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

perceiving the footsteps of his mother, rose up and said, ‘The Majesty of the Eternal cometh near!’ And that letter was her cry from the depths of anguish and desolation⁠—the cry of a mother robbed of her little ones. I was her eldest. Death had taken four babes one after the other. Then came, late, my little sister, who was, more than all the rest, the desire of my mother’s eyes; and the letter was a piercing cry to me⁠—‘Ezra, my son, I am robbed of her. He has taken her away and left disgrace behind. They will never come again.’ ”⁠—Here Mordecai lifted his eyes suddenly, laid his hand on Deronda’s arm, and said, “Mine was the lot of Israel. For the sin of the father my soul must go into exile. For the sin of the father the work was broken, and the day of fulfilment delayed. She who bore me was desolate, disgraced, destitute. I turned back. On the instant I turned⁠—her spirit and the spirit of her fathers, who had worthy Jewish hearts, moved within me, and drew me. God, in whom dwells the universe, was within me as the strength of obedience. I turned and traveled with hardship⁠—to save the scant money which she would need. I left the sunshine, and traveled into freezing cold. In the last stage I spent a night in exposure to cold and snow. And that was the beginning of this slow death.”

Mordecai let his eyes wander again and removed his hand. Deronda resolutely repressed the questions which urged themselves within him. While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, no other confidence must be sought than what came spontaneously: nay, he himself felt a kindred emotion which made him dread his own speech as too momentous.

“But I worked. We were destitute⁠—everything had been seized. And she was ill: the clutch of anguish was too strong for her, and wrought with some lurking disease. At times she could not stand for the beating of her heart, and the images in her brain became as chambers of terror, where she beheld my sister reared in evil. In the dead of night I heard her crying for her child. Then I rose, and we stretched forth our arms together and prayed. We poured forth our souls in desire that Mirah might be delivered from evil.”

“Mirah?” Deronda repeated, wishing to assure, himself that his ears had not been deceived by a forecasting imagination. “Did you say Mirah?”

“That was my little sister’s name. After we had prayed for her, my mother would rest awhile. It lasted hardly four years, and in the minute before she died, we were praying the same prayer⁠—I aloud, she silently. Her soul went out upon its wings.”

“Have you never since heard of your sister?” said Deronda, as quietly as he could.

“Never. Never have I heard whether she was delivered according to our prayer. I know not, I know not. Who shall say where the pathways lie? The poisonous will of the wicked is strong. It poisoned my life⁠—it is slowly stifling this breath. Death delivered my mother, and I felt it a blessedness that I was alone in the winters of suffering. But what are the winters now?⁠—they are far off”⁠—here Mordecai again rested his hand on Deronda’s arm, and looked at him with that joy of the hectic patient which pierces us to sadness⁠—“there is nothing to wail in the withering of my body. The work will be the better done. Once I said the work of this beginning was mine, I am born to do it. Well, I shall do it. I shall live in you. I shall live in you.”

His grasp had become convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as he had never been before⁠—the certainty that this was Mirah’s brother suffusing his own strange relation to Mordecai with a new solemnity and tenderness⁠—felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai’s present state of exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to utter a word of revelation about Mirah. He feared to make an answer below that high pitch of expectation which resembled a flash from a dying fire, making watchers fear to see it die the faster. His dominant impulse was to do as he had once done before: he laid his firm, gentle hand on the hand that grasped him. Mordecai’s, as if it had a soul of its own⁠—for he was not distinctly willing to do what he did⁠—relaxed its grasp, and turned upward under Deronda’s. As the two palms met and pressed each other Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings, and said,

“Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer.”

And in fact they parted at Cohen’s door without having spoken to each other again⁠—merely with another pressure of the hands.

Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy of finding in Mirah’s brother a nature even more than worthy of that relation to her, had the weight of solemnity and sadness; the reunion of brother and sister was in reality the first stage of a supreme parting⁠—like that farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free Mirah’s first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship of the other Cohens, notwithstanding their good nature, made him resolve if possible to keep them in the background for Mirah, until her acquaintance with them would be an unmarred rendering of gratitude for