a Jewess," said Mirah, insistently, "even
if I changed my belief."
"No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religion,
and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would
come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen," said Mrs. Meyrick,
taking that consummation very cheerfully.
"Oh, please not to say that," said Mirah, the tears gathering. "It is the
first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will never
separate myself from my mother's people. I was forced to fly from my
father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed me,
should I say, 'This is not my father'? If he had shame, I must share it.
It was he who was given to me for my father, and not another. And so it is
with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when
they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people. I will
always worship with them."
As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful
passion--fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped
and looking at Mrs. Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a
personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance
of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place and risk their
lives in flight, that they might join their own people and say, "I am a
Jew."
"Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed.
"God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. I
was only saying what might be if the world went on. But I had better have
left the world alone, and not wanted to be over-wise. Forgive me, come! we
will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to you."
"I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life," said Mirah, not yet
quite calm.
"Hush, hush, now," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I have been punished enough for
wagging my tongue foolishly--making an almanac for the Millennium, as my
husband used to say."
"But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear
to think of that," said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She
had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become
severe if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this inconvenient
susceptibility to innocent remarks.
Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange
contrast by the side of Mirah's--smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically
as he said, "That 'prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide
us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned with
what is."
Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed
to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a
tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said-"I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is
hardly anything we can talk about." Mab felt herself unanswerable here,
inclining to the opinion of Socrates: "What motive has a man to live, if
not for the pleasure of discourse?"
Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with
him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, "Hans is to share my
chambers when he comes at Christmas."
"You have written to Rome about that?" said Mrs. Meyrick, her face
lighting up. "How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah,
then?"
"Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you."
"I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have
always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying
a word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However!--Thank you a
thousand times."
Deronda divined something of what was in the mother's mind, and his
divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His inward
colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could see this
exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her;
but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution.
There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a
palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all
the gods. Deronda's mind was strongly set against imitating them.
"I have my hands on the reins now," he thought, "and I will not drop them.
I shall go there as little as possible."
He saw the reasons acting themselves out before him. How could he be
Mirah's guardian and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose charge he
had committed her, if he showed himself as a lover--whom she did not love
--whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover's
feeling in himself it would lead up to that issue. Mirah's was not a
nature that would bear dividing against itself; and even if love won her
consent to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, she would
never be happy in acting against that strong native bias which would still
reign in her conscience as remorse.
Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own
work well begun. It was a delight to have rescued this child acquainted
with sorrow, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected
paths. The creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet,
bruised and lost by the wayside--how we watch and fence it, and dote on
its signs of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, our self is a not-self
for whose sake we become virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of
reclaiming a life from misery and look for our triumph in the secret joy-"This one is the better for me."
"I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as set about spoiling
her peace," said Deronda. "It was one of the rarest bits of fortune that I
should have had friends like the Meyricks to place her with--generous,
delicate friends without any loftiness in their ways, so that her
dependence on them is not only safety but happiness. There could be no
refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my
taking the vows and settling everything as it should be, if that marplot
Hans comes and upsets it all?"
Few things were more likely. Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs
seemed more breakable than other people's--his eyes more of a resort for
uninvited flies and other irritating guests. But it was impossible to
forbid Hans's coming to London. He was intending to get a studio there and
make it his chief home; and to propose that he should defer coming on some
ostensible ground, concealing the real motive of winning time for Mirah's
position to become more confirmed and independent, was impracticable.
Having no other resource Deronda tried to believe that both he and Mrs.
Meyrick were foolishly troubling themselves about one of those endless
things called probabilities, which never occur; but he did not quite
succeed in his trying; on the contrary, he found himself going inwardly
through a scene where on the first discovery of Han's inclination he gave
him a very energetic warning--suddenly checked, however, by the suspicion
of personal feeling that his warmth might be creating in Hans. He could
come to no result, but that the position was peculiar, and that he could
make no further provision against dangers until they came nearer. To save
an unhappy Jewess from drowning herself, would not have seemed a startling
variation among police reports; but to discover in her so rare a creature
as Mirah, was an exceptional event which might well bring exceptional
consequences. Deronda would not let himself for a moment dwell on any
supposition that the consequences might enter deeply into his own life.
The image of Mirah had never yet had that penetrating radiation which
would have been given to it by the idea of her loving him. When this sort
of effluence is absent from the fancy (whether from the fact or not) a man
may go far in devotedness without perturbation.
As to the search for Mirah's mother and brother, Deronda took what she had
said to-day as a warrant for deferring any immediate measures. His
conscience was not quite easy in this desire for delay, any more than it
was quite easy in his not attempting to learn the truth about his own
mother: in both cases he felt that there might be an unfulfilled duty to a
parent, but in both cases there was an overpowering repugnance to the
possible truth, which threw a turning weight into the scale of argument.
"At least, I will look about," was his final determination. "I may find
some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after Christmas."
What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a
disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by
which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it
is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
"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 Rotton 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 bloodhounds; 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-àbrac_. A placard in one corner announced--_Watches and Jewlery 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 overrefinement 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 bestclad 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 bookshop, 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 mediæval 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, faroff 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 eye sand 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 _congé_. 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 firstrate 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.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
"Er ist geheissen
Israel. Ihn hat verwandelt
Hexenspruch in elnen Hund.
*
*
*
*
*
Aber jeden Freitag Abend,
In der Dämmrungstunde, plötzlich
Weicht der Zauber, und der Hund
Wird aufs Neu' ein menschlich Wesen."
--HEINE: _Prinzessin Sabbaz_.
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 how
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 white: 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.
BOOK V.--MORDECAI.
CHAPTER XXXV.
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 Ryeland's,
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, deepvoiced 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 _mésalliance_ is something like disowning your one
eye: everybody knows it's yours, and you have no other to make an
appearance with."
"As to _mésalliance_, 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 _mésalliance_ 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 found 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
_entrée_; 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
human flesh like that might be, wrapped round with fine raiment, her ears
pierced for gems, her head held loftily, her mouth all smiling pretence,
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-à-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 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 _naïveté_. "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 gurgoyle, 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 finelyarched 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-livercolored 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 flagsignal 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 _démangeaison_," 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 _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-à-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 pillard 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 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-andtwenty 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
nulified 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 slowing 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 martial 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 weddingday? 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 selfsuspicion 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.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
"Rien ne pese tant qu'un secret
Le porter loin est difficile aux dames:
Et je sçais 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 gobetween 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 Creüsa 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 hear
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 move 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 mealycomplexioned 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 it 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 deeptoned 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."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
_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 metal 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 rapidlysketched 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 æsthetic
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 néant_; 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 were 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 Marts 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, and 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 selfrepression, 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.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
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 overwhelming 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 iim 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 Cabbalists, 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 bookshop, 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 selfasserting 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 farreaching 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.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen
Sicher ist's in alien Fällen!
Wenn du lange dich gequälet
Weiss er gleich wo dir es fehlet;
Auch auf Beifall darfst du hoffen,
Denn er weiss wo du's getroffen,"
--GOETHE: _West-östlicker 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
_pièce de résistance_ 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 we're 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 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."
"_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 Fällen.'"
said Mirah, promptly. And Klesmer saying "Schön!" put out his hand again
as a good-bye.
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 lifesize, 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; ho 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 _rôle_ 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?
CHAPTER XL.
"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.
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 widespreading 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