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

were really less pressing to me than the trials you have been going through.” There was a sort of timid tenderness in Deronda’s deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look, as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her scenes of beseeching and confession.

A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir Hugo’s property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda’s way of asking her pardon,

“You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?”

“It will perhaps astonish you,” said Deronda, “that I have only quite lately known who were my parents.”

Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without check.

“The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to learn that⁠—in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my father’s death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill, and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained. Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew.”

“A Jew!” Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system.

Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if remonstrating against the mother’s conduct,

“What difference need that have made?”

“It has made a great difference to me that I have known it,” said Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily⁠—the distance between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language, making him uncertain what force his words would carry.

Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, “I hope there is nothing to make you mind. You are just the same as if you were not a Jew.”

She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding.

“The discovery was far from being painful to me,” he said, “I had been gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my life to some effort at giving them effect.”

Again Gwendolen seemed shaken⁠—again there was a look of frustration, but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired her with a dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it could reach Deronda’s. Great ideas in general which she had attributed to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure.

“That is an object,” he said, after a moment, “which will by-and-by force me to leave England for some time⁠—for some years. I have purposes which will take me to the East.”

Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating. Gwendolen’s lips began to tremble. “But you will come back?” she said, tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them.

Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against the corner of the mantelpiece, at a different angle from her face. But when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned and looked up at him, awaiting an answer.

“If I live,” said Deronda⁠—“some time.”

They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating something that she had to say.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, at last, very mildly. “Can I understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?”

“I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there,” said Deronda, gently⁠—anxious to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of their separateness from each other. “The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.”

There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other