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

one sense peculiar, has a great deal in common with the poetry of other nations. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his people’s religion more than one of another race⁠—and yet”⁠—here Deronda hesitated in his turn⁠—“that is perhaps not always so.”

“Ah no,” said Mirah, sadly. “I have seen that. I have seen them mock. Is it not like mocking your parents?⁠—like rejoicing in your parents’ shame?”

“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in, and like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them,” said Deronda apologetically.

“But you are not like that,” said Mirah, looking at him with unconscious fixedness.

“No, I think not,” said Deronda; “but you know I was not brought up as a Jew.”

“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a look of disappointed recollection, and slightly blushing.

Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause, which he put an end to by saying playfully,

“Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we all went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just the same.”

“To be sure. We should go on forever in zigzags,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I think it is very weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the contrary. Still one may honor one’s parents, without following their notions exactly, any more than the exact cut of their clothing. My father was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither quite Scotch, nor quite French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I honor my parents’ memory.”

“But I could not make myself not a Jewess,” said Mirah, insistently, “even if I changed my belief.”

“No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religion, and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen,” said Mrs. Meyrick, taking that consummation very cheerfully.

“Oh, please not to say that,” said Mirah, the tears gathering. “It is the first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will never separate myself from my mother’s people. I was forced to fly from my father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed me, should I say, ‘This is not my father’? If he had shame, I must share it. It was he who was given to me for my father, and not another. And so it is with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people. I will always worship with them.”

As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful passion⁠—fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs. Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place and risk their lives in flight, that they might join their own people and say, “I am a Jew.”

“Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!” said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed. “God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. I was only saying what might be if the world went on. But I had better have left the world alone, and not wanted to be over-wise. Forgive me, come! we will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to you.”

“I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life,” said Mirah, not yet quite calm.

“Hush, hush, now,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I have been punished enough for wagging my tongue foolishly⁠—making an almanac for the Millennium, as my husband used to say.”

“But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear to think of that,” said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become severe if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this inconvenient susceptibility to innocent remarks.

Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange contrast by the side of Mirah’s⁠—smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically as he said, “That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah’s feelings, she tells us, are concerned with what is.”

Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said,

“I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is hardly anything we can talk about.” Mab felt herself unanswerable here, inclining to the opinion of Socrates: “What motive has a man to live, if not for the pleasure of discourse?”

Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, “Hans is to share my chambers when he comes at Christmas.”

“You have written to Rome about that?” said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. “How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?”

“Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.”

“I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However!⁠—Thank you a thousand times.”

Deronda divined something of what was in the mother’s mind, and his divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His inward colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they