George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged
Page 20
Chapter Nineteen
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which easily found poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. To him this event of finding Mirah was heart-stirring. He sat up half the night, living again the moments since he had first seen Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh vividness of emotive memory.
When he took up a book, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before – not only the actual events, but possibilities of what had been and what might be, imagined with hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah’s search for her mother to grip his imagination. His first sympathetic instinct was to aid her in her search: there were ways of finding people in London. But here the mixed feelings of Deronda’s own experience naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety for Mirah.
His desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly haunted with dread; and in imagining Mirah’s mother and brother, it quickly occurred to him that finding them might turn out to be a calamity. In the boat, she had said that her mother and brother were good; but the goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and longing; and it was ten or twelve years since she had seen them.
Despite his strong tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, Deronda’s interest had never been drawn toward Jews, and the facts he knew about them were chiefly of a sort repugnant to him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion to merge in with the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy; but Deronda could not escape (who can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and he had never cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race.
But now that Mirah’s longing roused his mind, very disagreeable images urged themselves of what this middle-aged Jewess and her son might be. To be sure, Mirah’s refinement and charm were in their favour, but – he must wait to know more: perhaps through Mrs. Meyrick. Mirah’s voice, her accent, her looks – all the sweet purity that clothed her like a consecrating garment made him shrink from associating her with anything hateful or contaminating. In his mind’s eye flashed rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided down a dingy street; entering through a dim doorway, he saw a hawk-eyed woman, unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last bit of finery; or in some other quarter he saw a young Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with gentlemen’s tastes, and not fastidious about any business – and so on, through his brief experience of this kind.
Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into insulting ideas; but he was just now governed by dread, and if Mirah’s parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have been that his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the habit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this case as well as his own there was enough uncertainty to make the connection reasonable.
But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection in the fullest sense, and his chivalrous nature felt that the sooner he could engage for her the interest of others besides himself, the better. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he might be able to do so; he wished that she should understand herself to be entirely independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried to dispel as fantastic made him anxious that his friends should be acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. He had learned to hate secrecy about the ties and obligations of his life – to hate it the more because he felt unable to break such secrecy.
At one moment he resolved to tell the whole adventure to Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger the next morning, but the possibility that something new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs. Meyrick’s checked this impulse. He finally went to sleep having decided that he would wait until that visit had been made.