Part 91 (2/2)
Mirah thought, ”It is for something he cannot tell us.” But they all sat down, Deronda drawing a chair close in front of Mordecai.
”That is true,” he said, emphatically. ”I have a joy which will remain to us even in the worst trouble. I did not tell you the reason of my journey abroad, Mordecai, because--never mind--I went to learn my parentage. And you were right. I am a Jew.”
The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash from Mordecai's eyes, and pa.s.sed through Mirah like an electric shock.
But Deronda went on without pause, speaking from Mordecai's mind as much as from his own--
”We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall not be separated by life or by death.”
Mordecai's answer was uttered in Hebrew, and in no more than a loud whisper. It was in the liturgical words which express the religious bond: ”Our G.o.d and the G.o.d of our fathers.”
The weight of feeling pressed too strongly on that ready-winged speech which usually moved in quick adaptation to every stirring of his fervor.
Mirah fell on her knees by her brother's side, and looked at his now illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. The action was an inevitable outlet of the violent reversal from despondency to a gladness which came over her as solemnly as if she had been beholding a religious rite. For the moment she thought of the effect on her own life only through the effect on her brother.
”And it is not only that I am a Jew,” Deronda went on, enjoying one of those rare moments when our yearnings and our acts can be completely one, and the real we behold is our ideal good; ”but I come of a strain that has ardently maintained the fellows.h.i.+p of our race--a line of Spanish Jews that has borne many students and men of practical power.
And I possess what will give us a sort of communion with them. My grandfather, Daniel Charisi, preserved ma.n.u.scripts, family records stretching far back, in the hope that they would pa.s.s into the hands of his grandson. And now his hope is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to thwart it by hiding my parentage from me. I possess the chest containing them, with his own papers, and it is down below in this house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that you may help me to study the ma.n.u.scripts. Some of them I can read easily enough--those in Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think, Arabic; but there seem to be Latin translations. I was only able to look at them cursorily while I stayed at Mainz. We will study them together.”
Deronda ended with that bright smile which, beaming out from the habitual gravity of his face, seemed a revelation (the reverse of the continual smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy glance pa.s.sed from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little too much suns.h.i.+ne, and made her change her att.i.tude. She had knelt under an impulse with which any personal embarra.s.sment was incongruous, and especially any thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to this new aspect of things--thoughts which made her color under Deronda's glance, and rise to take her seat again in her usual posture of crossed hands and feet, with the effort to look as quiet as possible. Deronda, equally sensitive, imagined that the feeling of which he was conscious, had entered too much into his eyes, and had been repugnant to her. He was ready enough to believe that any unexpected manifestation might spoil her feeling toward him--and then his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred. If Mirah could have no love for him, any advances of love on his part would make her wretched in that continual contact with him which would remain inevitable.
While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah, Mordecai, seeing nothing in his friend's presence and words but a blessed fulfillment, was already speaking with his old sense of enlargement in utterance--
”Daniel, from the first, I have said to you, we know not all the pathways. Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations in one soul, where an idea being born and breathing draws the elements toward it, and is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in that Omnipresence which is the place and habitation of the world, and events are of a gla.s.s wherethrough our eyes see some of the pathways.
And if it seems that the erring and unloving wills of men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better, that depends on another order than the law which must guide our footsteps. For the evil will of man makes not a people's good except by stirring the righteous will of man; and beneath all the clouds with which our thought encompa.s.ses the Eternal, this is clear--that a people can be blessed only by having counsellors and a mult.i.tude whose will moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love. For see, now, it was your loving will that made a chief pathway, and resisted the effect of evil; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood to my sister, and seeking out her brother in the flesh, your soul has been prepared to receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, 'behold the mult.i.tude of your brethren.'”
”It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers,” said Deronda. ”If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you both, I think my mind would have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should have felt then--'If I could have chosen, I would not have been a Jew.'
What I feel now is--that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the gradual accord between your mind and mine which has brought about that full consent.”
At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop was vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he had then felt from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature to delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul, which seemed to be looking out from the face before him, like the long-enduring watcher who at last sees the mountain signal-flame; and he went on with fuller fervor--
”It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my life's task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, pa.s.sionate thoughts in many ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, and born blind--the ancestral life would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious meanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music. Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a mult.i.tude--some social captains.h.i.+p, which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me--to bind our race together in spite of heresy.
You have said to me--'Our religion united us before it divided us--it made us a people before it made Rabbanites and Karaites.' I mean to try what can be done with that union--I mean to work in your spirit.
Failure will not be ign.o.ble, but it would be ign.o.ble for me not to try.”
”Even as my brother that fed at the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of my mother,” said Mordecai, falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose, as after some finished labor.
To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of premature a.s.sent or delusive encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself a sacramental solemnity, both for his own mind and Mordecai's. On Mirah the effect was equally strong, though with a difference: she felt a surprise which had no place in her brother's mind, at Deronda's suddenly revealed sense of nearness to them: there seemed to be a breaking of day around her which might show her other facts unlike her forebodings in the darkness. But after a moment's silence Mordecai spoke again--
”It has begun already--the marriage of our souls. It waits but the pa.s.sing away of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite in a stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I have written, Daniel; for though our masters delivered rightly that everything should be quoted in the name of him that said it--and their rule is good--yet it does not exclude the willing marriage which melts soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made fuller, where the fullness is inseparable and the clearness is inseparable. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body that I gave my thought to pa.s.s away as this fleshly body will pa.s.s; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called yours.”
”You must not ask me to promise that,” said Deronda, smiling. ”I must be convinced first of special reasons for it in the writings themselves. And I am too backward a pupil yet. That blent transmission must go on without any choice of ours; but what we can't hinder must not make our rule for what we ought to choose. I think our duty is faithful tradition where we can attain it. And so you would insist for any one but yourself. Don't ask me to deny my spiritual parentage, when I am finding the clue of my life in the recognition of natural parentage.”
”I will ask for no promise till you see the reason,” said Mordecai.
”You have said the truth: I would obey the Master's rule for another.
But for years my hope, nay, my confidence, has been, not that the imperfect image of my thought, which is an ill-shaped work of the youthful carver who has seen a heavenly pattern, and trembles in imitating the vision--not that this should live, but that my vision and pa.s.sion should enter into yours--yea, into yours; for he whom I longed for afar, was he not you whom I discerned as mine when you came near?
<script>