Daniel Deronda · Book IV · Chapter 32 (3/3)

“You like my singing? I am so glad,” she said, with a smile of delight. “It has been a great pain to me, because it failed in what it was wanted for. But now we think I can use it to get my bread. I have really been taught well. And now I have two pupils, that Miss Meyrick found for me. They pay me nearly two crowns for their two lessons.”

“I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after Christmas,” said Deronda. “You would not mind singing before anyone who wished to hear you?”

“Oh no, I want to do something to get money. I could teach reading and speaking, Mrs. Meyrick thinks. But if no one would learn of me, that is difficult.” Mirah smiled with a touch of merriment he had not seen in her before. “I dare say I should find her poor⁠—I mean my mother. I should want to get money for her. And I can not always live on charity; though”⁠—here she turned so as to take all three of her companions in one glance⁠—“it is the sweetest charity in all the world.”

“I should think you can get rich,” said Deronda, smiling. “Great ladies will perhaps like you to teach their daughters. We shall see. But now do sing again to us.”

She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani and Schubert; then, when she had left the piano, Mab said, entreatingly, “Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn.”

“It is too childish,” said Mirah. “It is like lisping.”

“What is the hymn?” said Deronda.

“It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother singing over her when she lay in her cot,” said Mrs. Meyrick.

“I should like very much to hear it,” said Deronda, “if you think I am worthy to hear what is so sacred.”

“I will sing it if you like,” said Mirah, “but I don’t sing real words⁠—only here and there a syllable like hers⁠—the rest is lisping. Do you know Hebrew? because if you do, my singing will seem childish nonsense.”

Deronda shook his head. “It will be quite good Hebrew to me.”

Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her easiest attitude, and then lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint melancholy intervals, with syllables that really seemed childish lisping to her audience; the voice in which she gave it forth had gathered even a sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in her other songs.

“If I were ever to know the real words, I should still go on in my old way with them,” said Mirah, when she had repeated the hymn several times.

“Why not?” said Deronda. “The lisped syllables are very full of meaning.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “A mother hears something of a lisp in her children’s talk to the very last. Their words are not just what everybody else says, though they may be spelled the same. If I were to live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother’s love, I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it, from the very first it made.”

“Is not that the way with friendship, too?” said Deronda, smiling. “We must not let the mothers be too arrogant.”

The little woman shook her head over her darning.

“It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend. Friendships begin with liking or gratitude⁠—roots that can be pulled up. Mother’s love begins deeper down.”

“Like what you were saying about the influence of voices,” said Deronda, looking at Mirah. “I don’t think your hymn would have had more expression for me if I had known the words. I went to the synagogue at Frankfort before I came home, and the service impressed me just as much as if I had followed the words⁠—perhaps more.”

“Oh, was it great to you? Did it go to your heart?” said Mirah, eagerly. “I thought none but our people would feel that. I thought it was all shut away like a river in a deep valley, where only heaven saw⁠—I mean⁠—” she hesitated, feeling that she could not disentangle her thought from its imagery.

“I understand,” said Deronda. “But there is not really such a separation⁠—deeper down, as Mrs. Meyrick says. Our religion is chiefly a Hebrew religion; and since Jews are men, their religious feelings must have much in common with those of other men⁠—just as their poetry, though in one sense peculiar, has a great deal in common with the poetry of other nations. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his people’s religion more than one of another race⁠—and yet”⁠—here Deronda hesitated in his turn⁠—“that is perhaps not always so.”

“Ah no,” said Mirah, sadly. “I have seen that. I have seen them mock. Is it not like mocking your parents?⁠—like rejoicing in your parents’ shame?”

“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in, and like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them,” said Deronda apologetically.

“But you are not like that,” said Mirah, looking at him with unconscious fixedness.

“No, I think not,” said Deronda; “but you know I was not brought up as a Jew.”

“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a look of disappointed recollection, and slightly blushing.

Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause, which he put an end to by saying playfully,

“Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we all went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just the same.”

“To be sure. We should go on forever in zigzags,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I think it is very weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the contrary. Still one may honor one’s parents, without following their notions exactly, any more than the exact cut of their clothing. My father was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither quite Scotch, nor quite French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I honor my parents’ memory.”

“But I could not make myself not a Jewess,” said Mirah, insistently, “even if I changed my belief.”

“No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religion, and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen,” said Mrs. Meyrick, taking that consummation very cheerfully.

“Oh, please not to say that,” said Mirah, the tears gathering. “It is the first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will never separate myself from my mother’s people. I was forced to fly from my father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed me, should I say, ‘This is not my father’? If he had shame, I must share it. It was he who was given to me for my father, and not another. And so it is with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people. I will always worship with them.”

As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful passion⁠—fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs. Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place and risk their lives in flight, that they might join their own people and say, “I am a Jew.”

“Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!” said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed. “God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. I was only saying what might be if the world went on. But I had better have left the world alone, and not wanted to be over-wise. Forgive me, come! we will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to you.”

“I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life,” said Mirah, not yet quite calm.

“Hush, hush, now,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I have been punished enough for wagging my tongue foolishly⁠—making an almanac for the Millennium, as my husband used to say.”

“But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear to think of that,” said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become severe if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this inconvenient susceptibility to innocent remarks.

Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange contrast by the side of Mirah’s⁠—smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically as he said, “That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah’s feelings, she tells us, are concerned with what is.”

Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said,

“I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is hardly anything we can talk about.” Mab felt herself unanswerable here, inclining to the opinion of Socrates: “What motive has a man to live, if not for the pleasure of discourse?”

Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, “Hans is to share my chambers when he comes at Christmas.”

“You have written to Rome about that?” said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. “How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?”

“Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.”

“I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However!⁠—Thank you a thousand times.”

Deronda divined something of what was in the mother’s mind, and his divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His inward colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda’s mind was strongly set against imitating them.

“I have my hands on the reins now,” he thought, “and I will not drop them. I shall go there as little as possible.”

He saw the reasons acting themselves out before him. How could he be Mirah’s guardian and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose charge he had committed her, if he showed himself as a lover⁠—whom she did not love⁠—whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover’s feeling in himself it would lead up to that issue. Mirah’s was not a nature that would bear dividing against itself; and even if love won her consent to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, she would never be happy in acting against that strong native bias which would still reign in her conscience as remorse.

Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own work well begun. It was a delight to have rescued this child acquainted with sorrow, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected paths. The creature we help to save, though only a half-reared linnet, bruised and lost by the wayside⁠—how we watch and fence it, and dote on its signs of recovery! Our pride becomes loving, our self is a not-self for whose sake we become virtuous, when we set to some hidden work of reclaiming a life from misery and look for our triumph in the secret joy⁠—“This one is the better for me.”

“I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as set about spoiling her peace,” said Deronda. “It was one of the rarest bits of fortune that I should have had friends like the Meyricks to place her with⁠—generous, delicate friends without any loftiness in their ways, so that her dependence on them is not only safety but happiness. There could be no refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my taking the vows and settling everything as it should be, if that marplot Hans comes and upsets it all?”

Few things were more likely. Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs seemed more breakable than other people’s⁠—his eyes more of a resort for uninvited flies and other irritating guests. But it was impossible to forbid Hans’s coming to London. He was intending to get a studio there and make it his chief home; and to propose that he should defer coming on some ostensible ground, concealing the real motive of winning time for Mirah’s position to become more confirmed and independent, was impracticable. Having no other resource Deronda tried to believe that both he and Mrs. Meyrick were foolishly troubling themselves about one of those endless things called probabilities, which never occur; but he did not quite succeed in his trying; on the contrary, he found himself going inwardly through a scene where on the first discovery of Hans’s inclination he gave him a very energetic warning⁠—suddenly checked, however, by the suspicion of personal feeling that his warmth might be creating in Hans. He could come to no result, but that the position was peculiar, and that he could make no further provision against dangers until they came nearer. To save an unhappy Jewess from drowning herself, would not have seemed a startling variation among police reports; but to discover in her so rare a creature as Mirah, was an exceptional event which might well bring exceptional consequences. Deronda would not let himself for a moment dwell on any supposition that the consequences might enter deeply into his own life. The image of Mirah had never yet had that penetrating radiation which would have been given to it by the idea of her loving him. When this sort of effluence is absent from the fancy (whether from the fact or not) a man may go far in devotedness without perturbation.

As to the search for Mirah’s mother and brother, Deronda took what she had said today as a warrant for deferring any immediate measures. His conscience was not quite easy in this desire for delay, any more than it was quite easy in his not attempting to learn the truth about his own mother: in both cases he felt that there might be an unfulfilled duty to a parent, but in both cases there was an overpowering repugnance to the possible truth, which threw a turning weight into the scale of argument.

“At least, I will look about,” was his final determination. “I may find some special Jewish machinery. I will wait till after Christmas.”

What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.