“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 tonight?”
“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 tomorrow?” he said to Mrs. Meyrick.
“Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then.”
“Goodbye,” 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 everyday 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 move
ments 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.”