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

the boxes. I would ten times rather have these stables than those at Diplow.”

But she had no sooner said this than some consciousness arrested her, and involuntarily she turned her eyes toward Deronda, who oddly enough had taken off his felt hat and stood holding it before him as if they had entered a room or an actual church. He, like others, happened to be looking at her, and their eyes met⁠—to her intense vexation, for it seemed to her that by looking at him she had betrayed the reference of her thoughts, and she felt herself blushing: she exaggerated the impression that even Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of her bad taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey: as for Deronda, she had probably made him despise her. Her annoyance at what she imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed her of her usual facility in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her face to look at the roof, she wheeled away in that attitude. If any had noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not interpreted it by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her feeling; but while he was observing her he was himself under observation.

“Do you take off your hat to horses?” said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer.

“Why not?” said Deronda, covering himself. He had really taken off the hat automatically, and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless have done so with impunity; ugliness having naturally the air of involuntary exposure, and beauty, of display.

Gwendolen’s confusion was soon merged in the survey of the horses, which Grandcourt politely abstained from appraising, languidly assenting to Sir Hugo’s alternate depreciation and eulogy of the same animal, as one that he should not have bought when he was younger, and piqued himself on his horses, but yet one that had better qualities than many more expensive brutes.

“The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper into the pocket nowadays, and I am very glad to have got rid of that démangeaison,” said Sir Hugo, as they were coming out.

“What is a man to do, though?” said Grandcourt. “He must ride. I don’t see what else there is to do. And I don’t call it riding to sit astride a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun.”

This delicate diplomatic way of characterizing Sir Hugo’s stud did not require direct notice; and the baronet, feeling that the conversation had worn rather thin, said to the party generally, “Now we are going to see the cloister⁠—the finest bit of all⁠—in perfect preservation; the monks might have been walking there yesterday.”

But Gwendolen had lingered behind to look at the kenneled bloodhounds, perhaps because she felt a little dispirited; and Grandcourt waited for her.

“You had better take my arm,” he said, in his low tone of command; and she took it.

“It’s a great bore being dragged about in this way, and no cigar,” said Grandcourt.

“I thought you would like it.”

“Like it!⁠—one eternal chatter. And encouraging those ugly girls⁠—inviting one to meet such monsters. How that fat Deronda can bear looking at her⁠—”

“Why do you call him a fat? Do you object to him so much?”

“Object? no. What do I care about his being a fat? It’s of no consequence to me. I’ll invite him to Diplow again if you like.”

“I don’t think he would come. He is too clever and learned to care about us,” said Gwendolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be told (privately) that it was possible for him to be looked down upon.

“I never saw that make much difference in a man. Either he is a gentleman, or he is not,” said Grandcourt.

That a new husband and wife should snatch a moment’s tête-à-tête was what could be understood and indulged; and the rest of the party left them in the rear till, re-entering the garden, they all paused in that cloistered court where, among the falling rose-petals thirteen years before, we saw a boy becoming acquainted with his first sorrow. This cloister was built of a harder stone than the church, and had been in greater safety from the wearing weather. It was a rare example of a northern cloister with arched and pillared openings not intended for glazing, and the delicately-wrought foliage of the capitals seemed still to carry the very touches of the chisel. Gwendolen had dropped her husband’s arm and joined the other ladies, to whom Deronda was noticing the delicate sense which had combined freedom with accuracy in the imitation of natural forms.

“I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representations through the real objects,” he said, after pointing out a lovely capital made by the curled leaves of greens, showing their reticulated underside with the firm gradual swell of its central rib. “When I was a little fellow these capitals taught me to observe and delight in the structure of leaves.”

“I suppose you can see every line of them with your eyes shut,” said Juliet Fenn.

“Yes. I was always repeating them, because for a good many years this court stood for me as my only image of a convent, and whenever I read of monks and monasteries, this was my scenery for them.”

“You must love this place very much,” said Miss Fenn, innocently, not thinking of inheritance. “So many homes are like twenty others. But this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well.”

“Oh, I carry it with me,” said Deronda, quietly, being used to all possible thoughts of this kind. “To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years, and I’m not