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

said Mirah, rather abstractedly⁠—still searching for some expression.

“But was it beautiful for Buddha to let the tiger eat him?” said Amy, changing her ground. “It would be a bad pattern.”

“The world would get full of fat tigers,” said Mab.

Deronda laughed, but defended the myth. “It is like a passionate word,” he said; “the exaggeration is a flash of fervor. It is an extreme image of what is happening every day⁠—the transmutation of self.”

“I think I can say what I mean, now,” said Mirah, who had not heard the intermediate talk. “When the best thing comes into our thoughts, it is like what my mother has been to me. She has been just as really with me as all the other people about me⁠—often more really with me.”

Deronda, inwardly wincing under this illustration, which brought other possible realities about that mother vividly before him, presently turned the conversation by saying, “But we must not get too far away from practical matters. I came, for one thing, to tell of an interview I had yesterday, which I hope Mirah will find to have been useful to her. It was with Klesmer, the great pianist.”

“Ah?” said Mrs. Meyrick, with satisfaction. “You think he will help her?”

“I hope so. He is very much occupied, but has promised to fix a time for receiving and hearing Miss Lapidoth, as we must learn to call her”⁠—here Deronda smiled at Mirah⁠—“If she consents to go to him.”

“I shall be very grateful,” said Mirah. “He wants to hear me sing, before he can judge whether I ought to be helped.”

Deronda was struck with her plain sense about these matters of practical concern.

“It will not be at all trying to you, I hope, if Mrs. Meyrick will kindly go with you to Klesmer’s house.”

“Oh, no, not at all trying. I have been doing that all my life⁠—I mean, told to do things that others may judge of me. And I have gone through a bad trial of that sort. I am prepared to bear it, and do some very small thing. Is Klesmer a severe man?”

“He is peculiar, but I have not had experience enough of him to know whether he would be what you would call severe.”

“I know he is kindhearted⁠—kind in action, if not in speech.”

“I have been used to be frowned at and not praised,” said Mirah.

“By the by, Klesmer frowns a good deal,” said Deronda, “but there is often a sort of smile in his eyes all the while. Unhappily he wears spectacles, so you must catch him in the right light to see the smile.”

“I shall not be frightened,” said Mirah. “If he were like a roaring lion, he only wants me to sing. I shall do what I can.”

“Then I feel sure you will not mind being invited to sing in Lady Mallinger’s drawing-room,” said Deronda. “She intends to ask you next month, and will invite many ladies to hear you, who are likely to want lessons from you for their daughters.”

“How fast we are mounting!” said Mrs. Meyrick, with delight. “You never thought of getting grand so quickly, Mirah.”

“I am a little frightened at being called Miss Lapidoth,” said Mirah, coloring with a new uneasiness. “Might I be called Cohen?”

“I understand you,” said Deronda, promptly. “But I assure you, you must not be called Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. This is one of the trifles in which we must conform to vulgar prejudice. We could choose some other name, however⁠—such as singers ordinarily choose⁠—an Italian or Spanish name, which would suit your physique.” To Deronda just now the name Cohen was equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges.

Mirah reflected a little, anxiously, then said, “No. If Cohen will not do, I will keep the name I have been called by. I will not hide myself. I have friends to protect me. And now⁠—if my father were very miserable and wanted help⁠—no,” she said, looking at Mrs. Meyrick, “I should think, then, that he was perhaps crying as I used to see him, and had nobody to pity him, and I had hidden myself from him. He had none belonging to him but me. Others that made friends with him always left him.”

“Keep to what you feel right, my dear child,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I would not persuade you to the contrary.” For her own part she had no patience or pity for that father, and would have left him to his crying.

Deronda was saying to himself, “I am rather base to be angry with Hans. How can he help being in love with her? But it is too absurdly presumptuous for him even to frame the idea of appropriating her, and a sort of blasphemy to suppose that she could possibly give herself to him.”

What would it be for Daniel Deronda to entertain such thoughts? He was not one who could quite naively introduce himself where he had just excluded his friend, yet it was undeniable that what had just happened made a new stage in his feeling toward Mirah. But apart from other grounds for self-repression, reasons both definite and vague made him shut away that question as he might have shut up a half-opened writing that would have carried his imagination too far, and given too much shape to presentiments. Might there not come a disclosure which would hold the missing determination of his course? What did he really know about his origin? Strangely in these latter months when it seemed right that he should exert his will in the choice of a destination, the passion of his nature had got more and more locked by this uncertainty. The disclosure might bring its pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to him to be all on that side; but if it helped him to make his life a sequence which would take the form of duty⁠—if it saved him from having to make an arbitrary selection where he felt no preponderance of desire? Still more, he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside