by George Eliot
He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the fine hymns in the Hebrew liturgy, “As thy goodness has been great to the former generations, even so may it be to the latter.” Then after pausing a little he began, “Young man, I rejoice that I was not yet set off again on my travels, and that you are come in time for me to see the image of my friend as he was in his youth—no longer perverted from the fellowship of your people—no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who seemed to be claiming you as a Jew. You come with thankfulness yourself to claim the kindred and heritage that wicked contrivance would have robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, ‘I am the grandson of Daniel Charisi.’ Is it not so?”
“Assuredly it is,” said Deronda. “But let me say that I should at no time have been inclined to treat a Jew with incivility simply because he was a Jew. You can understand that I shrank from saying to a stranger, ‘I know nothing of my mother.’”
“A sin, a sin!” said Kalonymos, putting up his hand and closing his eyes in disgust. “A robbery of our people—as when our youths and maidens were reared for the Roman Edom. But it is frustrated. I have frustrated it. When Daniel Charisi—may his Rock and his Redeemer guard him!—when Daniel Charisi was a stripling and I was a lad little above his shoulder, we made a solemn vow always to be friends. He said, ‘Let us bind ourselves with duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.’ That was his bent from first to last—as he said, to fortify his soul with bonds. It was a saying of his, ‘Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.’ So we bound ourselves. And though we were much apart in our later life, the bond has never been broken. When he was dead, they sought to rob him; but they could not rob him of me. I rescued that remainder of him which he had prized and preserved for his offspring. And I have restored to him the offspring they had robbed him of. I will bring you the chest forthwith.”
Kalonymos left the room for a few minutes, and returned with a clerk who carried the chest, set it down on the floor, drew off a leather cover, and went out again. It was not very large, but was made heavy by ornamental bracers and handles of gilt iron. The wood was beautifully incised with Arabic lettering.
“So!” said Kalonymos, returning to his seat. “And here is the curious key,” he added, taking it from a small leathern bag. “Bestow it carefully. I trust you are methodic and wary.” He gave Deronda the monitory and slightly suspicious look with which age is apt to commit any object to the keeping of youth.
“I shall be more careful of this than of any other property,” said Deronda, smiling and putting the key in his breast-pocket. “I never before possessed anything that was a sign to me of so much cherished hope and effort. And I shall never forget that the effort was partly yours. Have you time to tell me more of my grandfather? Or shall I be trespassing in staying longer?”
“Stay yet a while. In an hour and eighteen minutes I start for Trieste,” said Kalonymos, looking at his watch, “and presently my sons will expect my attention. Will you let me make you known to them, so that they may have the pleasure of showing hospitality to my friend’s grandson? They dwell here in ease and luxury, though I choose to be a wanderer.”
“I shall be glad if you will commend me to their acquaintance for some future opportunity,” said Deronda. “There are pressing claims calling me to England—friends who may be much in need of my presence. I have been kept away from them too long by unexpected circumstances. But to know more of you and your family would be motive enough to bring me again to Mainz.”
“Good! Me you will hardly find, for I am beyond my threescore years and ten, and I am a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me. But my sons and their children dwell here in wealth and unity. The days are changed for us since Karl the Great fetched my ancestors from Italy to bring some tincture of knowledge to our rough German brethren. I and my contemporaries have had to fight for it too. Our youth fell on evil days; but this we have won; we increase our wealth in safety, and the learning of all Germany is fed and fattened by Jewish brains—though they keep not always their Jewish hearts. Have you been left altogether ignorant of your people’s life, young man?”
“No,” said Deronda, “I have lately, before I had any true suspicion of my parentage, been led to study everything belonging to their history with more interest than any other subject. It turns out that I have been making myself ready to understand my grandfather a little.” He was anxious less the time should be consumed before this circuitous course of talk could lead them back to the topic he most cared about. Age does not easily distinguish between what it needs to express and what youth needs to know-distance seeming to level the objects of memory; and keenly active as Joseph Kalonymos showed himself, an inkstand in the wrong place would have hindered his imagination from getting to Beyrout: he had been used to unite restless travel with punctilious observation. But Deronda’s last sentence answered its purpose.
“So-you would perhaps have been such a man as he if your education had not hindered; for you are like him in features:—yet not altogether, young man. He had an iron will in his face: it braced up everybody about him. When he was quite young he had already got one deep upright line in his brow. I see none of that in you. Daniel Charisi used to say, ‘Better, a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.’ What he despised most was indifference. He had longer reasons than I can give you.”
“Yet his knowledge was not narrow?” said Deronda, with a tacit reference to the usual excuse for indecision—that it comes from knowing too much.
“Narrow? no,” said Kalonymos, shaking his head with a compassionate smile “From his childhood upward, he drank in learning as easily as the plant sucks up water. But he early took to medicine and theories about life and health. He traveled to many countries, and spent much of his substance in seeing and knowing. What he used to insist on was that the strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness and communication, and he was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles; ‘It’s no better,’ said he, ‘than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.’ He mingled all sorts of learning; and in that he was like our Arabic writers in the golden time. We studied together, but he went beyond me. Though we were bosom friends, and he poured himself out to me, we were as different as the inside and outside of the bowl. I stood up for two notions of my own: I took Charisi’s sayings as I took the shape of the trees: they were there, not to be disputed about. It came to the same thing in both of us; we were both faithful Jews, thankful not to be Gentiles. And since I was a ripe man, I have been what I am now, for all but age-loving to wander, loving transactions, loving to behold all things, and caring nothing about hardship. Charisi thought continually of our people’s future: he went with all his soul into that part of our religion: I, not. So we have freedom, I am content. Our people wandered before they were driven. Young man when I am in the East, I lie much on deck and watch the greater stars. The sight of them satisfies me. I know them as they rise, and hunger not to know more. Charisi was satisfied with no sight, but pieced it out with what had been before and what would come after. Yet we loved each other, and as he said, he bound our love with duty; we solemnly pledged ourselves to help and defend each other to the last. I have fulfilled my pledge.” Here Kalonymos rose, and Deronda, rising also, said—
“And in being faithful to him you have caused justice to be done to me. It would have been a robbery of me too that I should never have known of the inheritance he had prepared for me. I thank you with my whole soul.”
“Be worthy of him, young man. What is your vocation?” This question was put with a quick abruptness which embarrassed Deronda, who did not feel it quite honest to allege his law-reading as a vocation. He answered—
“I cannot say that I have any.”
“Get one, get one. The Jew must be diligent. You will call yourself a Jew and profess the faith
of your fathers?” said Kalonymos, putting his hand on Deronda’s shoulder and looking sharply in his face.
“I shall call myself a Jew,” said Deronda, deliberately, becoming slightly paler under the piercing eyes of his questioner. “But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races. But I think I can maintain my grandfather’s notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation.”
It happened to Deronda at that moment, as it has often happened to others, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve. His respect for the questioner would not let him decline to answer, and by the necessity to answer he found out the truth for himself.
“Ah, you argue and you look forward—you are Daniel Charisi’s grandson,” said Kalonymos, adding a benediction in Hebrew.
With that they parted; and almost as soon as Deronda was in London, the aged man was again on shipboard, greeting the friendly stars without any eager curiosity.
CHAPTER LXI.
“Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, As birds within the green shade of the grove. Before the gentle heart, in Nature’s scheme, Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.” —GUIDO GUNICELLI (_Rossetti’s Translation_).
There was another house besides the white house at Pennicote, another breast besides Rex Gascoigne’s, in which the news of Grandcourt’s death caused both strong agitation and the effort to repress it.
It was Hans Meyrick’s habit to send or bring in the Times for his mother’s reading. She was a great reader of news, from the widest-reaching politics to the list of marriages; the latter, she said, giving her the pleasant sense of finishing the fashionable novels without having read them, and seeing the heroes and heroines happy without knowing what poor creatures they were. On a Wednesday, there were reasons why Hans always chose to bring the paper, and to do so about the time that Mirah had nearly ended giving Mab her weekly lesson, avowing that he came then because he wanted to hear Mirah sing. But on the particular Wednesday now in question, after entering the house as quietly as usual with his latch-key, he appeared in the parlor, shaking the Times aloft with a crackling noise, in remorseless interruption of Mab’s attempt to render Lascia ch’io pianga with a remote imitation of her teacher. Piano and song ceased immediately; Mirah, who had been playing the accompaniment, involuntarily started up and turned round, the crackling sound, after the occasional trick of sounds, having seemed to her something thunderous; and Mab said—
“O-o-o, Hans! why do you bring a more horrible noise than my singing?”
“What on earth is the wonderful news?” said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the only other person in the room. “Anything about Italy—anything about the Austrians giving up Venice?”
“Nothing about Italy, but something from Italy,” said Hans, with a peculiarity in his tone and manner which set his mother interpreting. Imagine how some of us feel and behave when an event, not disagreeable seems to be confirming and carrying out our private constructions. We say, “What do you think?” in a pregnant tone to some innocent person who has not embarked his wisdom in the same boat with ours, and finds our information flat.
“Nothing bad?” said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously, thinking immediately of Deronda; and Mirah’s heart had been already clutched by the same thought.
“Not bad for anybody we care much about,” said Hans, quickly; “rather uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently before. Considering what a dear gazelle I am, I am constantly wondering to find myself alive.”
“Oh me, Hans!” said Mab, impatiently, “if you must talk of yourself, let it be behind your own back. What is it that has happened?”
“Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that’s all,” said Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick, with his finger against a paragraph. “But more than all is—Deronda was at Genoa in the same hotel with them, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got her out of the water time enough to save her from any harm. It seems they saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However Deronda is a lucky fellow in being there to take care of her.”
Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her hands tightly clasped; and Mrs. Meyrick, giving up the paper to Mab, said—
“Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after him.”
“It was an inadvertence—a little absence of mind,” said Hans, creasing his face roguishly, and throwing himself into a chair not far from Mirah. “Who can be fond of a jealous baritone, with freezing glances, always singing asides?—that was the husband’s role, depend upon it. Nothing can be neater than his getting drowned. The Duchess is at liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the wedding.”
Here Mirah started from her sitting posture, and fixing her eyes on Hans, with an angry gleam in them, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice of indignation—
“Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Mr. Deronda would not like you to speak so. Why will you say he is lucky—why will you use words of that sort about life and death—when what is life to one is death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs. Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away from my brother—I know she would. Mr. Deronda would not call that lucky to pierce my brother’s heart.”
All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Mirah’s face, with a look of anger that might have suited Ithuriel, pale, even to the lips that were usually so rich of tint, was not far from poor Hans, who sat transfixed, blushing under it as if he had been a girl, while he said, nervously—
“I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word. I’ll go and hang myself like Judas—if it’s allowable to mention him.” Even in Hans’s sorrowful moments, his improvised words had inevitably some drollery.
But Mirah’s anger was not appeased: how could it be? She had burst into indignant speech as creatures in intense pain bite and make their teeth meet even through their own flesh, by way of making their agony bearable. She said no more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed the sheet of music before her, as if she thought of beginning to play again.
It was Mab who spoke, while Mrs. Meyrick’s face seemed to reflect some of Hans’ discomfort.
“Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. You are always taking Mr. Deronda’s name in vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way about his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men’s minds must be very black, I think,” ended Mab, with much scorn.
“Quite true, my dear,” said Hans, in a low tone, rising and turning on his heel to walk toward the back window.
“We had better go on, Mab; you have not given your full time to the lesson,” said Mirah, in a higher tone than usual. “Will you sing this again, or shall I sing it to you?”
“Oh, please sing it to me,” said Mab, rejoiced to take no more notice of what had happened.
And Mirah immediately sang Lascia ch’io pianga, giving forth its melodious sobs and cries with new fullness and energy. Hans paused in his walk and leaned against the mantelpiece, keeping his eyes carefully away from his mother’s. When Mirah had sung her last note and touched the last chord, she rose and said, “I must go home now. Ezra expects me.”
She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick and hung back a little, not daring to look at her, instead of kissing her, as usual. But the little mother drew Mirah’s face down to hers, and said, soothingly, “God bless you, my dear.” Mirah felt that she had committed an offense against Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking Hans, and mixed with the rest of her suffering was the sense that she had shown something like a proud ingratitude, an unbecoming assertion of superiority. And her friend had div
ined this compunction.
Meanwhile Hans had seized his wide-awake, and was ready to open the door.
“Now, Hans,” said Mab, with what was really a sister’s tenderness cunningly disguised, “you are not going to walk home with Mirah. I am sure she would rather not. You are so dreadfully disagreeable to-day.”
“I shall go to take care of her, if she does not forbid me,” said Hans, opening the door.
Mirah said nothing, and when he had opened the outer door for her and closed it behind him, he walked by her side unforbidden. She had not the courage to begin speaking to him again—conscious that she had perhaps been unbecomingly severe in her words to him, yet finding only severer words behind them in her heart. Besides, she was pressed upon by a crowd of thoughts thrusting themselves forward as interpreters of that consciousness which still remained unaltered to herself.
Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. Mirah’s anger had waked in him a new perception, and with it the unpleasant sense that he was a dolt not to have had it before. Suppose Mirah’s heart were entirely preoccupied with Deronda in another character than that of her own and her brother’s benefactor; the supposition was attended in Hans’s mind with anxieties which, to do him justice, were not altogether selfish. He had a strong persuasion, which only direct evidence to the contrary could have dissipated, and that was that there was a serious attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he had pieced together many fragments of observation, and gradually gathered knowledge, completed by what his sisters had heard from Anna Gascoigne, which convinced him not only that Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, but also, notwithstanding his friend’s austere self-repression, that Deronda’s susceptibility about her was the sign of concealed love. Some men, having such a conviction, would have avoided allusions that could have roused that susceptibility; but Hans’s talk naturally fluttered toward mischief, and he was given to a form of experiment on live animals which consisted in irritating his friends playfully. His experiments had ended in satisfying him that what he thought likely was true.
