Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (493 page)

“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 her 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 mantel-piece, 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.