Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (433 page)

Lush, having failed in his attempted reminder to Grandcourt, thought it well to communicate with Sir Hugo, in whom, as a man having perhaps interest enough to command the bestowal of some place where the work was light, gentlemanly, and not ill-paid, he was anxious to cultivate a sense of friendly obligation, not feeling at all secure against the future need of such a place. He wrote the following letter, and addressed it to Park Lane, whither he knew the family had returned from Leubronn: —

MY DEAR SIR HUGO — Since we came home the marriage has been absolutely decided on, and is to take place in less than three weeks. It is so far the worse for him that her mother has lately lost all her fortune, and he will have to find supplies. Grandcourt, I know, is feeling the want of cash; and unless some other plan is resorted to, he will be raising money in a foolish way. I am going to leave Diplow immediately, and I shall not be able to start the topic. What I should advise is, that Mr. Deronda, who I know has your confidence, should propose to come and pay a short visit here, according to invitation (there are going to be other people in the house), and that you should put him fully in possession of your wishes and the possible extent of your offer. Then, that he should introduce the subject to Grandcourt so as not to imply that you suspect any particular want of money on his part, but only that there is a strong wish on yours, What I have formerly said to him has been in the way of a conjecture that you might be willing to give a good sum for his chance of Diplow; but if Mr. Deronda came armed with a definite offer, that would take another sort of hold. Ten to one he will not close for some time to come; but the proposal will have got a stronger lodgment in his mind; and though at present he has a great notion of the hunting here, I see a likelihood, under the circumstances, that he will get a distaste for the neighborhood, and there will be the notion of the money sticking by him without being urged. I would bet on your ultimate success. As I am not to be exiled to Siberia, but am to be within call, it is possible that, by and by, I may be of more service to you. But at present I can think of no medium so good as Mr. Deronda. Nothing puts Grandcourt in worse humor than having the lawyers thrust their paper under his nose uninvited.

Trusting that your visit to Leubronn has put you in excellent condition for the winter, I remain, my dear Sir Hugo,

Yours very faithfully,

THOMAS CRANMER LUSH
.

Sir Hugo, having received this letter at breakfast, handed it to Deronda, who, though he had chambers in town, was somehow hardly ever in them, Sir Hugo not being contented without him. The chatty baronet would have liked a young companion even if there had been no peculiar reasons for attachment between them: one with a fine harmonious unspoiled face fitted to keep up a cheerful view of posterity and inheritance generally, notwithstanding particular disappointments; and his affection for Deronda was not diminished by the deep-lying though not obtrusive difference in their notions and tastes. Perhaps it was all the stronger; acting as the same sort of difference does between a man and a woman in giving a piquancy to the attachment which subsists in spite of it. Sir Hugo did not think unapprovingly of himself; but he looked at men and society from a liberal-menagerie point of view, and he had a certain pride in Deronda’s differing from him, which, if it had found voice, might have said — “You see this fine young fellow — not such as you see every day, is he? — he belongs to me in a sort of way. I brought him up from a child; but you would not ticket him off easily, he has notions of his own, and he’s as far as the poles asunder from what I was at his age.” This state of feeling was kept up by the mental balance in Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine.

When he had read the letter, he returned it without speaking, inwardly wincing under Lush’s mode of attributing a neutral usefulness to him in the family affairs.

“What do you say, Dan? It would be pleasant enough for you. You have not seen the place for a good many years now, and you might have a famous run with the harriers if you went down next week,” said Sir Hugo.

“I should not go on that account,” said Deronda, buttering his bread attentively. He had an objection to this transparent kind of persuasiveness, which all intelligent animals are seen to treat with indifference. If he went to Diplow he should be doing something disagreeable to oblige Sir Hugo.

“I think Lush’s notion is a good one. And it would be a pity to lose the occasion.”

“That is a different matter — if you think my going of importance to your object,” said Deronda, still with that aloofness of manner which implied some suppression. He knew that the baronet had set his heart on the affair.

“Why, you will see the fair gambler, the Leubronn Diana, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Sir Hugo, gaily. “We shall have to invite her to the Abbey, when they are married,” he added, turning to Lady Mallinger, as if she too had read the letter.

“I cannot conceive whom you mean,” said Lady Mallinger, who in fact had not been listening, her mind having been taken up with her first sips of coffee, the objectionable cuff of her sleeve, and the necessity of carrying Theresa to the dentist — innocent and partly laudable preoccupations, as the gentle lady’s usually were. Should her appearance be inquired after, let it be said that she had reddish blonde hair (the hair of the period), a small Roman nose, rather prominent blue eyes and delicate eyelids, with a figure which her thinner friends called fat, her hands showing curves and dimples like a magnified baby’s.

“I mean that Grandcourt is going to marry the girl you saw at Leubronn — don’t you remember her — the Miss Harleth who used to play at roulette.”

“Dear me! Is that a good match for him?”

“That depends on the sort of goodness he wants,” said Sir Hugo, smiling. “However, she and her friends have nothing, and she will bring him expenses. It’s a good match for my purposes, because if I am willing to fork out a sum of money, he may be willing to give up his chance of Diplow, so that we shall have it out and out, and when I die you will have the consolation of going to the place you would like to go to — wherever I may go.”

“I wish you would not talk of dying in that light way, dear.”

“It’s rather a heavy way, Lou, for I shall have to pay a heavy sum — forty thousand, at least.”

“But why are we to invite them to the Abbey?” said Lady Mallinger. “I do
not
like women who gamble, like Lady Cragstone.”

“Oh, you will not mind her for a week. Besides, she is not like Lady Cragstone because she gambled a little, any more than I am like a broker because I’m a Whig. I want to keep Grandcourt in good humor, and to let him see plenty of this place, that he may think the less of Diplow. I don’t know yet whether I shall get him to meet me in this matter. And if Dan were to go over on a visit there, he might hold out the bait to him. It would be doing me a great service.” This was meant for Deronda.

“Daniel is not fond of Mr. Grandcourt, I think, is he?” said Lady
Mallinger, looking at Deronda inquiringly.

“There is no avoiding everybody one doesn’t happen to be fond of,” said Deronda. “I will go to Diplow — I don’t know that I have anything better to do — since Sir Hugo wishes it.”

“That’s a trump!” said Sir Hugo, well pleased. “And if you don’t find it very pleasant, it’s so much experience. Nothing used to come amiss to me when I was young. You must see men and manners.”

“Yes; but I have seen that man, and something of his manners too,” said
Deronda.

“Not nice manners, I think,” said Lady Mallinger.

“Well, you see they succeed with your sex,” said Sir Hugo, provokingly. “And he was an uncommonly good-looking fellow when he was two or three and twenty — like his father. He doesn’t take after his father in marrying the heiress, though. If he had got Miss Arrowpoint and my land too, confound him, he would have had a fine principality.”

Deronda, in anticipating the projected visit, felt less disinclination than when consenting to it. The story of that girl’s marriage did interest him: what he had heard through Lush of her having run away from the suit of the man she was now going to take as a husband, had thrown a new sort of light on her gambling; and it was probably the transition from that fevered worldliness into poverty which had urged her acceptance where she must in some way have felt repulsion. All this implied a nature liable to difficulty and struggle — elements of life which had a predominant attraction for his sympathy, due perhaps to his early pain in dwelling on the conjectured story of his own existence. Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some sort of redeeming influence; and he had to resist an inclination, easily accounted for, to withdraw coldly from the fortunate. But in the movement which had led him to repurchase Gwendolen’s necklace for her, and which was at work in him still, there was something beyond his habitual compassionate fervor — something due to the fascination of her womanhood. He was very open to that sort of charm, and mingled it with the consciously Utopian pictures of his own future; yet any one able to trace the folds of his character might have conceived that he would be more likely than many less passionate men to love a woman without telling her of it. Sprinkle food before a delicate-eared bird: there is nothing he would more willingly take, yet he keeps aloof, because of his sensibility to checks which to you are imperceptible. And one man differs from another, as we all differ from the Bosjesman, in a sensibility to checks, that come from variety of needs, spiritual or other. It seemed to foreshadow that capability of reticence in Deronda that his imagination was much occupied with two women, to neither of whom would he have held it possible that he should ever make love. Hans Meyrick had laughed at him for having something of the knight-errant in his disposition; and he would have found his proof if he had known what was just now going on in Deronda’s mind about Mirah and Gwendolen.

Deronda wrote without delay to announce his visit to Diplow, and received in reply a polite assurance that his coming would give great pleasure. That was not altogether untrue. Grandcourt thought it probable that the visit was prompted by Sir Hugo’s desire to court him for a purpose which he did not make up his mind to resist; and it was not a disagreeable idea to him that this fine fellow, whom he believed to be his cousin under the rose, would witness, perhaps with some jealousy, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt play the commanding part of betrothed lover to a splendid girl whom the cousin had already looked at with admiration.

Grandcourt himself was not jealous of anything unless it threatened his mastery — which he did not think himself likely to lose.

CHAPTER XXIX
.

  ”Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice,
     him or her I shall follow.
  As the water follows the moon, silently,
     with fluid steps anywhere around the globe.”
                                    — WALT WHITMAN.

“Now my cousins are at Diplow,” said Grandcourt, “will you go there? — to-morrow? The carriage shall come for Mrs. Davilow. You can tell me what you would like done in the rooms. Things must be put in decent order while we are away at Ryelands. And to-morrow is the only day.”

He was sitting sideways on a sofa in the drawing-room at Offendene, one hand and elbow resting on the back, and the other hand thrust between his crossed knees — in the attitude of a man who is much interested in watching the person next to him. Gwendolen, who had always disliked needlework, had taken to it with apparent zeal since her engagement, and now held a piece of white embroidery which, on examination, would have shown many false stitches. During the last eight or nine days their hours had been chiefly spent on horseback, but some margin had always been left for this more difficult sort of companionship, which, however, Gwendolen had not found disagreeable. She was very well satisfied with Grandcourt. His answers to her lively questions about what he had seen and done in his life, bore drawling very well. From the first she had noticed that he knew what to say; and she was constantly feeling not only that he had nothing of the fool in his composition, but that by some subtle means he communicated to her the impression that all the folly lay with other people, who did what he did not care to do. A man who seems to have been able to command the best, has a sovereign power of depreciation. Then Grandcourt’s behavior as a lover had hardly at all passed the limit of an amorous homage which was inobtrusive as a wafted odor of roses, and spent all its effects in a gratified vanity. One day, indeed, he had kissed not her cheek but her neck a little below her ear; and Gwendolen, taken by surprise, had started up with a marked agitation which made him rise too and say, “I beg your pardon — did I annoy you?” “Oh, it was nothing,” said Gwendolen, rather afraid of herself, “only I cannot bear — to be kissed under my ear.” She sat down again with a little playful laugh, but all the while she felt her heart beating with a vague fear: she was no longer at liberty to flout him as she had flouted poor Rex. Her agitation seemed not uncomplimentary, and he had been contented not to transgress again.

To-day a slight rain hindered riding; but to compensate, a package had come from London, and Mrs. Davilow had just left the room after bringing in for admiration the beautiful things (of Grandcourt’s ordering) which lay scattered about on the tables. Gwendolen was just then enjoying the scenery of her life. She let her hands fall on her lap, and said with a pretty air of perversity —

“Why is to-morrow the only day?”

“Because the next day is the first with the hounds,” said Grandcourt.

“And after that?”

“After that I must go away for a couple of days — it’s a bore — but I shall go one day and come back the next.” Grandcourt noticed a change in her face, and releasing his hand from under his knees, he laid it on hers, and said, “You object to my going away?”

“It’s no use objecting,” said Gwendolen, coldly. She was resisting to the utmost her temptation to tell him that she suspected to whom he was going — the temptation to make a clean breast, speaking without restraint.

“Yes it is,” said Grandcourt, enfolding her hand. “I will put off going. And I will travel at night, so as only to be away one day.” He thought that he knew the reason of what he inwardly called this bit of temper, and she was particularly fascinating to him at this moment.

“Then don’t put off going, but travel at night,” said Gwendolen, feeling that she could command him, and finding in this peremptoriness a small outlet for her irritation.

“Then you will go to Diplow to-morrow?”

“Oh, yes, if you wish it,” said Gwendolen, in a high tone of careless assent. Her concentration in other feelings had really hindered her from taking notice that her hand was being held.

“How you treat us poor devils of men!” said Grandcourt, lowering his tone. “We are always getting the worst of it.”

“
Are
you?” said Gwendolen, in a tone of inquiry, looking at him more naïvely than usual. She longed to believe this commonplace
badinage
as the serious truth about her lover: in that case, she too was justified. If she knew everything, Mrs. Glasher would appear more blamable than Grandcourt. “
Are
you always getting the worst?”

“Yes. Are you as kind to me as I am to you?” said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes with his narrow gaze.

Gwendolen felt herself stricken. She was conscious of having received so much, that her sense of command was checked, and sank away in the perception that, look around her as she might, she could not turn back: it was as if she had consented to mount a chariot where another held the reins; and it was not in her nature to leap out in the eyes of the world. She had not consented in ignorance, and all she could say now would be a confession that she had not been ignorant. Her right to explanation was gone. All she had to do now was to adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude. There had been a little pause, during which she had not turned away her eyes; and with a sudden break into a smile, she said —

“If I were as kind to you as you are to me, that would spoil your generosity: it would no longer be as great as it could be — and it is that now.”

“Then I am not to ask for one kiss,” said Grandcourt, contented to pay a large price for this new kind of love-making, which introduced marriage by the finest contrast.

“Not one?” said Gwendolen, getting saucy, and nodding at him defiantly.

He lifted her little left hand to his lips, and then released it respectfully. Clearly it was faint praise to say of him that he was not disgusting: he was almost charming; and she felt at this moment that it was not likely she could ever have loved another man better than this one. His reticence gave her some inexplicable, delightful consciousness.

“Apropos,” she said, taking up her work again, “is there any one besides Captain and Mrs. Torrington at Diplow? — or do you leave them
tete-à-tete
? I suppose he converses in cigars, and she answers with her chignon.”

“She has a sister with her,” said Grandcourt, with his shadow of a smile, “and there are two men besides — one of them you know, I believe.”

“Ah, then, I have a poor opinion of him,” said Gwendolen, shaking her head.

“You saw him at Leubronn — young Deronda — a young fellow with the
Mallingers.”

Gwendolen felt as if her heart were making a sudden gambol, and her fingers, which tried to keep a firm hold on her work, got cold.

“I never spoke to him,” she said, dreading any discernible change in herself. “Is he not disagreeable?”

“No, not particularly,” said Grandcourt, in his most languid way. “He thinks a little too much of himself. I thought he had been introduced to you.”

“No. Some one told me his name the evening before I came away. That was all. What is he?”

“A sort of ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger’s. Nothing of any consequence.”

“Oh, poor creature! How very unpleasant for him!” said Gwendolen, speaking from the lip, and not meaning any sarcasm. “I wonder if it has left off raining!” she added, rising and going to look out of the window.

Happily it did not rain the next day, and Gwendolen rode to Diplow on Criterion as she had done on that former day when she returned with her mother in the carriage. She always felt the more daring for being in her riding-dress; besides having the agreeable belief that she looked as well as possible in it — a sustaining consciousness in any meeting which seems formidable. Her anger toward Deronda had changed into a superstitious dread — due, perhaps, to the coercion he had exercised over her thought — lest the first interference of his in her life might foreshadow some future influence. It is of such stuff that superstitions are commonly made: an intense feeling about ourselves which makes the evening star shine at us with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar encourage us. And superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding.

The time before luncheon was taken up for Gwendolen by going over the rooms with Mrs. Torrington and Mrs. Davilow; and she thought it likely that if she saw Deronda, there would hardly be need for more than a bow between them. She meant to notice him as little as possible.

And after all she found herself under an inward compulsion too strong for her pride. From the first moment of their being in the room together, she seemed to herself to be doing nothing but notice him; everything else was automatic performance of an habitual part.

When he took his place at lunch, Grandcourt had said, “Deronda, Miss
Harleth tells me you were not introduced to her at Leubronn?”

“Miss Harleth hardly remembers me, I imagine,” said Deronda, looking at her quite simply, as they bowed. “She was intensely occupied when I saw her.”

Now, did he suppose that she had not suspected him of being the person who redeemed her necklace?

“On the contrary. I remember you very well,” said Gwendolen, feeling rather nervous, but governing herself and looking at him in return with new examination. “You did not approve of my playing at roulette.”

“How did you come to that conclusion?” said Deronda, gravely.

“Oh, you cast an evil eye on my play,” said Gwendolen, with a turn of her head and a smile. “I began to lose as soon as you came to look on. I had always been winning till then.”

“Roulette in such a kennel as Leubronn is a horrid bore,” said
Grandcourt.

“
I
found it a bore when I began to lose,” said Gwendolen. Her face was turned toward Grandcourt as she smiled and spoke, but she gave a sidelong glance at Deronda, and saw his eyes fixed on her with a look so gravely penetrating that it had a keener edge for her than his ironical smile at her losses — a keener edge than Klesmer’s judgment. She wheeled her neck round as if she wanted to listen to what was being said by the rest, while she was only thinking of Deronda. His face had that disturbing kind of form and expression which threatens to affect opinion — as if one’s standard was somehow wrong. (Who has not seen men with faces of this corrective power till they frustrated it by speech or action?) His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt’s toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much of himself: — a favorite way of explaining a superiority that humiliates. However the talk turned on the rinderpest and Jamaica, and no more was said about roulette. Grandcourt held that the Jamaica negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song; Mrs. Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds.

While this polite pea-shooting was going on, Gwendolen trifled with her jelly, and looked at every speaker in turn that she might feel at ease in looking at Deronda.

“I wonder what he thinks of me, really? He must have felt interested in me, else he would not have sent me my necklace. I wonder what he thinks of my marriage? What notions has he to make him so grave about things? Why is he come to Diplow?”

These questions ran in her mind as the voice of an uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda with unmixed admiration — a longing which had had its seed in her first resentment at his critical glance. Why did she care so much about the opinion of this man who was “nothing of any consequence”? She had no time to find the reason — she was too much engaged in caring. In the drawing-room, when something had called Grandcourt away, she went quite unpremeditatedly up to Deronda, who was standing at a table apart, turning over some prints, and said to him —