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

the while to hide it. It is natural enough, of course, while she has to watch the slow death of this brother, whom she has taken to worshipping with such looks of loving devoutness that I am ready to wish myself in his place.

For the rest, we are a little merrier than usual. Rex Gascoigne⁠—you remember a head you admired among my sketches, a fellow with a good upper lip, reading law⁠—has got some rooms in town now not far off us, and has had a neat sister (upper lip also good) staying with him the last fortnight. I have introduced them both to my mother and the girls, who have found out from Miss Gascoigne that she is cousin to your Vandyke duchess!!! I put the notes of exclamation to mark the surprise that the information at first produced on my feeble understanding. On reflection I discovered that there was not the least ground for surprise, unless I had beforehand believed that nobody could be anybody’s cousin without my knowing it. This sort of surprise, I take it, depends on a liveliness of the spine, with a more or less constant nullity of brain. There was a fellow I used to meet at Rome who was in an effervescence of surprise at contact with the simplest information. Tell him what you would⁠—that you were fond of easy boots⁠—he would always say, “No! are you?” with the same energy of wonder: the very fellow of whom pastoral Browne wrote prophetically,

“A wretch so empty that if e’er there be
In nature found the least vacuity
’Twill be in him.”

I have accounted for it all⁠—he had a lively spine.

However, this cousinship with the duchess came out by chance one day that Mirah was with them at home and they were talking about the Mallingers. Apropos; I am getting so important that I have rival invitations. Gascoigne wants me to go down with him to his father’s rectory in August and see the country round there. But I think self-interest well understood will take me to Topping Abbey, for Sir Hugo has invited me, and proposes⁠—God bless him for his rashness!⁠—that I should make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a bank⁠—as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the other day and recommended me to apply myself to portrait. Of course I know what that means.⁠—“My good fellow, your attempts at the historic and poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a successful portrait-painter⁠—it has a little truth and a great facility in falsehood⁠—your idealism will never do for gods and goddesses and heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery. Fate, my friend, has made you the hinder wheel⁠—rota posterior curras, et in axe secundo⁠—run behind, because you can’t help it.”⁠—What great effort it evidently costs our friends to give us these candid opinions! I have even known a man to take the trouble to call, in order to tell me that I had irretrievably exposed my want of judgment in treating my subject, and that if I had asked him we would have lent me his own judgment. Such was my ingratitude and my readiness at composition, that even while he was speaking I inwardly sketched a Last Judgment with that candid friend’s physiognomy on the left. But all this is away from Sir Hugo, whose manner of implying that one’s gifts are not of the highest order is so exceedingly good-natured and comfortable that I begin to feel it an advantage not to be among those poor fellows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me tastes all the better because it comes out of his love for you, old boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me that your Vandyke duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the Mediterranean. I bethink me that it is possible to land from a yacht, or to be taken on to a yacht from the land. Shall you by chance have an opportunity of continuing your theological discussion with the fair Supralapsarian⁠—I think you said her tenets were of that complexion? Is Duke Alphonso also theological?⁠—perhaps an Arian who objects to triplicity. (Stage direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn gathers in his face till at the last word he flings down the letter, grasps his coat-collar in a statuesque attitude and so remains with a look generally tremendous, throughout the following soliloquy, “O night, O blackness, etc., etc.”)

Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used to more from me than a bare statement of facts, without comment or digression. One fact I have omitted⁠—that the Klesmers on the eve of departure have behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be expected from the planets of genius and fortune in conjunction. Mirah is rich with their oriental gifts. What luck it will be if you come back and present yourself at the Abbey while I am there! I am going to behave with consummate discretion and win golden opinions, But I shall run up to town now and then, just for a peep into Gad Eden. You see how far I have got in Hebrew lore⁠—up with my Lord Bolingbroke, who knew no Hebrew, but “understood that sort of learning and what is writ about it.” If Mirah commanded, I would go to a depth below the tri-literal roots. Already it makes no difference to me whether the points are there or not. But while her brother’s life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a lover, even one whose “hair is like a flock of goats on Mount Gilead”⁠—and I flatter myself that few heads would bear that trying comparison better than mine. So I stay with my hope among the orchard-blossoms.

Your Devoted, Hans Meyrick.

Some months before, this letter from Hans would have divided Deronda’s thoughts irritatingly: its romancing, about Mirah would have had an unpleasant