Daniel Deronda, George Eliot [portable ebook reader .TXT] 📗

ever a poor little bird, that was lost and could not fly, was taken and put into a warm nest where was a mother and sisters who took to it so that everything came naturally, as if it had been always there. I hardly thought before that the world could ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me now.” She looked meditative a moment, and then said, “sometimes I am a little afraid.”

“What is it you are afraid of?” said Deronda with anxiety.

“That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father. It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only sorrow,” said Mirah, plaintively.

“It is surely not very probable,” said Deronda, wishing that it were less so; then, not to let the opportunity escape⁠—“Would it be a great grief to you now if you were never to meet your mother?”

She did not answer immediately, but meditated again, with her eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and said firmly, as if she had arrived at the exact truth, “I want her to know that I have always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort her. She may be dead. If she were I should long to know where she was buried; and to know whether my brother lives, to say Kaddish in memory of her. But I will try not to grieve. I have thought much for so many years of her being dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We can never be really parted. I think I have never sinned against her. I have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry that I was not a good Jewess.”

“In what way are you not a good Jewess?” said Deronda.

“I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not liking Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not to like those who are better to me than any of my own people I have ever known. I think I could obey in other things that she wished but not in that. It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred. I remember a play I read in German⁠—since I have been here it has come into my mind⁠—where the heroine says something like that.”

“Antigone,” said Deronda.

“Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to love my best friends. She would be grateful to them.” Here Mirah had turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her whole countenance, she said, “Oh, if we ever do meet and know each other as we are now, so that I could tell what would comfort her⁠—I should be so full of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!”

“God bless you, child!” said Mrs. Meyrick, the words escaping involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of feeling she looked at Deronda and said, “It is curious that Mirah, who remembers her mother so well it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her brother the least bit⁠—except the feeling of having been carried by him when she was tired, and of his being near her when she was in her mother’s lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up. It is a pity her brother should be quite a stranger to her.”

“He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good,” said Mirah, eagerly. “He loved my mother⁠—he would take care of her. I remember more of him than that. I remember my mother’s voice once calling, ‘Ezra!’ and then his answering from a distance ‘Mother!’ ”⁠—Mirah had changed her voice a little in each of these words and had given them a loving intonation⁠—“and then he came close to us. I feel sure he is good. I have always taken comfort from that.”

It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt as painfully dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her memories,

“Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything else? I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have often fancied heaven might be made of voices.”

“Like your singing⁠—yes,” said Mab, who had hitherto kept a modest silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of Prince Camaralzaman⁠—“Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard her.”

“Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?” said Deronda, with a more deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.

“Oh, I shall like it,” said Mirah. “My voice has come back a little with rest.”

Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity of her nature. The circumstances of her life made her think of everything she did as work demanded from her, in which affectation had nothing to do; and she had begun her work before self-consciousness was born.

She immediately rose and went to the piano⁠—a somewhat worn instrument that seemed to get the better of its infirmities under the firm touch of her small fingers as she preluded. Deronda placed himself where he could see her while she sang; and she took everything as quietly as if she had been a child going to breakfast.

Imagine her⁠—it is always good to imagine a human creature in whom bodily loveliness seems as properly one with the entire being as the bodily loveliness of those wondrous transparent orbs of life that we find in the