Part 97 (2/2)

”Oh--not ignorant of what it is to be a miserable devil, I learn to gloat on the signs of misery in others. I found out that Rex never goes to Offendene, and has never seen the d.u.c.h.ess since she came back; and Miss Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about charade-acting--for I went through some of my nonsense to please the young ones--something that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin close enough to get singed. I don't know what was her part in the affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. That is always the way when an exceptionally worthy young man forms an attachment. I understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and remaining a bachelor. But these are green resolves. Since the duke did not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my friend Rex's sake. Who knows?”

”Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?”

said Deronda, ready to add that Hans's success in constructing her fortunes. .h.i.therto had not been enough to warrant a new attempt.

”You monster!” retorted Hans, ”do you want her to wear weeds for _you_ all her life--burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and merry?”

Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so much annoyed that Hans turned the current of his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his shoulders a little over the thought that there really had been some stronger feeling between Deronda and the d.u.c.h.ess than Mirah would like to know of. ”Why didn't she fall in love with me?” thought Hans, laughing at himself. ”She would have had no rivals. No woman ever wanted to discuss theology with me.”

No wonder that Deronda winced under that sort of joking with a whip-lash. It touched sensibilities that were already quivering with the antic.i.p.ation of witnessing some of that pain to which even Hans's light words seemed to give more reality:--any sort of recognition by another giving emphasis to the subject of our anxiety. And now he had come down with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He had sent word that he intended to call and to ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he found her awaiting him in the old drawing-room where some chief crises of her life had happened. She seemed less sad than he had seen her since her husband's death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found her. She was all the more alive to the sadness perceptible in Deronda; and they were no sooner seated--he at a little distance opposite to her--than she said:

”You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief and despair the last time. But I am not so today. I have been sorry ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain about me.”

There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen's tone and look as she uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer a beginning of the task.

”I _am_ in some trouble to-day,” he said, looking at her rather mournfully; ”but it is because I have things to tell you which you will almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of before. They are things affecting my own life--my own future. I shall seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in me--never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter into subjects which at the moment 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sure 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.

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