“When did you come down, Hans?” said Deronda, joining him in the grounds where he was making a study of the requisite bank and trees.
“Oh, ten days ago; before the time Sir Hugo fixed. I ran down with Rex Gascoigne and stayed at the rectory a day or two. I’m up in all the gossip of these parts; I know the state of the wheelwright’s interior, and have assisted at an infant school examination. Sister Anna, with the good upper lip, escorted me, else I should have been mobbed by three urchins and an idiot, because of my long hair and a general appearance which departs from the Pennicote type of the beautiful. Altogether, the village is idyllic. Its only fault is a dark curate with broad shoulders and broad trousers who ought to have gone into the heavy drapery line. The Gascoignes are perfect—besides being related to the Vandyke duchess. I caught a glimpse of her in her black robes at a distance, though she doesn’t show to visitors.”
“She was not staying at the rectory?” said Deronda.
“No; but I was taken to Offendene to see the old house, and as a consequence I saw the duchess’ family. I suppose you have been there and know all about them?”
“Yes, I have been there,” said Deronda, quietly.
“A fine old place. An excellent setting for a widow with romantic fortunes. And she seems to have had several romances. I think I have found out that there was one between her and my friend Rex.”
“Not long before her marriage, then?” said Deronda, really interested, “for they had only been a year at Offendene. How came you to know anything of it?”
“Oh—not ignorant of what it is to be a miserable devil, I learn to gloat on the signs of misery in others. I found out that Rex never goes to Offendene, and has never seen the duchess since she came back; and Miss Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about charade-acting—for I went through some of my nonsense to please the young ones—something that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin close enough to get singed. I don’t know what was her part in the affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. That is always the way when an exceptionally worthy young man forms an attachment. I understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and remaining a bachelor. But these are green resolves. Since the duke did not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my friend Rex’s sake. Who knows?”
“Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?” said Deronda, ready to add that Hans’s success in constructing her fortunes hitherto had not been enough to warrant a new attempt.
“You monster!” retorted Hans, “do you want her to wear weeds for you all her life—burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and merry?”
Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so much annoyed that Hans turned the current of his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his shoulders a little over the thought that there really had been some stronger feeling between Deronda and the duchess than Mirah would like to know of. “Why didn’t she fall in love with me?” thought Hans, laughing at himself. “She would have had no rivals. No woman ever wanted to discuss theology with me.”
No wonder that Deronda winced under that sort of joking with a whip-lash. It touched sensibilities that were already quivering with the anticipation of witnessing some of that pain to which even Hans’s light words seemed to give more reality:—any sort of recognition by another giving emphasis to the subject of our anxiety. And now he had come down with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He had sent word that he intended to call and to ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he found her awaiting him in the old drawing-room where some chief crises of her life had happened. She seemed less sad than he had seen her since her husband’s death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found her. She was all the more alive to the sadness perceptible in Deronda; and they were no sooner seated—he at a little distance opposite to her—than she said:
“You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief and despair the last time. But I am not so today. I have been sorry ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain about me.”
There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen’s tone and look as she uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer a beginning of the task.
“I am in some trouble to-day,” he said, looking at her rather mournfully; “but it is because I have things to tell you which you will almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of before. They are things affecting my own life—my own future. I shall seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in me—never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter into subjects which at the moment were really less pressing to me than the trials you have been going through.” There was a sort of timid tenderness in Deronda’s deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look, as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her scenes of beseeching and confession.
A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir Hugo’s property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda’s way of asking her pardon—
“You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?”
“It will perhaps astonish you,” said Deronda, “that I have only quite lately known who were my parents.”
Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without check.
“The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to learn that—in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my father’s death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill, and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained. Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew.”
“A Jew!” Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system.
Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if remonstrating against the mother’s conduct—
“What difference need that have made?”
“It has made a great difference to me that I have known it,” said Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily—the distance between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language, making him uncertain what force his words would carry.
Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, “I hope there is nothing to make you mind. You are just the same as if you were not a Jew.”
She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding.
“The discovery was far from being painful to me,” he said, “I had been gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my life to some effort at giving them effect.”
Again Gwendolen seemed shaken—again there was a look of frustration, but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired h
er with a dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it could reach Deronda’s. Great ideas in general which she had attributed to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure.
“That is an object,” he said, after a moment, “which will by-and-by force me to leave England for some time—for some years. I have purposes which will take me to the East.”
Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating. Gwendolen’s lips began to tremble. “But you will come back?” she said, tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them.
Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against the corner of the mantelpiece, at a different angle from her face. But when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned and looked up at him, awaiting an answer.
“If I live,” said Deronda—”some time.”
They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating something that she had to say.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, at last, very mildly. “Can I understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?”
“I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there,” said Deronda, gently—anxious to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of their separateness from each other. “The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.”
There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of relenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation.
That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen’s small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her, and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been roused in her relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all her anger into self-humiliation.
There had been a long silence. Deronda had stood still, even thankful for an interval before he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat like a statue with her wrists lying over each other and her eyes fixed—the intensity of her mental action arresting all other excitation. At length something occurred to her that made her turn her face to Deronda and say in a trembling voice—
“Is that all you can tell me?”
The question was like a dart to him. “The Jew whom I mentioned just now,” he answered, not without a certain tremor in his tones too, “the remarkable man who has greatly influenced my mind, has not perhaps been totally unheard of by you. He is the brother of Miss Lapidoth, whom you have often heard sing.”
A great wave of remembrance passed through Gwendolen and spread as a deep, painful flush over neck and face. It had come first at the scene of that morning when she had called on Mirah, and heard Deronda’s voice reading, and been told, without then heeding it, that he was reading Hebrew with Mirah’s brother.
“He is very ill—very near death now,” Deronda went on, nervously, and then stopped short. He felt that he must wait. Would she divine the rest?
“Did she tell you that I went to her?” said Gwendolen, abruptly, looking up at him.
“No,” said Deronda. “I don’t understand you.”
She turned away her eyes again, and sat thinking. Slowly the color dried out of face and neck, and she was as pale as before—with that almost withered paleness which is seen after a painful flush. At last she said—without turning toward him—in a low, measured voice, as if she were only thinking aloud in preparation for future speech—
“But can you marry?”
“Yes,” said Deronda, also in a low voice. “I am going to marry.”
At first there was no change in Gwendolen’s attitude: she only began to tremble visibly; then she looked before her with dilated eyes, as at something lying in front of her, till she stretched her arms out straight, and cried with a smothered voice—
“I said I should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And I am forsaken.”
Deronda’s anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her feet. She was the victim of his happiness.
“I am cruel, too, I am cruel,” he repeated, with a sort of groan, looking up at her imploringly.
His presence and touch seemed to dispel a horrible vision, and she met his upward look of sorrow with something like the return of consciousness after fainting. Then she dwelt on it with that growing pathetic movement of the brow which accompanies the revival of some tender recollection. The look of sorrow brought back what seemed a very far-off moment—the first time she had ever seen it, in the library at the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. Deronda would not let her hands go—held them still with one of his, and himself pressed her handkerchief against her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child, making an effort to speak, which was hindered by struggling sobs. At last she succeeded in saying, brokenly—
“I said—I said—it should be better—better with me—for having known you.”
His eyes too were larger with tears. She wrested one of her hands from his, and returned his action, pressing his tears away.
“We shall not be quite parted,” he said. “I will write to you always, when I can, and you will answer?”
He waited till she said in a whisper, “I will try.”
“I shall be more with you than I used to be,” Deronda said with gentle urgency, releasing her hands and rising from his kneeling posture. “If we had been much together before, we should have felt our differences more, and seemed to get farther apart.
Now we can perhaps never see each other again. But our minds may get nearer.”
Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look of grief, such as the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn up after the burial of life’s joy, made him hate his own words: they seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was like a dreadful whisper in her ear, which dulled all other consciousness; and she had not known that she was rising.
Deronda could not speak again. He thought that they must part in silence, but it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him. He advanced to put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers within it, she said what her mind had been laboring with—
“You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will try—try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only harm. Don’t let me be harm to you. It shall be the better for me—”