Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (466 page)

“But you don’t feel bound to continue with them now there is a closer tie to draw you?” said Deronda, not without fear that he might find an obstacle to overcome. “It seems to me right now — is it not? — that you should live with your sister; and I have prepared a home to take you to in the neighborhood of her friends, that she may join you there. Pray grant me this wish. It will enable me to be with you often in the hours when Mirah is obliged to leave you. That is my selfish reason. But the chief reason is, that Mirah will desire to watch over you, and that you ought to give her the guardianship of a brother’s presence. You shall have books about you. I shall want to learn of you, and to take you out to see the river and trees. And you will have the rest and comfort that you will be more and more in need of — nay, that I need for you. This is the claim I make on you, now that we have found each other.”

Deronda spoke in a tone of earnest, affectionate pleading, such as he might have used to a venerated elder brother. Mordecai’s eyes were fixed on him with a listening contemplation, and he was silent for a little while after Deronda had ceased to speak. Then he said, with an almost reproachful emphasis —

“And you would have me hold it doubtful whether you were born a Jew! Have we not from the first touched each other with invisible fibres — have we not quivered together like the leaves from a common stem with stirring from a common root? I know what I am outwardly, I am one among the crowd of poor — I am stricken, I am dying. But our souls know each other. They gazed in silence as those who have long been parted and meet again, but when they found voice they were assured, and all their speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in your veins.”

Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face tingling. It was impossible either to deny or assent. He waited, hoping that Mordecai would presently give him a more direct answer. And after a pause of meditation he did say, firmly —

“What you wish of me I will do. And our mother — may the blessing of the Eternal be with her in our souls! — would have wished it too. I will accept what your loving kindness has prepared, and Mirah’s home shall be mine.” He paused a moment, and then added in a more melancholy tone, “But I shall grieve to part from these parents and the little ones. You must tell them, for my heart would fail me.”

“I felt that you would want me to tell them. Shall we go now at once?” said Deronda, much relieved by this unwavering compliance.

“Yes; let us not defer it. It must be done,” said Mordecai, rising with the air of a man who has to perform a painful duty. Then came, as an afterthought, “But do not dwell on my sister more than is needful.”

When they entered the parlor he said to the alert Jacob, “Ask your father to come, and tell Sarah to mind the shop. My friend has something to say,” he continued, turning to the elder Mrs. Cohen. It seemed part of Mordecai’s eccentricity that he should call this gentleman his friend; and the two women tried to show their better manners by warm politeness in begging Deronda to seat himself in the best place.

When Cohen entered with a pen behind his ear, he rubbed his hands and said with loud satisfaction, “Well, sir! I’m glad you’re doing us the honor to join our family party again. We are pretty comfortable, I think.”

He looked round with shiny gladness. And when all were seated on the hearth the scene was worth peeping in upon: on one side Baby under her scarlet quilt in the corner being rocked by the young mother, and Adelaide Rebekah seated on the grandmother’s knee; on the other, Jacob between his father’s legs; while the two markedly different figures of Deronda and Mordecai were in the middle — Mordecai a little backward in the shade, anxious to conceal his agitated susceptibility to what was going on around him. The chief light came from the fire, which brought out the rich color on a depth of shadow, and seemed to turn into speech the dark gems of eyes that looked at each other kindly.

“I have just been telling Mordecai of an event that makes a great change in his life,” Deronda began, “but I hope you will agree with me that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you as his best friends, he wishes me to tell you for him at once.”

“Relations with money, sir?” burst in Cohen, feeling a power of divination which it was a pity to nullify by waiting for the fact.

“No; not exactly,” said Deronda, smiling. “But a very precious relation wishes to be reunited to him — a very good and lovely young sister, who will care for his comfort in every way.”

“Married, sir?”

“No, not married.”

“But with a maintenance?”

“With talents which will secure her a maintenance. A home is already provided for Mordecai.”

There was silence for a moment or two before the grandmother said in a wailing tone —

“Well, well! and so you’re going away from us, Mordecai.”

“And where there’s no children as there is here,” said the mother, catching the wail.

“No Jacob, and no Adelaide, and no Eugenie!” wailed the grandmother again.

“Ay, ay, Jacob’s learning ‘ill all wear out of him. He must go to school. It’ll be hard times for Jacob,” said Cohen, in a tone of decision.

In the wide-open ears of Jacob his father’s words sounded like a doom, giving an awful finish to the dirge-like effect of the whole announcement. His face had been gathering a wondering incredulous sorrow at the notion of Mordecai’s going away: he was unable to imagine the change as anything lasting; but at the mention of “hard times for Jacob” there was no further suspense of feeling, and he broke forth in loud lamentation. Adelaide Rebekah always cried when her brother cried, and now began to howl with astonishing suddenness, whereupon baby awaking contributed angry screams, and required to be taken out of the cradle. A great deal of hushing was necessary, and Mordecai feeling the cries pierce him, put out his arms to Jacob, who in the midst of his tears and sobs was turning his head right and left for general observation. His father, who had been — saying, “Never mind, old man; you shall go to the riders,” now released him, and he went to Mordecai, who clasped him, and laid his cheek on the little black head without speaking. But Cohen, sensible that the master of the family must make some apology for all this weakness, and that the occasion called for a speech, addressed Deronda with some elevation of pitch, squaring his elbows and resting a hand on each knee: —

“It’s not as we’re the people to grudge anybody’s good luck, sir, or the portion of their cup being made fuller, as I may say. I’m not an envious man, and if anybody offered to set up Mordecai in a shop of my sort two doors lower down,
I
shouldn’t make wry faces about it. I’m not one of them that had need have a poor opinion of themselves, and be frightened at anybody else getting a chance. If I’m offal, let a wise man come and tell me, for I’ve never heard it yet. And in point of business, I’m not a class of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpillar, and find my feet when I’m let alone. And though, as I may say, you’re taking some of our good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I’m not saying but we can afford that, though my mother and my wife had the good will to wish and do for Mordecai to the last; and a Jew must not be like a servant who works for reward — though I see nothing against a reward if I can get it. And as to the extra outlay in schooling, I’m neither poor nor greedy — I wouldn’t hang myself for sixpence, nor half a crown neither. But the truth of it is, the women and children are fond of Mordecai. You may partly see how it is, sir, by your own sense. A Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, that he was not made a woman; but a woman has to thank God that He has made her according to His will. And we all know what He has made her — a child-bearing, tender-hearted thing is the woman of our people. Her children are mostly stout, as I think you’ll say Addy’s are, and she’s not mushy, but her heart is tender. So you must excuse present company, sir, for not being glad all at once. And as to this young lady — for by what you say ‘young lady’ is the proper term” — Cohen here threw some additional emphasis into his look and tone — “we shall all be glad for Mordecai’s sake by-and-by, when we cast up our accounts and see where we are.”

Before Deronda could summon any answer to this oddly mixed speech,
Mordecai exclaimed —

“Friends, friends! For food and raiment and shelter I would not have sought better than you have given me. You have sweetened the morsel with love; and what I thought of as a joy that would be left to me even in the last months of my waning strength was to go on teaching the lad. But now I am as one who had clad himself beforehand in his shroud, and used himself to making the grave his bed, when the divine command sounded in his ears, ‘Arise, and go forth; the night is not yet come.’ For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness to take another’s. But it has been taught us, as you know, that
the reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another
— so said Ben Azai. You have made your duty to one of the poor among your brethren a joy to you and me; and your reward shall be that you will not rest without the joy of like deeds in the time to come. And may not Jacob come and visit me?”

Mordecai had turned with this question to Deronda, who said —

“Surely that can be managed. It is no further than Brompton.”

Jacob, who had been gradually calmed by the need to hear what was going forward, began now to see some daylight on the future, the word “visit” having the lively charm of cakes and general relaxation at his grandfather’s, the dealer in knives. He danced away from Mordecai, and took up a station of survey in the middle of the hearth with his hands in his knickerbockers.

“Well,” said the grandmother, with a sigh of resignation, “I hope there’ll be nothing in the way of your getting
kosher
meat, Mordecai. For you’ll have to trust to those you live with.”

“That’s all right, that’s all right, you may be sure, mother,” said Cohen, as if anxious to cut off inquiry on matters in which he was uncertain of the guest’s position. “So, sir,” he added, turning with a look of amused enlightenment to Deronda, “it was better than learning you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered to myself at the time. I thought somehow there was a something.”

“Mordecai will perhaps explain to you how it was that I was seeking him,” said Deronda, feeling that he had better go, and rising as he spoke.

It was agreed that he should come again and the final move be made on the next day but one; but when he was going Mordecai begged to walk with him to the end of the street, and wrapped himself in coat and comforter. It was a March evening, and Deronda did not mean to let him go far, but he understood the wish to be outside the house with him in communicative silence, after the exciting speech that had been filling the last hour. No word was spoken until Deronda had proposed parting, when he said —

“Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. You would wish her to do so — to come and see them, would you not?”

Mordecai did not answer immediately, but at length said —

“I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of my sister might be to them as the fresh bleeding of wounds. There is a daughter and sister who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers — and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain. In my ears I have the prayers of generations past and to come. My life is as nothing to me but the beginning of fulfilment. And yet I am only another prayer — which you will fulfil.”

Deronda pressed his hand, and they parted.

CHAPTER XLVII
.

  ”And you must love him ere to you
  He will seem worthy of your love.”
                        — WORDSWORTH.

One might be tempted to envy Deronda providing new clothes for Mordecai, and pleasing himself as if he were sketching a picture in imagining the effect of the fine gray flannel shirts and a dressing-gown very much like a Franciscan’s brown frock, with Mordecai’s head and neck above them. Half his pleasure was the sense of seeing Mirah’s brother through her eyes, and securing her fervid joy from any perturbing impression. And yet, after he had made all things ready, he was visited with doubt whether he were not mistaking her, and putting the lower effect for the higher: was she not just as capable as he himself had been of feeling the impressive distinction in her brother all the more for that aspect of poverty which was among the memorials of his past? But there were the Meyricks to be propitiated toward this too Judaic brother; and Deronda detected himself piqued into getting out of sight everything that might feed the ready repugnance in minds unblessed with that precious “seeing,” that bathing of all objects in a solemnity as of sun-set glow, which is begotten of a loving reverential emotion.

And his inclination would have been the more confirmed if he had heard the dialogue round Mrs. Meyrick’s fire late in the evening, after Mirah had gone to her room. Hans, settled now in his Chelsea rooms, had stayed late, and Mrs. Meyrick, poking the fire into a blaze, said —

“Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily. Hans, dear, do leave off laughing at those poems for the ninety-ninth time, and come too. I have something wonderful to tell.”

“As if I didn’t know that, ma. I have seen it in the corner of your eye ever so long, and in your pretense of errands,” said Kate, while the girls came up to put their feet on the fender, and Hans, pushing his chair near them, sat astride it, resting his fists and chin on the back.

“Well, then, if you are so wise, perhaps you know that Mirah’s brother is found!” said Mrs. Meyrick, in her clearest accents.

“Oh, confound it!” said Hans, in the same moment.

“Hans, that is wicked,” said Mab. “Suppose we had lost you?”

“I
cannot
help being rather sorry,” said Kate. “And her mother? — where is she?”

“Her mother is dead.”

“I hope the brother is not a bad man,” said Amy.

“Nor a fellow all smiles and jewelry — a Crystal Palace Assyrian with a hat on,” said Hans, in the worst humor.

“Were there ever such unfeeling children?” said Mrs. Meyrick, a little strengthened by the need for opposition. “You don’t think the least bit of Mirah’s joy in the matter.”

“You know, ma, Mirah hardly remembers her brother,” said Kate.

“People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again,” said Hans. “They are always in the way.”

“Hans!” said Mrs. Meyrick, reproachfully. “If you had lost me for
twenty
years, I should have thought — “

“I said twelve years,” Hans broke in. “Anywhere about twelve years is the time at which lost relations should keep out of the way.”

“Well, but it’s nice finding people — there is something to tell,” said
Mab, clasping her knees. “Did Prince Camaralzaman find him?”

Then Mrs. Meyrick, in her neat, narrative way, told all she knew without interruption. “Mr. Deronda has the highest admiration for him,” she ended — “seems quite to look up to him. And he says Mirah is just the sister to understand this brother.”

“Deronda is getting perfectly preposterous about those Jews,” said Hans with disgust, rising and setting his chair away with a bang. “He wants to do everything he can to encourage Mirah in her prejudices.”

“Oh, for shame, Hans! — to speak in that way of Mr. Deronda,” said Mab. And Mrs. Meyrick’s face showed something like an under-current of expression not allowed to get to the surface.

“And now we shall never be all together,” Hans went on, walking about with his hands thrust into the pockets of his brown velveteen coat, “but we must have this prophet Elijah to tea with us, and Mirah will think of nothing but sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem. She will be spoiled as an artist — mind that — she will get as narrow as a nun. Everything will be spoiled — our home and everything. I shall take to drinking.”

“Oh, really, Hans,” said Kate, impatiently. “I do think men are the most contemptible animals in all creation. Every one of them must have everything to his mind, else he is unbearable.”

“Oh, oh, oh, it’s very dreadful!” cried Mab. “I feel as if ancient
Nineveh were come again.”

“I should like to know what is the good of having gone to the university and knowing everything, if you are so childish, Hans,” said Amy. “You ought to put up with a man that Providence sends you to be kind to.
We
shall have to put up with him.”

“I hope you will all of you like the new Lamentations of Jeremiah — ‘to be continued in our next’ — that’s all,” said Hans, seizing his wide-awake. “It’s no use being one thing more than another if one has to endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly at you, and requiring all your remarks to be small foot-notes to their text. If you’re to be under a petrifying wall, you’d better be an old boot. I don’t feel myself an old boot.” Then abruptly, “Good night, little mother,” bending to kiss her brow in a hasty, desperate manner, and condescendingly, on his way to the door, “Good-night, girls.”

“Suppose Mirah knew how you are behaving,” said Kate. But her answer was a slam of the door. “I
should
like to see Mirah when Mr. Deronda tells her,” she went on to her mother. “I know she will look so beautiful.”

But Deronda, on second thoughts, had written a letter, which Mrs. Meyrick received the next morning, begging her to make the revelation instead of waiting for him, not giving the real reason — that he shrank from going again through a narrative in which he seemed to be making himself important and giving himself a character of general beneficence — but saying that he wished to remain with Mordecai while Mrs. Meyrick would bring Mirah on what was to be understood as a visit, so that there might be a little interval before that change of abode which he expected that Mirah herself would propose.

Deronda secretly felt some wondering anxiety how far Mordecai, after years of solitary preoccupation with ideas likely to have become the more exclusive from continual diminution of bodily strength, would allow him to feel a tender interest in his sister over and above the rendering of pious duties. His feeling for the Cohens, and especially for little Jacob, showed a persistent activity of affection; but these objects had entered into his daily life for years; and Deronda felt it noticeable that Mordecai asked no new questions about Mirah, maintaining, indeed, an unusual silence on all subjects, and appearing simply to submit to the changes that were coming over his personal life. He donned the new clothes obediently, but said afterward to Deronda, with a faint smile, “I must keep my old garments by me for a remembrance.” And when they were seated, awaiting Mirah, he uttered no word, keeping his eyelids closed, but yet showing restless feeling in his face and hands. In fact, Mordecai was undergoing that peculiar nervous perturbation only known to those whose minds, long and habitually moving with strong impetus in one current, are suddenly compelled into a new or reopened channel. Susceptible people, whose strength has been long absorbed by dormant bias, dread an interview that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening illness. Joy may be there, but joy, too, is terrible.

Deronda felt the infection of excitement, and when he heard the ring at the door, he went out, not knowing exactly why, that he might see and greet Mirah beforehand. He was startled to find that she had on the hat and cloak in which he had first seen her — the memorable cloak that had once been wetted for a winding-sheet. She had come down-stairs equipped in this way; and when Mrs. Meyrick said, in a tone of question, “You like to go in that dress, dear?” she answered, “My brother is poor, and I want to look as much like him as I can, else he may feel distant from me” — imagining that she should meet him in the workman’s dress. Deronda could not make any remark, but felt secretly rather ashamed of his own fastidious arrangements. They shook hands silently, for Mirah looked pale and awed.

When Deronda opened the door for her, Mordecai had risen, and had his eyes turned toward it with an eager gaze. Mirah took only two or three steps, and then stood still. They looked at each other, motionless. It was less their own presence that they felt than another’s; they were meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union. Mirah was the first to break the silence, standing where she was.

“Ezra,” she said, in exactly the same tone as when she was telling of her mother’s call to him.

Mordecai with a sudden movement advanced and laid his hand on her shoulders. He was the head taller, and looked down at her tenderly while he said, “That was our mother’s voice. You remember her calling me?”

“Yes, and how you answered her — ‘Mother!’ — and I knew you loved her.” Mirah threw her arms round her brother’s neck, clasped her little hands behind it, and drew down his face, kissing it with childlike lavishness, Her hat fell backward on the ground and disclosed all her curls.

“Ah, the dear head, the dear head?” said Mordecai, in a low loving tone, laying his thin hand gently on the curls.

“You are very ill, Ezra,” said Mirah, sadly looking at him with more observation.

“Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body,” was the quiet answer.

“Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other,” said Mirah, with a sweet outpouring of her words, as spontaneous as bird-notes. “I will tell you everything, and you will teach me: — you will teach me to be a good Jewess — what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep us. Oh, I have had such good friends.”

Mirah until now had quite forgotten that any one was by, but here she turned with the prettiest attitude, keeping one hand on her brother’s arm while she looked at Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda. The little mother’s happy emotion in witnessing this meeting of brother and sister had already won her to Mordecai, who seemed to her really to have more dignity and refinement than she had felt obliged to believe in from Deronda’s account.

“See this dear lady!” said Mirah. “I was a stranger, a poor wanderer, and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give my brother your hand,” she added, beseechingly, taking Mrs. Meyrick’s hand and putting it in Mordecai’s, then pressing them both with her own and lifting them to her lips.

“The Eternal Goodness has been with you,” said Mordecai. “You have helped to fulfill our mother’s prayer.”

“I think we will go now, shall we? — and return later,” said Deronda, laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick’s arm, and she immediately complied. He was afraid of any reference to the facts about himself which he had kept back from Mordecai, and he felt no uneasiness now in the thought of the brother and sister being alone together.