Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (ebook pdf reader for pc .txt) 📕

at the beginning of this century, and who remained amid this smart and instructed generation as a preserved specimen, soaked through and through with the effect of the poverty and contempt which were the common heritage of most English Jews seventy years ago. He had none of the oily cheerfulness observable in Mr. Cohen’s aspect: his very features⁠—broad and chubby⁠—showed that tendency to look mongrel without due cause, which, in a miscellaneous London neighborhood, may perhaps be compared with the marvels of imitation in insects, and may have been nature’s imperfect effort on behalf of the pure Caucasian to shield him from the shame and spitting to which purer features would have been exposed in the times of zeal. Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt in tins of meat and other commodities⁠—without knowledge or responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they might contain. But he believed in Mordecai’s learning as something marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed goodwill, and, putting on large silver spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts.

But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any explicit agreement as to their direction, were walking toward Ezra Cohen’s.

“We can’t meet there: my room is too narrow,” said Mordecai, taking up the thread of talk where they had dropped it. “But there is a tavern not far from here where I sometimes go to a club. It is the Hand and Banner, in the street at the next turning, five doors down. We can have the parlor there any evening.”

“We can try that for once,” said Deronda. “But you will perhaps let me provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and comfort than where you are.”

“No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing less precious from you than your soul’s brotherhood. I will think of nothing else yet. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it.”

Deronda was a little startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he could reply Mordecai added⁠—“it is all one. Had you been in need of the money, the great end would have been that we should meet again. But you are rich?” he ended, in a tone of interrogation.

“Not rich, except in the sense that everyone is rich who has more than he needs for himself.”

“I desired that your life should be free,” said Mordecai, dreamily⁠—“mine has been a bondage.”

It was clear that he had no interest in the fact of Deronda’s appearance at the Cohens’ beyond its relation to his own ideal purpose. Despairing of leading easily up to the question he wished to ask, Deronda determined to put it abruptly, and said,

“Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to about her daughter?”

There was no immediate answer, and he thought that he should have to repeat the question. The fact was that Mordecai had heard the words, but had to drag his mind to a new subject away from his passionate preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied with a careful effort such as he would have used if he had been asked the road to Holborn:

“I know the reason. But I will not speak even of trivial family affairs which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their tent as in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as they injure none other, is their own possession.”

Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks as a sort of rebuke he was little used to, and he also found himself painfully baffled where he had reckoned with some confidence on getting decisive knowledge. He became the more conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens’, which must be made not only under the former uncertainty, but under a new disappointment as to the possibility of its removal.

“I will part from you now,” he said, just before they could reach Cohen’s door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious fatigued face under the gaslight.

“When will you come back?” he said, with slow emphasis.

“May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens’ any evening after your hour at the bookshop? There is no objection, I suppose, to their knowing that you and I meet in private?”

“None,” said Mordecai. “But the days I wait now are longer than the years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the half. My hope abides in you.”

“I will be faithful,” said Deronda⁠—he could not have left those words unuttered. “I will come the first evening I can after seven: on Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me.”

He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered energy⁠—“This is come to pass, and the rest will come.”

That was their goodbye.

Book VI Revelations XLI

This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: “It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.”

—⁠Aristotle: Poetics.

Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda’s given not only to feel strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview with Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the adventure might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his thoughts; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual reaction of his intellect he began to examine the grounds of his emotion, and consider how far