Chapter Sixty-one
There was another breast besides Rex’s, in which the news of Grandcourt’s death caused both strong agitation and the effort to repress it.
It was Hans Meyrick’s habit to bring the Times for his mother. On a Wednesday, he always chose to bring the paper at about the time Mirah finished giving Mab her weekly lesson. But on this particular Wednesday he appeared in the parlour, shaking the Times aloft with a crackling which interrupted Mab’s singing. Mirah, who had been playing the accompaniment, started up and turned round; and Mab said–
“Oh, Hans! why do you bring a more horrible noise than my singing?”
“What on earth is the wonderful news?” said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the only other person in the room.
“Something from Italy,” said Hans, with a peculiar tone and manner.
“Nothing bad?” said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously, thinking immediately of Deronda; and Mirah’s heart had been already clutched by the same thought.
“Not bad for anybody we care about,” said Hans, quickly; “rather uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently before.”
“Oh, Hans!” said Mab, impatiently, “What has happened?”
“Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that’s all,” said Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick. “But Deronda was at Genoa in the same hotel, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got her out of the water. They saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However, Deronda is a lucky fellow in being there to take care of her.”
Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her hands tightly clasped. Mrs. Meyrick said–
“Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after him.”
“It was a little absence of mind,” said Hans roguishly, throwing himself into a chair. “The Duchess is at liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the wedding.”
Here Mirah started up, and fixing her eyes angrily on Hans, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice of indignation–
“Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Why will you say he is lucky – when what is life to one is death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs. Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away from my brother. Mr. Deronda would not call that lucky to pierce my brother’s heart.”
All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Poor Hans sat transfixed, blushing, and said, nervously–
“I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word.”
But Mirah’s anger was not appeased: how could it be? She had burst into indignant speech as creatures in intense pain bite even through their own flesh, by way of making their agony bearable. She said no more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed the sheet of music before her, as if she thought of beginning to play again.
Both Hans and his mother were silent. It was Mab who spoke, saying, “Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. You are always taking Mr. Deronda’s name in vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way about his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men’s minds must be very black, I think.”
“Quite true, my dear,” said Hans, rising and walking toward the window.
“We had better go on with your lesson, Mab,” said Mirah, in a higher tone than usual. “Will you sing this again, or shall I sing it to you?”
“Oh, please sing it to me,” said Mab, rejoiced to take no more notice of what had happened.
Mirah immediately sang with new fullness and energy. Hans leaned against the mantelpiece, keeping his eyes carefully away from his mother’s. When Mirah had sung her last note, she rose and said, “I must go home now. Ezra expects me.”
She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick, instead of kissing her as usual. She feared that she had offended Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking Hans; but the little mother sensed this, and drew Mirah’s face to hers, saying soothingly, “God bless you, my dear.”
“Now, Hans,” said Mab, “you are not going to walk home with Mirah. I am sure she would rather not. You are so dreadfully disagreeable to-day.”
“I shall go to take care of her, if she does not forbid me,” said Hans, opening the door.
Mirah said nothing, and when he had closed the door behind them, he walked by her side unforbidden. She had not the courage to begin speaking to him again, and she was pressed upon by a crowd of thoughts thrusting themselves forward.
Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. Mirah’s anger had waked in him a new perception, and with it the unpleasant sense that he was a dolt not to have had it before. Suppose Mirah’s heart were entirely preoccupied with Deronda in another character than that of her benefactor? He believed that there was a serious attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he had pieced together many fragments of observation, which convinced him not only that Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, but also that his austere self-repression concealed love for her.
As for Deronda’s annoyance at his aspiring to love Mirah, Hans took this to be accounted for by her dependent position; for he credited his friend with all possible unselfish anxiety for those whom he could rescue and protect. And Deronda’s insistence that Mirah would never marry one who was not a Jew seemed to exclude himself, since Hans shared the general opinion that Deronda was Sir Hugo’s son.
Thus he felt clear about Deronda’s affections; but now, he had seen a flash of revelation from Mirah – a betrayal of her passionate feeling on this subject which made him melancholy on her account as well as his own – yet on the whole, less melancholy than if he had imagined Deronda’s hopes fixed on her. Hans fluctuated between the contradictory states of feeling wounded because Mirah was wounded, and of being almost obliged to Deronda for loving somebody else. He longed that his speechless companionship should be eloquent in tender sympathy, an admissible form of wooing a bruised heart.
Thus the two went side by side to the door of Mirah’s home, and when Hans said “Good-bye,” with a look of penitence, she said gently, “Will you not come in and see my brother?”
Hans interpreted this as a sign of pardon. He did not understand how Mirah had been taught by her early experience to accept pain with resolution. When they went in together, half his grief was gone, and he was spinning a little romance of how his devotion might make him indispensable to Mirah. This was quite fair, since his friend loved another; and on the question of Judaism Hans felt thoroughly fortified: for in tales and history, Moslem and Jewish damsels were always attracted toward Christians. And thus his bird-like hope, constructed on the lightest principles, soared again.
They found Mordecai looking singularly happy, holding a letter, his eyes glowing with a quiet triumph which in his emaciated face gave the idea of a conquest over death. Mirah put her arm round his neck, not daring to ask about the letter.
“It is from Daniel Deronda,” said Mordecai. “Brief – only saying that he hopes soon to return. The promise of seeing him again is like the rainbow in the cloud to me,” he continued, looking at Hans; “and to you it must be a gladness.”
While Hans was answering Mirah slipped away to her own room; but not to indulge in any outburst of passion. She merely took off her hat, sat down and pressed her hands against her temples as if her head ached; dashed cold water on her eyes and brow; and then, with deep sighs of relief, put on her slippers and sat still for a couple of minutes, which seemed to her so long that she rose again, and went down to make tea.
Something of the old life had returned. She had been used to remember that she must learn her part, must rehearse, must hide her feelings from her father; and the more painful her life grew, the more she had been used to hide. She had learnt resolute endurance, and today her first violence of feeling had quickly transformed itself into a steady facing of trouble, the well-known companion of her young years. But while she spoke as usual, a close o
bserver might have discerned a difference between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraint, and the sweet genuine calm of the previous months.
Those who have been indulged by fortune feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. Mirah felt no such surprise when familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her according to the old use. And this habit of expecting trouble rather than joy, inclined her to believe in the probability of an attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, and the certainly that they would marry. There was a tie between him and this woman who belonged to another world than hers.
Well, well – if it could have been deferred so as to make no difference while Ezra was there! She felt instinctively that the relation between Deronda and her brother was incongruous with any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt. But in the still, quick action of her consciousness, her thoughts soon said distinctly that her repugnance would remain even if Ezra were secured from loss.
“What I have read and sung about, is happening to me – this is the love that makes jealousy;” so impartially Mirah summed up the charge against herself. But what difference could this pain of hers make to anyone? It must remain hidden. What should have been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk into selfish pain; the feeling she had hitherto delighted to pour out in words was degraded into something she was ashamed to betray – an absurd longing that she who had received all and given nothing should be of importance where she was of no importance. It was as if her soul had been steeped in poisonous passion by forgotten dreams in sleep, and now flamed out in this unaccountable misery.
For with her waking reason she had never entertained the thought that Deronda could love her. Her previous vague uneasiness had been easily explained as a general regret that he was only a visitant in her brother’s world, which was so different to his.
But her feeling was no longer vague: the cause of her pain – the image of Mrs. Grandcourt by Deronda’s side – was as sharp as pincers on her flesh. “I could bear everything that used to be – but this is worse – I used not to have horrible feelings!” said the poor child in a whisper to her pillow. Strange that she should have to pray against any feeling which concerned Deronda! But this conclusion had been reached through an evening spent with Mordecai, whose exaltation in the prospect of seeing his friend made him voice many thoughts aloud to Mirah. One thought especially occupied him.
“Seest thou, Mirah,” he said, “the Shemah, wherein we confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional exercise of the Hebrew; and this made our religion the fundamental religion for the whole world. See, then – the nation which has been scoffed at for its separateness, has given a binding theory to the human race. Now, in complete unity a part possesses the whole as the whole possesses every part: and in this way human life is tending toward the image of the Supreme Unity: for as our life becomes more spiritual, possession becomes more universal, and independent of material contact; so that in a brief day the soul of man may know more fully the good which has been and is to come, than all he could possess in a whole life where he had to follow the creeping paths of the senses. I hold the joy of another’s future within me: a future which these eyes will not see. I love it so, that I can lay down this poor life upon its altar and say: ‘Burn, burn indiscernibly into that which shall be, which is my love and not me.’ Dost thou understand, Mirah?”
“A little,” said Mirah, faintly, “but my mind is too poor to have felt it.”
“And yet,” said Mordecai, rather insistently, “women are specially framed for the love which feels possession in renouncing. Somewhere in the later Midrash, I think, is the story of a Jewish maiden who loved a Gentile king so well, that she entered into prison and changed clothes with the woman who was beloved by the king, that she might deliver that woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king to be happy in his love which was not for her. This is the surpassing love, that loses self.”
“No, Ezra, no,” said Mirah, with low-toned intensity, “that was not it. She wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and to feel that she was better than the other. It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that made her die. The Jewish girl must have had jealousy in her heart, and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king’s mind. That is what she would die for.”
“My sister, thou hast read too many plays. Thou judgest by those, and not by thy own heart, which is like our mother’s.”
Mirah made no answer.
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged Page 64
