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

And Gwendolen was not without her afterthoughts that her husband’s eyes might have been on her, extracting something to reprove⁠—some offence against her dignity as his wife; her consciousness telling her that she had not kept up the perfect air of equability in public which was her own ideal. But Grandcourt made no observation on her behavior. All he said as they were driving home was,

“Lush will dine with us among the other people tomorrow. You will treat him civilly.”

Gwendolen’s heart began to beat violently. The words that she wanted to utter, as one wants to return a blow, were, “You are breaking your promise to me⁠—the first promise you made me.” But she dared not utter them. She was as frightened at a quarrel as if she had foreseen that it would end with throttling fingers on her neck. After a pause, she said in the tone rather of defeat than resentment,

“I thought you did not intend him to frequent the house again.”

“I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated civilly.”

Silence. There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar.

If these are the sort of lovers’ vows at which Jove laughs, he must have a merry time of it.

If anyone should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, “Because it was he, because it was I.” There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable power that brought on this union.

The time had come to prepare Mordecai for the revelation of the restored sister and for the change of abode which was desirable before Mirah’s meeting with her brother. Mrs. Meyrick, to whom Deronda had confided everything except Mordecai’s peculiar relation to himself, had been active in helping him to find a suitable lodging in Brompton, not many minutes’ walk from her own house, so that the brother and sister would be within reach of her motherly care. Her happy mixture of Scottish fervor and Gaelic liveliness had enabled her to keep the secret close from the girls as well as from Hans, any betrayal to them being likely to reach Mirah in some way that would raise an agitating suspicion, and spoil the important opening of that work which was to secure her independence, as we rather arbitrarily call one of the more arduous and dignified forms of our dependence. And both Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda had more reasons than they could have expressed for desiring that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. Perhaps “the little mother” was rather helped in her secrecy by some dubiousness in her sentiment about the remarkable brother described to her; and certainly if she felt any joy and anticipatory admiration, it was due to her faith in Deronda’s judgment. The consumption was a sorrowful fact that appealed to her tenderness; but how was she to be very glad of an enthusiasm which, to tell the truth, she could only contemplate as Jewish pertinacity, and as rather an undesirable introduction among them all of a man whose conversation would not be more modern and encouraging than that of Scott’s Covenanters? Her mind was anything but prosaic, and had her soberer share of Mab’s delight in the romance of Mirah’s story and of her abode with them; but the romantic or unusual in real life requires some adaptation. We sit up at night to read about Sakya-Mouni, St. Francis, or Oliver Cromwell; but whether we should be glad for anyone at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more, to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another affair. Besides, Mrs. Meyrick had hoped, as her children did, that the intensity of Mirah’s feeling about Judaism would slowly subside, and be merged in the gradually deepening current of loving interchange with her new friends. In fact, her secret favorite continuation of the romance had been no discovery of Jewish relations, but something much more favorable to the hopes she discerned in Hans. And now⁠—here was a brother who would dip Mirah’s mind over again in the deepest dye of Jewish sentiment. She could not help saying to Deronda,

“I am as glad as you are that the pawnbroker is not her brother: there are Ezras and Ezras in the world; and really it is a comfort to think that all Jews are not like those shopkeepers who will not let you get out of their shops: and besides, what he said to you about his mother and sister makes me bless him. I am sure he’s good. But I never did like anything fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much preaching in my youth and lost my palate for it.”

“I don’t think you will find that Mordecai obtrudes any preaching,” said Deronda. “He is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of proportions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track. Mordecai is an enthusiast; I should like to keep that word for the highest order of minds⁠—those who care supremely for grand and general benefits to mankind. He is not a strictly orthodox Jew, and is full of allowances for others; his conformity in many things is an allowance for the condition of other Jews. The people he lives with are as fond of him as possible, and they can’t in the least understand his ideas.”

“Oh, well, I can live up to the level of the pawnbroker’s mother, and like him