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

mostly stout, as I think you’ll say Addy’s are, and she’s not mushy, but her heart is tender. So you must excuse present company, sir, for not being glad all at once. And as to this young lady⁠—for by what you say ‘young lady’ is the proper term”⁠—Cohen here threw some additional emphasis into his look and tone⁠—“we shall all be glad for Mordecai’s sake by-and-by, when we cast up our accounts and see where we are.”

Before Deronda could summon any answer to this oddly mixed speech, Mordecai exclaimed,

“Friends, friends! For food and raiment and shelter I would not have sought better than you have given me. You have sweetened the morsel with love; and what I thought of as a joy that would be left to me even in the last months of my waning strength was to go on teaching the lad. But now I am as one who had clad himself beforehand in his shroud, and used himself to making the grave his bed, when the divine command sounded in his ears, ‘Arise, and go forth; the night is not yet come.’ For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness to take another’s. But it has been taught us, as you know, that the reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another⁠—so said Ben Azai. You have made your duty to one of the poor among your brethren a joy to you and me; and your reward shall be that you will not rest without the joy of like deeds in the time to come. And may not Jacob come and visit me?”

Mordecai had turned with this question to Deronda, who said,

“Surely that can be managed. It is no further than Brompton.”

Jacob, who had been gradually calmed by the need to hear what was going forward, began now to see some daylight on the future, the word “visit” having the lively charm of cakes and general relaxation at his grandfather’s, the dealer in knives. He danced away from Mordecai, and took up a station of survey in the middle of the hearth with his hands in his knickerbockers.

“Well,” said the grandmother, with a sigh of resignation, “I hope there’ll be nothing in the way of your getting kosher meat, Mordecai. For you’ll have to trust to those you live with.”

“That’s all right, that’s all right, you may be sure, mother,” said Cohen, as if anxious to cut off inquiry on matters in which he was uncertain of the guest’s position. “So, sir,” he added, turning with a look of amused enlightenment to Deronda, “it was better than learning you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered to myself at the time. I thought somehow there was a something.”

“Mordecai will perhaps explain to you how it was that I was seeking him,” said Deronda, feeling that he had better go, and rising as he spoke.

It was agreed that he should come again and the final move be made on the next day but one; but when he was going Mordecai begged to walk with him to the end of the street, and wrapped himself in coat and comforter. It was a March evening, and Deronda did not mean to let him go far, but he understood the wish to be outside the house with him in communicative silence, after the exciting speech that had been filling the last hour. No word was spoken until Deronda had proposed parting, when he said,

“Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. You would wish her to do so⁠—to come and see them, would you not?”

Mordecai did not answer immediately, but at length said,

“I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of my sister might be to them as the fresh bleeding of wounds. There is a daughter and sister who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers⁠—and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain. In my ears I have the prayers of generations past and to come. My life is as nothing to me but the beginning of fulfilment. And yet I am only another prayer⁠—which you will fulfil.”

Deronda pressed his hand, and they parted.

XLVII

And you must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

—⁠Wordsworth.

One might be tempted to envy Deronda providing new clothes for Mordecai, and pleasing himself as if he were sketching a picture in imagining the effect of the fine gray flannel shirts and a dressing-gown very much like a Franciscan’s brown frock, with Mordecai’s head and neck above them. Half his pleasure was the sense of seeing Mirah’s brother through her eyes, and securing her fervid joy from any perturbing impression. And yet, after he had made all things ready, he was visited with doubt whether he were not mistaking her, and putting the lower effect for the higher: was she not just as capable as he himself had been of feeling the impressive distinction in her brother all the more for that aspect of poverty which was among the memorials of his past? But there were the Meyricks to be propitiated toward this too Judaic brother; and Deronda detected himself piqued into getting out of sight everything that might feed the ready repugnance in minds unblessed with that precious “seeing,” that bathing of all objects in a solemnity as of sunset glow, which is begotten of a loving reverential emotion.

And his inclination would have been the more confirmed if he had heard the dialogue round Mrs. Meyrick’s fire late in the evening, after Mirah had gone to her room. Hans, settled now in his Chelsea rooms, had stayed late, and Mrs. Meyrick, poking the fire into a blaze, said,

“Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily. Hans, dear, do leave off laughing at those poems for