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

march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda’s mind was strongly set against imitating them.

“I have my hands on the reins now,” he thought, “and I will not drop them. I shall go there as little as possible.”

He saw the reasons acting themselves out before him. How could he be Mirah’s guardian and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose charge he had committed her, if he showed himself as a lover⁠—whom she did not love⁠—whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover’s feeling in himself it would lead up to that issue. Mirah’s was not a nature that would bear dividing against itself; and even if love won her consent to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, she would never be happy in acting against that strong native bias which would still reign in her conscience as remorse.

Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own work well begun. It was a delight to have rescued this child acquainted with sorrow, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected paths. The creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet, bruised and lost by the wayside⁠—how we watch and fence it, and dote on its signs of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, our self is a not-self for whose sake we become virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of reclaiming a life from misery and look for our triumph in the secret joy⁠—“This one is the better for me.”

“I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as set about spoiling her peace,” said Deronda. “It was one of the rarest bits of fortune that I should have had friends like the Meyricks to place her with⁠—generous, delicate friends without any loftiness in their ways, so that her dependence on them is not only safety but happiness. There could be no refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my taking the vows and settling everything as it should be, if that marplot Hans comes and upsets it all?”

Few things were more likely. Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs seemed more breakable than other people’s⁠—his eyes more of a resort for uninvited flies and other irritating guests. But it was impossible to forbid Hans’s coming to London. He was intending to get a studio there and make it his chief home; and to propose that he should defer coming on some ostensible ground, concealing the real motive of winning time for Mirah’s position to become more confirmed and independent, was impracticable. Having no other resource Deronda tried to believe that both he and Mrs. Meyrick were foolishly troubling themselves about one of those endless things called probabilities, which never occur; but he did not quite succeed in his trying; on the contrary, he found himself going inwardly through a scene where on the first discovery of Hans’s inclination he gave him a very energetic warning⁠—suddenly checked, however, by the suspicion of personal feeling that his warmth might be creating in Hans. He could come to no result, but that the position was peculiar, and that he could make no further provision against dangers until they came nearer. To save an unhappy Jewess from drowning herself, would not have seemed a startling variation among police reports; but to discover in her so rare a creature as Mirah, was an exceptional event which might well bring exceptional consequences. Deronda would not let himself for a moment dwell on any supposition that the consequences might enter deeply into his own life. The image of Mirah had never yet had that penetrating radiation which would have been given to it by the idea of her loving him. When this sort of effluence is absent from the fancy (whether from the fact or not) a man may go far in devotedness without perturbation.

As to the search for Mirah’s mother and brother, Deronda took what she had said today as a warrant for deferring any immediate measures. His conscience was not quite easy in this desire for delay, any more than it was quite easy in his not attempting to learn the truth about his own mother: in both cases he felt that there might be an unfulfilled duty to a parent, but in both cases there was an overpowering repugnance to the possible truth, which threw a turning weight into the scale of argument.

“At least, I will look about,” was his final determination. “I may find some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after Christmas.”

What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.

XXXIII

“No man,” says a Rabbi, by way of indisputable instance, “may turn the bones of his father and mother into spoons”⁠—sure that his hearers felt the checks against that form of economy. The market for spoons has never expanded enough for anyone to say, “Why not?” and to argue that human progress lies in such an application of material. The only check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not hold that sentiments are the better part of the world’s wealth.

Deronda meanwhile took to a less fashionable form of exercise than riding in Rotten Row. He went often rambling in those parts of London which are most inhabited by common Jews. He walked to the synagogues at times of service, he looked into shops, he observed faces:⁠—a process not very promising of particular discovery. Why did he not address himself to an influential Rabbi or other member of a Jewish community, to consult on the chances of