Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (451 page)

The next day, recovered from the shuddering fit of this evening scene, she determined to use the charter which Grandcourt had scornfully given her, and to talk as much as she liked with Deronda; but no opportunities occurred, and any little devices she could imagine for creating them were rejected by her pride, which was now doubly active. Not toward Deronda himself — she was singularly free from alarm lest he should think her openness wanting in dignity: it was part of his power over her that she believed him free from all misunderstanding as to the way in which she appealed to him; or rather, that he should misunderstand her had never entered into her mind. But the last morning came, and still she had never been able to take up the dropped thread of their talk, and she was without devices. She and Grandcourt were to leave at three o’clock. It was too irritating that after a walk in the grounds had been planned in Deronda’s hearing, he did not present himself to join in it. Grandcourt was gone with Sir Hugo to King’s Topping, to see the old manor-house; others of the gentlemen were shooting; she was condemned to go and see the decoy and the waterfowl, and everything else that she least wanted to see, with the ladies, with old Lord Pentreath and his anecdotes, with Mr. Vandernoodt and his admiring manners. The irritation became too strong for her; without premeditation, she took advantage of the winding road to linger a little out of sight, and then set off back to the house, almost running when she was safe from observation. She entered by a side door, and the library was on her left hand; Deronda, she knew, was often there; why might she not turn in there as well as into any other room in the house? She had been taken there expressly to see the illuminated family tree, and other remarkable things — what more natural than that she should like to look in again? The thing most to be feared was that the room would be empty of Deronda, for the door was ajar. She pushed it gently, and looked round it. He was there, writing busily at a distant table, with his back toward the door (in fact, Sir Hugo had asked him to answer some constituents’ letters which had become pressing). An enormous log fire, with the scent of Russia from the books, made the great room as warmly odorous as a private chapel in which the censors have been swinging. It seemed too daring to go in — too rude to speak and interrupt him; yet she went in on the noiseless carpet, and stood still for two or three minutes, till Deronda, having finished a letter, pushed it aside for signature, and threw himself back to consider whether there were anything else for him to do, or whether he could walk out for the chance of meeting the party which included Gwendolen, when he heard her voice saying, “Mr. Deronda.”

It was certainly startling. He rose hastily, turned round, and pushed away his chair with a strong expression of surprise.

“Am I wrong to come in?” said Gwendolen.

“I thought you were far on your walk,” said Deronda.

“I turned back,” said Gwendolen.

“Do you intend to go out again? I could join you now, if you would allow me.”

“No; I want to say something, and I can’t stay long,” said Gwendolen, speaking quickly in a subdued tone, while she walked forward and rested her arms and muff on the back of the chair he had pushed away from him. “I want to tell you that it is really so — I can’t help feeling remorse for having injured others. That was what I meant when I said that I had done worse than gamble again and pawn the necklace again — something more injurious, as you called it. And I can’t alter it. I am punished, but I can’t alter it. You said I could do many things. Tell me again. What should you do — what should you feel if you were in my place?”

The hurried directness with which she spoke — the absence of all her little airs, as if she were only concerned to use the time in getting an answer that would guide her, made her appeal unspeakably touching.

Deronda said, — “I should feel something of what you feel — deep sorrow.”

“But what would you try to do?” said Gwendolen, with urgent quickness.

“Order my life so as to make any possible amends, and keep away from doing any sort of injury again,” said Deronda, catching her sense that the time for speech was brief.

“But I can’t — I can’t; I must go on,” said Gwendolen, in a passionate loud whisper. “I have thrust out others — I have made my gain out of their loss — tried to make it — tried. And I must go on. I can’t alter it.”

It was impossible to answer this instantaneously. Her words had confirmed his conjecture, and the situation of all concerned rose in swift images before him. His feeling for those who had been thrust out sanctioned her remorse; he could not try to nullify it, yet his heart was full of pity for her. But as soon as he could he answered — taking up her last words —

“That is the bitterest of all — to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease? — and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. There are many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled.”

“But you have not wronged any one, or spoiled their lives,” said
Gwendolen, hastily. “It is only others who have wronged
you
.”

Deronda colored slightly, but said immediately — “I suppose our keen feeling for ourselves might end in giving us a keen feeling for others, if, when we are suffering acutely, we were to consider that others go through the same sharp experience. That is a sort of remorse before commission. Can’t you understand that?”

“I think I do — now,” said Gwendolen. “But you were right — I
am
selfish. I have never thought much of any one’s feelings, except my mother’s. I have not been fond of people. But what can I do?” she went on, more quickly. “I must get up in the morning and do what every one else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. I seem to see all that can be — and I am tired and sick of it. And the world is all confusion to me” — she made a gesture of disgust. “You say I am ignorant. But what is the good of trying to know more, unless life were worth more?”

“This good,” said Deronda promptly, with a touch of indignant severity, which he was inclined to encourage as his own safeguard; “life
would
be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life — forgive me — of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?”

Deronda paused, but Gwendolen, looking startled and thrilled as by an electric shock, said nothing, and he went on more insistently —

“I take what you said of music for a small example — it answers for all larger things — you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy in it. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction? If one firmament has no stimulus for our attention and awe, I don’t see how four would have it. We should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own inanity — which is necessarily impious, without faith or fellowship. The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are clad with knowledge.”

The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda’s voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child — shaken out of its wailing into awe, and she said humbly —

“I will try. I will think.”

They both stood silent for a minute, as if some third presence had arrested them, — for Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure which is apt to come when our own winged words seem to be hovering around us, — till Gwendolen began again —

“You said affection was the best thing, and I have hardly any — none about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible. Things have changed to me so — in such a short time. What I used not to like I long for now. I think I am almost getting fond of the old things now they are gone.” Her lip trembled.

“Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light,” said Deronda, more gently. “You are conscious of more beyond the round of your own inclinations — you know more of the way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours. I don’t think you could have escaped the painful process in some form or other.”

“But it is a very cruel form,” said Gwendolen, beating her foot on the ground with returning agitation. “I am frightened at everything. I am frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring things — take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself.” She was looking at nothing outside her; but her eyes were directed toward the window, away from Deronda, who, with quick comprehension said —

“Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may do a great deal toward defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.” Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger.

“Yes, I know; I understand what you mean,” said Gwendolen in her loud whisper, not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small gloved hand and waving it in deprecation of the notion that it was easy to obey that advice. “But if feelings rose — there are some feelings — hatred and anger — how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer —
 
— “ She broke off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning, that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compassion which was spread over his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said —

“I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You
can
help me. I will think of everything. I will try. Tell me — it will not be a pain to you that I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when you rebuked me.” There was a melancholy smile on her lips as she said that, but she added more entreatingly, “It will not be a pain to you?”

“Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come,” said
Deronda, with strong emphasis; “otherwise, it will be a lasting pain.”

“No — no — it shall not be. It may be — it shall be better with me because
I have known you.” She turned immediately, and quitted the room.

When she was on the first landing of the staircase, Sir Hugo passed across the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. Grandcourt was not with him.

Deronda, when the baronet entered, was standing in his ordinary attitude, grasping his coat-collar, with his back to the table, and with that indefinable expression by which we judge that a man is still in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved, however, and began to arrange the letters.

“Has Mrs. Grandcourt been in here?” said Sir Hugo.

“Yes, she has.”

“Where are the others?”

“I believe she left them somewhere in the grounds.”

After a moment’s silence, in which Sir Hugo looked at a letter without reading it, he said “I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan — you understand me?”

“I believe I do, sir,” said Deronda, after a slight hesitation, which had some repressed anger in it. “But there is nothing answering to your metaphor — no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching.”